Our political analyst was spot-on

Before the election yesterday (primary election for a Senator to finish out Ted Kennedy’s term), each person in our family wrote down a prediction for how the vote would turn out. This wasn’t just predicting the winner; this was predicting what percentage of the vote each Democratic candidate would get. And this morning we compared our predictions to the actual results. Check it out.

……………………	S…….	E…….	M…….	actual
Coakley	43	51	47	47
Capuano	37	23	27	28
Khazei	4	7	11	13
Pagliucca	15	19	15	12

If anyone out there is looking to hire a political analyst, M is available after school most weekdays.

A blue underwear hunt

Question: what do you do when you take the afternoon off from work because your child’s school has a half-day and you have vacation time to use up?

Answer: Lots of chores and errands. So far, I’ve taken the car for its inspection sticker, bought milk and bread and bleach, swapped out the semi-broken clock-radio in the bedroom for one with a functional alarm, washed a bunch of dishes, and (with M’s help) picked up the last 2,897 pinecones out in the yard.

But the most fun we had was going on a blue underwear hunt. Ever since a recent incident that also involved M’s black jeans and a washing machine, our underwear and socks have been rather blue. It didn’t look too bad when M’s undershirt poked out above his shirt collar; at least the laundry hadn’t turned pink instead of blue, or he’d probably have stopped wearing undershirts. But in successive washings, the blue was starting to fade towards gray. And this time of year is just too dreary without starting the day by putting on blue-gray underwear. So M and I went through the hamper and dresser drawers and frisked ourselves and rounded up every last piece of blue underwear and blue socks, and they all got a close encounter of the bleach kind.

The power of evil

M’s tendency to mumble and slur words together has only gotten worse with the addition of orthodontia, so I finally went online and looked around for do-it-yourself speech exercises that might help. One site suggested having the child look in the mirror and recite something he knows by heart while exaggerating all the facial movement that happens as he speaks. It’s meant to strengthen facial muscles and (in M’s case anyway) will also teach him to speak a bit more slowly and distinctly. Yes, I want to ruin his chances at a career as the guy who spews out 60 seconds of boilerplate legal disclaimers in the last 15 seconds of a TV or radio ad.

So M and I had a little discussion to identify what things he knew by heart, and he headed into the bathroom to practice. The Pledge of Allegiance segued into the first dozen digits of Pi which segued into the Lord’s Prayer and then an interesting assortment of songs.

Luckily, it was an exercise in speech, and not an actual test of memorization. He omitted “one nation under God” from the Pledge, and I don’t think it was done as a deliberate political statement. He managed 11 out of the 12 digits of Pi correctly. And the Lord’s Prayer got rephrased as “Lead us not into temptation, for thine is the power of evil,” which I really hope is not part of his personal theology. At least the first few lines of “I Believe I Can Fly” seemed to come off OK.

Christmas advertisements

So far my favorite Christmas ad is one in the drugstore flier for a “Tranquility Fountain or Smokeless Ashtray — Wow! $5.99″

Wow indeed; you can stub out your cigarette in a tiny stream of water that flows over midget rocks. That would sure minimize the smoke.

Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be two separate products, united only in their price and in the ad department’s need to fit two more products into one small box to make a nice symmetrical layout on the “gifts under $10″ page. At least they didn’t merge the smokeless ashtray with the $5.99 pet bed.

But still, the Christmas ad reminds me of my favorite roadside sign ever, outside a family’s home-based business: “Wedding Invitations Toro Mowers.” I’m picturing fancy script fonts and little tractor logos requesting the pleasure of your company.

Listening in

S here, and I drove M and two of his friends home from math club after school today. On the down side, this meant I had to endure the smell of a car full of sweaty teens. (Don’t ask me how they work up a sweat at math club. I don’t want to know.) On the up side, I stayed quiet enough to enjoy the best part of driving carpool: the kids forget a parent is in the car with them, and so they chatter about all the things that are really on their minds, without the parent having to drag ideas out of them a phrase at a time.

M and his two friends have evidently invented some kind of verbal role-playing game. It includes secret burrito powers, magic chocolate that may or may not be magic poop, the wisdom of turtle-land, a stone jackalope, and a large number of other equally random things. (Someday these guys will outgrow bathroom humor, right?)

The most amusing dialog came when M announced, “The evil warlock pops up and challenges you. What do you do?”

M’s friend replied, “Oh no! I’m not ready to fight the evil warlock”

M reassured him, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to fight him yet, this is just a difficult chase scene. Now, do you take the path to the left, the right, or the center?”

We’ve done some re-organizing around the house

This is now the drawer we store the cat in.

And this is his spot at the table.

The lesser-known skills that a Boy Scout needs

On Monday night M achieved 2nd Class rank in Boy Scouts. The way his troop handles the awards ceremony, not only does the Scout receive a cloth badge for his uniform, but he is also handed a small metal pin with a miniature symbol of the rank badge, and he is told “In recognition of your parents’ love and support, place the miniature pin on your mother.”

It’s a pin with a single prong on the back and the kind of clasp you pinch to remove. It was clear M had no idea how to remove the clasp, so I took that off for him. And then M, with an impressively confident flourish of “I have no clue what I’m doing, but I’m going to pretend that I do,” stabbed the pin directly into my shoulder.

Fortunately for me, I was wearing a very heavy wool sweater, so the prong didn’t reach my skin and the pin actually stayed in place without a clasp long enough for M and I to get off the stage. But I definitely heard a number of muffled giggles from the audience at M’s approach to the problem: “In recognition of your parents’ love and support, please stab your mother in the shoulder.”

Strange night for wildlife sightings

4:40 a.m. — Pack of several coyotes howling and yipping somewhere on the other side of the shrubs from our yard.  We reminded the cat, who was busy peering out the window looking for them, “This is why we don’t let you out at night.”

6:40 a.m. — 4 turkeys ambling along the main road on their commute to work.

6:45 a.m. — 1 cat walking along the same road, also on its commute to work. 

7:10 a.m. — 1 raccoon trotting briskly down the sidewalk on the same road, who was clearly going to be late for work if he was scheduled to be working the same shift as the turkeys and the cat.

8:00 a.m. — 1 very skinny woman in leather pants and thigh-high boots, who probably worked the same hours as the coyotes, but at least not behind our shrubs.

For future queens or wannabes…

Come on, you know you want one.  E

Barbie Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken Doll

Snow and rain

No, these aren’t photos from two days ago, when we got the freakishly early first snow of the year. These are photos from today, as we get an even more freakishly early second snow.

Fortunately for M and his camping trip, it was actually dry on Friday night and Saturday. The rain didn’t start until Saturday night, and it didn’t change to snow until after he got home this morning. So he brought home plenty of wet clothes and a sodden tent, but his sleeping bag stayed dry, and he was not uncomfortably cold and wet on the trip.

In other news, the cat spent quite a while today trying to convince E to let him outside. She explained that it was wet out. She showed him that it was raining outside the front door. She showed him it was raining outside the back door. Each time, he poked his head out, agreed with her assessment, and went back inside, only to start squawking again 20 minutes later. The third time she showed him that it was still raining outside the back door, he decided rain wasn’t so bad after all and made a run for it. Three minutes later, he turned up at the front door, wet and shivering and begging to come in — which would have been fine except that he had a chipmunk in his mouth and he did not want to leave his prey outside.

Sorry, dude; what happens in the yard has to stay in the yard.