Endings

Today was MM's last day of Jr. Kindergarten. His last day of daycare.

He chose his outfit with care. Today was "Hollywood Pizza Party! Dress glamorously!"

He wore his blue pants, his white oxford shirt, his ocean-print coral-reef bowtie.

Couldn't you just keel over from the cuteness?

Neither he nor his friend DeepVoicedKindergartener have really realized it, but today was their last day of school together...at least for this year. DVK is going to public school starting Tuesday, while we're keeping MM at Posh Place (they have full-day Kindergarten. Our county public schools do not. PP doesn't have after-school care this year for the half-day kids, only for the full-day ones. Sigh.)

DVK and MM have been in daycare together since they were nine months old. They are best friends. I don't know how they will feel about this change. Especially DVK...his parents just got divorced.

We're already setting up a boatload of playdates with him. You betcha.

So , two endings in one. And a new beginning on Tuesday. Imagine! No naps*!





*please note he hasn't napped at school for over 4 years. He. Just. Doesn't.

Good gravy...

Found this in the Post. Speechless. Not at all surprised, but still speechless.

I am a Senior at Nearby U.

Really and truly!

First day was good. My Sensation & Perception lab looks like it's going to be writing intensive, but otherwise breezy with many weeks off. F'rinstance, I don't have to be there on the 10th.

My Cellular Structure and Function lecture seems like it will be a blast. My professor, Dr. Beautiful, is from Camaroon and speaks American idiomatic English with a lovely lilting accent. The class is rumored to be hard (only a 66% pass-rate most semesters), but I have a feeling that it may be a "it's only a 100-level class, how hard can it be?" sort of attitude from the ranks.

Tomorrow's my long day.

Tomorrow also marks the last week before MM is a kindergartener. How the heck did THAT happen?

Heads up

Hey y'all! In dribs and drabs I'm sending out e-mails to pretty much everybody I know here in blogland about that unbloggable thing going on at Chez Mystere. If one doesn't find its way into your inbox and you'd like to know what's up, please let me know!

Also, school starts up again on Monday. Three 4-credit lab courses: Anatomy; Cell Structure and Function; and Sensation, Perception, and Information Processing.

Despite the sadness of the last few weeks, I really enjoyed the break. I only wish I'd gotten more done housework-wise.

I love Amtrak

MM loves it too. He took himself to the little water fountain 5 or 6 times, figured out the locking mechanism in the bathroom and took himself to the potty several times, he stood up and danced alot and knelt on the floor in front of his seat to play with his pirates (he really loved those two little boxes, KLee!). He ate most of a ham hero that we bought in the cafe car and revelled in the fact that THERE ARE NO SEATBELTS.



Handy tip for taking Amtrak with children: invest in a Redcap. He (or she) will board you on the train early for the cost of a gratuity (I did $5.00/bag), and it leaves your hands free to keep your active child from attempting to find out what the under carriage of the train looks like.

Wisdom from my mother

My mom used to run everyday before work. At 6:15 every morning she'd meet her friend NameMatchesHerTemperment and they'd run around Prospect Park together.

The rule was: if you were going to cancel, you had to do it in person. Downstairs. On the street. At 6:15 AM. No cancelling over the phone.

By the time they were up and dressed and on the street to cancel they'd realize they might as well go running.

Brilliant.

Now all I need is a jogging partner and three or four VERY sturdy jogbras to wear at one time.

The post of catching up UPDATED!

1. Went to my MIL's for a few days in Humidity Like A Brick Wall Region
   
2. Saw KLee! Here's proof!
   
3. MM came awfully close to actually using an airsick bag. Fortunately, vomit was averted. He kept the bag near his face for a half-hour though.
4. De1ta lost our luggage on the way home, but delivered it to us after midnight.
5. Took MM to the doctor's this AM. No infection it seems, so they sent us to have an x-ray. Altogther, it was about 3 hours of office time.
6. Doctor hasn't called us. Answering machine is saying to try back during office hours and then clearly says that THESE ARE OFFICE HOURS. Sheesh.
7. Leaving for NYC tomorrow for Grandpa Professor Emeritus's memorial.
8. Mom wanted me to find a picture of MM and GPE together. Unfortunately, while there are plenty of pictures of MM at GPE's house, there doesn't seem to be any of them together. Fourteen of MM with Late Sweet Dog, but none with GPE. Photoshop, anyone? MS FOUND SOME!!! MS FOUND SOME!!! WOOOHOOO!
9. I'm doing laundry.
10. MM and I will go and buy new sneakers for him tonight. His current ones smell of old dead cat pee and they're too small to boot. (Ha! Boot! Sneakers! I crack me up.)
11. He is now 45 inches tall and a whopping 40.5 pounds. He comes up to my armpit, but I can still carry him through an airport.

Nu? How's by you?

I was going to blog against racism

But I got my vituperitiveness out yesterday yelling at J3t B1ue and I have nothing left.

So I pulled weeds in the garden and scrubbed my shower and tried to get a head of steam up to blog against racism. But I haven't got it.

So I'll tell you a story that my aunt Lillian told me. I think it was Aunt Lillian, it might have been Aunt Esther.

Esther and Lillian were Grandpa Professor Emeritus's younger sisters. They both died several years ago.

Anyway, Aunt Esther (or Lillian) was a dark-skinned Russian Jewish woman. That side of the family comes from the Ukraine. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that this story was told to me by Esther. For a few years in the 20's and 30's, my grandfather's family lived in southern Virginia. Esther, being dark skinned and having a somewhat flattish nose, was unable to "pass" as white. She looked "colored" and she was treated as colored. To the family, this was nothing new. They'd fled from Russia to escape the pogroms, after all. The only difference to them was that this time it wasn't their religion that was being reviled. Not that they practiced Judaism. Grandpa's father was a devout Atheist.

When they all moved back up to New York, they joined the great big community of Russian Jewish emigrants where they were all accepted and blended in, but Esther never forgot (and made sure we never forgot) that to racists and anti-semites, it doesn't matter who you are, what matters is how you are perceived.

J3t B1ue, I think I hate you (edited for typos, I was pooped.)

Reasons I hate them:

1. 4 hour delay going. Granted, not their fault. Weather. But I'm not feeling generous at this moment.

2. Cancelled yesterday's flight and didn't call my cell, though they did send an e-mail, which wasn't useful since I was nowhere near a computer. I waited on line over an hour yesterday to change my flight to today because they don't let you do that at the kiosk.

Which brings us to today.

Today I arrived at JFK 2 hours early for my flight. I was clearly told to go to gate 15. I double checked the board. Sat down at gate 15 to wait. The gate itself had a different flight number up, so I asked the nice lady at the gate and she said yes, I was in the right place. Whereupon I took up a seat right next to her and waited.

About 10 minutes before my scheduled departure time I finally lost patience and asked when they would be boarding my flight and she said, "Oh! They switched the gate to gate 14 and it's closed for boarding now!"

I ran to gate 14 and the plane was pulling away. 10 minutes early.

I never heard an announcement. I never heard them page me. Not once. And I was listening. Truly, I was.

I cannot begin to describe to you how upset I was.

And then, customer service lied to me. They said, "Everyone else made it onto that flight."

Except they didn't. Another woman who had the same experience was placed on Stand-by for the next plane along with me.

Oh! And they switched the gate on that one, too. And there was no announcement, just a change on the board (which, fortunately, I was checking every five minutes.)

And they only put up the flight number at the gate 5 minutes before they boarded. And they made three brief announcements, the special assistance one, the rows 10 and up one, and the general boarding one. And then they got us stand-bys on. 10 minutes after the first call, the plane rolled away from the gate. And it was a sold-out plane. And they never paged the missing passengers, so how'd they have extra seats for me and my co-horts? Hmmmm? Which made me feel better about missing the announcements for the flight I was SUPPOSED to have been on.

And then the plane was stuck on the tarmac for 2 and a half hours. Again, not their fault, weather. But I would not have spent 11 hours in an airport today if they'd ACTUALLY MADE THE ANNOUNCEMENTS THEY SHOULD HAVE MADE.

I hate them.

Out of Office Message

I'm on my way to NYC. I'll be back on Wednesday when I'll see you all here. The memorial will be the weekend of the18th, probably.

Thank you all for the kind wishes. I'm so glad and proud to have you as friends.

Grandpa Professor Emeritus 1910-2007

He died tonight.

Home from the hospital on Wednesday, with his children around him. He was laughing and joking this morning but was very clear that he was ready to go.

It seems we were right to joke that his strong will to live was what kept him here through heart attacks and cancer, through diabetes and infections. When he said he was ready to go, he meant it. He let go.

He used to skip with me down the street and this last time we saw him he sang the silly song to Muffin Man that he used to sing with me when we skipped.

He was a Physics professor. I've seen a film of him teaching - completely incomprehensible to me, but MS said it was a good lesson. I'm looking right now at two books he gave to MS, "Mathematical Methods of Physics" and "Fundamentals of Mathematical Physics".

What is my grandma going to do? She was married to him for almost 50 years.

This is a very incoherent post. I'm happy for him and for my mother that the next few weeks aren't going to happen as we'd all thought they would. But sad he's gone and sad for my grandmother in particular.
...

Just talked to my sister. She just saw him this morning and then drove six hours to get home. She said he said that he expected the morphine to make him feel muddled, but he felt clear as a bell. He told stories of his father for an hour. His nurse said, "Morphine couldn't make him muddled. Not him."

And that's it. That's the essence of who he was. He held himself together.

Feeling of coziness.

Today, I sent a friend an e-mail and then I went to a party and came home and checked my e-mail (nothing in my inbox) and started to open a browser to check her blog when PING! there came an e-mail in my inbox!

She'd gotten my e-mail and replied and then I replied and then she replied. And it wasn't until just now when I realized that it was kind of like having a short phone conversation with this person who is a dear friend whom I've never actually spoken to (as in, using my vocal chords).

And this feeling, this "we just had a phone call" feeling is making me feel very cozy and warm.

Phantom, thank you both for the exchange and this feeling.

Grades are in. Happiness, Sadness

I got three A+'s and a B+ for the semester. The B+ was in my one-credit course, so I have a 3.93 for the semester (stupid registrar doesn't record the extra points for the pluses on the A's. Hmff).

That puts me at 3.78 overall. I couldn't be happier scholastically.

However....

Grandpa is home from the hospital, hospice has been called in and he has 24-hour care at home. He's on oxygen to make him more comfortable. My aunts are with him now, my sister will be there for the day tomorrow.

I'm so glad I got to see him a couple of weeks ago. He was in pretty good shape that weekend and was able to enjoy our visit and laugh at MM and make MM laugh too.

Ninety-seven years of life is a good, long time. But, oh! it's not long enough. It's just not long enough.