Oh yeah, the weekend. I almost forgot about it while forgetting everything else I’m supposed to be doing.

As noted last week, Friday was spent at home. Despite repeated attempts on my sanity, the little ones managed to cause me to turn purple only a couple of times. It’s amazing how many different ways children can fight over wads of torn paper or a rubber band.

We got up and got dressed and had breakfast and got ready to take Big Sister to band practice. Her grandmother has been taking her, so this was my first time, and I assumed I was just supposed to drop her off in front of the junior high. Which is where I kept getting told I was supposed to drop her off. I pull up at the stop sign right in front of the junior high-- “Here we are, this okay?” Indeterminate shrugging and refusal to speak above a mumble, and I get something like “you have to go back there” or, “the band room is down there” and pointing to the end of the building. I turned around in the middle of the street, (yes, I was somewhat perturbed, but glad I didn’t get hammered with a ticket from Trussville’s Finest) with the intent of trying to get her down to the lower level by driving around the back of the building. By this time, the backseat driving squad are yammering something about what Grandmama does, and I’m trying to determine exactly where behind the building I’m supposed to drop her, and she is telling them to be quiet, and slowly the fog begins to lift and I come to a even more perturbing conclusion.

As we near the end of the block, she says to turn. “Here?!” Right at the stop sign. “Uh huh.” Well, you see, there is an access drive for the junior high that parallels the street in front of the school. Street—grass—sidewalk—grass—access drive. Any guesses as to where this one lane access drive leads? Yes, that’s right—right back to the front of the school where I had stopped to begin with. ::sigh::

Again, the backseat crew loudly starts up, “You didn’t have to do that; Grandmama always goes down this little road, but you don’t have to because you can just pull up in front of the building!” [frankcostanza] SERENITY NOW! [/frankcostanza]

She storms off and we head back to the house, long enough for the kids to tear around the backyard and feed the neighbor’s cat, then it was time to return and pick up our young clarinetist, who it seems had learned a new tune, which she called “Raspberry.” It’s one of those hypnotic-trance inducing series of notes that they play at football games to fire the team up—I never heard it called anything other than “Go Fight Win.” I know you’ve heard it (especially any of you who watch SEC football)—it’s goes something like:

womp…Womp…WOMP…WAHHH-Da;
womp…Womp…WOMP…WAHHH-Da;
womp…Womp…WOMP…WAHHH-Da;
BOM!BOM!BOM!
bumbumbum

then repeat. Lots of horn, lots of bass drum, rhythmically catchy, and absolutely the single most annoying thing you will ever hear a carload of children become addicted to. “N +1 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”? Phshaw. “Wheels on the Bus”? Literal child’s play. This insidious little ditty, by whatever name it goes, very nearly caused me to keel over deader’n a hammer. But, we had to go to Daddy’s work to pick up his paycheck. Nothing steels one’s nerves like having to get to the bank before all of those promises-to-pay start making cartoon ‘boing-boing’ sounds.

Thankfully they were nice and well behaved (my kids, not the folks at work), all without benefit of mumbled threats. Then we went and put Daddy’s check into the bank, so that the mean people won’t come and take our house away from us. (Although, I do have fantasies of them showing up to evict us, then giving up halfway through as they exhaust themselves trying to haul all of our stuff out to the curb.)

Then, of course, the inevitable chorus of “Have they got any suckers, Daddy?” started up.

“No kids, this is the credit union—we told them we would rather have a 16th of a point higher interest than give away lollipops to kids!” “You sure they don’t have suckers?” “No, they don’t.” “But when Grandmama takes us, they always give us suckers…” “That’s because Grandmama uses a real bank, where they make her pay exorbitant ATM fees!” “Can you ask them if they have suckers?” ::sigh::

“Do you…,” “No sir, I’m sorry we don’t.”

Ahh, a life lived in front of an open microphone.

Back home, then time for lunch and time to catch up on bloglandia and post a couple of things to further perpetuate the moronic aspects of Possumblog. Decided to not waste time going BACK to town to pick up my wife’s paycheck, but instead decided to go get advance tickets for Scooby Doo. Yea! Daddy’s a hero again. When Mom got home, we piled into the van and went and ate supper at Milo’s and settled in for a bit of summer pifflery.

Movie Review Time

I hated just about every Hanna-Barbera cartoon ever made. I hated Squid Diddly, I hated the Super Friends, I hated Peter Potomus, I hated Magilla Gorilla, I hated Muttley, I hated Josie and the Pussycats, I hated Atom Ant. And I hated Scooby Doo. These dreckful masterpieces to this day still remind me of all the crappiness that was the mid-1970s—crappy cars, crappy clothes, crappy food, crappy crap, and crappy cartoons.

So, then, how to explain that the movie was not crappy. Cleavage. Cleavage has the power to save just about any movie short of The Janet Reno Story. And it has that guy from Mr. Bean, except he doesn’t shave his tongue. That’s about it, at least for me. The kids liked it because it has a talking dog and tee-tee jokes and fart jokes. Of course, they have never seen the ne plus ultra of cinematic audiovisual fartography, the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles. Still, it was the one thing that I actually laughed out loud about. And it had cleavage. So, it was not completely crappy.

But apparently, either due to the ham sandwich I had for lunch, or the very nearly raw hamburger I had for supper, my tolerance for such lighthearted summer silliness was at a low ebb, especially after not being able to get more than an hour’s sleep that night due to continued trips to the outhouse. By the morning of Father’s Day Eve (which, of course, started at about 6:00 a.m. with the sounds of Angry Mom and the Argumentative Four having a polite discussion about breakfast and the necessity of allowing Daddy to sleep a bit) I was a very tired and weak person, to the point that I didn’t think I could make it to take the kids for their pony riding lessons. I was so sick, I even volunteered to stay home with the Wrecking Ball and let Reba take the older ones.

I had piled up on the bed and gotten Baby Girl to go get a movie to watch. She went and got Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and put it on. We never saw this one at the theater, but the kids got it recently and have nearly worn it out. I had heard pretty good things about it, and despite my lack of solid internal structure, was actually looking forward to watching it.

Yet another Movie Review

A movie not in need of cleavage to succeed. I really enjoyed it. Good casting, exciting visuals, neat looking stuff, steam engines, silly Englishmen, mortal danger. Ripping good. It would be interesting to see the U.S. equivalent of Hogwarts Academy. And cleavage would be okay. Hmmm. Well, I guess that would be pretty close to Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. Interesting how that all ties back to Sarah Michelle Gellar, whom I think would make an excellent Hermione.

As time got closer to take the kids to the corral, Reba decided to take Baby Girl, too, which made me decide to get up and get dressed. I really didn’t want to be saddled with the guilt of not being there when Catherine decided to strangle a horse or eat all the oats or bring Mommy some pretty poopy. So, I got dressed. ::sigh::

The ride turned out very good again, although the horses were already saddled when we got there, so the kids didn’t get to wrestle them down from the pasture. This time they got to go out of the paddock and ride around the camp, which went very well with no sudden scream-inducing runaway horse silliness. They did get to untack after the lesson was over and lead the horses to the pasture, and Rebecca found out where mules get their stubbornness. Her horse was bound and determined to eat some grass, and it was all she could do to drag the big lummox through the gate. But she did it, and was greatly pleased with herself. If there’s one good thing about learning horsemanship, it is that whenever they say “I can’t do it,” I can always say “You mean to tell me anyone who can yank around an 800 pound pile of glue can’t do something!?” So far, I’ve only had to use this once, but it worked like a charm.

Back home, and back to my sickbed. No longer sick, just tired as all get out. Reba went to the store to shop for that special father in the kid’s lives (and for me, too) and I decided to make the best of my time by telling the kids to put on one of their movies downstairs, as I loaded up Fargo and Falling Down.

Oh, sweet Moses Malone, not another stinkin’ movie review…

Fargo—Never saw it at the theater. Odd, disturbing, work of the mind, enigmatic, gratuitously bloody, ain’t no Raising Arizona, but hey, what is? Who knows what to make of it, other than to say it’s typical Coen Brothers.

Falling Down—Never saw it at the theater. Not what I expected, and in a bad way. From dimly remembered reviews and trailers, thought I would like it—sort of an urban Rambo, man done wrong tale. Just a sorry psychopath. Blech.

After Reba got home and all of the gifts were wrapped and cards signed, I was summoned to the kitchen and presented with an assortment of very sweet little cards with lots of Xs and Os, some nice casual shirts, some very special sleepwear (rRRRrrowlll, Baby!) and from my littlest admirer, a genuine plush stuffed blue-eyed husky puppy that sits here upon my desk even now. Little Bit tends to buy for herself; little did she think that I would actually KEEP her present. I think it goes well with the troll in the pink dress that I got from my oldest when she was but a wee sprite of three years, and from Boy, the cardboard tube with yellow paper on top, which represents a torch. And the wall of drawings behind me of horses and cats and flowers and fish and a very large apartment building and a large-headed, microscopic-bodied bespectacled man entitled simply “D Ad.”

Almost as good as those were the well-wishes from the extended Possumblog family—faithful Louisiana reader Janis Gore and Miss Lee Ann Morawski both wrote to wish me a Happy Father’s Day—thanks to you both. It’s very odd for me to hear such things, and it always catches me off guard. Last night after church we stopped for supper at the nearby Ruby Tuesday, and our server Miss Jennifer gave her good wishes. It was such a sweet and unexpected gesture that I got all tongue-tied. We eat there enough so that we know all the staff, and our whole group loves Jennifer above all the rest because she is unfailingly nice to all of us and is a great waitress. So, since I mangled it last night—Jennifer, thank you very much.

Of course, me being me, the tongue-tangletude continued unabated after leaving the restaurant. Catherine started feeling queasy (possibly due to the combination of salad, baked potato, rice, and crab cake she gleaned off of everyone else’s plate, washed down with sweet tea) so we stopped right down the street at the convenience store to allow Dad to go in and beg for a plastic bag to contain any toxic rumblespew. I parked to the side of the store and went in and asked for a plastic bag. The clerk happily supplied me one, and then, just as Jennifer had earlier, she caught me off guard with a “Have a Happy Father’s Day!” Now how she knew I was a dad, I’ll never know—the wild eyed look, the messed up hair, the unzipped pants—who knows, but I’m sure she will always treasure my response…”Huh--…oh! Thank you! You too!” I am such a putz.

But my kids love me.
posted by Terry at 4:16:00 PM