Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

Time	Event
1:43p	Fidelity Fiduciary Bank (Dawes, Jones, Mousely, Grubs) A couple of weeks ago, we had Bigglest and Middlest open savings accounts at my local bank. They've both begun working as mother's helpers, and Bigglest is babysitting, so they need a place to stash the cash. Up until now, their earnings have mostly been from chores at home, and we keep a credit sheet and Mom and Dad "bank" for them. Today, Middlest is making her first deposit. She has some cash she wants to save, and a check from me for folding laundry. (Around here, toting, washing, and drying laundry is an unpaid chore, but folding it is a paid job. Reflects Mama and Daddy's own attitudes toward laundry.) She brought out her book, and I showed her in my own book how to fill out a deposit slip, how to endorse a check, and how to write the deposit in and change the balance. All very nicely done. No one ever showed me this stuff, in spite of the fact that I acquired my first savings account when I was about Middlest's age. I figured it out myself. Middlest muttered, "This is complicated!" in the middle of writing the deposit slip, and I very carefully didn't laugh. It's important for the bandar log to learn to handle money, and this is the way we're going about it, so I might as well take it seriously. I will be very proud of Middlest when she makes her deposit today. smplmn helped the Bigglest and Middlest open the accounts, and he is on both accounts as trustee. We wouldn't bother, since nothing but their own money will go into these accounts -- college savings are sequestered somewhere else -- and we figure they can decide for themselves how to spend it. The bank, however, insists, probably owing to the fact that there have been incidents of parents putting away the college money in an account available to a child, and then having the child (presumably one nearing eighteen) decide to spend it without consulting. Five figures worth of college tuition, gone on whatever a teenager can think of to do with that kind of money. Ooops. This is fine with me. I'm a lawyer's brat, and I get the idea of protecting your ass. Folks overdo it, of course, and it can be a curse, but it's no big deal in this case. We'll countersign any withdrawal they want to make, although we may discuss big ones beforehand. And they'll have ATM cards and checking accounts as soon as possible. I'll tell you what would have sent me stamping out of the bank after refusing to open the bandar log's accounts and closing my own, though. When smplmn questioned the need for a trustee on the accounts, the bank official handling the opening said very snidely, "Oh, you'll be glad when they're sixteen and old enough to drive." I'm sorry, I don't take well to people putting down my children, especially when my children are sitting right there. I suppose it's a good thing that smplmn was doing the job, and not Ms Touchy Bitch. It would have been a nuisance to move my account. You know, if you assume that all teenagers are irresponsible brats, I'm guessing that you're more likely to *get* teenagers who are irresponsible brats. And maybe yours are. But don't make rude assumptions about mine. (2 Comments | Comment on this)
2:35p	And the microphone smells like a beer I'm paranoid about putting my jeans in the wash. I'm reluctant to let them go, and I sweat bullets until they show up again. Irrational? You tell me. I own four pairs, and jeans are about all I wear in the cold weather. One pair is too big, but the others all fit just fine. At any given moment, the too-big pair is in the dresser, I have one pair I'm wearing, and the other two are AWOL. It's true. Put my jeans into the wash and watch them disappear for weeks at a time. It isn't that the was isn't getting done, either, because we can wash everything, fold it and put it away, and there's still no sign of my jeans. I know enough to hunt through smplmn's jeans, since he often gets mine by default. (I have no sympathy for the bandar log on this one, since all they need to do to get them into the right pile is check out the ass; we wear different brands and different sizes.) Sometimes I remember to make Bigglest turn out his drawers; not only does he sometimes get mine, but he'll wear them and comment to me that he really needs a belt. Noticing that the waist is four inches too wide for him and that the legs are dragging the ground is apparently not enough to clue him in to the fact that the jeans he's wearing don't belong to him. Today, I don't get it. Two pairs just went in, so I understand where they are. I'm wearing the damn too-big pair, because the third pair, which has been in the wash for at least two weeks, is showing no signs. I've pawed through smplmn's stuff, and I know he didn't take them with him accidentally, 'cause he checks. Next I think I will stand over Bigglest with a club, but we just pulled all of his stuff apart to figure out what fits him and what doesn't, and the jeans would have been sussed out then if they were there. Soooo ... where are my jeans? The Shadow knows. I don't. (13 Comments | Comment on this)
6:00p	The people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face Middlest, in spite of barely making it to a majority of classes in the session, passed out of Basic I in skating and will be in Basic II next session. Backward swizzles, here we come! I made a little list. smplmn set one up for the bandar log yesterday, so that they would know what their chores and school are this week, and I've been pretty much right on top of it today, so they're getting things done. But I also made one for myself, a list of things that had to get done or be picked up either today or tomorrow so that we would be ready to go on Thursday morning. In the middle of the afternoon, the bandar log were mostly done, so I declared a break, picked up the Girlfriend, and set off on a round of errands. Middlest and I made our deposits at the bank, in my case in the face of misplacing my prepared deposit and having to run around at the last minute and find it. Rabbit food and a salt block have been acquired, in spite of the fact that we forgot that only one pet shop around carries rabbit food in twenty-five pound bags and as a result ended up going to almost every pet shop in town. For the record, the shop by the Home Depot has it, and nobody else. Thank you to the nice lady in the one by the cloth store who recommended other branches of her own store, but I'm not going beyond the city limits when I know for a fact that *someone* around here has the stuff. We have greens for guinea pigs and quantities of food for the trip East. If it weren't for the fact that my mother prefers to eat a true meal, we could pick her up at the airport and just head east with no major stops until dinner. But that's okay, I don't mind -- she'll want the time out of the car after spending all morning in an airplane anyway. Middlest, miraculously, walked into the shoe store with me, bitched extensively about the selection (she's into women's sizes, which means she has the same problem with picking sneakers that I do) but still managed to pick out the perfect pair on the first try. In spite of the fact that some fool had packaged a 7 with a 6 1/2 and we had to go back to locate the missing mate. Ten minutes, in, out, done. Shoe-shopping bliss. The whole lot of us made it to the coffee shop, where Mike teased Littlest and the Girlfriend about the fact that their drinks are obviously Starbucks drinks (caramel macchiato with extra caramel and whipped cream,) and where we played two hot rounds of UNO. Bigglest was disgusted, because he's now ended up holding cards in something like the last six or eight hands he's played. The Girlfriend says UNO is too aggressive. I think the Girlfriend needs siblings to give her a more realistic view of the world. The car is gassed, and I paid $2.31 a gallon. Now that is stochastic. Clearly the end of the world is at hand. Hey, guess what? Polls show that a majority of folks here in the US think that the sharply dropping gas prices are an attempt by Bush to manipulate the elections in November. I don't know what's behind the price drop (I really haven't paid much attention) but if Big Oil is doing this on behalf of the Republicans, they're a day late and a dollar short. Screw with our freedoms, threaten the very foundations our country is founded on, okay, but do NOT mess with our gasoline. Who do you think you are, anyway? Now all we have to do tomorrow is more laundry, a couple of chores, and pack, pack, pack. And any idiot can pack -- we do that all the time. Plus remember that I have a therapy appointment tomorrow evening. I doubt I'll get anything constructive done -- I must have forgotten the dates of this trip when I made that appointment. And my mother, who is concerned about the extra stress on me from having to orchestrate all the preparations myself, firmly assured me this morning that anything that gets left behind can be replaced in PA. I'm not worried, but I appreciate the sentiment behind it. When my mother is not driving me crazy, she's pretty cool. Note to self: Saturday morning, take Bigglest and walk downtown to the coffee shop to have some Mama time together. The other two have been positively swamped with Mama time, and it's about time he had his shot. PS -- Dear Zanne, do not forget Littlest's gymnastics class tomorrow. You will go to hell if you do. (Comment on this)
8:35p	Trial by Fury Aha! I found a site (www.cotswoldsavoyards.com) with all the libretti for Gilbert & Sullivan. Hurrah! smplmn has bought me a couple of recordings, but I like listening to opera with a libretto in front of me so that I'm not distracted by straining to hear the words. I'm lazy. (3 Comments | Comment on this)
10:30p	Play hard, play fair, have fun I was just checking out the site of someone I used to be acquainted with on-line. She's a Christian. I stopped following her site because she took it down for a while, and she stopped coming over here right around the time that I started admitting that my faith was crumbling and that I was angry. Today I checked, out of curiosity, to see if her site is back up. It is. And it had a piece that really made me sad. She was talking about a church she'd seen that had, "Come on over to my house before the game. -- God" on one side, and, "Come on over to my house. Bring the ribs. -- God" on the other. She was terribly upset. Didn't the people at that church understand that they needed to look at the pleasures of heaven, not the pleasures of the flesh? And then she asked if people really "play" with God that way, and was upset that they might take their relationship with God so lightly. I don't know about you, but I played with my father when I was a child, and I play with him now. I played with my mother, and we play now. Part of the parent/child relationship is play, even when the child is an adult. (Or at least it should be. It might be any kind of play -- in my family it's verbal play -- but it should be there.) How sad to see God only as a stern parent, and not one who might be playful. Have you ever read The Color Purple? I like when Shug says that anyone can see that It (god/dess) loves us and wants to be loved back. How can you tell? Because it's always trying to do stuff that pleases us. It invented the color purple, dancing trees, and sex. (And possibly smplmn and I have to say, only a god/dess with a sense of humor could have pulled that one off, although Shug doesn't say so.) That does not sound like a god/dess who wants their people to be solemn, or to experience only high-flown, "spiritual" pleasures. One of the things that flipped me out of the church like a water drop in an oily pan was the fact that I was beginning to suspect that the whole denial of the pleasures of the flesh thing was bullshit. I didn't jump off the other side of the bridge and decide that pure indulgence was the way to go. Even in my state of flaming apostasy, I'm not interested in simply tipping the seesaw to the other side. But there is one thing I know. If there is no divine (and maybe there isn't,) it's still a good thing to invest in the pleasures of the soul, and there is no requirement to be ascetic about the pleasures of the body. (Ain't a problem if you're drawn to it -- different people balance different ways.) (Don't argue with me about the fact that with no divine there is no soul. Says who?) If there is a divine, if it's a divine with any sense, it wants us to enjoy *all* of the world, not just one straitened part of it. Funniest part? As usual with Christians who are trying to draw straight lines around their own and other's souls, it isn't even Biblical. David danced before the Lord, Jesus turned water into wine for a wedding, and anyone who wants to tell me that Song of Songs is strictly a poem of spiritual love is extremely naive. And it's just sad. Mama and Daddy want to play, and Junior thinks he's too grown up. (2 Comments | Comment on this)

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