BORN TOO SOON

My boys really missed out, as far as shopping carts go.  When they were small, there were no options while shopping with Mom; they just had to sit in the cart and holler a little bit.

But now…what riches!  What glory!  I can see the gleam of power in the eye of those children who today get to drive the car attached to his mom’s shopping cart.  What joy!  What triumph!  My boys would have been in 7^th Heaven.

Now shopkeepers have just upped the ante on shopping cart competition:  the video/TV cart.  Yes!  At a super-Kmart this week I saw a rental shopping cart that has a television attached, presumably with movies or some-such for your discerning child.

 

Just makes you want to turn the clock back, doesn't it?

BEING A BAG LADY

Today it was time to do something about the messes of bags (mostly plastic) that have accumulated in the hallway closet—you know, the kind of situation where it all comes falling out when the door is opened?  Because when it was closed the last time, I stuffed everything in just enough to get the door closed and hoped for the best!

I like plastic bags just as much I like and collect cloth ones, and there are some I just want to hang on to forever.  I keep them because they will be “useful” at a certain future day.

For example, isn’t this large bag with handles so handy and convenient?

This was a souvenir someone brought back for us from England; certainly Sainsbury’s is my favorite grocery chain there.   

And who wouldn’t look classy at a homeschool convention carrying one of these around?  Although I have to admit, I’m not sure where else I would carry it….  It surely was an expensive bag, with the gold and all, so I shouldn’t throw it away—it would be too wasteful.

This one is not my favorite, but it’s the right size, the right price, and the right kind of helpful plastic.  It is a very handy bag!  Because of its appearance, I don’t find myself using it very often.  But I need to keep it just in case.  

These always show you have good taste and a lot of money (or you HAD a lot of money till you acquired the bag).  

But my favorites are the ones that bring back wonderful memories.  And they’re handy for showing off.  I can’t use them very often because I wouldn’t want to lose them, you know:    

And here’s the best of all:

       

SIR LANCELOT HE’S NOT

There’s been a surplus of hilarious activity in the wide world recently.  One way of keeping up-to-date on these sorts of things is to read the Odd News that Yahoo offers.  For instance, there was the Japanese fellow who had a woman secretly living in his closet for a whole year—he DID keep wondering why food disappeared from his home while he was away at work.

She was tidy and clean, though.

Then there was the man who (when his wife was away) hired a nude maid to clean the house for $100 an hour.  Somehow, when he wasn’t looking, she stole $40,000 of his wife’s jewelry.

And there was the lost pet bird who was able to tell the vet what his name and address is (he had been cautious enough not to divulge this information to the police).

Or how about the scientists who wanted to get camera footage of a rare rhino species, in order to learn their secrets?  The only footage they got was that of the rhinos destroying the cameras.

The best one, though, is about the guy who was caught crawling under a table in a university library—spraying saltwater onto a woman’s shoes with a syringe.  Here is an honest-to-goodness police photograph of him:

IT’S NEVER EASY

My son is learning things without me.

For a homeschool mom, this can be an emotionally challenging idea to cope with.  For 20 years, we’ve been together and advanced together, but now he’s doing the life-changers on his own.  And I cannot go there. 

Surely homeschool mothers have so many more milestones of letting go than those who send their children off to public school.  I am so grateful that these happen one by one, to help ease the pain.

Meanwhile, I’ll become an armchair tourist, which is the best I can do.

Identifying marble from various parts of the world, to learn how far away the ancients traded.

  


Walking the streets of Sidi Bou Said, in Tunis
  



The evening place for tea

 


A Muslim cemetery with the Mediterranean beyond

Perhaps some learning experiences I won't miss

ANOTHER WAY FOR LOVE

I used to call my brother Burnhead.  Burnt for short.  Or I did till he got married, and for some reason, his wife didn’t appreciate it very much.

I don’t remember how that nickname came about, although since his real name is Brent, it’s possible that Burnt came from a morphing of that name.

It could also be because he once rubbed the head of my brand-new Ken doll against the rough wall of the living room.  It took off all of Ken’s nice hair.  We had to use a magic marker to help repair the damage, but the head always looked burned after that.

Isn’t it odd about nicknames?  These are really called “hypocoristics” or “pet names” (according to Wikipedia) because they’re used between people with a close emotional bond.

The Old Days seemed to have more nicknames than nowadays.  When I was growing up, there was a man everyone called Skinny.  There was a Red, a CJ, a JC (CJ’s cousin, of course), a Stretch, and Hap—everybody liked him.

In the third grade, I was called Scabman.  That was due to my severe and serious run-in with poison ivy when my parents were clearing out a fencerow and I “loved-up” the dog a bit too much.

In the sixth grade and beyond, I was called Porky.  My nose seemed to flare out in a certain way that caught the attention of some of the boys.  It WAS done affectionately….

Two of my high school friends still sometimes call me by the nicknames we had back then.  My friend Chester calls me Spike, and my friend Johann calls me Alice, which comes from the major role I had in the musical Bye Bye Birdie:  I had 2 whole lines (unless you count the 3^rd  line I spoke when Karen forgot to get us started on Act 5).

In my own house today, we have a Bob.  That’s because two-year-old Ben always answered “Bah-bee” when you asked him what his name was.  When I went to the homeschool convention, I bought him a shirt with Veggie Tales’ BOB THE TOMATO on it, with words that said, “Hi, my name is Bob.”

We sent him off to VBS at a sister church with that shirt, and his teacher, who had never heard of Veggie Tales (you're right, they have no television) thought that was his name.  It took years to get THAT straightened out!

The rest of us in this house decided we needed nicknames too.  So we sat down and came up with names for ourselves.  But when you do it that way, it never really sticks.  These names only really get used online or for computer documents.  I’m afraid you’ll have to come to my house and rummage through my computer to find out what THAT one is for me!