Waste paper much?

Number of items I bought at Stop & Shop this morning: 10
Length of my receipt: 36.5 inches.

Ridiculous.

A wee heartbreak

The Peanut spent yesterday afternoon and evening digging through her bin of markers and drawing little orange pumpkin faces on pages from one of those pocket-sized spiral notebooks. Each one was different, and on each, she wrote one of her classmates' names. She counted carefully to be sure she hadn't forgotten anybody. Then she clipped them together and put them in her frog backpack, and today, she was going to hand them out to everyone.

When I met her bus after school, she waved to her friends as always, and as always on the walk back to the house, I said, "so Peanut! Tell me all about it! Did you learn anything today?" And she said "Yes, but Mommy, nobody wanted my pumpkin faces, Sienna drew all over hers, and I had to throw some of them away, because nobody wanted them! I worked so hard on them, and nobody wanted them!" And she cried and cried in my arms as I whispered "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," and fought back tears myself.

I hate other kids. I hate them.*

And I know that they just didn't understand that the Peanut was giving them a piece of her heart, and that it's a lot to expect of a kindergartner to say thank you when a friend gives them a little piece of paper that seems meaningless. But my heart breaks to think of the Peanut watching her classmates reject or wreck these little gifts, and bringing the rest of them to the trash.

Did you learn anything today, indeed.

It was, at least, good timing for something like this. Peanut's best friend Gina -- who kept her little paper pumpkin face -- is over to play. Her Mom brought her over just as Peanut and I were wiping our tears. The girls took off running immediately, and the pumpkin face fiasco is suddenly ancient history. As I write, they are zooming around the yard like maniacs in between bites of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (that'd be no-salt-no-sugar peanut butter and all fruit jelly on wheat bread, because I am That Mom) and sips of chocolate milk. We're going to make lemon cheese bars (they're better than they sound) and they can eat them at the top of the play gym and then scream their little heads off coming down the slide.

She'll forget about it, or get it in perspective, and bounce right back. Me? I'm still sad. Sad to see her realize that she can't just wear her love for everyone on her sleeve and receive it back in kind. My heart broke for the Bean when it happened to her in Kindergarten, and it's breaking for the Peanut now. It's a chip out of their innocence -- just a sad, sad feeling, for a parent who cares about that sort of thing in a world where plenty don't.


*no, not really. But still.

Things that are always around when you don't need them but are somehow hard to find when you do

pens or pencils
matches
shallots
Chap stick
nail files
massage therapists
scrap paper
backs of earrings
quarters
gas stations
receipts
sunglasses
offspring
vacuum cleaner bags
little packets of ketchup/mustard/mayo/relish
napkins, in the car
complete thoughts

This post is toned down a notch from what I wanted to say after it happened.

A kid on a playground grabbed my daughter so hard that he left gouges in her arm. Asked how this came about, the woman watching him said, "oh, Todd needs redirecting sometimes, he's a special needs child, so we redirected him, and it's fine now."

Well, no, actually. It is not fine now.

I don't give a rat's skinny ass how "special" this kid's "needs" are. My girls have the evidently not-so-special need not to be injured by other children on playgrounds, and I'm sorry, but that trumps whatever he's got. Insensitive? Hell yes. My sensitivity ends where my daughters' safety begins. Call it whatever you like, but keep your kid's hands off my girls, or you'll experience a "redirection" you will never forget.

Have a nice day now.

I don't get it.

Roman Polanski drugged and raped a child.

Why is anyone -- ANYone -- upset that this is a serious punishable offense?

We're not talking blow-job-from-consenting-adult, censure and move on.

He drugged. And raped. A child.

Harrison Ford? Whoopi Goldberg? I love you both, but STFU.

It's Mountain Day!

I went to college in western Massachusetts, on one of the most beautiful campuses you'll ever see. This time of year is so gorgeous, so exhilarating, there. Fall is the best time of year on Cape Cod, and in many places, but out in western Massachusetts, it's cranked up a notch. It goes to 11.

My alma mater has a clock tower with bells heard on the hour all over campus. Every fall semester, on one day chosen from all the impossibly gorgeous fall days, the bells would toll the seven o'clock morning hour... and then keep ringing, and ringing, and ringing for five minutes. This was the signal for Mountain Day -- a college tradition since 1838. On Mountain Day, classes and meetings of all kinds were called off. The idea was that everyone should spend that day climbing the nearby hills.

Many students really did climb a little mountain on Mountain Day. Others turned off their alarms and got some more sleep before using the day as a reprieve from too-pressing deadlines, maybe giving a nod to the tradition by doing some work outside on the green instead of in the library. Either way, Mountain Day was a gift -- a day of sanctioned hooky (if there can be such a thing), or one more day to finish that paper you should've finished yesterday (as a practical measure, though taking a bit away from the pure joy of things, experienced professors would include Mountain Day deadline contingencies in their syllabus).

Mountain Day is a different calendar day every year, and part of the fun of it was guessing when it would come. On especially lovely days, we'd listen carefully at 7:00, and if the bells stopped at 7, the suspense would continue. Too early and it doesn't seem like enough of a gift -- the pressures of the semester haven't piled up enough. But left too late, we might run out of gorgeous days. Autumn's stunning reds, golds and greens give way to chilly greys and browns all too soon.

I can't remember a year when they didn't find the perfect balance.

Now of course we're all older, with jobs and/or children and whatever other adult obligations make it harder to just ditch everything on short notice and head for the hills with a picnic for the day. But today, at a lovely little college in western Massachusetts, it is Mountain Day, and as they've done for 170 years, students are ditching the books for a few hours and scrambling up a hillside to get a good look at their little corner of the world from up top. Perfect.

Plenty of college traditions haven't stayed with me. I never got into the one involving prancing 'round the Maypole, for example. But declaring a Mountain Day from time to time is good for the soul.

Who the hell is Mitchell? I was writing to Pamela.

Lately, because I'm in charge of different stuff for different organizations, I've had to email a lot of people I don't know particularly well. I'm amazed at the number of women who use an email address with their husband's name on it, and not their own. For example say I'm writing to Daisy Popplebottom; her email addy won't be daisyp@___, or the gender-neutral dpopplebottom@____, or a family thing like CapeCodPopplebottoms@____, or even Daisy&Thirsty@____, or something completely unrelated to her name, say, naughtyzoot@___ (not that I have ever used "naughtyzoot" as a username for anything. Never you mind.) No, Daisy's email address is ThurstonQPopplebottom@_____. When she replies to my email, I have no idea who the hell this is or why he'd be writing to me, but I have to open it in case it's one of these women with their husband's email addresses.

Gah! Why would you do this? There's just no good reason not to have your own email address. Even if it's a "family" one, why attach only one person's name to it?

My own inclination to independence and not being thought of as adjunct to anyone else, particularly in business I'm conducting my own self, leads me to think of these women as somehow pathetic. But I'm obnoxious like that. Does it bother you the same way, or at all?