Skip to main content
So I went to see the new Star Wars movie. It was an action-packed night.

First, I met everyone at the house. Daniel and Christopher both grabbed seats in my car, which left Emily and Chris trying to figure out who would ride with us and who had to ride alone with Dad and Tina. (Tina is Dad’s girlfriend. She’s a very nice person. Long ago, we used to go on vacations with her and her boys.) But none of the kids want to be alone with them, which is pretty funny. Neither did anyone want to sit in the middle of my backseat. Nor did they want to ride together in the other car, which seemed like a logical solution, at least to Daniel and me. So there was a standoff in the driveway.

(Aaron was smart and took off with his carload early.)

Eventually Chris got exasperated and slammed out of my car to ride with Greg and Tina. We all decided that he would get shotgun on the way back.

Then we headed to the theater. Lines were already forming, but we had time to eat. Some people wanted to eat at one restaurant, some at another, which again made things easy. I took the Pot Bellies crowd, and I must say we were definitely the fun group.

After that, we stood in line, all thirteen of us. Me, my kids, their dad, his girlfriend, her kids, his brother, several assorted school friends. Some of us were placeholders while others went and got snacks. The line was not really a line; it was a clump of jostling people. Light sabers and vader heads bobbed everywhere. I paid Daniel in candy to go get my soda and Reese’s Pieces.

The movie was pretty good.

Comments

Anonymous said…
FIRST of all, I am shocked, hurt, and annoyed to be called a "various school kid." We were the fun crowd, so you got lucky there (this time!) Learn your lesson from Aaron, take off quickly, before anyone notices!
listeme said…
Yes, one can learn many lessons from Aaron!

And my deepest apologies for calling you a school friend in my desire to avoid making this a confusing list of names (especially with the Chris/Christopher confusion). Devon and Margaret joined us (in the fun crowd), and Greg's brother also has a name, Glenn.

Whew!

Popular posts from this blog

This has been a very long week -- perhaps 16 or 17 days, at least. I have been offered -- and accepted -- my younger sister’s finished basement for the next year and a half. This will be a major cost-saver for me and a big help for her (she has two toddlers and is expecting a baby in August.) So that was a humongous start to the week. My other sister and her teenaged son have had to make some really hard decisions. She gave me permission to quote her: “spent yesterday at the hospital with my son. about eleven hours. sitting here writing and rewriting this entry trying to find just the right words. how to explain-- he is not healthy. he is mentally ill. he is not safe at home. none of this really covers it. so here's one image from the day. we walk into the east wing at maine med escorted by security. the very nice guard LOOKS like a skinhead but actually has incredible kindness and compassion for my snarly boy. he tells us gently that he has to check ian for weapons and sharp o...
More lake news : they've installed microwaves in the cabins. Okay. This is deeply disturbing to me. First of all, let's be honest. The furniture is rickety at best. Harvest gold plaids went out of style with the Bradys. The easy chairs with no legs never were in style. The high chair is just plain dangerous. The pots and pans are not non-stick; that's baked-on grease. So bringing in cute little white microwaves seems like some perversion of priority. Not to mention! Microwaves introduce things like frozen dinners, oatmeal with dinosaurs, and something called EasyMac. This is just wrong. Sick and wrong. Why, when I was a kid we chipped ice away from the lake's edge just to get our drinking water and then lit a fire to melt it. And the microwaves are really tiny and inadequate. It took 14 minutes to defrost my chili.
So I can finally talk about this without shuddering… much. There I was, innocently minding my own business, reading “Freakonomics” in the bathroom, and out of the corner of my eye I saw something run by. Curie and Sagan were both napping, so I was immediately alarmed. I thought maybe it was a mouse. (This should give you an idea of the size of the thing.) It was not a mouse. It was a centipede. It dashed into the laundry nook. “Aahh!” I said and looked around for help. No help was in sight. I believe in being prepared. I also believe in keeping an eye on my enemy. This presented a dilemma. I had to go find weapons without taking my eye off the creature. So I would run out of the bathroom, look around for something, anything -- where is a bazooka when I need one? -- and then race back in to see if he was still there. I did this several times. Finally, armed with a long piece of, well, bamboo (to poke with, of course), a bottle of bathroom cleaner, and a big cup, I advanced ...