We weren't supposed to get the bus for elementary school, but they changed their mind after seeing the expressway interchange nine year old was supposed to traverse. She got the bus, and even hugged the driver, who we've had for 7-8 years.

The next day was the first day of school for fourteen year old. School shopping wasn't too bad this year, we bought the pricey graphic calculator last year. We even had two different instances of RIASC at two different Staples when we ran into classmates.

Speaking of fourteen year old, we were intrigued when a male called asking for her, but it was just the tree cutting service saying they would need access to our backyard when they take down our neighbors' maple tree. That's the third big tree taken down in and adjacent to our yard in as many years. Here comes sunshine in the morning, and we'll have fewer nights being woken up by sex crazed squirrels.

The backyard is much more spacious. Our garage is a mess, the tree hid how bad the eaves were. Once it gets a little cooler I need to redo the garage roof, and replace the eaves and gutters, hopefully I can salvage the old gutters.

Speaking of the dead, my step mother-in-law died last week. They live out in California, so Mrs. Ha didn't go. I hadn't seen her in years, she was becoming to frail to travel, and was bedridden for years. I don't know if my father-in-law understood our inability to drop $1000 on last minute round trip airfare, his understanding of my corp solidified in the 50's and 60's, when 100 shares of stock became thousands and thousands, it's not like that anymore.

Sick

We missed the wedding, I was sick, probably norovirus. I blame Mrs. Ha, she had something similar three or four days before. It was a waste of a childfree long weekend, though we watched lots of movies and I finished lots of books. See below.

I managed to leave the house Saturday, and we went to the flea market in Avon, and the littler one across the street. I came away with the 1984 version of Statis Pro Football, for $2, how can you go wrong? It's an old, musty version. I may never play it, but you never know. Porsche-boy was intrigued (but then he's a proto-gamer, he plays Pokemon and drags Porsche-mom to the close gaming store).

Media Rewviews

First up was Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, where somehow Progressives, suffragists, Republicans, anti-immmigrants and Southern Democrats banded together long enough to violate Constitutional rights and spawn vast criminal conspiracies. It was interesting to read about a Southern black man being lynched for assaulting a white teenage woman, he was allegedly under the influence of Black Cock Vigor Gin some cheap gin with a picture of a semi-nude white woman on the bottle, from a distillery run by Lee Levy. Jews selling poison to the Negroes that incite their lawless lust, had this been written by the Nation of Islam or the KKK, I would have been dubious. Then again, it's just one data set. My google-fu failed me, I hoped to find an image of that bottle. I did get a chance to try Bing at home, no luck on images of a bottle of Black Cock Vigor Gin.

Recommended, especially for the lightly drawn parallels to today's prohibition.

Next was Vance's The Dying Earth, a short book of short stories of science fantasy taking place on Earth in it's final years, with a post-apocalyptic feel. The spells (based on some forgotten math principles) have great names, but many sound familiar if you've played D&D.

The final book was Darkly Dreaming Dexter, the first Dexter book. I liked the second Dexter book, this one wasn't as good. My mom likes mysteries, so I handed it off to her.

We caught TCM's cougariffic film festival one night, starting with most of The Graduate. It's still great. If you've never seen it, see it, so you can understand why everyone parodies it. Later that night, too late for sickly me, was Summer of '42, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we were able to DVR it. Summer of '42 is a biographical story of some horny teenage boys on a New England island in 1942. A couple moves to the island, the husband goes off to war, the comely old lady (she must have been in her 20's at least) excite one young man's fancy. Sweet and romantic, one could easily tell it was filmed in 1971.

Finally, we watched Away We Go, in which unmarried hipsters expecting a bastard visit various friends across North American, hoping to find a home.