It has NOT been quiet around here... Before I launch into my regular helping of chat and ego-boo. VONS! Your store at 1st and Atlantic in Long Beach is a SAD MESS!!! The produce is awful, the selection ridiculously small, (or perhaps you are a convenience store when I mistook you for a supermarket?) And you tow people out of your lot in ways that strike me as pure evil. Pride parade? Perfect excuse to tow. Art fest? TOW! Why is the vacancy of your little patch of land SO dang important, you meanies? Oh and I apologize to any crumblie who ate the McDonald Apple Pies we left in the lobby today. We got them by mistake, and I hate to waste food, even REALLY awful food.
This week, in the middle of Caddie/Sibelius HELL, ie. transcription, we got a bit of a break. Unfortunately it was for the bittersweet occasion of T's uncles memorial service.
First however we picked up Aunt and Uncle PandE in San Juan Capistrano where Lionel got to watch the train roll in, and then he pet the bunny-pigs at the petting zoo.
It was in Cuyamaca, in the mountains, at the site of the ruined cabins that stood for 70 years before an idiots flare gun destroyed them. I saw a few people I knew, a few people I should've known and a few people who said, "...and you are...?" As I didn't really know the memorial-ee I made myself room mommy for Lilo and another little girl. They played in an ice chest for the better part of 2 hours, by the end L was so smitten he was flinging himself against her and HURLING her to the ground, all in love. Then when she said he gave her an owie on her knee, he dutifully blew the hurt away with worship in his eyes. Oh, sonny boy.... The girls'l get you EVERY time!
T and I stayed for quite a while chatting and eating. Then we maneuvered Alfie over the VERY rocky and bumpy road to Julien where we were spending the night. L found the closet immediately and demanded his bed be set up inside of it.
The next day we headed for the natural History museum and the Uncles photography exhibit. L was far more interested in the Megatooth shark and the Dinosaurs and spent a good 2 hours exploring paleontology, while we adults chatted. I wanted to go into the Bodyworks exhibit, but it seemed vaguely disrespectful....

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school It's a wonder I can think at all

I found some scrapbooks today, filled with theatre memories from when I was a very young kid. It got me remembering how AWFUL most of the theatre experience at my High School was. I was doing semi-professional theatre outside of HS, but since I was incarcerated anyway, I hoped that the theatre dept. would make the experience less hellish.
Exhibit A: Freshman year. My "Drama" teacher was a bodybuilder and the coach for ladies softball, with no appreciable talent or desire to be saddled with the Drama Club. WE did Sweet Charity. This was Catholic school, mind, but no one seemed to have looked up the definition of "Taxi Dancer" before approving the script. Somehow or other my big mouth got me in trouble with Ms Muscles and I was OFF the drama squad until my Junior year. Perhaps my pointing out she didn't know which was upstage and which was downstage offended the lady in some way.
Junior year the Brothers of Mercilessness hired a VERY young VERY raw girl, who dressed VERY colorfully, gelled her thick eyebrows up in a constant expression of surprise, and had very distinct ideas about putting on a play. She loved me, but she was a little insane, and when it came to staging Grease she completely lost her mind. I was playing Rizzo and she called a special rehearsal for my big solo, "There Are Worse Things I Could Do" Then proceeded to do a highly choreographed interpretative high kick dance, while singing my simple little number as loud as she could. I just stared at her in disbelief and as if she was insane. I flatly refused to do her dance, and she was pretty mad, but it didn't matter because she didn't even last till the end of the year.
Senior year. A real pro. Guy knows what he's doing, but obviously has no time to do it. The musical comes up, and since I was,"so talented" i.e. would do his job for him willingly without being paid, he let me put together a musical review and direct the thing all by myself. I was WAY out of my league, but his son was a talented musician and things fell into place, somehow. Of course I kept the best songs for myself, including the Judy Garland solo.
Terrible. Then the year I graduate they hire a FANTASTIC guy to run the dept. and build a state of the art theatre. Those Brothers ALWAYS had it in for me.