I hate filling out forms.  Therefore, I am quite bad at it. 

Back before our school district became completely computerized, there were little colored cards to fill out – in triplicate – for each boy.  And because so many parents are divorced or never married or have never even met, there are different spaces for absolutely everyone’s address, office phone, home phone, cell phone, fax, email, and favorite coffee shop where you might be found in case of emergency if your cell is dead or the ringer is off.

That’s just the parents. 

Then there are the lines for the pediatrician (and all his/her numbers) and the dentist (ditto) and the person authorized to pick your kid up in the car line in the event no biological relatives can drive that day.

It became exceedingly tiresome to fill out these cards.

To ease the tedium, I started filling in the address line with an ink pad and a stamper.  Chris and I work at home – the address is always the same!  Or I would use those charity address labels that otherwise have no purpose, since nobody uses the US Mail anymore. 

There was one year when I made the mistake of facing the little blue cards late at night after drinking too much of what Chris calls Mommy’s Special Juice.  They quickly became an inky, smudgy, messed-up mess.  Reduced to trying to make copies on our fax machine so I could start over, I succeeded only in faxing smudgey, whited-out forms to god knows where.  If there is any justice in the world, they went to the fax machine of that mythical Nigerian prince.

So, bottom line, forms are not my thing.  I would make a terrible bureaucrat.

I didn’t realize anyone else in the family noticed or cared about this until yesterday, when Hugh and I went for his driving test (Take Two).  I had printed out the form validating that yes, he had put in at least 50 hours of driving on the road.  It was all filled in properly.  I had my driver’s license, we had the insurance card and the registration from the glove box (which I used to call glove compartment, but that’s another story).  After waiting in a long line of cars for nearly one hour, it was finally our turn.

The examiner asked for the forms.  She told me I didn’t need the 50 hour form since that had been turned in during the first driving test (parallel parking was the downfall there).  I handed over the other things – she examined them – announced “your insurance expired, make another appointment,” – handed back the papers, and off we went.  Again.  In dismay.

On further examination, I saw that the insurance card was good up until the very day before the test.  In a cell phone call, Chris said “Of course our insurance is valid, it runs from October to October, that must have been a temporary card from when we bought the Jetta in September.”  We cursed, and felt cursed.

As Hugh drove disgustedly back to tennis team practice, he lectured me.  Our roles were reversed.  I sat, ashamed, in the passenger seat, while Hugh lambasted me for the insurance screw-up.  Even in anger, he is very mature.  “I know that insurance isn’t your area, but this is the kind of thing that happens too much in our family.  I hate how forms aren’t filled out on time.  I was always the kid who turned in his permission slip on the last possible day, or even later.  And that was really embarrassing.  Maybe I shouldn’t have felt embarrassed, but why can’t we just do this stuff on time?”
I pointed out that Hugh has only one more year at home and in high school, there are no field trips, so it’s not much of an issue for him any more.  “Well, maybe if you change, it can help Malcolm.”  Ouch.

My next defense was that no family is perfect.  Perhaps the kid who turns in permission slips exactly on time is also being raised on a steady diet of Lunchables and Spaghettios.  Or worse, Burger King crap served in the car while his mom drives him from lacrosse practice to music lessons.

Hugh didn’t exactly respond with “Irrelevant, your honor” but it was close.  The poor kid has a point.  I am awful at forms, and paperwork, and organization.

While I have resolved to reform, I am also a realist. 

Can I improve on this score?  Yes.  Will I ever be one of those perfect moms?  No.

Thank God.

This weekend’s snowfall was of Biblical proporations.  As proof, here’s what our church courtyard looked like on Sunday morning.

And a view out the other window.

By Sunday, things were pretty much back to business as usual. 

But on Saturday, it could have been 1910.  Life was insular and simple.  There was no running to the store to get anything.  There was no driving, period.  Nothing to do, nowhere to go.  

Everyone shoveled, then took a nap from sheer exhaustion, as a fire burned in the grate.

No airplanes in the sky, no cars on the road.  Outside, almost total silence.  We live on a busy state road on which 5,000 cars a DAY speed by.  On a snow emergency day, it’s like one of those nuclear holocaust movies in which all the cars stop working – only with beauty all around, instead of decimated buildings and flaming trees. 

The beauty was only on the outside. 

Indoors, the area around each door was a horror show, strewn with cold weather gear and puddles of ice melt.

Despite the interior nightmare, I nevertheless give thanks that Chris and I do not have to personally be involved in getting children in and out of snowpants, boots, and gloves anymore.  It’s been years since we’ve had to help them, and yet we are still grateful.  The memories are fresh.

We will long remember this weekend.  It’s wonderful when forces of nature force you outside of ”normal.”

A final note: don’t forget to mail your Valentines cards early this year!  More snow is predicted for mid-week and as we learned on Saturday, lots of white stuff WILL actually keep the postman from his appointed rounds.

Sometimes it’s depressing to live in a place that nobody considers exciting.

When we go on trips and people ask where we’re from, and the answer is “Pennsylvania” or “Philadelphia,” there’s a glassy smile and a vague, “Oh, that’s nice…”  or maybe a “Yes, the Liberty Bell….”  Ian reported that in Europe, everyone said “Rocky!”  While it’s nice to be known for Sly Stallone’s character, he’s not real and he doesn’t actually go running through the Italian Market.

Contrast this with what happens when we’re vacationing with friends Lindsay and Bruce from San Francisco.  When they say where they’re from, everyone perks up and starts oohing and aahing about how much they adore the Golden Gate Bridge, the fabulous restaurants, Chinatown, the amazing architecture or the non-stop gorgeousness and coolness of the place. 

This used to happen at college in Ohio too.  Lindsay and I would walk into a frat party.  The guys would ask for basic information by way of introduction.  “I’m Jennifer from Missouri.”  Stifled yawns.  “I’m Lindsay, from Las Vegas.”  Cue the neon lights and the loud striptease music.  The buzz was instant.  ZING!!!  LAS VEGAS!  “I didn’t know anyone was from there, what’s it like to grow up among gamblers, do you know any showgirls?”    I would fade into the woodwork, then count the minutes until I could slink back to Beaver Hall, which was the actual name of our freshman dorm.

Sometimes, I was terribly jealous of my friend for hogging the geographic spotlight.  Before Las Vegas, she had lived in New Orleans.  In the FRENCH QUARTER.  Where her stepdad was a musician and her super young mom wore maxi dresses, and they had an apartment with wrought-iron balconies. 

After college, my zip code envy did not improve.  Lindsay went off to live in such glittering locales as New York, Boston, and SF.  I think she was strategically turning down  job offers in any run-of-the-mill places.  I was in NYC very briefly, then Washington DC (which was really very dull), and finally here.

Now, I have made my peace with being from a place that is perceived to lack sizzle.  OK, so it’s true that we’re not on the coast, we’re not on the prairie, we’re not in the desert or the mountains, and we don’t have amazing topography. 

The flip side?  We don’t have wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, mudslides, rockslides,  tsunamis, or floods.  We don’t even have crippling blizzards.  There are no alligators in our backyards, no scorpions in our shoes, and no bears nosing around our garbage cans. 

Above all, we don’t have earthquakes.  

Here is an excellent, and rather short, essay from Tracy Kidder on the history of Haiti and why a naturally occuring disaster there is made even worse as a result of the mis- treatment  its people  have endured for centuries. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/opinion/14kidder.html

As Americans of all time zones and zip codes, we will send help to Haiti.  And I will personally give thanks that our family is safe from almost all natural disasters, a silver lining of our dull location.

I am reminded of the Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times.”  I would add “And interesting places.”

Apparently, finding material is not a problem for this guy.  

BOOKS:  Casting back to this earlier post, I have read  Out Stealing Horses (almost dreamlike, brutal but beautiful), and am just finishing Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan (wonderful premise, great narrator, packed with funny and serious observations).  It was a treat to go from the ice and snow of Norway to the heat and jungles of Burma.  OSH was written in spare, stark prose - and then there’s Amy Tan, a wizard of wordiness.  I loved both of these, suggested by Melanie.  However, I could not get into her pick Ella Minnow Pea, even though the premise is clever and it’s all about words and language. Will try again.

Again, I’m so grateful for all the reading suggestions from you MOBsters.  It makes me feel snug and secure, knowing there’s a long list of good books in the pipeline.  On Thursday I’ll put up the entire list of recommendations.

COLLEGE:  This is crunch week - schools need to know on May 1 which kids have accepted their offers, and which kids are going elsewhere.  As a recent newspaper article said, ”A lot of families will be sitting around the table on Thursday night with a whiteboard.”  Memo to self:  get a whiteboard with magical decision-making abilities. 

 STINKBUGS:  And going back many months, I must re-visit the topic of hideous stinkbugs.  These god-awful things are everywhere, and they are driving me mad.  I can’t just shrug and co-exist with them, I must wage war upon each and every one.  As you can imagine, this doesn’t help my daily productivity quotient.  I describe my favorite waterboarding technique in the old post, and I continue to stand by this method.

But I’ve found an effective new technique of stinkbug torture as well.  This involves scooting said vermin onto a sheet of paper, then slapping a huge piece of strong tape down on top of them.  Don’t let any antennae or skinny arms and legs stick out – I’ve seen them escape through tiny gaps.  In a pinch, several criss-crossing bits of regular Scotch tape will do.  It’s kind of like home-made flypaper.

These scourges are the size of jellybeans.  When they make contact with solid objects, a small thud results.  They buzz, they swarm to lights by night and to windows by day.  No pesticide has been found to work against them.  Last night, Malcolm noticed the hall light was full of charred and dessicated stinkbug husks.  Today, I cleaned out the globes, chuckling grimly at the carnage – and the evidence that – haha – they can’t escape every danger, can they?

Please tell me Stinkbug Season will be over soon.

The idea of a jail for big kids is morbidly fascinating to kids of school age.  They worry for the teenagers who are “inside,” and they worry they might be sent there some day.  That fear seemed far-fetched, until I read this in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.  Two judges in Luzerne County, PA have been convicted of sentencing children as young as 13 to Juvenile Hall and expensive wilderness camps for such crimes as 1.  lying  2.  stealing loose change from unlocked cars  3.  shoplifting a $4 jar of nutmeg (my mind snagged on this detail – what kind of a kid would steal nutmeg?  Did the mom need it for a recipe but she had no money?  Was the shoplifter an aspiring chef?  Shouldn’t we be rewarding kids for choosing nutmeg instead of Doritos, even if it’s pocketed?)

It turns out the judges were themselves lying and stealing.  They were getting kickbacks from the juvenile corrections people.  And they were lying about it.  Talk about wicked collusion.  These grown men, entrusted by society to make wise and fair decisions, were being bribed to tear young kids away from their families for petty, ordinary infractions.   Imagine the trauma their “cure” has caused.  One attorney involved in the class-action suit said this was ”one of the worst judicial scandals in history.”   The judges have agreed to serve more than 7 years in federal prison but have not yet been sentenced.

I have an idea.

Let’s demand poetic justice here.  Send the judges to wilderness camp for 3.5 years.  Their counselors will be kids they sentenced to the same fate, working on rotation.  “Chop that wood for 8 hours, then you can have 30 minutes for lemonade and cookies and berries right outside that den where the bears are stirring.”

The next 3.5 years of their sentence should be served in Juvenile Hall in Luzerne County.  Their jailers, of course, will be the kids they condemned.  “Mop the floors for 8 hours, with your tongue.  After that, a plate of slop.  If you still have the taste of Murphy’s Oil Soap in your mouth, we’ll have some nutmeg shavings on the side.”

Definitely, no basketball privileges. 

This story is one for the anals (sic) of crime and punishment.