Feliz diá de la Conmemoración de la Batalla de Puebla !*
oooOOOooo
I did not win a copy of The Final Evolution, which has me bummed, except I have a ready-made excuse for not figuring out the puzzle—I spent the hours between seven and midnight at the Emergency Room with two badly sprained ankles.
Not mine—my friend Grace fell down some steps last night** and landed on her feet, which isn’t the blessing your cat would have you believe. After frozen peas didn’t ease her pain, she called me, and I chauffeured her to the hospital and keep her spirits up in the waiting area, which I did by offering a running commentary on the Disney Channel and picking up her book whenever she dropped it.***
I did bring along a printout of the puzzle—just to distract Grace, of course—but you can’t work on something like that for more than an hour at a time without feeling like someone is hitting you in the forehead with a mallet made of your own galvanized stupidity. Or maybe that’s just me?
I’d planned to come home and blitz the site with random answers, but by the time I returned, I’d lost the desire for anything other than my pillow. Things didn’t change much after I got up.
And then there were none. C’est la guerre.
But, hey—If you’re one of the ones who did win, or at least solved the &$^% thing, would you do me a favor and e-mail me the answer? That stupidity mallet kind of got good to me, and I’d like to revel in it. . .
oooOOOooo
Quotes from the Notes
“Successful theft exhilarates.”
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
I know it’s wrong, but I prefer the movie to the book. Of course, I also prefer George Peppard to Truman Capote, so there you go.
oooOOOooo
Janie has discovered that if she gives away her old toys to her four-year-old sister, her mother won’t yell at her quite so much about cleaning up her junk and she still retains visiting rights.
Sunny is all in favor of this, since it means her eight-year old sister won’t yell at her quite so much for “sharing” toys without asking first.
Their parents are all in favor of this because there isn’t quite so much yelling going on, though we’ll have to revisit the policy once Sunny’s floor disappears.
It won’t be long—she’s started to actively solicit donations. She’s not overly aggressive about it, but she is persistent. And predictable:
Janie woke up coughing this morning. She made some horrible hacking noises at breakfast, until her father asked her to dial it back a little.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m trying to get rid of this frog in my throat.”
Sunny perked up over her oatmeal. “Can I have it?”
“Sunny,” said my MIL, “a frog in the throat means she has stuff in her throat. She’s hoarse.”
“Oh.” Her little brow furrowed. “Can I have the horse, too?”
oooOOOooo
Those of you who aren’t parents, or haven’t been parents for a while, may not know about Peep and the Big Wide World. It’s a kids’ show about a small, round, yellow ball of a chicken and his friends.
It’s one of the more educational offerings out there and one of the very few that doesn’t render adults homicidally insane.^ It’s actually taught me a lot about storytelling for intergenerational audiences, dialogue, and comedy beats.
My favorite episode is when Quack—the blue duck—is displeased to discover fish in his pond. But this one has a pretty good lesson about the inherent subjectivity in descriptions:
Favorite lines:
Peep: Plus, a cat is supposed to slink around silently. You hit the ground like a big lump!
and
Chirp: Is that a unicorn?
Quack: Uh huh. We only need one for the plan to work. Four would be better, though.
____
*Thanks goes to my co-worker Cristina for translating “Random Thursday” into Spanish—she says she knows the phrase looks like Arabic, but that’s just the Moorish influence on the language. For some reason, I find that extremely cool.
**If she’d been near the top of the stairs instead of the bottom of the landing, this would be a completely different post.
*** I also accidentally kept it when they came to wheel her into the examination room, but by the time she came back, the Vicodin had hit and she was in a forgiving and somewhat forgetful mood.
^I’m looking at you, Jake and the Neverland Pirates.
Earful of Cider 