Can't Buy Me Kite

So, let's assume that you have a yen to go kite flying. It's windy. You'd like to go that day. There's not a specialty shop near you, but you have a big-box toy store and a Target somewhat nearby.

Would you be kite flying later that day, or not?

That would depend on your timing and which employee you ask at the correct store, but very possibly, you would not be kite flying that day.

It's such a basic toy, isn't it? Target has whole aisles dedicated to Pla-Doh and things that buzz and tweet and toot, but I dare you to find a kite in Target. Perhaps at the beginning of whatever season is considered kite flying season (I honestly don't know...but aren't there windy days in every season?) then there MIGHT be a novelty kite in the seasonal row, but you'll get nothing but blank stares from the (usually helpful, 'round these parts) Target employees if you ask.

We made a special trip (~20 minutes each way) to a Toys'R'Us and looked around on our own before inquiring with an employee, and we lucked out and picked the guy in the store who has a crazy ability to remember the locations of even the most incidental of items. He remembered two sorta goofy pseudo-kites that they only had in stock because they were character-branded, and they were stuck on an endcap in the seasonal section among the pool stuff. You actually had to look quite closely to figure out was in the packages. We bought them and went kite flying with mixed results (wasn't quite windy enough) but if it hadn't been for that employee and some buyer who stocked the item because it went with the other seasonal stuff for that franchise's characters, we would still be kiteless.

They're sort of cheesy kites, really, so we still are kind of kiteless. It's weird to think of such a basic childhood toy as something you just can't find anywhere but a specialty shop. I'm trying to look for something close by that I can get something sturdier, but I may end up buying one from Amazon or something. Still...strange. Who thought kites were so scarce?

Pants -> Skirt

So, you all know the B is tall. She outgrows her jeans in length before the waist is too small. What's a mom to do?

So of course, I cut em' off, got a bandanna from the $1 bin at Target, and made a skirt out of them. Just the tiniest pain in the butt, but I finished it in one 1/2 hour session of cutting and pinning and then about an hour of sewing today.

It's not perfect, the enormous pockets on the original pair of jeans didn't help at all, and she keeps saying, "No!" when I ask her to put it on to have her model it for a picture, so, though I think they came out fine, perhaps it isn't the rousing success that I was hoping for.

Two Meditations on Replacing a Cable Box

There was all manner of cable company weirdness at the homestead yesterday. It was like a semi-self-correcting cascade failure: first the internet connection, then the phone, though television service was still fine. I busied myself resetting modems (cable and phone) and eventually it all worked itself out.

Then the oddness started. We lost our HD channels, so I switched to the 'regular' version of the channel to wait it out, see if it would correct itself again. About ten minutes later, though, the box itself started to make some alarming clicking noises. I mean, Poltergeist-style. (Combine this with my daughter's latest habit of randomly proclaiming, "It's coming!" and you can see why I was momentarily freaked out.)

I tried to power it off with the remote to no avail, so I got up and yanked out the power cable. In the vain hope that a power cycle would somehow help things, I plugged it back in, only to observe the problem even worse than it had been the first time.

A call to Comcast, with a remarkably laid-back customer service agent (which I thought was a thing of the past, as those CS agents seem to be judged on call length more than customer satisfaction) led us to the idea that the construction in my area had caused my intermittent outages, and also a surge of some kind when the cable was fully restored that one of my boxes survived, but the older, more beat-up looking of the two, did not.

I got the address of the "closest" service center (if you, like me, can observe that they're never close to where you live, that's actually a good thing, which I'll get to later) and planned my route for after the B got up from her nap. The good thing was that the office was open until 7:00, so it allowed me, home-bound during her nap, to still make it there after she got up. Thumbs up on the office hours.

It came time to head over there and we took off, GPS and Google Maps-assisted. The neighborhood got worse and worse as I got closer and closer. I had used street view to look around where the office was so that I would more easily recognize the office once I got there (unnecessary, as it turns out...there was a huge sign that even my sense of direction-impaired butt could see) and the building opposite the cable office, whose sign was too blurry to read in Google street view, turned out to be a "Gentleman's Club". Ahem.

I went in to retrieve my new box and was asked for my saga yet again, but it was, I think, just conversational. The content of my story didn't seem to be a contingency on getting my box, but a way to pass the time while he brought up my account and switched the old box out and the new box in. Interestingly, I was told I was getting the last one, and it was indeed the only one of its kind in the stack on the table behind him. I mentioned that the phone agent had told me she thought they had "plenty", since, as the agents can't see inventory for the different offices, they are supposed to send an email to the phone center when they are running low. This apparently reminded him of what he was supposed to do (though that hadn't been my intent, I just mentioned it in stream-of-consciousness mode) and he was working on it when I left with my prize.

So my first meditation, for those scoring from the title, is that cable service centers are always in the Bad Part of Town.

On the ride home, I decided to actually listen to the GPS and take the highway, instead of the side streets I tricked it into on the way there. There were many changes from one road to another, and in those merges, I realized the second of the things I learned on my trip yesterday.

By far, and I mean a very wide margin, the drivers of cars bearing a specific sort of Colorado plate seem to be the ones most likely to try to run you off the road, stay ahead of you on a merge at any cost, or refuse to let you switch lanes. That plate is this one, initially added to the roster after the Columbine school shootings, but now seems to be in use more by abortion opponents more than people concerned with schoolyard violence:



Not one, not two, but three cars with this type of license plate messed with me on my way there or my way back. I assure you, with my two year old in the car, I err on the side of caution, so I was not driving so aggressively as to anger everyone around me. One of them was clearly behind me as I tried to merge onto I-270, with plenty of space ahead of them for me to come in and still leave him sufficient following distance, but he sped up and paced me, forcing me to slow down to merge in behind him.

He was, of course, one of those Colorado drivers (and yes, I say Colorado, because this is more prevalent here than ANYWHERE else I've ever driven) who, once all the merging and whatnot is done, they drive along the highway at LEAST ten miles per hour under the speed limit.

I guess there were sort of two driving meditations there at the end, the first about the Respect Life plate and the second about the Colorado Sunday Driver phenomenon, but I'm far too lazy to change the title now.

Crap

I took the B to a "pick your own" farm today, where I was nervous the entire time we were in the flower patch picking flowers (none of the good veg is in season yet, I guess, and the only fruit you could pick yourself were pie cherries, and the last thing I need is cherry pie) that she would get stung by a bee or a hornet. We made it out of there okay, got some beans (they had yellow, green, and purple) and checked out.

On the way out to the car, we walked across a little bridge thingie with hollow piping used as railing, and when we got to the far side, the B must have patted the piping or something and a swarm of hornets flew out. One of them was on her hand before I could react, and she started crying. I looked at her hand and there was a little bloody spot on it with the skin around it starting to swell.

Crap.

It appears she has no bee sting allergy, which is good. I cleaned it out well at the car (with the doors closed, thankyouverymuch) and drove home, where I put insect sting/itchy skin cream on it and then gave her the band-aid she kept asking me for in the car. (We put them on her mosquito bites after the 4th to keep her from scratching, so she knows what they're for.)

I know there's nothing I could have done to prevent it. Even someone with my level of persistent paranoia couldn't have imagined the pipes were housing a hornet's nest, and the sting happened so fast after I realized they were there that I couldn't have done anything about it anyway.

Still, seeing her little swollen hand and the band-aid makes me sad.

I Hope She's Not On To Something

For about a week, the B (now two and a half, for those of you who don't know) has been randomly, out of the blue, saying, "It's coming."

Now, we've said this to her when we're waiting for food at a restaurant or something like that, so she is just mimicking what we've said, but it's been a little like starring in an independent horror film for the last week or so.

Add to that her alternate names for shadows, which are "monsters" and "aliens". Where she got this, I don't know. She doesn't seem to be afraid of the "monsters" or "aliens", so I've been letting it slide and just saying, "Yes, that's a shadow," and hoping she embraces the right word on her own.

But when you put those two things together, and you get a child who says, "It's coming," and "Look, aliens!" and "Monsters!" while she points at, you know, NOTHING but some shadows on the wall, and it's honestly hard not to feel a little creeped out.

Manditory Intelligence Testing Proposal for the TSA

First, please read this.

Then tell me why the people who decide who is and isn't 'tall enough to ride this ride' and what they are allowed to bring onto the plane shouldn't be tested for a certain baseline of intelligence, and if a reliable test can be devised, for common sense as well.

I mean, come on. It was the SAME KNIFE the airline gives out with its meals!! And he was the frakking PILOT! If he wanted to harm the people on the flight, he could point the nose of the plane at the ground and wait. He doesn't need a knife with microscopically-fine serrations on it so he could paper cut someone to death.

My eyes just sprained from rolling too far.