Schoolless

What I learned at girl scout camp

Spending a weekend camping with 32 girls is illuminating in all sorts of ways. For me, the biggest lesson was linguistic. I learned a new word.

Ew.

Well, the word wasn't entirely new to me, but I learned it previously in a completely different dialect. The word I knew, and very occasionally used, was more like eee-eww, each of the two syllables distinctly enunciated, with stress on each, spoken with plenty of inflection and appropriately exaggerated facial expressions.

The new word I learned may be in the same family, and is also used to express a level of disgust. However, it has a completely different ring to it. Or no ring. No inflection. No expression. Maybe the slightest sneering curl of the upper lip, only enough to get the word out of the mouth.

Ew.

A junebug fell in the fire.

Ew.

And now it's sizzling.

Ew.

There is a dead junebug in the toilet.

Ew.

Wait, you've got a spider on you.

Ew.

This mattress has maggots.

Ew.

Would you like a breakfast sausage?

Ew.

Who belched?

Ew.

The perfect, brief, compact way to let the world know your sensibilities have been offended.

I have to go now. I have so much to do. After just two days of camping, my daughter and I have brought back five loads of laundry.

Ew.

Sluck!

If you've landed on this page looking for something else, go away. Before you get any funny ideas, let me remind you that this is a family blog.
I think we invented a new word. I could be wrong. In the early eighties I was under the impression that I invented the word "snork", but pretty soon other people were using it, and laying claim to it's origins. Whatever. I'm not possessive.
Sluck is a cross between slurp and suck, especially while eating spaghetti. Whether the word belongs to us or not, we were having some fun slucking our dinner.

There was some disagreement about the rules of slucking. While Peter thought a properly slucked spaghetti noodle should go into the mouth in one smooth motion, I felt one should get extra credit if the noodle slapped the diner's cheeks and forehead on the way in. Nadia thought one should get bonus points for slucking two noodles at the same time. Chris could not participate in slucking, because he prefers to cut his spaghetti into small bits before forking it into his mouth (we're not taking him to Italy).

BTW, the scene below does not depict slucking. It is an example of flirping.

My blog ratings suck!

WARNING! FOUL LANGUAGE AND DISTURBING IMAGES!
Ok, so I've been following the blog awards discussion on Doc's, COD's and other pages, read an illuminating summary by Dawn of why this discussion matters, and finally used a tip from Andrea to run my blog through the rating checker.
Yikes! G-rated.
Gotta change that. Solidarity, you know.
Fortunately, there is still enough Halloween candy around the house to turn me from a mild mannered, self-possessed mom into a raving bitch in less than fifteen minutes. Or else it was PMS. Anyway, it's not enough that the kids eat that shit day and night and can't think of anything else to talk about for a week before and a few weeks after Halloween. It's not enough that I have to go out and freeze my ass off on a cold evening, when I would rather sit around with a nice glass of wine, and knock on some strange schmucks' doors begging for candy. It's not enough that I run into the goddamned candy wrappers all over the house.
But why do I also have to run into this?

What the hell is this?! Hairball? Cat shit? No, it's a fucking Tootsie Roll, chewed up, and left behind the bookshelf in my kids' room! I mean, WTF!
So, I told Peter that if he ever saw one of his friends do this, he had my permission to kick his ass.
OK, that should do it.

Fun Guy

Who's the Fun Guy? He's the guy made entirely out of fungi.

As part of our study of fungi and bacteria, we took a walk in the woods to see what we would find. While I am fairly certain that the woods are teeming with bacteria, none of them were immediately visible to the naked eye, so we concentrated on fungi: regular mushrooms, shelf mushrooms, lichen, leaf mold. What we found went into the making of Fun Guy.
Here are all the things we found, including some we couldn't bring home with us:

Devil with a blue dress on

We've been waiting to use this real, unretouched photo of our very shy cat Phoebe.
Happy Halloween!

Speaking of dressing up (since it's Halloween), the kids and I had an interesting conversation. One of our family's old friends, whom I'll call Jack, has been morphing over the past few years into Jackie. Chris and I have a difficult time referring to Jackie as she, because we've known Jack as he for so long. So, despite very visible, and in many ways advantageous changes in Jack/Jackie's physiognomy and demeanor, changes which easily fool newly met individuals, we still see the male face behind the glamour, and continue to refer to Jackie as he. Jackie sometimes uses our garage for various carpentry projects, and our kids have had the opportunity to observe both Jackie's transformation, and our confusion over pronouns.
But they're OK with it. After a recent episode of he-she confusion I asked them if they ever wonder why dad and I can't decide how to refer to Jackie.
Peter: No, not really.
Mom: Why not? Do you think Jackie looks like a man or a woman?
Peter: Dunno. Sometimes he looks like a little bit of both.
Nadia: Yeah, but he doesn't dress like a lady.
Mom: What would you think if he did?
Nadia: Then he'd look like a lady.
Mom: So what would you call him then?
Nadia: A she.
Mom: So you don't think it's weird that we sometimes call Jackie a he and sometimes a she?
Both: Nuh-uh.
Mom (leading the witness): You don't think that's weird?
Peter: All grownups are weird sometimes.
Mom: And Jackie's no different?
Peter: Right.
There you have it. Trans-gender alteration taken completely in stride.