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The Monday Morning Epistle |
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18 April 2005 |  |
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After the back-to-back fun of Spring Break and Space Camp, last week was calm, relaxed, and generally uninspiring. Mary and Alex repeatedly locked horns over his Science Project, which he seems to have little enthusiasm for, even though it's due at the end of this week. He's supposedly doing a study of the ethics of cloning, but so far his research seems to involve more playing on the PS/2 than anything else. We were faced with a dilemma Friday night when Rauchfang re-opened for business after being closed for a month: on the one hand, we are still mourning the departure of 'Family Lombardo', but on the other hand, our internal pasta levels have been running dangerously low. When Mary noticed that Rosario was helping out in the kitchen, we put on our best brave faces and joined Cherry and Lew for a late dinner. Rosario was as pleased to see us as we were to see him, and we found out later in the evening that he agreed to work with the new owners for a few weeks to ease the transition. The only significant change to the menu-apart from a few dishes being renamed-was the total lack of beef entrees: good cuts of beef are expensive in Europe, as most are imported from Argentina or New Zealand. Our meal was acceptable without being memorable, and it was rather amusing to see the new proprietors hover anxiously at every table. They are visibly nervous and eager to please, no doubt because they recognize that it will take some effort to retain the regular clientele. Mary and Alex will spend the rest of this week getting ready for the Troop 324 trip to Normandy over this coming weekend. They leave at "O God Thirty" Thursday morning for the 12+ hour drive, and come back around midnight on Sunday. Jacob, Garion & I will be left to our own devices for the four-day trip, but that's fine with me because it will give me a chance to unpack and rebuild a new computer! After weeks of configuring high-end gaming rigs on various vendor web sites, I got fed up and bought an HP 'Multimedia PC' at the Power Zone. This may be the computer equivalent of a toaster (plug it in and use it) but it was less than ½ the price of some of the other systems I was drooling over. Jacob has graciously volunteered to help me test all the games on the new computer this weekend…he is such a thoughtful and caring boy! Oh, and for reasons that I still have yet to fathom, I shaved off my mustache for the second time in 25 years… KidBit: Garion is starting to participate in 'getting dressed' and one morning, after helping put on a long-sleeved shirt he proudly announced "I put my hands in the slide!" I tried to correct him that they were called 'sleeves' but he wasn't having any of it; as far as Monkey-Boy is concerned, shirts have 'slides' for hands.
PotW: Kelly had each student in the 5th grade write a letter of thanks to their chaperone, and on Friday Jacob brought home a neatly bound 'book' of letters to me from the boys that I was responsible for. This one from Felix-who really took to heart my request to "…help me with my German"-is my favorite; it only took two trips to the dictionary for me to read it!
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16:38 09 Jan 06 |
