The Monday Morning Epistle

Even though he's had his Driver's Permit for nearly a year, Alex was still woefully short of the minimum 50 hours behind the wheel he needed for a license, so we signed him up for commercial driving lessons. This entitled Alex to an entire weekend at a test track, several afternoons and evenings with an instructor in actual traffic, and finally some old-fashioned class room time preparing for the written driver's test. (For anyone over 30, think $750 worth of “Driver's Ed” compressed into ten days.) The test track session was this past weekend, and we dropped Alex off bright and early both Saturday and Sunday morning with a full tank of gas in our 4-cylinder KIA. He was nervous at first, but by Saturday evening he drove home without hesitation and with a new-found sense of confidence. Sunday afternoon featured a ‘recital’ where the students took their parents for spin through the course to show off what they had learned: this was both fun and little unnerving, as Alex demonstrated a range of ‘controlled emergency avoidance techniques’ that included loudly squealing tires and adult passengers hanging on for dear life. Alex was bummed that he didn't get to take us onto the skid pad—where he had learned to deliberately put Kermit into a sideways skid at 30 miles an hour and then recover from it—but Mary & I hastily agreed that we would accept on faith that he had pulled it off with exceptional style.

While Alex was off learning how not to become a statistic, the rest of us did our chores and lugged desks and computers up into kid bedrooms. Installing a wireless network went fairly smoothly, and I wasn't a bit surprised when at least three different neighbors unknowingly offered us free Internet services. With computer security in my professional pedigree, it was a given that I would spend several hours wrestling with network settings until finally arriving at a workable security configuration that may not stop the NSA from reading our mail, but should at least slow them down for a little while. More importantly, trimming our basement study from four computers on three different desks down to a single desk and computer really helped diminish the clutter, not to mention almost completely eliminating the ever-present rat's nest of cables and power supplies. (Or, in the case of Alex's desk, empty soda cans and dirty dishes.)

Following last week's happy extravaganza of model railroading, it was only natural that I would want to enjoy what I bought, so much of Sunday afternoon was spent ‘playing trains’ in the laundry room. Garion was equally fascinated with the new purchases, and pestered almost non-stop until I finally pinned about 18 inches of track to the Styrofoam baseboard so that he could roll a used bargain-bin boxcar back and forth. To my surprise and delight, the older boys joined in once Monkey-Boy was in bed, and Alex spent nearly an hour painfully poking holes in his thumbs while helping me attach teeny metal rail joiners. (I kept offering him the needle-nose pliers, but he refused…) Here's hoping that all three boys will continue to show an interest in helping me build the layout over the winter, because that will make my thinly-veiled excuse of “…doing it for our children.” almost believable.

KidBit:  Alex was invited by a group of friends to visit a haunted house Saturday night, and we gave him permission to go on the condition that he would be home at a reasonable hour. In our family, ‘reasonable’ equates to ‘before 10 pm’, so when he called around 10:30 pm, he correctly guessed that he was already in trouble. He started by explaining that they were still at the haunted house because the driver had locked her keys in the car, then went on to glumly admit that they were also still in the outskirts of Denver…an hour's drive away! Alex did finally make it home safely around midnight, and the first words out of his mouth were laced with frustration: “I'm sorry I'm home so late. I don't know why nobody told me the haunted house was so far away…I guess I just have stupid friends.” He was obviously much more annoyed about the whole situation than I was, so I opted to skip the lecture, and we both went to bed.

PotW: We entered our Porsche Boxster in a local car show to help the Colorado Springs fire fighters raise money for MDA. Even though there were only few contemporary cars—most of the entries were lovingly restored American ‘heavy metal’ from the 50's and 60's—we still won a People's Choice trophy by popular vote. (Girls 12 and under really liked Polgara because “…it looks like a race car.”)

Until next week…Tschüß!

,,,^..^,,,

2007.10.18-09:57