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The Monday Morning Epistle |
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2 Jan 2008 |
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Our New Year literally started out with a bang: about 2:15 in the morning on New Years Day, there was an impressively loud two car collision right in front of our house. Thankfully, no one was injured, but the event was complicated when the occupants of one car witnessed the driver of the other car hurriedly throwing items over the fence into a neighbor's back yard. By the time all five police cars arrived, Mary was already handing out warm coats and hot chocolate—the outside temperature was near 0° Fahrenheit—and the final tow truck didn't leave until well after 4 am. The cops eventually found the bottle of liquor and baggie of pot dumped by the stoned/drunk teenager who caused the accident, and he left the scene handcuffed in the back of a patrol car; I'm predicting that his new year is going to start out badly… Christmas in the Neuse household was a bounty of blessings, as we invited Shawna (the ‘tall girl’) to join us for the holiday festivities. She arrived after work Christmas Eve in time to help us trim the tree, and then spent that night and Christmas Day as an honorary member of our family. We had promised Garion that everyone would open presents as soon as he woke up, on the condition that it was light outside; unfortunately, we weren't real specific about what constituted ‘light’, so he got us up when the first rays of sunlight peeked over the horizon about 5:15 am. As always, Santa was very generous and each person was delighted with their gifts; I was particularly pleased with a gorgeous leather Porsche jacket that matches my wife's car, while Mary was equally thrilled with tickets to the U.S. Senior Open later this year in Colorado Springs. Alex got a chef's coat with his name embroidered on it, and promptly declared that it was much too nice to be worn at work; Jacob was thrilled to receive his own personal ATM machine (sort of an intelligent piggy bank) mostly because we pre-loaded it with several months of unpaid babysitting earnings. The highlight of the day, however, was Garion's ‘big present’: a Bumble-Bee action figure from the Transformers movie; since it would have been unfair to give Monkey-Boy two expensive toys—but Bumble-Bee needs a foe—we gave Alex a Megatron Transformer as well. A word about Transformers: the movie is a fun and well-crafted two hour commercial for the toys, which predate the movie by several years; they are also on the leading edge of “How complicated can we make something and still call it a toy?” Bumble-Bee and Megatron convert back and forth between a robot and a car (or jet in the case of Megatron) and the process involves so much twisting, snapping, and assembling that Daddy is the only one with enough patience and engineering skill to actually transform the darn things. This resulted in a tragic mistake on my part when I agreed to watch the movie with Garion a few days later: he naturally assumed that (a) his toy would be able to mimic the on-screen action, and (b) Daddy would be there to transform Bumble-Bee at all the right moments. I lost count of how many times I assembled and/or disassembled Bumble-Bee, only to have Monkey-Boy hand it right back moments later; in the film, it takes each Transformer only a matter of seconds to transform…lets just say it takes Daddy a lot longer! Christmas week also heralded a new era in personal transportation, as Alex got his drivers license on Boxing Day, and is now permitted to drive himself to and from work. We have also already had the obligatory “It's still my car” father/son lecture on New Years Eve when Mary went to work and I joined JR for a day of model railroading; this forced Alex to walk the mile or so to the mall, which he obviously (and ungraciously) considered an unforgivable hardship. Since Mary & I carpool most weekdays, Alex can drive Kermit a lot more than (I think) he's entitled to, and more importantly, this means he will no longer depend on us for transportation. Consequently, we have been encouraging him to permanently extricate himself from the ‘Spaghetti's Soap Opera’ by finding a new job. With some reluctance, he will be leaving Spag's next week to become a dishwasher/bus-boy at Joe's Crab Shack, where he will be joining several Spaghetti's alumni, including Shawna. Although going from de facto chef back to dishwasher is not exactly a promotion, the work environment at Joe's is a lot more stable, and his paychecks should stop bouncing. More importantly, he will no longer have to worry about trying to prepare meals with an empty larder or being the target of drunken rages by an alcoholic head chef. We are also confident that if Alex is given the chance to demonstrate his cooking skills, he won't remain a dishwasher for very long! KidBit: I was giving Alex some paternal advice on job interviews and pointed out that compared to his peers, his greatest assets were reliability and sobriety. He later confided in me that on his application at Joe's—under the heading “Why should we hire you?”—he wrote down “Because I show up stone-cold sober on time, every time, and work my ass off until the end of my shift.” Upon reading this, the assistant manager hired him on the spot. 
PotW: Christmas from above: looking down into our living room from upstairs. From left to right, Shawna, Garion, Jacob, Mom, and Alex.
2008.01.21-20:31 |