Month: August 2005

Ahh, the stench of bus exhaust is in the air today. Leominster Public Schools are back in session. This summer went by FAST. I mean, seriously, did they have more than a few weeks off? It doesn’t seem like it.

I took the requisite first day of school photo, and I actually think that maybe he’s wearing the same shirt today that he wore for the first day last year. Well, we’ll just keep it in rotation until he bursts out of it like the Incredible Hulk. If we’re lucky, it will happen when he’s angry.

I hope he has a good teacher this year. Nobody recognized her name, so she might be new. Scary to get the new teacher, because nobody can tell you anything about her. But her name sounds nice, if that makes any sense, so we’ll see.

All seriousness about this Katrina thing aside, I do want to say that I seriously pity the people who rented the house we rented for vacation this week. Cause it’s a couple thousand dollars a week, and they have no sun in sight. We apparently hogged it all up. Of course, there’s no chance that they will have water up to their eyeballs and have to go sleep in a football stadium, so I can’t offer too much pity, but man, if it was me down there in the rain with the kids for a week, I’d be slowly drinking myself into a stupor. As it is, while we tried to limit the amount of time the television was on, they still watched these two Gamera movies I had with me about 50 or 60 times. Lord help us if we hadn’t been able to spend a few hours down in the water every day. I’d have the dialog memorized.

(You know what’s cool? When your kids discover the stuff you loved as a kid. I wasn’t a big Gamera fan, but my sister was. She was into channel 56’s “Creature Double Feature” every Saturday starting at noon, too, which is I guess how she knew Gamera. So the kids are totally into it, and aren’t at the “so campy it’s cool” stage. They actually find it thrilling when the big pointy-headed monster that kind of looks like an octopus uses his pointy head to stab Gamera, but then Gamera uses his fiery jets to spin off with the monster stuck to him and he wins the fight! Hooray Gamera!)

But enough. I don’t need to see these again for a number of years, thanks.

Okay, I can complain, I’m good at it. But I won’t, not when I’ve got half an eye on the news reports from Louisiana.

You’d think you would come back to work after vacation refreshed and raring to go, but maybe it’s the 2 weeks remaining of a 4 week contract thing that makes it hard to be refreshed about anything. Or maybe it’s mentally preparing for Wednesday’s first day of school. Or the fact that the dog either has some kind of urinary tract infection or he’s in puberty because he is literally peeing all over the entire house since we picked him up from the boarding place Saturday. I’m tired of walking in pee. Oh, and by the way, they gave him the more horrific haircut ever. When they brought him out we thought it was the wrong dog. I want my schnoogie woogums back, not this little ratty poodle-faced pup. *sigh*

Wait, I said I wasn’t going to complain, right?

I am such a liar.

Okay, it took me all day, but here are some photos of our trip. Of course, these are only a few of the 300 I took, but I’m not going to bore you completely. You can click the restaurant sign to pull up the page of images (it may take a few extra seconds to load, but hey, I’m worth it!)

On our way home. I’m sad. So, so sad. But relaxed, so there’s that. I think we’d be close to home already if there hadn’t been an apparently *really* bad accident on Route 6. We were stuck in stop and go traffic for over an hour. Great fun.

Can’t wait to start pullung together all the photos and video. I think a trip to Target for photo processing is in order. That should set my back a small fortune. Of course, this might be the trip that makes a photo printer a sound investment. Mr. Dump was telling my about an HP photo printer that ends up costing less per print to use than a CVS or snapfish…I am going to look it up.

More later when I am home with a real keyboard…