The Big DumpTruck

I’m getting nervous about how little time is left between now and the end of the month. I just broke the 29000 word mark, and I don’t know how much more I’ll be able to write tonight. Why do I put myself through this?

My cold is a little better but Mr. Dump says I gave it to him, so that’s not good.

The comment spammers are back, so I’m trying to keep those edited. Hopefully none of you will comment while I’m in the middle of deleting stuff. I apologize in advance if that happens.

Oh, and we had Junior’s teacher meeting tonight. He’s doing very well – is in the advanced groups for both Reading and Math. But he’s a talker. Now anyone who has ever met this child is just nodding his or her head. Yup. My sister had the best experience with his talking. She rode all the way home from North Conway NH with him the van with her kids, and her kids fell asleep and Junior didn’t stop talking the whole way. I was in a different car, and when we arrived at her house, she looked at me with wild eyes and asked (out of his earshot) “Does he ever shut up?” Heh heh heh. Welcome to my world.

I’m up to 27333 words. Not nearly as many as I meant to write over the weekend. I blame this cold-thing. My God, it just clings to you and you can’t shake it loose. Just sick enough that doing normal stuff like grocery shopping wipes you out for hours, but not sick enough that you take to your bed for the day. I didn’t have the energy to do too much, even though I wanted to. And the cough, it continues. Crab, moan and complain. I know, I know, there are people who have it far worse than me. I do know that, and I’m embarrassed to have taken up valuable air with my meager complaints.

It’s the season of the Giving Tree, by the way. You know, where you can select the name of a child and “make Christmas” for them. I usually do this, but this year at work the deadline is a week from Friday, and I’m just not going to have my shopping money lined up by then. So I don’t think I’m going to commit to a specific child here at work. On the other hand, I do want to help out, so my other option is to donate gifts to a general collection box. And in this box you can also include items for adults, household appliances, toiletries, and other things so sorely needed by those struggling to get by. I am a big believer in this kind of collection – for several years at my old job I ran a toiletry drive every year. So I do think this is probably what I’m going to donate this year. I am also going to look to my own community instead of the one where I work (no offense, but home is home) and will be gathering items for Ginny’s Helping Hand food pantry on Mechanic Street. (I had a URL for her but it doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll keep trying.)

Okay, now that the DVD drive is working, it was time to go through all the video I shot down at DisneyWorld last month. Man, there was a lot of footage, but now that I’m done with it all, I can’t help but smack myself for the stuff I *didn’t* tape. I mean, what is my malfunction? Why would I be taping and then stop all of a sudden? Why do I not have more footage of us on rides? I think I was too worried about getting still photos, and there was at least a day if not more that I left all the video camera stuff behind because I just couldn’t handle carrying two cameras around. But there’s still not excuse for me not getting shots of us on the monorail (duh, we were wearing t-shirts that said “Monorail Breakfast Club” one day), or more of the hotel. Hindsight is 20/20, and every time we go on vacation I get a little better, but still, would it kill me to just shoot a ton of extra stuff so that I can have more to choose from when editing it all together? Grrrr.

I just feel the need to give a shout-out to the live chat support line at Dell. They fixed me right up with a solution to my DVD burner problem and voila, I can now burn DVDs again! Woo Hoo! Now I only have 2 and a half hours of Florida tape to organize, edit and burn. That should take me forever.

Tonight I learned that the very first food eaten by people was popcorn.

[Johnny Carson Voice] “I did not know that.”

He swears up and down that this is what his teacher told them today. The other day he came home and told me that Veterans Day was the day that we thanked all the people who fought the war with Columbus. Or something involving Columbus. I tried to explain that veterans are people who fought in wars, or even people who joined the military when there wasn’t a war, but he couldn’t shake that Columbus thing.

Either he’s only half listening in school, or his teacher is doing this on purpose to screw him up. I think I’m going to go with the former, because I know they had a Native American come in and do a presentation today and I’m wondering if somehow the whole corn being a dietary staple that they introduced to the Europeans came up, and was somehow mistranslated in Junior’s head. It does make you realize you can’t take everything the kid says at face value. My best example of this, ever, was the time his old babysitter came up to me and said, “Junior says that daddy wears black lipstick.” She had a look on her face that said “please tell me there’s some not-so-obvious explanation for this.” And I had to put on my Junior Thinking Cap and I realized that yes, Mr. Dump went through a phase where he was practically ingesting Chap-Stik, the ones with the black wrapper. And Junior turned that into black lip stick. Easy mistake. But the whole thing still makes me laugh.