Letters to Holly

Tuesday, June 1

We're Officially Ready

The office threw us a nice shower Friday, complete with ice cream cake and baby gifts. As a joke, they offered tiny pickles to eat with the cake. I tried it. The salty taste covers the daily entirely. One of my coworkers tried to whisper that I had a big smile on my face, and I immediately swallowed it. I'm a different guy at work, and I blame the atmosphere. It's not the kind of air that I thrive in socially, and I'd rather raise the blast shields and save my winning personality for Your Sister.

On the drive home, the daily 5 p.m rainstorm clobbered us with hail. Big hail. Hail that mushed and piled up like snowbanks. I've never seen that before. We drove out of it after a few minutes. There's a spot between Asheville and Mayberry that is hit the hardest during summer, and the town becomes a block of rain virtually every day at 5 p.m.

All the rain has not helped my garden seeds, and we bought new sprouts Saturday: peppers and tomatoes. I also bought marigolds to scare the bugs away from the tomatoes. Those were planted Sunday morning. Your Sister's dizziness kept her home Saturday night, and she missed a birthday party for a fellow teacher. She did go to work Sunday to grade papers.

A sudden bill in the NC statehouse has raised the possibility of shortening this spring semester. The school rumor is that the semester would end next Friday, not the 15th as currently scheduled. The county board argued over this and eventually decided to keep the current school schedule in another nod to local businesses who hire teens. This time, the summer camps balked at starting the fall semester early to avoid bad weather delays that might shove the following spring semester into late June. There was lots of to-do, and now the statehouse may make it moot. This affects Your Sister by allowing her to cut out material from the final exams. She went into school Monday to huddle with her sub, and I dropped off a carload of cardboard for the science teacher. He wants to use them for garden beds. We had gobs of the stuff from baby gift packaging.

Roo is making her much warmer than normal, and she's now taken to soaking her feet to cool down. My Mom again pressed the issue of a name, and I said we won't divulge the options now lest camps break out over preference. I don't want campaigns for names.

After buying shelf boxes, we decorated the nursery walls with an applique tree and leaves. We are rapidly running out of preparations to make. We'll pack our suitcases tonight, I hope. I also need to choose a stack of CDs for the delivery room.

Using NetFlix, we're watching Colonial House, the PBS reality show of volunteers living in a 1620s English colony in Maine. Unlike in Frontier House, this group have to work toward a common goal: making money for England, and the colony governor -- a Baptist preacher from Texas -- is trying to make it a religious retreat. They haven't tried to trade with the natives after two months of interaction, and they are betting everything on a giant crop of corn. The illusion of Jacobean civilization vanished quickly as the womenfolk refused to live under the throwback social standards. It's calamity.

Word is moving through the neighborhood that the police are looking for a couple of burglars scouting our street for empty houses. I suspect that they would have moved on by now; if the jig is up, they'd have to be desperate to try the same tactics in the same area. I'm hiding my laptop and backup drives before I leave work. Your Sister is at home of course, and I assume sneak-thieves won't try anything with someone in the house.

A podcast of Fanaticon interviews is online here. Skip to the final ten minutes or so to hear me.

Moving Picture of the Day
New Scott Pilgrim trailer. I'm jazzed.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

you don't want "Campaign For Names?"
I agree, it really doesn't role off the tongue, and worse, the kids in the schoolyard might call him Campy for short.

see the lameness of my jokes? directly proportional to the amount of material I cram into my feeble, jaded brain in preparation for next Friday's exam.

Gregory said...

Someone suggested Phineas this weekend, and it's tempting.

I'm also cramming on baby protocols from our manuals. I really wish we'd had a 15-minute CPR lecture instead of a screed on dental health.