Look what I found:



Pruitt-Igoe: designed by Minoru Yamasaki. Current status of the site: a "wildlife preserve" of sorts.

And look at what the Book found:



The fight indeed continues, with a nifty comment by Lolis Eric Elie on the disposal of reusable building materials left over from the Lafitte housing development's demolition in today's column.

As for the schools in planning area H, I will have more on them a little later, although I must say that it is one hell of a way to open a flickr account. And, if anybody wants to contribute a score a la Philip Glass, or with a hip-hop beat, or whatever, let me know. Haven't you always wanted to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Update, 3-6: Huh. I had no idea that Godfrey Reggio was born in New Orleans. Thanks, Noos Ladda!

I give you Exhibit A: the City Business article detailing 47 RSD schools on the chopping block:

Thirty-four schools — Abrams, Alexander, Bienville, Bradley, Coghill, Gordon, Jordan, Little Woods, Osborne, Sherwood Forest, Arthur Ashe, Lafon, LaSalle, Fisk-Howard, Hoffman, Hynes, Morris F.X. Jeff, Terrell, Wheatley, Wilson, Edison, Edwards, Haley, Hardin, Lockett, Morial, Moton, Tubman, Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Shaw, Waters, Chester and Dunbar Elementary Schools - have all been slated for replacement.

Thirteen more schools — Gregory and Priestly junior high schools, Lake Forest Montessori and Parkview magnets, Woodson, Phillips, Lake Area and Augustine middle schools, L.B. Landry, Schwartz Alternative, Abramson, G.W. Carver and Lawless high schools — also face the wrecking ball if recommendations are finalized.

Exhibit B: from the New Orleans School Facilities Master Plan site:

March 4th, 2008

6 p.m. - 8 p.m.

Village de l'Est Elementary

5100 Cannes Street.
New Orleans, LA 70129

DISCUSSES THE FOLLOWING SCHOOL SITES:

Abrams Elementary School
Gaudet Elementary School
Jordan Elementary School
Lake Forest Montessori School
Little Woods Elementary School
Livingston Middle School
Morial Elementary School
Osborne Elementary School
Schaumburg Elementary School
Sherwood Forest Elementary School
Village de l’Est Elementary School
Fannie C. Williams Middle School

And, yes, March 4th is tonight.

Exhibit C: The Lake Forest Montessori School building summary:

Current Use: Vacant Building - Designated as “School Buildings Demolition Project”

CITYWIDE MEETING RESULTS
Community Considerations / Priority to Community
Size of the student pop. near the site.........................................60% = high
Demographic makeup of student pop........................................50% = high
Ability for the school to serve as catalyst for future repop.....60% = high
School is above flood elevation....................................................36% = high
36% = medium
Cultural significance of school building.......................................44% = medium
42% = high
Historic or architectural significance of school building...........49% = high
Potential for school building expansion on site.........................62% = high
Potential for expanding schools into new sites..........................55% = high
Availability for open space at or near school site......................66% = high
Availability of athletic fields at or near school site....................66% = high
Availability of large performance venue at/near school site...50% = high
School is within walking dist. of the neighborhood it serves....67% = high
School is near public transportation............................................67% = high
School is near libraries, health clinics or other comm. services..66% = high

Community use of school after hours and on weekends....very important (84%)
Maximum walking distance to elementary school......................1/2 mile (84%)
Maximum walking distance to high school................................ 1 mile (42.2%)
School construction with unlimited funds...............................new facility (44.5%)
cost effective (34.4 %)
Alternative school property uses...........................................community use (33%)

Exhibit D: Lake Forest Montessori School, March 4, 2008, approx. 2 PM:

The sign attached to the fence has an address for Lake Forest Elementary Charter, on Hayne Blvd, which leads us to...

Exhibit E:

Old Lake Forest Montessori to New Lake Forest Charter
Total Est. Distance: 3.57 miles

So now the folks who wanted quality schooling for their children in the area Lake Forest Montessori used to serve must now enroll their kids in private schools or get in a car and schlep to the lakefront.

I'm intrigued now. I wish I were able to attend tonight's meeting to see if anybody knows of this. What was the RSD's detailed "school buildings demolition project" all about? We know the buildings were flooded. We also know that the buildings can be knocked down - it's happening all over the city.

How did the RSD "finalize" their demolition plans if the community meeting was going on tonight? Did they use a time machine? Did they read minds?

Do they really care about what the community thinks?

Does the word "farce" come to mind?

We headed off to the Avis earlier this evening to pick up the most claustrophobia-inducing vehicle Dan has ever driven to tide us over while the mechanics do their best to figure out why the heck the older of our two cars won't start. It was outside the airport that I saw the stupid billboard that got me ticked. It said something to the effect of "Shop at a mall in a museum!", showed a picture of a French Quarter balcony, and urged viewers to visit the Quarter.

Boy, did that rub me the wrong way.

The airport across the way from that idiotic billboard is one of the places that shows how ridiculous the economic development strategies of this area have been, and how piddly they continue to be. Does a world-class metropolitan area really have an airport that is that devoid of air traffic? A place that touts itself to be a gateway to the Americas - but its gates have clearly seen better days? Are we really reduced to touting an area of historical and cultural interest as a mall?

Ummm, the answer seems to be "yes" to all of the above questions.

My brother has recently floated a spring break travel idea to my parents: a trip to Jamaica that will only cost him, and his three friends who also plan to go, the airfare and $35/day for the four of them in "environmentally-friendly accomodations" that include meals. My mother half-joked that they were probably going to end up in a tent on the beach. She's going to be clued in on more details tonight as my brother plies her with more carefully researched information on this prospective trip while she fires back with the stories about my cousin who got mugged on the beach in Costa Rica and tales about Natalee Holloway's bad end in Aruba. What can I say? Mom's a champion worrier with a wry sense of black humor.

I suggested he come to New Orleans, and she could resort to that if things got really rough. Chances are, he'll chuck that suggestion on knee-jerk impulse, simply because it came from Mom. Having seen that billboard, though, something in me started to wonder if it was such a good suggestion after all, because it had me asking the question that does and doesn't apply to my home:

What exactly are we rebuilding this city for?

I ask this question in the interest of reexamining the hard truth: that in many ways, we New Orleanians are indeed squandering some assets here. The worst evidence of that was that dumbassed billboard. I see even more evidence of this nearly every other time I check out the daily exertions of the New Orleans News Ladder, whose Editilla digs up all kinds of ways in which the Army Corps of Engineers is still weaseling out of the thoroughly unsexy yet still vitally necessary job of bolstering levees all over this country. As Abba Eban once said of Yasir Arafat, it seems I and others who live here are surrounded by institutions that never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Yes, it is a good idea to keep the voluntourism rolling...but in the third year after the Federal Flood, it is apparent that the volunteers aren't going to be getting themselves dirty in a political sense. It's an easy thing to condemn this city from afar. Fine. Keep dishing it out. Go back home after your sobering, drunken jaunts through any and all neighborhoods in this town and keep telling others who are clueless that this city is still on its knees, but hey, it'll crawl its way back out of the mire! Just toss some tourist dollars at it and help nail some two-by-fours together and it will always be there, the oldest city on the youngest geological land in this country.

I say this quite honestly and not a little testily: Help us, dammit.

Help us get the crooks of any and all stripes out of our elected positions. It could be you in that situation - and, in fact, it currently is, if you take a good long look at the illustrious oaf in the White House and his supporting cast.

Help us get some real, viable economic development here that doesn't involve knocking down lots of places for retail. All that those shopping centers and big box stores will be doing is taking our hard-earned wages and sending them out of this city and state. Don't even get me started on the jobs - well, I will say one thing. A new labor movement must get going, one that will be closing the loopholes that businesses seem to have found in order to circumvent some hard-won labor gains over the decades. Cutting people's work weeks down to 38 hours in order to deny them benefits is a good way to begin a good fight.

Help us get some good social services here, starting with quality day care for children in order to free up half of a potential workforce. Hospitals need to be rebuilt, not razed. Our mental health here is very much on the fritz and nearly nonexistent - start recognizing that traumatic circumstances deserve a great deal of sensitivity in helping those affected. Case in point. Don't just tell those proud parents that they shouldn't be raising their daughter there. They just rebuilt their home. They want to live here and are active people that most other communities across this country would kill to have working for them. Instead, this city, if it continues as it has been, will most likely be killing them. Let's chalk up better police and a better justice system while we're at it.

Help us to educate our children - and not in the way education seems to have nearly always been regarded for most of the years it has been seen as a profession. Start treating it like a real profession and pay our teachers more. Back them up with the resources they need. Quit throwing loads of roadblocks in their way that seem to impede more than aid progress. Promote teaching strategies that actually care about the kids and carefully take their sense of wonder into account. That kind of empathy goes a very long way - it can even go right back into the very places that teach it.

If a lot of what I'm saying could just as easily apply to your community, no matter where you are, then you know that what I am also saying is Help us all, dammit. I'm sure the last thing you would want is for me to come back from a visit to your city or town and say that it's on its knees, but hey, it'll be back. Just throw some money around over there and nail some boards together.

Speaking of boards...

Anybody got a match? There's a certain billboard in Kenner that is in dire need of remediation by fire. Maybe if it's torched, the planes will start landing, like moths to the flames.

Deep down, though, I know a different sort of fire is desperately needed. And, if anybody else out there reading this listens to their deep down feelings, well, you know it, too.

Just...help.

I've never been a big one for serious art on my walls. And it's only recently that I've pulled out some of my glass pieces I made long time past and put 'em in am Ikea case Dan brought home a while back. I'm still having some visions of the little guy in near-future years doing what my cousin did in my grandparents' house one day and knocking the stuff to shards with a baseball. Oh, that glass art? Planned obsolescence pieces, that work!

I am starting to cast an eye about for some other things, though. The one below has some sentimental value, for certain:

Shortly after a fellow tenant in the house got the poster and put it up on her wall, my landlady grumbled about it a little and wondered aloud if she could possibly get some form of remuneration for the use of her house in that year's poster. We had to dismiss the possibility as highly unlikely, as the house wasn't a copyrighted image under my landlady's name. Oh, that we could all think of these things beforehand...

And then I open up my morning paper and behold this thing of beauty:
My first thought was Finally, a woman on the poster!!!! Had to look it up and found that Mahalia Jackson has been on a poster before - my bad. The thing is, though, a) Mahalia is dead and gone, and b) I have a real fondness for Irma Thomas. The first time I saw her perform was when she was the Soul Queen of Krewe du Vieux many years ago and she rocked the then-recently closed Krauss' department store to the rafters. I am still mourning the disappearance of my hard-won Irma Thomas cup from that parade...not to mention CDs of hers I've owned that were stolen by our horrible thieving movers when we moved up to NYC. Oh, hell, forget the poster - time to get some CDs! Lord knows they are a heck of a lot cheaper...Plus, the one time I saw Irma Thomas at JazzFest, she was a dud. It was a crying shame. Maybe if she decides to use the steel ovaries she's got and demand some kind of remuneration for the use of her image on this year's poster, I'll splurge. A highly unlikely possibility, however.

As for this year's JazzFest, I've got other things to worry about. The first weekend of it happens to coincide with the tail-end of the Passover holiday - which means no bread, no pasta, no rice, no corn, no beer...well, for eight days, there's no leavened products allowed, and the restrictions also include any foods that look like they're rising when they cook, even if they are not technically leavened. At least, that's the Ashkenazic tradition. Dan always half-jokes that we ought to declare ourselves Sephardic Jews just so's we can eat more over those eight days of Passover, but I know it'd be a farce. And yes, I know that pretty much everything at JazzFest is already not kosher, but in past years, when I worked the show as a crafter, the coincidence of Passover with the Fest meant no gumbo for me. Grrrrr...

I think I will simply drag myself to this humble gathering instead. You can bring your own food and drink, do whatcha wanna, and watch some evil little creatures wiggle their way across a makeshift racecourse. Much better than the Corn Festival lizard races in Bunkie at any rate. I'd check with the buckmoth caterpillars to see if their image is copyrighted, however, before beginning a poster series.

Current listening:



And yes, it's him again. Can't help it. The new album's good - but I don't know what to make of his Americana: A Work In Progress DVD that came with it. It starts out with his touring back around the time 9-11 happened and ends with his going to New Orleans to get to where his line of music began.

Whatever it is, Ray, I hope you don't just leave it at "To Be Continued..."

The greggar kits are sitting on my kitchen counter, complete with instructions on how to assemble them. I'm still missing some of the materials for their construction, but I'll be taking care of that well before this coming Sunday. I'll be bringing them in and trying to teach a bunch of jaded middle-school aged young 'uns how to put 'em together and why there is this crazy holiday in the Jewish calendar that sanctions noisemaking in a house of worship, getting into the craziest costumes imaginable, and getting so completely drunk off your butt that good is bad and bad is good. And no, I am not talking about Mardi Gras.

I think the toughest thing to get across to a group on the edge of their teens is this idea that masking can reveal your true self. The place in which these kids live prides itself on concealing so much behind the guises of "historical records", of long-held traditions, of regional pride, of the way things have supposedly always been done. And that's just New Orleans. The individuality that fuels our popular culture these days has little room for the truth unless it serves some kind of purpose somehow, usually one pertaining to monetary, social, or political gain. We are encouraged to take on certain masks nearly every living moment because the way that things are depends on it.

So how can a disguise be a window to what lies beneath, no matter what that "beneath" is?

I suppose one could start with alcohol. The stuff has a way of knocking our disguises clean off and yanking our inhibitions out from under us as though they were flimsy bits of carpeting. Just ask anybody who has been under its influence....which, in this town, is at least every other person. Being a teetotaler here is akin to denying that we all have needs - and, at times, those needs include the right to make complete and utter fools of ourselves.

It doesn't mean that we should be drinking anywhere and everywhere, however - a friend of mine said to me recently that she is most content and comfortable when drinking with good friends, preferably at their homes for parties. When everybody is already familiar with everybody else, and they all have a good idea of how each person is when they are drunk, it only adds to the pageant.

So, hmmm, it's okay to have no inhibitions in a controlled environment...

Oxymoron!!!!

Well, what else is to be expected of a holiday that reveals hiddenness? Of a learning experience that had my kids getting plastered - with gauze that hardened on their faces into masks for them to remove and decorate? Of the celebration of the day a drunken party animal of a king kicked an anti-Semitic adviser out on his ass and saved his new bride as well as a large chunk of the population of his kingdom? Of a day when we are supposed to blot the bad guy's name out by making as much noise as possible, and yet we keep relating the same story, with Haman's name in it, every year?

Everything right is wrong again, y'all....and I can't help but think that we are in the perfect time and place to explore that.

As for the middle schoolers, something will stick. Kids really don't change in one mostly hidden way: everything is going in. We just have no clue as to when, where, or how it's gonna come out.*
________________

Oh, and, speaking of oxymorons...

My thoughts on all the school linkeroos today dovetail nicely with the following:

"We were designing just one step ahead of the pile drivers, as it were," van der Gracht recalled. "Construction was always on the heels of design," was the way Renshaw put it. Indeed, construction sometimes got ahead of design, often enough that Luther Leisenring, the architect in charge of the specifications group, took to referring to building specs as "historical records"; by the time they were written, there was often something else already in the building.

"How big should I make that beam across the third floor?" architect Allen Dickey was asked by a colleague.

"I don't know," Dickey replied. "They installed it yesterday."**

My only questions are: Are we looking at "historical records" in the making, in the form of the charade of getting parents in on the planning processes behind the RSD schools? Or will they simply be historical footnotes?


*One of the best, most fitting Purim costumes ever really stands out for me. In grade school, for a Purim pageant, we were encouraged to get into the craziest getups we could possibly think of. Since Purim doesn't occur at the same time as Halloween, we were generally SOL on the store-bought costumes and had to fend for ourselves. A super-popular jerk of a girl (well, she always treated me like crap) ended up coming in with a standard school-issue globe of the world wired on top of her head. If that doesn't reveal volumes about the pressures kids are under these days, I don't know what does.

**The Pentagon: A History, Steve Vogel

I have a post worming its way through my brain, ready to wiggle out at some point today...

...but I must attend to the fact that, for the first time in my blogging history, I am it.

So, six utterly useless things, habits, quirks I seem to never be able to completely overcome:

- I hate it when somebody uses the microwave, pulls something out before the cooking time is completely up, and fails to reset the thing. There's a button called "CLEAR" on the damn thing, people. Use it. The worst offender here: my mom. Love her dearly...but push the button, Mom!!!

- Microwaves, VCRs, digital clocks, digital car radios that display the time: all of those things must have the correct time on them, even when allowances are made for daylight savings. Spring forward and fall back, people. Dan doesn't care about this and actually gets annoyed at me for changing the clocks in his car to the correct time after the rest of the Western world has been advised to turn clocks back or forward. He thinks it's expending too much energy on changing numbers that will eventually go back to what they originally were anyhow. I think of the horrific dream I had when I was starting college: the one in which I checked every single clock in my parents' house and none of them were right. Time was of the essence, and I'd lost it.

- I still find myself turning things over and over again in my hands from time to time. It's a reflex that is dying very, very hard from my years as a glassblower, when hot glass on the end of a blowpipe had to be kept in constant motion and on-center so that gravity could be fully overcome. I imagine inanimate objects getting incredibly dizzy in my hands sometimes. To all those pens, pencils, cooking utensils, baseballs, coins, nail clippers, etc.: I apologize unreservedly for your altered states.

- Sometimes I find myself really really hating the fact that I can't curse. I had parents who cussed blue streaks to a point where I was seriously disgusted. I dropped my disgust when I went to college, and it slipped even more when I worked for a boss who cussed in such creative ways that I just had to join in. The cussing thing ended when I had my son. Now I find myself sounding like a shrill, annoyed Doris-Day-ish, stamping-of-feet (insert your best nasal voice here) "ma-MAAH" when I get ticked at the little guy and say things like "For goodness' sakes!" or "What did I just say?" or "How many times do I have to tell you these things?" - when what I really want to say can border on verbal abuse, even if I'm simply venting. Sometimes motherhood resembles sucking shit on a stick. Bottom line: I just hate that I sound like Miss Manners these days. It's damned unbecoming. But I am also very conscious that words can and do hurt. Oh, well.

- I read. A lot. A lot a lot a lot. I am trying to cut down on the terrible habit I have of buying books. I think I need to change my breaking point when it comes to book buying, because I have been basing it on the story of a geologist and rock collector I met when I was in middle school and working on a science project about geodes. Said geologist was quite the avid collector of all kinds of mineral, gem, and crystal specimens, until the foundations of his house sank from the weight of all his finds. His wife was especially peeved that money had to be expended on jacking the house up, and she laid down the law on his collecting, forcing him to donate or sell a number of his finds and confining the keepers to one room in the house.

I think Dan needs to start putting his foot down. The foundations of our house aren't in jeopardy, but I need a new, more critical and ever-present breaking point. If anybody's got any ideas, let me know.

- I'm just not a big fan of memes...but hey, I'm doing the polite thing and doing this one. Honestly, I don't mind doing them myself - it's just this idea that I have to pass 'em along as though they are hot potatoes. I guess I just worry a tad too much about what other people think concerning them.

So, if you're reading this, and it looks like a fun thing for you to do, go for it and send me a line as to what you've posted. Tag yourselves. Just remember...it's all fun and games, 'til someone loses a virtual eye. Try not to poke or get poked.

A little guy epiphany, obtained today after having passed a certain pizza restaurant on Magazine:

"Mom! New York has a Statue of Liberty!"
"Yes, it does, honey."
"And New Orleans has a Statue of Liberty!"
"Yeah, we just passed it in front of the pizza place..."
"Both New York and New Orleans have 'new' in their names!!!!"
"That's right."
"And they smell the same...

(uhhh, I guess...)

"But New Jersey doesn't have those things, except for the 'new'."
"No, I guess not, but technically, the Statue of Liberty is in New Jersey."
(confused look) "Really, Mom?"
"Yes, but it welcomes people who are coming in to New York by boat."
(relieved confirmation on his face) "Yeah!!!"

Later on, Dan said to me, "I don't know about the same smells..."

Depends on where you are in NYC and at what time of year. Advice to those of you traveling on the Belt Parkway near the easternmost outskirts of Queens - don't visit that brand-new Target shopping center on a hot day when the breezes off Jamaica Bay are coming in. Not all the methane from that reclaimed landfill across the parkway has dissipated just yet.

Aside from that, I'd say, yeah, some of the smells are similar. New Orleans' smells are NYC's minus the dumpster smells from various retail businesses, the choking exhaust from many, many cars and city buses, and the cooking smells (not all of 'em good) from the apartments above and beside your own.

Pretty much the same.

Lost in all the hubbub over the Walking Id's outbursts against the mainstream media and the "bloggers" was a little bit at the beginning of the Eric Paulsen-Sally Ann Roberts interview that talked about the recent success of the city's hosting of the NBA All-Star Game, and, more importantly, the $52 million rebuilding of the Orleans Parish Prison. A rebuilding partially financed by FEMA at first, but then revealed to be a possible money pit for recovery money from the agency.

In light of the recent studies stating that yes, the trailers allotted to displaced and rebuilding homeowners are indeed toxic and all those people have not been crying wolf, the following words best describe how I feel about the juxtaposition of these two stories:

Tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of law-abiding New Orleanian can't seem to get the federal, state and local governments to get up off the collective asses and keep their collective promises to rebuild their destroyed homes, but by God nothing will stand in the way of government rebuilding destroyed prisons to house the poorest of the poor blacks.

Post-racial America my ass.

Thanks, Reverend.

So I headed over to the Alternative Media Expo at the last late minute, taking Oyster up on his half-hearted and throughly dripping-with-flu plea to man the table for Rising Tide. I took my trusty CompUSA closeout special with me to test it out and found myself at a table between a few fun folks tucked in towards the back of the Contemporary Arts Center space.

First off, God forgive me for relying on the CAC's wireless service. Really. I should have gotten a clue when one of the Consortium of Genius dudes asked me to let him know if I got a signal. Actually, I did, and I called up the RT website just fine. The mistake I made was calling up the schedule page from the site for an EMT who was interested in the "Making Civics Sexy" panel and wanted to talk more about the (terrible) situation the hospitals are in here. I told him Editor B had addressed the topic many times on his blog and had spoken at RT II as a panelist. Once I got that schedule up, schmoozed a little more with the fellow, and then tried to call the homepage back up after he'd left the table, the network booted me off. It took me a half-hour to get the homepage back up, and that's when I decided to simply leave it up. Everyone, stay awaaaay from the keyboard, else the network will self-destruct. The COG guys were amazed I even got a signal. "CompUSA closeout special, y'all!" I said, nearly leaning back in my chair with my hands behind my head. And the CAC is supposed to have a Cyber Cafe! For shame...

Oh, wait. It is currently closed. C'est la vie.

Anyhow, I was glad to have attended, even though I had to leave an hour early. Got to meet some folks I've known of online and through other bloggers, like Loki, Leo McG., Humid Haney, and Dr. Daisy, who came late due to air travel difficulties but trolled those Expo aisles with a good deal of energy obtained from her daiquiri and her bubbly companion (not champagne; I'm talking about a good local friend of Daisy's! Sheesh...). E stopped by and we commiserated on what a week in local blogging history it has been. most of my hours at the table, though, were spent talking up Rising Tide, emphasizing that it was not strictly for bloggers, that we are always accepting proposals for new speakers, new presentation ideas, and that we are at risingtidenola.com. To emphasize this fact, I ended up ripping a bunch of religious school attendance sheets into small pieces, writing the URL on them, and arranging them on the table in a giant wave. Somebody commented on how much they liked my approach in the midst of its creation, and another said, "Ooooh, way to recycle!" Yep, at the Expo, anything DIY goes.

So, if anybody is emptying out their purse or their pockets, sees a small scrap of deckled-edged (i.e., ripped-paper edged) rectangular pink or white paper with the RT web address on it, and decides to check it out, check our links as well. Keep on reading, maybe start your own blog if you are so inclined, and bring your unique voice to the table. In the end, that's what it's all about.

Oh, and...speaking of current local issues that many of the NOLA blogpocheh are concerned with, go to G Bitch. Now. And, if not now, yesterday.

You know things are gonna get weird when you get these kinds of messages in your voicemail:

Hey...it's about three. Um, I was just gonna try to grab you before you got here at four to let you know that, um, oh, these kids...it's so pretty outside we let 'em out. The yard's dry, but this area around the edges are reeeeally muddy...The little guy is just sooo...we decided, you know, he just...got full of mud & we were gonna change him but then he kept playin' in it and so I thought well you know he's just full of mud...I'm just gonna ask you to bring some clothes but I think he's got some here...Actually he's not really as full of mud as he is wetLITTLE GUY, NO!!! I'M TALKIN' TO YOUR MOM RIGHT NOW...don't know if he thinks I'm talking to you (unintelligible)...And right in front of me he's smirkin' and he'splayinginthispuddleohlemmegoBye.

Now, you have a sense of humor, right? He's really really really in need of, um, some shoes, too.

I headed to school to pick my son up and found him in his own dry shorts and t-shirt, no underwear, some dry socks and some white light-up heart sneakers with pink trim. The teacher for his class had forgotten that he'd come to school that morning with a pair of galoshes as well as his regular Cars sneakers (since it was raining cats and dogs yesterday morning), so he changed back into his frog galoshes and we returned the light-up heart sneakers to his classroom.

I think his teacher was really freaked out by a possibility that I was going to give her hell for his being a typical kid. Another parent had come in to get her waterlogged daughter and was not amused. I, however, was laughing my head off. The little guy is the yin to a puddle's yang. Plus, he is washable, as are his clothes.

Yes, on the one hand, the teachers should have been a tad more thoughtful and realized that the ground out there was still very wet after the rains. On the other hand, ultimately, no harm was done other than the use of some electricity to get his damp and slightly muddy clothes washed and dried along with a regular load of laundry that had accumulated in the house.

C'est la vie. What a hoot!

And, in other blogpocheh news:

Tim is leaving his 'hood for many, many good reasons. Shehecheyanu v'kiy'manu v'higianu laz'man hazeh.

Mark Folse's spouse is recovering from appendicitis. R'fuah shleimah to her and her family from me and mine.

Expectant mamas abound in the local blogosphere, and their due dates are around the corner. Wish 'em well. I know I do. Remembering what the homestretch was like with my pregnancy, I'm sure these women are wishing the kids would pack up and move already.

On the one hand, Greg Peters wants you to buy him a beer. On the other hand, there is an ad that pops up in Google Ads on his blog's sidebar that has a link to "10 Rules to losing belly fat" at www.FatLoss4Idiots.com. My suggestion: go in and screen your ads, Greg. I had to when one showed up in my sidebar for "Dating Outside Marriage". That just ain't kosher.

Dangerblond made it through her bar(f) exams. Woohoo! See that Shehecheyanu link up by Tim's news, Kim, and have some stiff drinks. You deserve it!

And, once again, it is raining out. The only footwear my son has on today is the galoshes, as his sneakers are still very waterlogged. And he does have an extra set of clothes, with underwear, in case he decides to pull a Gene Kelly.

Don't get worried...get prepared.

Update, 3:05 PM: Mazel tov to Editor B and Xy on the birth of their daughter, Persephone Jean. Welcome to the blogger spawn ranks, baby girl!

I wasn't going to enter this fray...but Jeffrey's post (aka, The Devil) made me do it.

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