Daphne had her very first day of Kindergarten today. She was a wee bit excited.
She’s carrying a lunchbox (exciting!) shaped like Hello Kitty (double exciting!!) and has a backpack stuffed with school supplies (excitement overload!!!)
Of course, nothing stomps on a 5-year-old’s enthusiasm like being asked to wait in line.
Seriously, she had a great time. Her best neighborhood friend is in her class (not sure if that’s good or bad as they are hellions together) and we’re told that she turned off the “shy” routine as soon as she was out of visual range of her parents.
She told us afterward that it was “way better than my stupid preschool” but that her teacher “has a problem listening to me”. Holly tried to explain that the teacher has lots of other kids to pay attention to, but Daphne couldn’t really wrap her mind around that argument.
After school, Daphne and a friend were so excited that they decided they just had to throw a party. And a party should have lots of people, right? So how to get lots of people to come?
Advertise!
The text reads, “Daphne and Annika’s Party House for Fun!” Unfortunately the “Daphne” has been decorated and curlicued past all legibility, and the rest is written in mirror-text. But it’s the thought that counts, right?
Even if the thought (that a poster taped to a light pole in the suburbs at 7:45 P.M. would draw a crowd of children from an unspecified location, and that said children would be welcomed by the parents of the organizers) was somewhat half-baked.
They actually had the good sense to realize, not 30 seconds after they hung the poster, that it would have been more effective if it contained the house number. I chose this time to put my foot down and remind both girls that it was bedtime. And much whining did commence. But no more than we expected at the end of a day full of new.
Comments
Dig that hot Russian-on-Georgian action!
Cold warriors all over the country are wetting themselves with glee over this opportunity to wax moralistic over The Great Bear, cuz’ man, if we’re going to warp domestic and foreign policy by framing everything in terms of a grand conflict, those cold, white people with the funny alphabet are just so much more credible than a bunch of turbaned beardos in caves!
Seriously, blowhards on the right and the left are so excited to replay history from 1949 to 1989 all over again. They are rubbing Ben-Gay into their pontificatin’ muscles. They are blowing the dust off their Tom Clancy paperbacks and rewinding their VHS copies of Red Dawn.
Will the Cold War 2.0 be as, like, totally rad as the first one? Let’s find out!
Afghaniwhaa? Iraqistan, you say? Who cares? Taking off your shoes at the airport to foil The Terrists is way not as cool as mutually assured destruction!
Let’s ship our boys home from the front so they can start shipping our Star Wars tech to Poland!
WHEEEEEE
Update: huzzah, the stupid has begun.
Comments
…waking up at 1:00 A.M. to retrieve a cotton ball that your child has inexplicably inserted in her nose.
Apparently she did this many hours ago and it took this long to become painful. Pulling it out was also painful in that she was screaming.
Actually this served to remind me how fortunate I am not to have to deal with her bodily fluids, waste products, etc. on a daily basis anymore. That was not so long ago!
3 Comments
This heartwarming story of TSA officials confiscating airplane meal utensils from a pilot is a pretty hilarious example of what I’ve long been thinking of as the Soviet-ization of America.
A less hilarious example is the recent craven capitulation of Congress to President Bush’s every whim on the whole warrantless wiretapping thing. Way to not stand up against an overwhelmingly unpopular president on behalf of the American people and the Constitution, guys! Did you remember to deliver the bill to the White House on your knees and avert your eyes in the presence of His Bushness?
The summative problem of the Soviet Union is that it had a powerful government that served a select few while remaining insulated from most of its citizenry. Much of our cold war rhetoric was predicated on the idea that central economic planning was the main problem… but it seems clear in retrospect that central economic planning was merely an implementation detail. Don’t you think America’s stumbling economy, celebration of mediocrity, military worship, and descent into Panopticon-like surveillance state give the place a sort of retro-Russky feel? Maybe it’s time to replace the eagle and pyramid on the back of our dollar bills with snapshots of a tank and a decaying concrete housing block.
Comments
Here is a nice brief pictorial overview of the 2008 floods in Iowa City.
The parts you saw on CNN were probably Cedar Rapids, which is located nearby but is on the Cedar River, not the Iowa River like we are. The flooding involved several different waterways.
1 Comment
Remember when the army covered up Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire?
Well now they are covering up this young woman’s death by friendly fire:
The additional wrinkle is that along with friendly fire, LaVena Johnson also suffered friendly rape and friendly getting-burned-with-acid and friendly being-set-fire-to.
Oh, and since we wouldn’t want to hurt morale back home, the Army classified her death as a suicide.
She is not the only person to receive such treatment.
Yay this war! USA! USA!
Comments
If your job involves some sort of ongoing operational responsibility, and if your brain works anything like mine, you probably worry a bit about any extended absence, such as a long vacation. Something will break, right? And you won’t be there to fix it!
This is how I ended up with 5 weeks of stored-up vacation days, which in turn is how I ended up finally taking a long (2-week) vacation.
Of course, now that I’ve left, a bunch of ridiculous crap is happening at work — I fielded no less that 12 phone calls from work today, mostly about 2 nasty issues, and I know for a fact that 2 more are waiting in the wings.
But that’s not enough, oh no. The universe is playing havoc with my anxiety levels by also providing unprecedented flooding back home during the time we’re out of state.
Yeah, the whole damned town is underwater. If I were at home I would be filling sandbags in between bouts of troubleshooting.
I won’t belabor the point; this is apparently an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime flood situation, much worse than the previous record flood in 1993. Most of the routes I would take to work are closed, actually. My favorite park is entirely underwater, with only tree crowns and the tops of the kiddie rides (e.g. a 15-foot ferris wheel) visible over the churning brown muck.
You can find images on CNN or weather.com or presscitizen.com or kcrg.com (those last two being local news organizations). For context, though, here are some cell-camera snapshots I took before the flood, when there was just an unusually large amount of water, say within the last couple of weeks.
Here Daphne is forlorn as a hiking trail near Coralville Reservoir is partly submerged. We cheated our way around the submerged bit and then continued.
Daphne checks out the churning waters exiting the spillway at the Coralville Dam. The spot in which she stands has become, in the time between the snapshot and this writing, a deadly dangerous place to be as the waves are going right through the fence, and the water is actually up into the parking lot. The water is now well over the top of this particular dam, in case you hadn’t heard.
These next two are both North Dubuque street, my route home from work. Taken while driving through several inches of water, put there entirely by the rain. Again, these are photos from before the flood. This road is now impassable; it’s basically part of the river now.
Finally, these guys are fixing something at the water treatment plant just off the Burlington street bridge. I’m almost certain the platform these dudes are standing on is, by now, completely underwater.
I can’t really add anything else as I am many, many miles away. Go to the Press-Citizen site if you want up-to-date info.
2 Comments
