Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 11:23AM We were about to leave for the downtown library when I picked up Alex's clip-on tie and attached it to my shirt.
"Do I look cool enough to go?" I asked him.
"You're always cool," said Alex. Then he paused and gave me a serious look. "Because nerds are cool."
I am, of course, busted.
Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 11:12PM On the day December first me and a few of my friends got on the limo to eat with Paul Harpol at the Big Texan. We were expecting just us but instead we found other schools. We were a expecting a nice smooth limo but instead we found a old rickety limo with a driver that sped.
When we got there we saw an elderly good looking man in a suit. It was Paul. He told all the kids what he was going to build downtown then he told us about his life. After the speech we dug in. After digging in I realized I put too much ketchup on my food *grunt*. Then the animal control person talked, fire fighters talked, and a librarian talked. They gave us stuff then we went back to school.
That was my exciting day with the mayor.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 8:46PM So this is the big one. Sixteen years old. Driving age.
Colleen didn't want a big shindig for her birthday. Instead she invited five friends to a dress up dinner at Kubuki, one of those teppanyaki-style Japanese restaurants where a chef cooks all the food on a large griddle in front of you. We had a semi-private room for the party, and the food was great, although the soup was loaded with MSG, which I fear.
Afterward, we drove back to the house for presents and ice cream cake, and then we played a fierce game of Spoons.
All that was a prelude to the actual thing that made Colleen the most excited: her driver's test. She had been working hard all summer, spending countless hours with the online Texas driver's education course and spending even more time driving with Suzanne. (I drove a little with Colleen, but it was no where near the billion hours of driving time Suzanne spent with her in the car.)
In the beginning, Colleen's driving was . . . well, tenative. Stop signs were suggestions, and curbs seemed to leer way to close to her. But over the summer she got quite good, and during the actual day of her test she passed with no trouble at all (even with the parallel parking part, which in a Prius is a bit of nasty work; this is because the visor slit in a suit of midieval armor has greater visibility than the back window of a Prius).
So now she's official, and as such can officially and heroically drive herself and Megan back and forth from swim practice at night. That's a great birthday present - for me and Suzanne!
Colleen, birthday in Celebrations Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 11:35AM Alex and I were going to build a few robots with our Lego Mindstorms kit, but we ran into a conflict. I wanted to follow along with a book about a kid building robots to explore some Mayan ruins, but Alex wanted to jump in the box of legos and build whatever inspired him.
I tried to cajole him to follow the story so we could learn how to build some sophisticated robots, but he would have none of it.
"Sometimes," he explained to me patiently, "I don't want the lemon. I just want the lemon juice."
