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"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.
]]>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.
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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!
]]>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."
]]>That didn't mean we couldn't have a semblence of Halloween, so at 9:15 we drove to the Little Theater parking lot for a trunk-or-treat party. Trunk-or-treat is a funny thing. A bunch of people get together in a parking lot and pop their car trunks open and show off their candy wares for the kids who pass by. If it were a random parking lot with random cars, this kind of thing would win the creepiness award. But in our case, it was a parking lot of parents who had kids in the play.
We didn't, of course, expect the outlandish displays of lights, spiderwebs, speakers, and special effects that decorated a lot of trunks. We just showed up with a bag of candy and a mini van.
That's when we put our Scare Plan into action. I wore an extremely disturbing clown mask I had borrowed from Colleen and, once the kids started going trunk to trunk, I hid in the small dug out area in the back of the van (this is where the back seat goes when it folds down). I covered myself with a blanket and waited for Suzanne to utter the secret code phrase, "Do you want some candy?" At which point I hopped up from behind her and gurgled out, "CAAAANDEEE!"
This worked amazingly well, and we were the focal point of screams and yells and shouts followed by parents wanting to take my clown-faced picture with their kids.
Unfortunately, all that popping up and down ripped the skin off my elbow and shoulder. It felt as if someone had taken a blowtorch to those spots. And since I had been crammed in a small space, I had whacked my knee on some disjointed mini van plastic something-or-other. That meant that all my zombie lurching and stumbling when I finally extracted myself from the van was due to my inability to make my arms and legs move properly. The things I do for my art!
I suppose an advantage of trunk-or-treating compared to the good, ole-fashioned American door-to-door trick-or-treating is that the kids raked it in. I mean their bags were busting. Alex must have had ten pounds of candy. Megan, double that.
And I, loose limbed and sweaty, stole a few pieces for myself, a peanut butter cup from each. Megan and Alex were kind enough to protest only somewhat.
But I noticed they both counted every piece that remained, fully knowing my nature for a return visit.
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