<p>and also with you, mootmom!</p>
<p>Here’s to TSFH cum M1 license - do we now call him TSFHM1? Here’s hoping it will take him until approximately age 34 to save up to buy a two-wheeled motorized vehicle.</p>
<p>Hint to worried mom: do not buy said type of vehicle and do not give cash for Xmas/bday/grad gifts. That’ll slow the kid down a bit.</p>
<p>mootmom: Saying prayers for the stabbed hand and the Hell’s Angels 
son.</p>
<p>I had an interesting event today! I had lunch with my 5th grade teacher - whom I have not seen since 5th grade!!! She was a nun back then, now she’s a “regular” person. Ha. She was by far the best teacher I can ever recall having. It turned out we had a mutual friend, who “fixed us up.” We had a great chat and even a glass of vino (that is the Sinner’s Alley conection)! She remembered astonishing number of things about me and my class. She knew my parents well too (all active in the Civil Rights movement in the 60s - my liberal roots go WAYYYY back…). Anyway, really fun. And all I can say is she must have been REALLY young then - because she seemed more-or-less my age now!</p>
<p>SBMom - good girl for saving the lives of those poor chocolates
Cheers - good girl for learning the difficult technology of foundation-brushing
Moot - we will send marmots
Weenie - you don’t need marmots you have a de-nunned teacher drinking with you in the alley…</p>
<p>"Model making ie; exacto blades "</p>
<p>I have scars on my fingers as records of just how good at model making I am. :eek:</p>
<p>Foundation brushing? i.e. waterproofing? I’ve never done it!</p>
<p>I’m pretty decent at:
Word
Publisher
Adobe Photoshop
Excel
(however I despise Access and Powerpoint)
Google
fax machine
scanner
my laser tape measurer lies to me regularly (is there a secret I don’t know?)</p>
<p>I have only the remotest idea how our remotes work, but I can get the radio out of our DVD player. </p>
<p>I just got a nano - but am regularly mystified by it.</p>
<p>I HATE my cellphone. I got charged 10 cents for text messaging. But I never did it. However when I complained t-mobile said they can’t turn it off. I can barely get message people leave me and I forget to check it or bring it with me half the time.</p>
<p>Funny thing how 15-20 years is this VAST difference in 5th grade, but then when you’re our age, it’s nothing… How fun to go have a drink with a grade school teacher!</p>
<p>I have one good friend who is my mother’s age (~75?). I never feel the difference in our ages except occasionally when I MARVEL at her and pray I will wind up similarly cool when I am in my 70’s. She is fun, funny, hip, warm, amazing-- yet she never seems to try AT ALL to be “young.” </p>
<p>She gives me hope!</p>
<p>I also made a young friend this year, and it has been so cool to experience a younger person as a friend rather than as ‘the mom.’ So I’ll buy a round for cross-generational friendships, and the way they affirm the core humanity in all of us.</p>
<p>mootie, sympathies to you as TSFH spreads his wings…</p>
<p>Haha Mathmom. </p>
<p>I meant using the MAC foundation brush when I coat my imperfect face with MAC foundation. New skill for me–apparently new concept for you?</p>
<p>Eeek. SBMom, maybe your friend, your 75-year old friend, IS MY ACTUAL MOTHER!!!</p>
<p>Stranger things have happened. If your friend says things like “Oh, I don’t need that article, I will never visit Finland again”, or “What do you think of this?” <em>shows Neiman Marcus catalogue</em> “I thought it was rather attractive”, or “All right darling, I love you. We would love to see you ANY TIME” or “We had such great fun at the Museum treasure hunt”…</p>
<p>then it is a scarily small world:).</p>
<p>Tech skill I have recently become good at:</p>
<p>Scotch taping almost useless wire antenna thing-y attached to almost useless clock radio to <em>exactly</em> the right spot on the wall near the window so that I can receive NPR on my bedside radio while here in Baja.</p>
<p>Our super-duper Harman Kardon receiver attached to DS/DH’s fancy-shmancy HDTV won’t receive NPR <em>at all</em>!</p>
<p>Mimosas/Bloody Mary’s to all - the whole round on me - tomorrow morning as we tune in to Weekend Edition. :)</p>
<p>Okay, Alu, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have your Mom, as I’ve met my pal’s daughter-- and let’s just say the prettiness fairy did not stop at that cradle.</p>
<p>OTOH if you ever meet a VERY odd 75 year old in northern California who is wearing a horrid little dog in a baby sling, reading The Bhagavad Gita <em>in the original Sanskrit,</em> buying random paperbacks at garage sales, or chatting with sketchy homeless people under an overpass? That’d be SBMom’sMom. And then you’d know why I pound virtual booze!</p>
<p>jmmom, the antenna taping skill sounds ESSENTIAL. You must’ve channelled the old bunny-ears-adjustment skill from back in 1965 tv days… or perhaps the standing-as-still-as-a-statue-with-cellphone-so-as-not-to-lose-connnection skills more recently acquired?</p>
<p>SBMom ROFLMAO. Sounds like your mom might benefit from a bit of antenna taping herself? Tap into a different frequency? That original Sanskrit could also be an alien language after all.</p>
<p>I miss the X Files.</p>
<p>I lived the X files!!! </p>
<p>Don’t get me started. Raised by two gen-u-ine hippies, one of them an anthropoligist Mom who discovered (embraced? delved into? main-lined?) eastern philosophies and religions starting when I was about 9 or 10. She went from hatha yoga to Sufi dancing to Hinduism to Sanskrit… to infinity, and beyond! </p>
<p>And she never baked cookies again. </p>
<p>You know how when two engineers mate, you can get Aspergers?.. Well, when two Berkeley humanities nerds mate, you get SBmom.</p>
<p>I wish I could write a sluggbugg version of the day she tried to pick me up at my suburban junior high school with a Swami wearing a turban and sporting a garland of flowers next to her in the passenger seat. HORRORS! Did stuff like this ever happen to Marcia Brady? I think not! My Mom was rubbernecking all around looking for me among the throng while cold sweat ran down my neck. </p>
<p>Would I have to acknowledge her as MINE? </p>
<p>Reader, I hid. </p>
<p>She eventually gave up looking and drove off. I walked home.</p>
<p>In retrospect it was pretty funny but at the time I would sooner have walked naked through the lunchroom than gotten in that car with those WEIRD PEOPLE, and with all my peers watching.</p>
<p>SBMom!! :eek: You poor thing, I am fanning you with a Sears Mail Order Catalogue,…someone get the Magnum of Marmot Mumm’s…whew…Great Story!!</p>
<p>Taping wires and cellphones reminds me of the time I managed to attack wires to the phone jack in the kitchen (only one jack) and maneuver the wire up to my attic bedroom, I could talk on the phone and sit out on the roof under the stars…:)</p>
<p>Thanks BHappy, and actually you have cheered me up because your story reminded me: once I bought a phone at a garage sale, liking it’s retro look and rotary dial, before realizing it did not have a jack at the end of the wire. But-- cheap and determined-- I managed to pry the jack case off the wall and get the thing hooked up by going wire to wire, even though there were an odd number of wires. That was pretty much a technological high-water mark for me.</p>
<p>Wow. Sisters we are. Another telephone wire-r here. Back in the day when <em>we</em> - not our parents - were hippies (I do hate these constant reminders that I am the eldest sister here -hmmph… but I digress), I knew how to wire phones in the dorms. We had the one phone booth in the hall, but we had old-style phone jacks in some of the rooms and one or two actual phones. I guess they cost real money back in those days. Somehow - how??? - I was the one who knew how to move those phones around the floor and hook them up in different rooms.</p>
<p>That skill has probably atrophied by now.</p>
<p>jmmom, the lucky thing is: whether the younger sister, the older sister, or the middle sister, no problem. Soul sisters don’t worry about that sort of thing. 
Plus someone has to be the cutting edge of the Mexico RE exodus.</p>
<p>SBmom, that’s the best story of 2007 so far…
Loved it.</p>
<p>OK, time to bump this thread up to it’ rightful place on the first page of the parent cafe, and toast my daughter’s charmed existence. Today she was scheduled to return to NY for her second semester, booked on one of those delightful flights with a late morning departure and early evening arrival. Of course I wisely checked her in online and printed out her boarding pass before she went to bed last night. </p>
<p>When she arrived at the gate, well ahead of schedule, she was told that the flight was overbooked and they were looking for volunteers to take a later flight out – the prize was a $500 certificate toward future travel. Well, that entailed a 2 hour wait, but any kid of mine can figure out that being paid $250/hour is a good deal… so she took the bait and rebooked.</p>
<p>Well, guess what happens? Her flight leaves as scheduled and her checked luggage somehow manages to go with her… but the original, “overbooked” flight was delayed 4 HOURS! D. was already in a cab in midtown Manhattan when she called and asked me to check status of the other flight, which turned out to be airborne over Ohio. The earlier plane didn’t actually land until almost 2 hours after my d. had arrived.</p>
<p>Now, the planes left from adjacent gates at the same airport, and my daughter had no idea until she arrived in NY that the other plane had been delayed – she is not the clueless sort who would sit in an airport for 3 hours and not notice announcements of a flight being delayed … so I am figuring that the other plane probably boarded as scheduled and then those lucky passengers must have sat out on the tarmac for 4 hours… </p>
<p>All I can say is that from now on, whenever I travel with my daughter, I am going to follow her instincts every step of the way…</p>
<p>Calmom…that is a GREAT story! My 18 year old has been traveling quite a bit in the past 2 1/2 weeks and all has not gone so smoothly. Nonetheless she is having a great time. I just don’t need any more travel stories on her end, thank you very much! One more leg left…will be flying from Brazil to NYC through the night tomorrow (let’s hope no issues, or if there are any, they are of the nature of your D’s!).</p>