<p>You can have a big drink. And we have an IV hookup out back. As far as the Hawaiian bar, yeah, you get to change the “skin” of Sinner’s Alley any time you want. </p>
<p>I am prone to making it into a Shanghai soju palace but hey, that’s just me:).</p>
<p>Welcome…</p>
<p>SA is definetly the most fun place on CC! cocktails are always perfect and the moral support is invaluable:D </p>
<p>So welcome!!!</p>
<p>Lafalum, I just read your road trip thread. You get doubles every time. we will all hold our breaths until S gets home.</p>
<p>OMG. Rescue from Page 3 ignominy.</p>
<p>Hope something funny happens in my life soon worthy of the Alley:).</p>
<p>Note that I will have both children in foreign countries as of next week.</p>
<p>I guess I won’t be feeling like joking until S’s plane lands safely in Costa Rica.:P</p>
<p>More separated at birth TSFS, soon to be TJFS is also headed to Costa Rica! However, not until the end of the summer. :)</p>
<p>Wild. It is getting a little peculiar - doncha think? Pura vida as they say.</p>
<p>What are all the other various Alley denizens’ offsprings doing? I know about cheers - her kids are wandering the globe:).</p>
<p>Haha. I just had a stray thought of cheers with grandchildren at every port. Sorry. Sorry. Take it back:).</p>
<p>Hey, what’s shakin’ in this place? Last time I checked, kids were graduating, and parents had that graduation glow. This year’s batch of graduation announcements was kinda small, a grand total of four cards. But, for the first time, I got a college graduation notice. The envelope had an aura around it, so it was easy to find in the stack of mail. </p>
<p>One of the girls from my old Girl Scout troop graduated from Cornell, and she sent the hardest working leader in show business a grad announcement. :::warm & fuzzy moment::: This calls for a round of Fuzzy Navels --1/3 peach schnapps; 1/3 orange juice; 1/3 lemonade, and lots of ice.</p>
<p>Breaking news… </p>
<p>Sluggson’s gap quarter + summer is going well. He’s moving into his first apartment in Berkeley next month. He has a nice girlfriend who takes him to her family picnics, and they go on regular, old-fashioned dates. He’s performing with his band around the Bay Area, and their CD is being played at one of the local restaurants. </p>
<p>In August, he’ll go with us to Chicago where he plans to check out a studio production course. He’s trying to hook the band up with a real music producer. There’s a guy in the windy city who runs a production program for unknown bands, and then, records them at the end of the course. While we’re at the Second Life convention, he’ll be checking out the music scene in Chicago. </p>
<p>We like his girlfriend. She works at a Chinese restaurant six days a week and brings us free Chinese food. *Mental note for aspiring girlfriends: Bring the parents free fast food. She attends classes at the local jc, and they both plan to start classes again in the Fall. She’s a doggone culinary wizard, and I’m already thinking that she can help stuff the turkey next Thanksgiving. </p>
<p>Either the boy’s brain is reconnecting after a long hiatus, or she’s a good influence on him, or both. Sluggdad was stupefied last night when sluggson walked in and handed him an early Father’s Day card. 
SluggSr looked like one of the wee folk had just handed him a pot of gold from the end of the rainbow. It was a REAL Hallmark moment, if Hallmark had the cojones to show the genuine confusion on the faces of parents when their 19-year old sons hand them a piece of paper that is not a traffic ticket, an eviction notice, or an academic warning from a university. :p</p>
<p>Looking back on the year since he graduated…Should he have started college in the Fall? Probably, even though he was destined to bail out by the end of the second quarter. I think it was the traditional freshman dorm and classic college experience that didn’t sit well with him. He’s a better candidate for the commuter student and part-time job, plus active social life educational experience. I think he actually likes us, and he likes living in the Bay Area. We figure we got about 2 weeks of peace without our kids bugging the Holy Hell out of us. He still a little clueless about some things…What?! SluggyD is moving to Copenhagen? When did this happen? But, he now notices when the magic fairy who lives in his Element’s dashboard tells him to take the car in for an oil change. :)</p>
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</p>
<p>ahahahahahhahahahaha!!!</p>
<p>No, no, not Page 2. :)</p>
<p>Slugg baby! You da man. You back. We happy!!!</p>
<p>If Second Life didn’t have such a HUGE executable I’d be there. I am lobbying to install it in our office so we can “stay abreast of trends” ;)</p>
<p>Just would like to point out that Aluson has also bought himself with bday money a huge honking thing that looks like an airplane instrument board but he insists is called a keyboard. However, I suspect it is a computer in disguise because more music seems to come from looks suspiciously like software than from actual plonking of any actual keys.</p>
<p>So who wants to hear tracks from an upper middle class white kid trying to make hip hop. Hmm. Stay in touch Slugg, we may all need to listen and learn.</p>
<p>And do start the Slugg line of Hallmarks. I look forward to it.</p>
<p>Funny you should mention SL’s huge executable… I am at this moment downloading the new 1.17 client so I can get back there to check on the science exhibit I installed last week. Can’t make it to the SL convention, Sluggy, but I’ll be at Virtual Worlds in October, you? Anyone else? (C’mon, Alu, you know you want to! 
)</p>
<p>And oh yeah, summer’s fine, the kids are fine, work is fine, everything’s fine. (I am hearing that Tracy Bonham song in the back of my mind as I type this, though…)</p>
<p>Thought I’d stop in for a quick one. Spending this week in a dazed, glazed, stupor… Graduation went off wonderfully on Monday night. Although I spent the day going in and out of basket-case mode, by the evening I was fine and I SMILED all through graduation. D#2 was assigned double-grandma duty during the graduation (she says I owe her BIG time!) Astrogirl’s Val speech in the big NBA arena was short, sweet, and got some laughs. Huge relief for everyone involved. Leaving Monday for a week in Puerto Vallarta (Cerveza, por favor…I’ll leave the tequila for someone else). Then AstroD and I come back in a week so she can leave 2 days later for her one-month study/travel trip in Germany. D#2 then gets a month’s dry run of what it’s going to be like to be an “only child” come September. Fall schedules already finished, let’s breeze through the summer, shall we?</p>
<p>ALU, D is going to costa rica next week also!! </p>
<p>Must admit i am a little nervous.</p>
<p>Graduation was today. It looked like it would rain the whole time and was freezing, but it went off without a hitch. Though dh was late as usual. :rolleyes: The mayor gave the best (and shortest) talk. I’m still chilly, make mine a coffee with a kick.</p>
<p>Yeah, yeah…this is where the global plan will go awry. cheers will still be spending beaucoup dollars on long haul travel–trying to get to see her grandchildren. </p>
<p>One boy is home on eight day furlough. He leaves Tuesday for last leg of GAP, the same country, different city as your D, Alum. He wishes he was going back to London. I’m trying to decide if we can visit him in early August.</p>
<p>The other one is sending emails that cannot be sent to the Nannas. Too bloody intense. Nana wouldn’t like to think about him in that environment. If you girls don’t stop fretting about beautiful, tropical Costa Rica, I’m going to send you some emails that will take the hair off the back of your neck.</p>
<p>I hope those trips fire up your boys as much as they have fired up my guys. I cannot imagine my guys at uni without that travel in their background. It’s made a huge difference in the academic maturity of both.</p>
<p>In that cae, I am going to sign TJFS up for Siberia next summer.</p>
<p>SBMom, Cheers = Hahahahaha.</p>
<p>Congrats mathmom on the graduation.</p>
<p>Do you think mathson will take on travel at some point?</p>
<p>4Giggles - well let us hope that the rays of good fortune focus on the land of Pura Vida.</p>
<p>My kids are so different. Mathson hates, hates to travel. He’s adaptable enough, he can make himself at home wherever, but he’s happy with a small circle of friends and his computer. His younger brother OTOH loves to travel and see new places. (He also hates math and loves history and music.) I may need a name change. :)</p>
<p>Haha, mathmom. I’ll most certainly need a new name for round 2 w/ D2…I think I’ve already posted a couple of possibilities, but the current one is marinebiologyorSpanishorGermanorteachingordancemom… I’ve always been quite intrigued with the massive personality differences between our two…evident since birth…</p>
<p>astrophysicsmom–Haha, you should have chosen a name based on your attributes, not your offspring’s! </p>
<p>All is quiet here. One boy working all day, one boy in summer school for a few weeks (get that stupid Health course out of the way) so I can spend my mornings moving the sprinkler from place to place (I DO wish it would rain) 
</p>
<p>And practicing my instruments. The community band I play in is out for the summer so I have to be a good girl and practice my flute. Remember summer band? We never had camp but did have some weeks of practice before school started. This was pre-airconditioning, and it was…HOT. </p>
<p>I don’t remember having water bottles, either. Were they invented yet? Of course not. You would have to believe, like the people in the Creation Museum, that dinosaurs co-existed with water bottles. ;)</p>