WWII for Dummies

Well, we had to endure this week an event that, surprisingly, more parents than I would have expected have experienced (based on my mini-poll at work)

"Mom, I have a History project due"

O-Kaaaay.

It's Sunday night.
He's known about it for 2 weeks.
It's due Wednesday.

He had to put together a powerpoint presentation on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the following requirements:

A minimum of 25 CONTENT pages
Not too many or two few graphics - must be very clear and pertinent to the subject
Require a minimum of Five different sources
Formal Bibliography required
5 additional sentences relating to EACH of the 25 content pages
Music ok but only if pertinent to the project
Must select or develop a powerpoint template that fits the subject
Must be in a NEW clean folder
Must include printout with Notes, Labeled CD, project on Flashdrive

Did I mention he's in EIGHTH GRADE?????

...and only two evenings to do it.

ARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!

Luckily, I happen to like History, and in return for his lack of planning, I was going to make sure his sorry butt was going to not only learn his subject in record time. (and pulling it off a couple of serious all-nighters)

He better LIKE IT too.

I didn't allow him to do 25 pages on the single act of the bombing. Because it was bigger than that.

I made him set it up from the start of WWII with a timeline leading up to the bombing and the corresponding socio-economic-cultural effects of post-modern Japan and the rest of the planet.

BROOOO-WAAA-HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAA.

He'll be in therapy for years, I'm quite sure.

*******

We, yes WE (well, hell, I had to at least steer him on it but he had to get the better part of it done with me proofing and doing grammatical clean-up and goading him to stay awake and not pass out onto the keyboard of the laptop ), got it done barely in the nick of time - and as a post script to his "I still don't get it" attitude, we had a long discussion last night about what his project really meant. After many tries, kind of like the proverbial story of teaching a pig to dance, I broke it down for him like this.

********
The Redneck's guide to WWII.

The world gave Germany a big ol' spanking after WWI
They didn't like it, so they picked on Poland.
This set off something akin to a bar-room brawl across the planet.
In the meantime one of the side fights got a wee bit out of control in Asia....
The US tried to stay out, but Japan wasn't behaving towards China.
We told Japan to behave and imposed economic sanctions until they did.
They didn't listen, and sucker punched us at Pearl Harbor.
We decided we'd had enough and ended the fight with a nuclear tko.
Japan decided to listen after that (to their benefit)
and that's how we got VCRs and Hondas today, and its why it was decided we needed the U.N. to prevent anymore trouble in on this here planet.
**********

Now I'm not certain my summary was historically accurate, but for some reason Firstborn decided to go do some serious reading out of the encyclopedia after MY history lesson for him.

**********

And don't you dare furrow your brow at me like that. I might have to follow up with a diatribe on the Cold War if YOU don't behave.....

**********

Post-script - To Firstborn:

"IF THE TEACHER GIVES YOU TWO WEEKS TO DO A PROJECT, SHE EXPECTS TWO WEEKS WORTH OF WORK - Ya' big DOOFUS!!!!"
;o)

Help!!!

We need help.

In light of the gas crisis, we need to eat at home more.

Problem is, we only have about 10 different meals that are standard in our household repetoire.

I need a TRULY EASY and NEW recipe for a bunch of seriously picky eaters.

I don't get home until 7pm, and my husband does the cooking... but when he gets too creative the kids (and unfortunately me too) won't eat it.

Here's what's out as far as ingredients:

BEETS
OKRA
SAUERKRAUT (or however the heck you spell it)
GREEN PEPPERS
PINE NUTS

The recipe has to be able to be put together in 20 min or less and cooked within 30-45 min.

Soup recipes are excellent for us.

Anybody have one? We're getting sick of spaghetti and poppy chicken.

:o)

Thought for the Day

You know the gas crisis is BAD when you pull in to get gas and the "LOW FUEL" light comes on AFTER you put the gas IN your car.

No lie.

I pulled in to get a few bucks worth to get around town, and my low fuel alarm didn't sound until I pulled AWAY from the pump.

I swear it was mocking me......

:o)

PROM SEASON

Ah Spring! It changes the whole "eat out" perspective, because now, in addition to having a nice meal out you get the entertainment value from seeing the local kids in their finest attire out for the PROM.

I always get a little twitchy when it comes to the whole subject. Being a geek and all in high school, it might go without saying, that although I made three attempts to get to the prom and have a good time....

It never went very well.

Attempt #1


In my high school, one of the BIG status symbols was to get asked to the prom (and actually go...) as a freshman or sophomore. So my best friend and I set out to get ourselves to the prom any way we could. Now never mind that after the boy with the car showed up at my house when I was in eighth grade and caused an incident of such epic proportion with my father that no boy with any sense within 625 miles of my house would dare even pass me a stick of gum underneath a jail cell door... TWas not enough of a problem to daunt my attempt to GET TO THE PROM.

Needless to say, I wasn't exactly the most dicerning when came to getting someone, ANYONE, to take me and neither was my friend.

Do the words BIG MISTAKE mean anything????

Well, considering I didn't think this through very well, there was a boy in my typing class that showed some interest in taking me. Good enough, I figured. I go to the prom, he has a date and avoids complete and utter social disaster, everybody wins. He was a junior, I a sophomore.

To sum up the guy - imagine David Spade's gay cosmic geek twin with braces.

Everything was fine until I agreed to go to the prom.

"How do I run from thee, let me count the ways...."

Here is the conversation I heard:

HIM "Will you go to the prom with me?"
Me "Okay"

What HE heard:

HIM "Will you go to the prom with me and love me forever and let me follow you around like a sick puppy for weeks on end??"
ME "I Love You. You are my hero and I want you to be my boyfriend"

Now, either I was the first girl to give him the time of day (much less a date) OR he was really, really, not that picky about who he would attach his affection too.

No matter how acerbic my responses to his existence, he remained, well, undaunted.

I got Cards. Flowers. Candy.

To make matters worse, he sat right directly in front of me in typing class, so when he was finished, he would turn around and watch me longingly (don't EVEN go there...)

Well, after 3 months of dodging loverboy and still keeping the delicate balance in place between keeping him at bay and not losing my prom ticket, the big day came.

So I and my equally unpicky about her date friend asked the guys if they wouldn't mind double dating. Thankfully, they complied. Oh and if the eighties weren't bad enough, our dates had the whole powder blue tux that matched our dresses thing going on.... So my friend and I spent most of the evening tittering and chattering on and on and on and on.... ANYTHING to distract, disturb, or deflect any interaction between us and our dates.

Now, before you get all irritated about our behaviour.

We were fifteen year old girls. And all would have been well, had these guys not taken our acceptance of a prom date as the first step towards some sort of future matrimonial engagement!!!

Needless to say, we bolted from the car (both retreating to my house) and politely waved good-nite as sweetly and remotely as possible.

Karma baby, Karma. Don't think it didn't come back on us.

My next attempt at the prom was worse.

Can you say BLIND DATE???

To be continued...

Some kids should have locks on their mouths....

Anyone who knows me personally, knows I cannot live without my AMP Energy Drink.

Period. I must have it. And preferably, with a chocolate iced donut.

So we're in Wal Mart picking up a few things we needed this evening.

Oh Happy Day! AMP now comes in an 8 PACK!!!

However, they don't keep it where I can FIND it and no matter where it was last time they don't have it in that spot the next time I make a trip in....

So here I am dragging my little Giz all over Wally World on a desperate search for mommy's little helper.... and the entire time she is joyfully skipping along and singing her own little TMI song to the world:

"Mommy needs her AMP or she'll go out just like a LAMP..."
"If she doesn't get her drink. her at-ti-tude will STINK...."

GRRRRRR. Intelligent kid, BIG MOUTH.

.

detention.

Firstborn got his first detention this week.

And he has to be at school at 6:30 A.M. to serve his sentence!!!!!

The offense? Several boys were on the internet at a time during computer class when they should not have been. I don't disagree with the punishment, but DAMN, we live an HOUR away from the school. Needless to say, he got seriously grounded HERE.

That said, my kids are so lucky. My parents pay to have them in private school, so in a lot of ways they are very sheltered. My husband went to private Christian school growing up, and it shocks me the things he talked about getting in trouble for!

In MY school, you basically had to shoot somebody to get suspended. And even then, it was less of "oh go get the grief counsellors and call the national news" and more of "whew, one more of THEM out of the gene pool...." Of course in the 70s and early 80s, school culture was very different. Columbine hadn't occurred yet and truly gross acts of violence were more random and singularly focused (rather than on "populations" of students.)

Honestly though, I went to a very rough high school. And you know, it wasn't so bad while I was there, because everyone kinda knew their place - in a strange way. You knew where you could go and when, who to avoid, etc. The freaks and geeks stayed in their group, the jocks in theirs, the "heads", the gangs, etc. You just didn't really cross lines.

However, we knew better than to go back to a football game at our 20 year reunion because we knew, that they didn't know us. We'd be fair game for a mugging for sure.

To give you an example. We were sitting in biology class one day, and all of a sudden we started seeing "stuff" falling past the windows outside. Well, apparantly, the typing teacher in the class above got sick and left the class alone for a bit, and so the kids started dumping EVERYTHING out of the windows!!! (of course we all knew it wasn't a real typing class, they basically made it up to round up all the heads and gangsters and put them someplace...) But needless to say, not much was done to the kids, or the teacher (bless his heart.) Nowadays, this would probably make national headlines!

Or another time, a teacher was shoved down the stairwell. Again, not newsworthy then, but probably would have been a candidate for national news on a slow day.

We had plenty of drugs. And we knew who took them and who didn't. I mean for crying out loud, field trips were banned in my middle school because the kids kept bringing liquer on the bus!

Pregnancy was rampant, and violent fights were a regular occurrence. The dropout rate was pretty high too.

We did have the er, coolest, scariest, (or most memorable) Vice Principal. I'll call him "Mr. Cook" for reference sake.... but he was the... BIGGEST, BLACKEST, BALDEST, most STERN looking human I have, or proabably ever will, see in PERSON. He was about 6'4" tall, and wore a three piece suit (even in 90 degree weather) and he wore a fedora on the way in and out - the mere sight of him made even the thuggest of thugs shake in their shoes. We all swore the whites of his eyes glowed from a deal with the devil. You never, EVER, looked him in the eyes. Kids who went to his office were purported to occaisionally never return, ever to be seen again. It was rumored he mysteriously appeared after the riot of '78, but no one would ever corroborate or refute the story.

We even had a special room known as the B.I.R. room. Or respectively, the "Behavior Improvement Room". That's where Teddy the Dropout and Bart the Fart lived, and you did NOT want to have to spend the day with THEM. I'm quite certain that they were there so much, they got posthumous credit for it. Just so the administration could find a way to get them OUT... LOL.

So, it could be so much worse.

Detention, it is.

Recycling today.

In honor of Earth Day or Blackout Hour or whatever it is that is currently being done to save the planet... I am pulling up from the earlier days an old post (and to substitute for today's lack of creativity)

But today I also physically recycled:
1 bag of aluminum cans
1 inkjet cartridge
14 old batteries
and I fed the dog my leftover baked chicken so it wouldn't go to waste.

I'm not expecting any awards, but I did try a little....

FROM NOVEMBER 2006:

"Yes Doctor, I AM Bitchy today"

Today I got to participate in my favorite yearly event.

Oh the beloved annual visit to the ob-gyn.

Just the mere idea of having to go sends my blood pressure up at LEAST 30 points.

Notably, my doctor erroneously asked me why I was so grouchy for all my annual visits - after all, "what had he done to deserve such a bad attitude from me all these years?"

I apologized and asked him not to take it personally. And after a brief moment of pensive thought I responded:

"Never mind, the minute I walk in, your perniciously perky receptionist starts in on what a nice day it is and her gratuitous, yet contrived efforts to be overly pleasant start off raking on my already edgy demeanor. The next series of questions, that after 12 years of NO changes, I still must answer. Next, I have to wait for 30 minutes in a waiting room full of annoyed and bored husbands and boyfriends - all of which now KNOW what I'm going to have to do... Once my name is called in a depersonalized fashion 'MSSSSUSS. SMMMMITH!' (no real name used here of course) you force me to attempt a skilled exercise for which I am not physically designed to do properly - the whole pee in a thimble mess. After the initial denuding of my dignity, I am STABBED in the finger, made to stand on the ENEMY known as the "scales" and if THAT isn't enough, you stick me in a refrigerated room with nothing but a tissue to cover up with and only "Oprah" magazines to read for God knows how long.... THEN you come in here and SMASH what's left of the bags formerly known as breasts after nursing two wonderful children, and if that wasn't enough....,

YOU SCRAPE MY VAGINA WITH A TOOTHPICK!!!!!

....and have the nerve to ASK ME WHY I AM IN A BAD MOOD????"

Awkward Silence.

Needless to say, I got an extra bag of samples today >o)

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:o)