It was bound to happen some time in the not-so-distant future, but I thought I still had at least another year before the inevitable. Nope. It happened this weekend: Jesse beat me at chess. I taught Jesse how to play when he was in Kindergarten, and so for the last three years, I've remained undefeated in our matches. Not that he was easy to play. I had to really think my way out of some real jams. And even though he was a good little player, I knew his weaknesses pretty good and could exploit them to my advantage. For example, he hated losing any pieces and wouldn't sacrifice a piece to move his game forward, so I could tie him up with a few stalemates and command the board. But yesterday, he was a totally different player. Confident and careful and deliberate. In the end, I had only my king left, and he had his queen and king. But it wasn't even close. He killed me. And I was so proud of him. And then we moved on to Connect Four, where I beat him 10 games to 1. Booyah!

Nothing else much happened this weekend. We barely left the house. A friend who recently moved back to Memphis brought her boys over to play Saturday afternoon, and we went to lunch with them at Huey's. And Sunday I only left the house to go grocery shopping. I caught up on my back issues of Entertainment Weekly and New Yorker. I watched way too much television. I wanted to see a movie, but Jesse is such a homebody and he didn't want to go anywhere.

Things I know:
Stephen Colbert is a genius.
At least once a week, I will walk out of the house wearing shoes that I will later regret wearing.
At least once a month, Geoff Calkins will write a sports column in the local daily that will make me cry. (This morning's column was a real tear jerker).
I will always obsess about my weight.
Even though I know I don't want another child, I will keep adding to my running list of girls' names. (Audrey Sue is my new favorite because of the links to family).
It's impossible to eat so much chocolate that you eventually get sick of it. Believe me, I've tried.
I'm way too nice.
If there's nothing to worry about, I will worry that there's something I should be worrying about.

Jesse has two more weeks of freedom before school starts back Aug. 14. He's not the only one dreading the start of school. I've enjoyed getting to sleep "late" in the mornings. Since school let out I've gotten to sleep as late as 7 a.m., an hour later than I get to sleep during the school year. The benefit of getting up so early is that I get to work about an hour before anyone else, and I can get a lot of work done during that time because no one is in the office to bug me. But the start of school really signals the start of a hectic time of year. For one thing, I've become a season ticket holder for the Memphis Tiger football team this year, so there are games to attend on the weekends. Then there are school events, and several big work events. And then you blink and it's Thanksgiving and Christmas, which always stress me out. I'm a spring and summer girl, all the way.

I bit my tongue while I was eating lunch today, so I'm sure I'll be in agony from a canker sore by tomorrow. I added a listing for Rembrandt's toothpaste for canker sore sufferers to my amazon.com wish list. If anyone plans on ordering me birthday presents from my list next month, go ahead and add a couple of tubes to the order for me. No, I'm not kidding.

Even before school starts there's an event to attend tonight. Campus school is having Skate Night at East End skating rink tonight. I'm taking Jesse but haven't decided if I'll bring my skates too. I could probably use the exercise. Yeah, I should take them.

For the past few weeks, I've walked by him in the mornings. Asleep, curled up on his side, clothes askew, no shoes, hands tucked under his head, nothing but a few pieces of cardboard separating his body from the sidewalk. A collection of food containers, bottles, cans, newspapers and other pieces of detritus lying a few feet away from him. Sometimes there's even a book. Sometimes he's there in the evenings too. Clearly he's living there in the alley I walk through to get to my office. I don't see him as a threat, so I haven't changed my route. Maybe I'm naive. This news would most certainly worry most of my friends and family. But there are always people walking through the alley, so my thoughts are about the well-being of this man, and not my safety. It's hard to even call it an alley; after all, it has a name: Center Lane. It's wide enough for traffic to drive through it. I did worry when Jesse came to work with me one morning for a few hours. We were halfway down the alley before I started thinking about what we would say if we saw the man. Explaining homelessness was not a conversation I felt up for that morning. But he wasn't there, and I didn't have to deal with it. I'm not sure I could ever satisfy all his questions about why someone is sleeping on the sidewalk.

Sad morning

My friend Bethany's father passed away early this morning. I'm trying to beam all my strongest and best thoughts and prayers her way this morning.
I don't know why, but July seems to have been a rough month. A former professor and mentor had open heart surgery yesterday (she's doing OK in recovery), and then there was the news that a couple I've been friends with since college are splitting up and it's not been very amicable. And everybody I know is just plain worn out from working so hard. It's enough to make you want to crawl under a rock. Or eat your weight in chocolate.

Victory! Our little team won trivia night at the Flying Saucer last night. We so totally rocked. So next week's beer is already paid for. Woo hoo!

Unnerving moment of the night: I've been reading a series of books based in alternate reality where the British and Russians are still embroiled in the Crimean war, which I've never heard of. So just to test the brain power of my teammates, Ron and his sister Susan, I asked what they knew about the Crimean war. Without any hesitation, they started spouting off dates, locations and strategies and countries involved. I was humbled, and I didn't let on, but also a little scared to be in the presence of their big brains. Now, I can rattle on for hours about the discography and history of Duran Duran, but that doesn't make me smart. Those two? Are SMART.

Here's something totally cool. Ron and his lovely wife Bethany were telling me that they've joined a program called Upromise and are putting the rewards they receive into a college fund for Jesse and Hannah (the daughter of another couple they're friends with). Ron informed me last night that Jesse's fund is now up to 2 bucks and some change. What's sad is this is more money than I've managed to save for my own child's college. So, I looked up Upromise this morning, and I'm going to register with the program. I think friends and family can join it too, so I'll send some info out on that as soon as I can.

It would appear to some that I've been ignoring this blog, but they would be wrong. I spent about 23 hours trying to add a sitemeter to this site yesterday, and when I finally accomplished it (thanks to help from the lovely Labmonkie) I was too exhausted to post anything. Except by "hours" I mean "minutes." And "exhausted" really means "busy working at my actual job."

So. Weekend recap: Ummm, didn't really do anything exciting. I saw the movie "The Devil Wears Prada." Loved it. Meryl Streep will get an Oscar nom and probably win a Golden Globe for that role. You heard it here first. Maybe. Note to the people who compile movie trailers: It's probably not a good idea to slip a real downer trailer for a movie like "World Trade Center" before a movie that's a comedy. People have come to this movie to laugh, and that's made difficult if you've got a big lump in your throat and your heart is pounding. I'm just saying.

Other than that, I tried my best to stay indoors, because it is hot, people.

CNN had a story a couple of days ago about some researchers who've started studying the effects of psilocybin, which is the chemical in psychedelic mushrooms. Apparently scientists suspended research of the chemical back in the '60s when recreational use started skyrocketing. But the new experiments showed pretty definitively that this chemical can evoke a profound spiritual experience in users, and the effects are often felt for months causing some of the subjects to report that the experience had changed their lives. The CNN story had a stern warning from the researchers: Absolutely do not try this at home. Which to me is a little like the reporters who flock to the hurricane target zones saying "This is a very dangerous situation, and you should leave as soon as possible." But the viewers at home hear this: "Wheeeeee! Hurricanes are fun! Look at how cool it is for me to try to stand up in 50 mph wind. Yeehaw!"

Jesse called me at work yesterday afternoon to tell me that his dad had dropped his pocket knife in the kitchen and had put a hole in the kitchen floor. No one had lost a toe, thank goodness. Also yesterday, SkooterPie managed to totally freak Jesse out while they were playing on the trampoline. They were wrestling, and SkooterPie's wrestling name was Tickler Spankler. Something about the faces SkooterPie was making apparently really scared Jesse, despite the fact that his wrestling name was Death.

And here's something the parenting manuals don't really tell you how to handle. I'm in the middle of making Jesse a milkshake, and SkooterPie walks in holding Jesse's toy hammer and announces that Jesse is banned from playing with it. He found the hammer lying in the grass next to our brick barbecue thingy, that now has chipped places all along one side. Jesse said he didn't know how it happened. Now, giving a child a milkshake after hearing this news and denial seems somehow wrong. But I had invested time in this milkshake, and I wasn't about to pour it down the drain. So I gave it to him anyway and sent him to his room to drink it. Later, neighbor kid Oliver showed up at our door and I quizzed him about the hammer (because they'd been hanging out in our back yard), and he denied having anything to do with it either. In fact, I think he was five seconds away from telling me that he'd never even been in our back yard before and that he was in fact Schmoliver, Oliver's twin brother. So something is definitely up there.

After a three-week hiatus from Trivia night, we finally showed up at the Flying Saucer last night and got our asses kicked. Too many sports questions and too much overthinking on some pretty easy questions killed us. But I still had a good time hanging out with Ron, Bethany and Susan.

It's been three days of Jesse and SkooterPie hanging out together, and hilarity has already ensued. Take yesterday for example. SkooterPie announces that he and Jesse are going to hit the road together. He works out a plan where he takes Jesse to my dad's shop and then drives by himself to Nashville so he can see an old buddy who's in town for the night. He plans to pick Jesse back up from my dad the next day so the two of them can go to Cookeville and see his mom and spend the night there. It took hours to work all this out because Jesse is now old enough to have his own agenda for these road trips. He wanted to pick up Alia and bring her back to Memphis so he could play with her, and he and his dad argued about it for quite awhile. And by the time SkooterPie finally got around to getting everything packed up, he lost his momentum. He called me at 2:30, frustrated, saying they weren't going because it was just getting too darned late. When I got home last night, their luggage was still sitting out, half packed.

Weekend recap:
I road-tripped to Chattanooga this weekend to hang out with some high school classmates. And I just really don't feel like writing about 90% of the weekend for various reasons, one of which is that a post along those lines would probably come back to bite me in the ass later (again for various reasons, none of which involve me doing something that I'm ashamed/embarrassed of). I will say that we ate at a fabulous Italian place on Saturday night. And that I love Chattanooga and would move there in a second. But I think I'm done traveling for a while.

Jesse is officially on summer vacation with his dad for the rest of July. Now, that SkooterPie is finished with his summer class (he made an A, by the way), he's available to look after Jesse. There are several kids on our street and in the neighborhood who are home during the day, so I'm sure that Jesse will be out playing most of the time. I think it's cool that they get to spend some time together.

Weirdest CNN headline I've clicked on today: "Putin kissed boy 'like a kitten'"

Which led to this exchange with a colleague:
Colleague: Did he give him a zrbrt?
Me: No. But that would be at least less weird. He raised the kid's shirt, kissed the kid's stomach, patted him on the head and walked away.
Colleague: That is the strangest thing.
Me: Did Bill Cosby actually coin the word zrbrt?
Colleague: I don't know. Probably.
Me: What did we call it before Cosby called it a zrbrt?
Colleague: I have no idea.
Me: That's going to bother me all day.

While I appreciate having a day off from work, it's really screwing with me today. It's like having two Mondays in a week. Blech. And I'm taking Friday off, which means I'm cramming a lot of work into today and tomorrow. So, why am I blogging? Good question. Welcome to Procrastinationville — population: me.

I'm so glad I got to see my friend Einat sworn in as an American citizen. She was so excited. I got to talk to her before the ceremony and after. Our citizenship oath is really weird, by the way. They had to pledge to give up their allegiance to foreign princes or potentates. Our forefathers could really write an oath, couldn't they? Anyway, she was one of 100 immigrants representing 42 different countries, and there was a record-breaking crowd, just over 18,000 people, there to witness the swearing in. It was a very moving thing to see.

However, I can think of 10 reasons right off the top of my head why we should never attend another baseball game, and eight of them involve Jesse. The kid could not sit still. By the end of the night, he had ice cream and peanut shells all over him. At one point I tried to clean off his face with a napkin dipped in orange Fanta, which Jesse then refused to drink. He got up every time one of us got up. And then there was this:
Jesse: I have to use the bathroom.
Me: Why didn't you mention that when Dad got up to go smoke about two seconds ago.
Jesse: Sor-ry.
Me: Wait until Dad gets back.
(SkooterPie returns. Jesse meets him at the end of the row, and they disappear. An hour later, they return. Jesse now has a chocolate ice cream cone AND a new Redbirds hat.)
Ten minutes after he finishes his ice cream cone:
Jesse: I have to use the bathroom.
Me: You just went to the bathroom.
Jesse: But I have to go.
Me to SkooterPie: He says he has to go to the bathroom again.
SkooterPie: What?! You are lying.
Jesse: No I'm not.
SkooterPie: You just went to the bathroom.
Me: This is like that thing you do in the car when you say you have to use the bathroom just because you're sick of riding and want out of the car. Unless it's really like when you say you went to the bathroom, but you didn't. Like at SeaWorld, when you said you had peed, but the truth was it was so crowded you didn't feel like waiting so you left. Is that what happened?
Jesse: Nods head.
Me: Jesse!
I then threatened to stand up and yell loud enough for the whole stadium to hear that he had lied to us about peeing. But cooler heads prevailed and SkooterPie took Jesse to the bathroom again.


And it was a looooong game, what with the citizenship ceremony and the fireworks and the concert and the hour spent sitting in my parking garage. OK, that last bit was after the game, but it was a real mood killer. Well, not entirely, because it certainly created other moods among the passengers in my car as we sat waiting until we could leave. We got home around 11:30. I tried not to notice how dirty Jesse was when I dropped him at Lindenwood this morning.

SkooterPie if you are reading this, you'd better stop and get back to writing that paper.

Welcome to the A-Team

Jesse, SkooterPie and I are going to participate in that great American past-time of watching a baseball game on the Fourth of July. We'll be watching the Memphis Redbirds take on the Nashville Sounds. Baseball is not really my thing. I love AutoZone Park, and the barbecue nachos are worth the price of admission alone. But baseball is a tad boring to me. So I'm not really going for the game, or the food, really. I'm going because a friend of mine is being sworn in as an American citizen at the end of the game. She's from Israel and is very excited about taking her oath on the Fourth of July at a baseball game. Oh, and there will be fireworks too.

Weekend recap: I had a craving for Gus's Fried Chicken Friday night, so we drove Downtown for dinner. It turned out to be a stressful dinner because A) the place was packed and the kitchen seemed more interested in getting out the to-go orders before actually serving the people at tables, and B) we didn't know if we were going to make it home in my car. During the drive there, SkooterPie suddenly felt the power steering go out and my battery and brake indicator lights came on. After frantically thumbing through my manual, I read that this had something to do with my alternator. SkooterPie parked the car and popped the hood, and sure enough, the alternator belt had broken. I consulted with dad, who advised us to drive home with a close eye on the temperature guage and also to be aware that the battery could die on us at any moment. I called a friend during dinner and asked her to be on stand-by in case we needed to be rescued. But we made it home, and SkooterPie got up early Saturday morning to buy new belts and a new battery at AutoZone. He tinkered with my car for a couple of hours, and fixed it all by himself. Isn't he handy? My hero.

We didn't do much of anything else this weekend. It was too damn hot. I did the grocery/Target shopping Sunday and felt like I was going to pass out by the time I got home. I usually hate these huge over-air-conditioned stores, but this is the time of year when I relish that blast of cold air you get walking into a building. Within a few minutes, though, I'll be freezing again and will relish that blast of warm air from outside.

I need to do a post about one of Jesse's latest escapades at Lindenwood, but I need photos for illustration so all you readers out there will just have to wait.