Unrelated Ramblings

We bought an almost 20-year-old Volvo today. While Alison* and I were waiting in the gentleman’s living room for him to get some of the paperwork together, I glanced up to a shelf along the far wall. In the center spot, which is normally reserved for a trophy, your child’s gilded shoe or photo of Aunt Matilda, there was a wilted cardboard box with bold, black lettering on the side. It read:

FRESH
CURLS
POO.

Well, once I’ve seen a thing, I can’t just unsee it. So I had to keep looking at it and trying not to giggle. Then I mouthed it to Alison when the guy’s back was to me and pointed and waved at the box. And then I felt 13, hormonal, and begged myself to stop, but did I? No. I never listen. Instead, I drove myself crazy with the idea of blurting it out loud to the man. ‘FRESH CURLS POO?? Really?? Your CURLS are FRESH and POO? POO?’ At which point I realized I no longer felt 13. No, I felt 3 with a major chance at ruining my perfect potty-training chart with a sad, empty spot sans sticker for today if I didn’t get it under control. And so I did get it under control. But as soon as we left and had the chance, we both looked at each other and laughed and yelled out loud. It was almost a Laverne & Shirley moment.

On the way home, the bumper sticker of the car in front of me said:

Bringing Friends and Fun Together.
Square Dancing = FUN.

I don’t think I have much to say about that except – ok.

The Office is one of my favorite shows. I love the BBC version as well, but the US version has Steve Carell. From last week:

Michael (Steve): We are just going to sit here until someone comes forward or you are all under punishment.
Pam: What kind of punishment?
Michael: Time Out! You’re all in time out!

My son worked on the LAB portion of his science report over the weekend. His idea = pit a mouse and rat against each other in a race for food and see which one is faster. The twist? First train them both to recognize a color and link it to food intake. He created a maze (and I use the term maze loosely because it was in essence a large box with four horse stalls on one end) and put large swatches of color at the end of each of them. The problem? He didn’t take the time to color-train them, which may be fine because I don’t think they are color-trainable due to the fact that rodents are color blind. He wanted to do a week’s worth of races, one per day, which became seven races in one day which became three races in one hour which finally became no races of any kind and more of a food-fest where the rodents hung out in the middle of the box and ate sunflower seeds, peanut butter and cheese together while speaking of politics and religion. After watching them gorge themselves, my son decided to just make up the results and call it a day. If I was one of those conscientious parents, I would have made sure he actually did the science experiment the way he had originally outlined and told him under no circumstances could he just make up the results. And when I mentioned that to him, he calmly told me that science is not, in fact, facts but more hypotheses and conclusions. I just hope his teacher takes that in to account when she reads his conclusion that the rat was trained better to the red color than the mouse was, thereby making him the winner of the race tourney. His graphs turned out fantastic.

*Go listen to Alison’s new song, A Boy and a Bird.