- Once in a while, it’s good for the soul to forget about all the bureaucratic stuff and just careen madly down a waterslide.
- One upside of middle-aged weight gain is that it adds to your waterslide speed. Okay, that’s probably not an even trade, but I’ll take what I can get.
- It’s even better when your six year old daughter, formerly afraid of waterslides, finds the courage to go, too. The look on her face at the bottom was worth the trip.
- Huge theme parks are more fun with friends. TB discovered one of his friends from school in the wavepool, and pretty much went off on his own for a couple of hours. Bliss all around...
- Watching long, televised trials just makes you want to take a shower later.
- Miniature golf works better with a goalie. TW and I took The Girl to play mini golf on Saturday, while TB was at a sleepover. The mini-golf course has a series of creeks running through it, working as de facto water traps. TG’s putting skills are, uh, in development, and we lost the first ball at the third hole. After that, we developed a policy that for every hole near a water trap, the folks who weren’t putting would play goalie. The goalie’s job was to block the water trap, keeping the ball on the green by whatever means necessary.
- Miniature golf is also improved by a mercy rule.
- Public swimming pools have many upsides: they’re free to use, but maintained by other people. They don’t take up backyard space. They provide common ground among social classes. This is all to the good. However, they have a potentially fatal downside: the public.
- On the holiday itself, we had to leave the pool because someone pooped in it. Seriously. I am not making this up.
- Lifeguard, overheard: “And you know what’s really gross? I have to pick it up!” Yeah, I remember summer jobs...
- To a ten-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl, nothing is funnier than someone pooping in a pool. The entire ride home was devoted to coming up with funny ways to describe what had happened. “Someone dropped some friends off at the pool!” “Someone dropped a deuce in the drink!” It went on for some time, interrupted only by TB’s and TG’s laughter. As we got home, TG announced happily “Finally we have a REASON to talk about poop!” Sigh...
- The Dog is unperturbed by fireworks, but creeped out by the sound of someone turning pages. Thunderstorms are a non-issue, but the arrival of the UPS guy is a crisis. I don’t get it...
- Several days of not thinking about anything academic or administrative or bureaucratic can be amazingly restorative. I’m thinking now that what we really need for the big kickoff meeting in September is a waterslide...
