The big news this week at the G & G household is that Lil' S1 is taking his first solo flight. He is currently tens of thousands of feet in the air en route to Florida to visit his grandparents for spring break. Somewhat surprisingly, I'm not worried about it at all. I thought I might be, but now it's here, and I'm not. There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that Lil' S1 can handle it. He's good with this sort of thing. He's very much still a little kid in many ways, but when it comes to venturing out into the world on his own and not freaking out about it, he's pretty good. He's been doing errands on his own for years, and he takes the Metro to and from school several times every week. I'm sure it's safer by an order of magnitude to be in an airport and fly than to be in a DC Metro station and take the train. You don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket and go through security in the latter scenario.
Also, S and her mom are on it. S took him to the airport and escorted him all the way to the jetway, and her mom and her mom's niece and her husband will be waiting for him at the gate on the other end. Plus, he has his cell phone, so we can always track him or call him -- provided he remembers to take his phone off airplane mode, that is. That's actually one of my only worries. That is exactly the type of thing he would forget to do. We might be saved there, however, by the fact that he'll try to watch something on YouTube and will have to turn it off airplane mode to get it to work.
This is the first year the kids have different spring breaks, so it's a little different logistically. Lil' S1 is going to Florida by himself, and then in a few weeks, S and her sister will take Lil' S2 there. I don't get to go at all, which is fine. I'm going on enough trips this year, and we go down there so often, it's perfectly acceptable for me to miss a trip every now and again. It's actually a nice time right now in our kids lives. They aren't yet in brooding teenager, too cool for school mode, but they also are past the need-to-be-monitored-at-almost-all-times stage. S is a bit sad today because she caught a glimpse into what it will be like when our kids leave the house (Lil' S2 went to a friend's birthday party and will likely be gone the entire day), but I'm just enjoying the break. Plus, the way things are going in the world today, with the job market and the arrested development of our youth, our kids might not ever leave our house for good -- and I'm only half-kidding about this.
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Alright, lightning round and then let's call it a post.
- My injured finger is slowly getting better. It's still bruised and
tender, but I have a bit more range of motion. I had to put my Krav Maga
gym membership on medical freeze for a few weeks. I can't punch, grip a
barbell, or do a pushup, which makes it pretty much impossible to take
martial arts or fitness classes.
- I can still do the stationary
bike, though, thankfully. I also might -- just might -- be able to start
jogging again. I quit about a year ago due to inflammation in my right
knee, but it's been feeling pretty good of late. Once the weather gets a
bit nicer, I'll test it out. That would be huge if I could go running
again.
- I've been hitting Queen Bee on NYT Spelling Bee a decent amount of time (about 10%, which might not sound that impressive, but keep in mind, it's not at all an easy thing to do). Here's my daily Spelling Bee routine: I
play until I get to Genius level, and then I have to get one more word
(it's a game within a game that only exists in my head), and then I'm
allowed to look at the number of possible words and the highest possible
score. I'm not allowed to look at the solution, mind you, just the
highest possible totals. If I'm sufficiently close, I then try for Queen
Bee. Yesterday, I finished the job when I remembered that CIVET is a
word. I don't know what it is -- I'm thinking a type of bolt, but I know
that's wrong, because that's a RIVET -- but I do know it's a word.
- As it turns out, a CIVET is "a slender nocturnal carnivorous mammal with a barred and spotted coat and well-developed anal scent glands, native to Africa and Asia." Huh, how about that? In my Scrabble days I found that words I didn't know almost always fell into one of the Four-F categories: flora, fauna, foreign letters, foreign money. Examples are the Scrabble staples QAT, AI, XI, XU -- a shrub chewed as a stimulant, a three-toed sloth, the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and a monetary unit of Vietnam, respectively.
- I found out I can watch all the non-CBS March Madness games on Max, which is huge. The March Madness app is one of the few cable streaming services my parents’ defunct cable credentials don’t work for (and it’s not that their specific credentials don’t work; the app doesn’t accept the provider at all), so I’d have no good way to watch them otherwise. And I love watching March Madness games—well, the last few minutes of them, anyway. Even I’m not enough of a sports sicko to watch a random college basketball game, in today’s watered down NCAA, from start to finish.
- Update: Lil' S1 arrived safely at his destination. See, no need to worry, at all.
Until next time...
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