Month: May 2013

Tina just emerged from the hallway.  “Tina, go to bed!” Jacinta greeted her.

“Mama,” Tina explained, “I’m sick!”–this quite cheerfully.

“Then you need to go to bed,” Jacinta countered.  “When you are sick you need to lay down and rest.  You will feel better in the morning.

“No, I want to go to bed at the hospital!” Tina insisted.

Um, no.  The hospital has been on her mind ever since her recent stay due to some kind of RSV-imitating virus.  When Jacinta explained that you can’t eat the green leaves on a rhubarb plant, Tina questioned:  “If you eat it, you get sick and have to go back to the hospital?”  And that has been our threat when she does anything dangerous:  “If you fall down and break your arm, you’ll have to go back to the hospital!”

But when it’s 9:30 at night and the world is boring, I guess anything is better than laying in bed.

Well, I really, really fell off the blogwagon this time.  For reasons known only to Providence, the cosmic law of academic life dictates that the end of the semester shall be turbulent, somehow, some way.  This year I just grew more and more tired as the end approached, and when it ended I was simply exhausted.  And I didn’t blog.

But when it comes to resolutions, one must beware the “OH WELL” fallacy.  When somehow, by some stupifying improbability, not everything goes as planned this year, even though everything has gone exactly as planned for the past ten years running, one is tempted to say:  “OH WELL.  I can’t keep this resolution perfectly, so I’ll just drop it.”

Not so.  Even a hundred FTTs will be better than 93!  So on to #94!

Tonight there unfolded in my kitchen a complex event which I can only summarize as follows:

Bernadette threw a drinking glass at her mother.  When asked to explain this extraordinary behavior, she excused herself on the grounds that she was trying to imitate an excited tissue box.

I leave you to reconstruct the context.