What a week!

There's been so much going on that I haven't taken any time at all to sit her and bore you all (Hi Dad!) with the details.

Josie was grounded last weekend; no fun, phone or facebook.

I know, it's hard to believe; she's like the perfect child but she got grounded anyway.
Why?  Well, Friday after school she took off with her cousin Carolyn, which is fine, Carolyn is as perfect a child as Josie is, but Josie didn't tell us that she was taking off.

She didn't call.

She didn't answer our calls when we tried to find her.

She didn't answer texts.

We had to track her down by calling her friends.

I don't have any of her friends numbers!  Why would I, she has a cell phone by which I can talk directly to her 24/7!  It's not like the old days.  This is the first time she's ever not answered.

You know how it is when you're a parent; you don't think "Oh, maybe she went to a movie and turned it off."  You think "She's been abducted by a gang of white slavers and they've tossed her phone into the Mississippi River!!!"

Parents are really good at whipping themselves into a frenzy this way.

I was able to find the numbers of several of Josie's friends by pulling up an old email roster of her volleyball team.  The first girl I called is a lovely lass whom Josie hangs out with a great deal of the time.

I asked her if Josie was with her and she said "NO.  I'm in Chicago."

Damn these portable telephones.

The second person I called was Carolyn (actually Carolyn's mom, I don't have C's cell number.)  Kelly immediately burst out laughing and handed the phone to my wayward daughter.

We had been trying to get a hold of her for over four hours.

Now, she didn't do anything terrible, she just hadn't done the one thing that would have made it all right and consequently, she scared a few decades off her parent's life expectancy.  Kids gotta pay for that kind of thing.

Josie felt really bad that she'd freaked us out.  she didn't even argue her case (smart kid) when she got home, she just handed over her phone and resigned herself to spending a super dull weekend with the 'rents.

I wouldn't have grounded her for the whole weekend.  I'm not as tough as Jay.  That's why our kids have always behaved much better with him than with me.  I swear, when they were little, he could take them all, even Zack, anywhere and they always behaved themselves.  It took me a while to realize it's because when Jay said "Calm down or we're going home" while in the car on the way to the zoo, if they didn't calm down right away, he turned the car around and no one went to the zoo.  He never made empty threats.

Kids are smart.  They know whether or not they have to take a parent seriously.

Me; I want to go to the zoo, therefore you can behave like a pack of wild animals.  Where's a better place for wild animals than the zoo?

Jay; I want well behaved kids.

Pretty simple, no?

On other matters, I went and saw Bridesmaids with my sisters and Meg.
To solve the dilemma of Mom and daughter seeing a raunchy movie together, Katie and Meg didn't sit in the same row.  Meg, MJ and I sat in the very back and Katie disappeared into the packed theater to sit with strangers.  This is a time honored method for seeing this type of movie with your offspring; Zack and I saw Clerks II at the same time years ago.  Bridesmaids wasn't that raunchy and it was funnier.  It wasn't funnier than the original Clerks, which is the vilest movie that ever made me laugh until my sides cramped up.

But Bridesmaids is pretty darn funny.

Kristen Wiig looks like what you'd get if you put my sister Katie through the ugly machine once.  I'm not saying KW is ugly, she's just not as pretty as Katie.

Like Scarlett Johanssen isn't ugly but you'd have to put my niece Phanie through the ugly machine to get Scarlett.

If you put my brother Bill through the ugly machine twice; you'd have Jack Black.

The ugly machine is fun.

There's a pretty machine, too but it's not as easy to use.

Because of being grounded, Josie didn't get to see Bridesmaids with us; we made her babysit MJ's girls while we went.  How mean is that?

The Rapture didn't come on Saturday, as it was predicted.

Although, while reading the mocking headlines on Sunday, I couldn't help but wonder: how do we know it didn't' happen?

Maybe the Rapture DID happen and only about seven people were worthy of being taken. 

Maybe God's in Heaven with the lucky few, looking down at the rest of us going "They knew the Rapture was coming, killer tornadoes sweep through the country, literally lifting hundreds into the air and killing them and the survivors look around at the devastation saying 'nope, no Rapture here'.  How stupid are they???"

I sure hope the Rapture didn't happen.

I dont' know where the idea of the Rapture came from.  It really doesn't square with Biblical prophesy at all.  We were told that War, Famine, Death and Pestilence would show up.  Well, they've all been here for years, I'll admit but not in such a way as to call much attention to themselves.

Although this whole 'Arab Spring' thing was apparently touched off by food riots, so I guess Famine is getting a bit more center stage these days.

And War is making  a fuss in the part of the world the Bible was written in.  So what else is new?

My entire basket of eggs is resting on the fact that I'm unaware of Pestilence dancing through the Middle East.  In fact, Seal Team 6 excised a large tumor from that part of the world just a month ago.

Anyway, I guess I'm just saying I don't buy the idea that God will gently lift the righteous out of the world someday, leaving the rest of us to our own devices.  That doesn't fit God's profile and it's not even close to what He said He was going to do. 

On Stranger Tides.

Jay and I made Josie come see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie on Sunday.  We all enjoyed it.  It's not as good as the original Pirates but sequels never are.  I didn't care much for the way the fight/chase scenes were filmed; too much steady cam and too many close ups rob these sequences of their impressiveness and just render them confusing.  The chase scene in Stranger Tides in which Cap'n Jack Sparrow hops from the top of one carriage to another should have been as hilarious and breath taking as the fight through the jungle on top of the mill wheel in an earlier movie but it's not.

I haven't seen Thor yet.

Zack came over on Monday.  I had filled my daily quota by noon so we watched The Fighter together.  It's very good.  Christian Bale deserves his Oscar.

Anybody could have played Melissa Leo's part.  How hard is it to portray a selfish loser who pimps out her own son and has no redeeming qualities?  The woman the part was based on may be exactly like that, but what a cliche!

That doesn't mean Leo didn't deserve her Oscar; maybe there really weren't any better roles or performances last year.  Natalie Portman won too and she stunk up the joint in Black Swan.  She'll be picking bits of scenery out of her teeth till she's forty.

Lots of other stuff happened in the last week but I've got to get back to work.

Yeah, yeah; I don't have to.  I'm just bored of typing.

So I'm gonna stop.

 

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