News From Home

Yes, it HAS been an entire week since I last wrote. Quite frankly, I wasn't up to blogging - and if you've been anywhere north of the equator this past week, you'll understand why it is significant that WE DON'T HAVE AIR CONDITIONING.

The Vampire and I spent much of our days last week annoying bookstore and fast food restaurant employees by hanging about their establishments for hours at a time. On one hand, we did purchase things (cold beverages, at the least). On the other hand, we rendered ourselves obnoxious by playing interminable games of Scrabble during which we entertained ourselves by lodging indignant accusations of cheating and immediately following them up with propositions of increasingly improbable and/or potentially rude words of questionable origin: "'catacking', it's a fractious gerund. It's what your cat does when you are trying to take a tic off it during the summer and you're wearing shorts and it scrabbles to get away and gives you huge bloody scratches down your leg. Really!"

We spent the evenings back at the sauna that used to be our home, trying to convince ourselves that the air moving outwards from our fans was doing more than just nudging the beads of sweat around in such a way that they'd thoughtfully spell 'Slippery When Wet' for the benefit of the rescue workers when they arrived (too late).

You will be either amazed and impressed, or dubious and concerned, when I report that the Pirate biked from downtown Minneapolis to Frogtown in St. Paul every day last week. He said he LIKED it. I think he just likes feeling justified in standing outside and dumping cold buckets of water from the spigot over himself. He's just a big kid at heart...

The one thing we DID accomplish last week is to work out our study schedule for the coming six weeks. Which, not entirely by coincidence, happens to be the amount of time between last week and the time that the American Idol auditions will be held in the Twin Cities.

The Vampire has decided that even though he has very little chance of even making it to the Randy/Paula/Simon auditions, he is going to audition. He is doing this for a couple reasons:

a) He might make it to the auditions in front of the producers, in which case he might get some valuable criticism (hopefully constructive, but if not it will at least be practice for dealing with hecklers). He wants to be a performer, and performers need to audition - as with anything else, the more you practice the better you get.

b) He will probably meet lots of people while waiting in line, and hopes to convince a few to join him in growing hair for the Beautiful Lengths program. The Vampire is an inch or two from his goal length - he wants to still have some length to his hair after it is cut. This is a wonderful way to do something good for others, and it costs nothing.

I'm very proud of my kid. Wish him luck, please... it's not easy to risk rejection, and certainly not easy to risk being exposed to the sort of ridicule to which some of the Idol contestants are subjected. Even harder to go into the situation knowing that his youth and relative inexperience nearly guarantee early rejection. But as he says, "The only thing that's absolutely sure is that if you don't try, the chances are 100% that you're going to fail to reach your goal."

Really, don't you wish you were related to him?