Weekend Journal

Random, spoon, and Up.

I'm sitting here at the computer with the slight nausea of sleep exhaustion. Jonah had a sleepover party last night. We had eight boys sleeping not sleeping on our living room floor. Every once in a while, Steve and I would yell down the stairs, "knock it off, kids." They would settle down for about five minutes and then the muffled shouts and thumps would start again. I think everyone got three hours of sleep last night.

Jonah had some of his usual friends over, including Bored and Neighborhood Urchins. We had three new additions this time. There was Random. At one point, Random was jumping in place with the sleeping bag over his head shouting non sequiturs, "Fish! Cheese! Pickles!"

There was Nimrod. Nimrod really, really likes the word, nimrod, and he experimented with using that word as a verb, noun and adjective all night.

There was Borderline. Borderline is obsessed with the presidency. He demonstrated his trick of reciting all the presidents in order in less than 15 seconds and launched into a long discussion of Watergate.

Jonah has been hanging out with these boys for years now. They have their inside jokes and rhythms. While each is quirky in his own way, they're all nice boys and I imagine a few of them will be stuck with Jonah for life.

We saw a lot of those kids this weekend. On Friday night, Jonah did a skit in the talent show with Random and Borderline and the Girl Who Hangs Out With Boys. Random was dressed up as a spoon and the others were raisins. Random just chased them around the stage screaming "Spoon! Spoon!" And that was basically it. We pretended that our child was the one who played the violin solo.

We needed an activity this afternoon that required no brain power, so we went to the movies and saw Up. It was fine. I cried in the first ten minutes of the movie. It has a couple of parallels with Monster House, but it was a Pixar movie through and through. The reoccurring theme of family togetherness. The bad guys were an ego-maniac, a developer, and an absentee dad. It wasn't a perfect movie, but there were some very good parts. 

I've been plowing through my academic paper this summer. I suppose it's a "no duh" observation, but I write a lot faster when I'm writing what I want to write and not writing what I think I'm supposed to write. I also write a lot better when I'm not stressed out and writing in odd moments here and there. I'll have a complete draft by the end of the week for Steve. He's always my first quality control inspector.

Twitter. I spent a good chunk of the past few days on Twitter following the Iran thing. I'm continuing to add interesting articles on New Media and Iran to the post below. (Too tired to do the hyperlink thing.)

Off to bed.