jimsjournal
| A babe magnet -- 03/26/02 |
Sorry I haven't written, but...
I've just been running out of day before I run out of tasks... day after day.
Did you know that this past Friday (March 22nd) was William Shatner's birthday. Happy 71st Birthday, Captain Kirk!
Well, that had been the planned start of an entry for that date... but I just didn't get time to write it. It was a very busy week at work... and busy at home as well... Nancy was sick at the beginning of the week, missed a day of work, and just had enough energy left each night to grade papers and do lesson plans. I was working hard at designing and building new exercises for a course, busy at work and busy reading stuff and planning at home at night as well.
The weekend was packed full as well. I spent a lot of time on income taxes... for Nancy and me, of course, but also for Jennifer and Sean. (I finished the kids' taxes -- and ours would be finished except for a pair of missing 1099div forms, have to be around here somewhere, but so far they have eluded us.) Nancy and I went over to her mother's house for dinner on Saturday (we brought salad and wine), joined by her sister Janet and her family as well as by sister Karen and her daughter. (Sigh... yet another little pre-school aged niece who suddenly turns into a college graduate practically overnight... where do the years go?)
Sean and his friend Sam (who was going to sleep over at our house) had fed themselves and were going to spend the evening watching tv and eating tons of junk snack food with two or three other teens at his friend Kristin's house, just a few blocks away. When I suggested a midnight return Sean had asked to stay out a bit later, but promised to be home before one a.m. Okay, why not, after all, they're going to be right in the same neighborhood... Nancy and I got home from her mom's around nine, perhaps a bit before, relaxed with some tea, talked a bit. We had been doing a little bit of furniture rearranging -- moving a love seat from the living room into my den and moving a recliner from my den into the living room -- and as part of that had to empty bookcases in order to move them around. We did some of that and left the rest for morning... and about ten-thirty went up to bed to read.
Eleven o'clock... Sean comes in... Nancy goes down to greet him... He is inside, his friend Sam and his friend Zack are on the front porch. Why aren't they coming in? Oh, Sean explains, Sam is allergic to dairy products and he just drank three glasses of milk and it upset his stomach. Nancy looked out onto the front porch. Okay, Sean, now let's have the real story. Well, at some point in the party Sam had wandered outside (Sean was playing DJ and another kid told him his friend had just left) and sometime later Sam came back in and Jeremy took one look and realized that he was plastered... totally wiped-out wasted drunk. (As best as we could determine, Sam had gone off with "some URI kids" -- i.e., probably college students -- and that he had probably called them on his cell phone but his memory is apparently a total blank for much of the evening.) Now as I have mentioned here, Sean is a big kid and can easily pass for college age even though he is still a few weeks short of 17. Sam is even bigger, taller than Sean, maybe six three or so and weighs around 250. Sean had given him some water to drink and then got him outside before he threw up... and then attempted to walk him to our house with great difficulty because Sam was totally out of it, Sean had to hold him up to keep him from falling down. Fortunately Zack had come by in his car and drove them the last two blocks.
So... we decided that Sam needed to go home, that he was in very bad shape and needed parental care... Sean wondered if we should take him straight to the emergency room, but we explained that they would require parental approval before treatment. Nancy drove him home, Sean sitting in the backseat with Sam, attempting to keep him awake... They finally found his house, rang the doorbell at 11:30 pm, and explained what had happened... At one point Sam's mother looked at Nancy and said that she looked familiar... (Nancy is Sam's younger brother's math teacher.)
Sam's mother brought him by on Sunday so he could apologize. She had taken him to the ER after Nancy and Sean had left, just to play it safe... nothing other than alcohol was involved, but a major amount of that had been consumed. And when we got together with Kristin's parents we discovered that they had not been home at the time of the incident, that Kristin had permission to have three or four kids over to watch movies, but not the eight or ten that had actually been there... although there had been no drinking in the house and whoever Sam had gone drinking with had not entered the house. Sam's mother and Kristin's parents look on Sean as the hero of the evening because he did not abandon Sam but did his best to take care of him.
Kristin's parents stopped by last night... at one point her mother referred to Sean as "a babe magnet" and I guess Nancy or I must have looked puzzled because she went on to say that that's what her daughter and her friends call him, and they've told her that at school there is always a swarm of girls around him... And Nancy and I realized that although we (as parents) had always thought of him as being a good-looking kid, we had to look at him from a fresh viewpoint and realize that he really is quite handsome and that over the past year or year and a half he has dropped almost fifty pounds and added considerable muscle... My goodness... my son, the babe magnet....
Sunday morning Nancy's mother and two sisters and a niece came over for coffee and bagels after church... I spent the afternoon and evening working on taxes (and related financial chores)... Monday I didn't feel well (actually, I felt dizzy) and came home from work early. Today I stayed home -- partly as a sick day, although I did spend a few hours working -- then went to my periodontist this afternoon for a cleaning and check-up... and ended up being worked on...
I have kept up with reading my regular round of journals and exchanging email but I've just never had the time to write an entry. Other than tiny amounts of early morning local news and a couple of five or ten minute peeks at Are You Being Served (a very old British comedy rerun endlessly on public television) and that two hour documentary about 9.11 that aired on March 11th, I can't even think of any television I might have watched since I came back from since I came back from Philadelphia two and a half weeks ago.
[Note: Sam and Kristin are not their real names.]
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