Wet Hot American Summer

I dropped my daughter off at camp today for “slime week”. It’s a full week of making slime, playing with slime, slip and sliding in slime and probably bathing in slime. As long as she is not sniffing the glue they are making the slime with, I’m totally okay with this. Also, as long as they are not sending any of said slime home with my kid, it’s good. I don’t need a single other thing that can get ground into my couch.

As I was walking out of the building there was a mom with two young boys almost in tears. She had brought her boys to soccer camp the wrong week. They were signed up for next week. She was on the phone with her husband trying to figure out what happened. And if she is anything like me she was trying to make sure the blame fell squarely on the man of the house. I felt for her. Camp is a giant pain in the ass.

Normally I wouldn’t say this. I would say camp is the thing that is saving my sanity after spending every day of the first half of the summer with my daughter who knows how to press every single button I have. But this year, the process of getting my child to camp has been full of complications. It’s my own fault too which makes it even worse. I always send my kid to camp at her school which is totally hassle free. This year my daughter decided that in addition to a few weeks at her school she wants to attend a few weeks of camp at our gym. When I grabbed a registration form from the child care center, the woman behind the desk told me to take the full packet because there were more forms. She wasn’t kidding. There are a dozen forms that need to be filled out, signed in blood, notarized and delivered by a judge.

One of the forms is a health appraisal form which needs a signature from her doctor. This is the form I turn in every year to her school, but I don’t have a copy and it’s summer, so I can’t exactly get a copy from the school. I, of course, called the doctor’s office. I was promptly told by the uninterested receptionist that they would not give me a form because my daughter is overdue for a visit. I informed her that we have an appointment in two weeks but I need this form now. She basically told me that this was not her problem and she didn’t have the time or desire to help me. When I asked to speak with my daughter’s doctor her response was simply “no”. Seriously, I think this woman saw that David Spade receptionist skit one too many times. I left my number for a call back from the pediatrician (which I am still waiting for) and did a Google search for a new doctor, one that could get us in immediately. Unfortunately not a single office can get us in for a month, but I talked to a very nice man at an office a few miles from our house who told me that I can get my daughter the form she needs by going to a local urgent care for a sports physical. He saved me a giant headache so I rewarded (punished) him by setting up a new patient appointment for next month.

I spent four hours on the phone, found a new pediatrician for my child, added three more things to my “to do” list, discovered another annoyance that could send me to anger management, and still not filled out a single form in the dictionary-sized package I need to submit before my daughter can go to camp next week. I have come to the conclusion that it will take me from now until the day she goes to camp to actually complete this paperwork. God help me. Now I understand why parents go on vacation when their kids go to sleep-away camp.

The best part of all of this is after reading through the paperwork I quickly learned that the health appraisal form I was going into apoplexy over is not necessary as long as I certify that it exists. I really should investigate a little more before I get my panties in a bunch about something that may not even be an issue. Oh yeah, and my daughter brought home slime and promptly managed to smear it into the couch.

I wrote this blog while listening to the new Interrupters album!

Hello?

Photo Credit – Nitro Circus

Last week my parents informed me that Erik Estrada – you know, the guy from Chips – was planning to jump a building in Las Vegas on a motorcycle. My first thought was “I wonder if VH1 has some new pseudo-celebrity series that is airing this”. It’s been a little while since some D list celebrity has had a turn in a boxing ring, rehab or semi-scripted vacation that has aired on cable. Danny Bona-douchebag must be making a living at a drive-thru somewhere. My second thought was “I wonder what the insurance coverage is on something like that”. Unfortunately that is just how my brain works. I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that my Mom obtained this information from watching Fox News.

A few days later I learned that the exhibition in Las Vegas was actually Travis Pastrana beating some of Evil Knievel’s records. I, of course, learned this while stalking Carey Hart’s Instagram account. It’s a good thing I have social media to report news of the non-fake variety. And of course that obsession with heavily tattooed smoking hot motocross guys helps.

When I first received the information about Erik Estrada’s big comeback to showbiz I didn’t think much about whether or not it was legit. As with a lot of information I get from my parents, I gave it a 50/50 shot of being accurate. You see, this is not the first time data has been lost in translation. My dad has left many newspaper clippings over the years about bands he thinks I like or concerts I attended that made the news (often by the amount of arrests). I determined the old man just didn’t know me at all when he left an article about Nickelback on the kitchen table. I almost disowned him right then and there. Over the years he has informed me of more dead musicians than I can count, and almost all of the names he gave me are still alive and well.

Receiving information from him is similar to playing a game of telephone with a three year old. Every now and then he throws something really bizarre at me that I know can’t be true. Like that time he told me Sammy Hagar was the new lead singer of Van Halen. Unfortunately this was one of the few he got right. He also told me some reality television star who bankrupted six companies was running for president. I wasn’t buying it. Once again, he was correct.

My mom is not a whole lot better than my dad, but her misinformation is usually about someone we know. She sometimes gets my cousins confused and I think the one who is pregnant is getting divorced and the one who is divorcing got herself knocked up. I end up congratulating the soon to be single and dropping hints about a great workout plan for the prego. At these times I would feel embarrassed if I were capable of feeling that emotion.

So congratulations to Travis Pastrana for crushing it. And congratulations to Erik Estrada for… well I guess for still being a household name. My parents think Ponch is up to some pretty exciting things these days.

Lake Life

The view is worth the work

My parents bought a house on a lake seven years ago. Each year we seem to spend a little more time out there and each year my dad somehow acquires more toys for the water. He started out with a couple of wave runners and started adding rafts he could pull behind the wave runners as my daughter got a little older. Then he finally bought himself a boat. And of course he had to buy a bigger raft to pull behind the boat. My mom acquires her own water toys yearly, mostly of the floating pineapple and alligator variety. It now takes about three hours to get all of the water toys ready for us to use for an hour. My dad actually pulls a cart behind his riding lawnmower stacked 6′ high with every type of flotation device imaginable. But we love it.

My dad and the seven year old are the only ones who drive the boat. My dad is the only one who parks the boat because getting it pulled onto the boat lift can be challenging. Sometimes it takes my dad a few efforts to get there. Because of this he usually loads up the boat with enough people and provisions to stay out on the lake for awhile.

The other day my parents had a party for the Fourth of July. All of my cousins and their kids were there and most of them wanted to go rafting. We jumped in the boat and took a bunch of the littles for a ride around the lake. We went around and around, trading places on the four person bouncing couch until I had a permanent kink in my neck and the youngest was ready to head to shore. When we pulled back in we pulled the boat up onto the lift but didn’t raise it, since we would be heading back out. It had been hard to push the boat off and the front end was far enough out of the water that it wasn’t going anywhere. Or so we thought… 

My dad and husband headed into the house for some food as all of the other adults hung around on the deck and in the yard. The kids all took off to play some lawn games and take a rest from being in the water. Ten minutes later I heard someone yelling “you’re losing your boat! Your boat is floating away!” I looked down to the water to see my dad’s boat bobbing in the water about fifteen feet from the dock. It was in between two docks headed right for a bunch of women and children floating around on their little blow up unicorns and flamingos. Luckily my parents’ neighbor and one of his friends were right there and were quickly pushing my dad’s boat back toward the lift. On a side note – I’m fairly convinced that my parents’ neighbor likes our family so much because we are always ready to turn him into the hero of the day. He is fairly consistently bailing us out of some lake dilemma.

Of course this happened when the two people who would know what to do were nowhere to be found. All of the other guys were not even wearing bathing suits and nobody who was outside could be of much help. So, it was apparently going to be up to me to get the boat back with the help of the neighbors. I ran into the water and started pulling the front of the boat onto the lift as the neighbor pushed from the back. Luckily the boat had just started floating away when they caught it so there wasn’t far to go, but we still had to get it back onto the lift.

Luckily the big guns were there. My family has been calling me “the big guns” for a year. I got the name when three guys were trying to push the boat onto the lift last year with little luck. I walked up and said “get out of the way and let the big guns get it” as they all laughed at me. They shut up a minute later when I successfully pulled the boat onto the lift from the front. Truth be told, my ass did most of the work. I pulled on the front of the boat while sitting down into the water. It just sounds a lot better to be called “big guns” than “big ass”.

On this day, we were pretty much in the same position as the day I got my nickname. And I got myself in the same position as before and pulled as I sat back into the water. My ass once again did the work and my arms got the credit. Sorry ass, that’s the way it goes. I was at the tail end of pulling the boat onto the lift when my dad walked out onto the dock after someone had told him what was going on outside. He got in the boat after we had it in position and raised it out of the water a little bit so it would stay secured.

When the littles came running back to the beach to go for another ride my dad suggested we take the wave runners and pull the smaller rafts. I thought it was a pretty good idea considering my guns were done for the day. The kids like the small rafts even more anyway since they fly all over the place and fall off. I opted not to drive for this round of rafting since I had already run into the neighbors’ dock the day before after not being able to find reverse. I have very much secured my position of brawn and not brains in this operation.

You would think that after seven years of part-time lake living we would all be a little better at it. To date we have almost sunk a boat, almost lost a boat, got a boat stuck on the lift, been unable to get a boat on the lift and I have crashed into two docks and run over my dad with a wave runner. Every time I am at the lake I feel a little bit like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, but somehow that water keeps luring me back.

In honor of my big Irish Catholic family I of course wrote this while listening to Dropkick Murphys

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