I find it hilarious when thoughtful people respond to hatemail.

Chris is priceless.

“I’ve poisoned your awful child! He’ll be dead soon!” I liked to imagine their fictional reactions: “Oh my God, how can we thank you? Now we can buy things we like!”

Enjoy your weekend.

One thing I’ve hated lately:

Hearing adults use the word “mom” as an insult

One thing I hated and then liked:

The Corrections. I hated it at first because the characters had so much anxiety that I could identify with that just reading about them made my scalp feel too small. But then the characters, instead of just sitting there hating themselves, began to go out in the world, and the world stole their wallets and gave them back their childhood train sets and fed them some eggs and [spoiler deleted] and then they felt better.

Three things I’ve loved lately:

The way the air smells now. The way the angle of the sun is changing. Red leaves, even in this palm tree infested town.

Portrait of a chef as a young felon

Jackson: I can’t wait ’til I’m a big kid so I can cross the street by myself.

Me: What else do big kids do?

Jackson: Play with knives!

Hair History though a work in progress, is up here.

I brought a dozen doughnuts to our job site CPR training. This is a teeny bit like passing around cough syrup at a N.A. meeting. You just don’t offer bags full of colorful, artery-clogging goodness to people trying to learn how to save each other from heart attacks.

The second thing I learned was what to do if someone has a pencil sticking out of their eye.

1. Tear the lip off of a Styrofoam cup until the cup is about an inch tall

2. Punch a hole in the bottom of the cup

3. Position the cup over the person’s eye so the pencil comes through the hole in the bottom of the cup

4. Wrap or tape the cup securely

5. And while you’re at it, wrap or tape the other eye, because the eyes move together, and if you leave one eye unwrapped, every time someone says “Hey! Pokey!” the guy with the pencil in his eye will move his unwrapped eye to look, and you know how your eyes usually move together? The eye with the pencil in it will move, too.

6. *shudder*

7. Cup both your hands over your own (open) eyes and count to ten and listen to how strange your voice sounds

8. Sit there with your hands cupped over your eyes long after the instructor has moved on to another topic, and then remove them abruptly and look around to see if anyone noticed how you were stimming on the ambient noises of your cement-floored office

Also, if you get bit by a snake? Not just a little half-circle vegetarian snake jaw-print on your arm, but actual fang holes? Don’t do that late-night TV western thing where you slice the skin above the wound and suck out the poison. Because then you’ll have snake venom in your mouth. Where it will be absorbed into your system with breathtaking efficiency. And no tourniquets, unless you’re one of those people who looks forward to an amputated limb. If you’re not one of those people, just circle the bite marks and note the time with a ballpoint pen on your skin and call 9*1*1*.

Then save the ballpoint pen in case you need to give someone a tracheotomy.

We were watching Scooby Doo and Jackson asked me who I liked best. “I like Shaggy and Velma best,” I said. “I like Daphne and Fred and Scooby best,” said Jackson, which was great because it showed me he’s beginning to define himself as an individual in our little family herd.

But nothing prepared us for the other night as Jack and Jackson were watching the Yankees game on TV. After Jack and I chanted a rousing chorus of “Let’s! Go! Jorge!” a little voice from under a blanket called out “Let’s go Red Sox!”