Elizabeth's turn

The setting: Elizabeth is reading in the upper bunk. I'm reading to Colleen who is in the lower bunk. Colleen has a whole pile of books she wants me to read. I'm exhausted and decide that one story is all I can do. She's obviously disappointed. I have a great idea and say, "Maybe Elizabeth can read you some of her book."

The comeback from Elizabeth: "MOM! Are you insane?!? This is the Klingon Dictionary!!"

I'm sure it's pretty easy to imagine the pre-teen inflection associated with the italics and CAPS in that quote.

Robert's turn

Robert got all dressed up for Picture Day on Wednesday. With his fresh hair cut, church clothes that Nanny got him for Christmas and a clip-on tie, he was ready for his close-up.

When I picked him up from school he said, "Mom, I think I attracted 10 girls today. I looked really good."

Not expecting such a sentence from my seven year old son, I sputtered, "What?!" He confidently replied, "Girls like when guys dress up. You always say I look cute."

True.

When she sings

We have a daughter who doesn't like to sing for her dad. That dad smiles intensely and gets all warm inside when he hears said daughter sing. Usually that happens when she sings along to songs on the radio or on the CD player in the car. It's all he can do to say nothing and just enjoy the moment.

And that's fine.

But she can definitely sing.

The mysterious missing box

Shortly before leaving Virginia, I put all of the important paperwork for my corporation, the one which runs the D3sports.com network of Web sites, into a cardboard box. It was in the kitchen in the spring as I was working on the taxes, and sat there afterward, as we got packed up and headed out.

Move to Minneapolis. I had kind of thought we had the box among the stuff that we left out of storage and drove out with us. But no dice -- we searched through our unpacked belongings many times, for months, checking and rechecking every cardboard box. It contained the rest of the business checks, paperwork dating back years, receipts, the whole nine yards. I looked through our storage containers as much as I could for this mysterious missing cardboard box without luck.

Buy a house, move to Bloomington, unpack the storage containers and get everything out of mom and dad's house. Still nothing. If we have this box, we officially have no idea where. In the meanwhile, we've closed down and opened a new corporation and checking account, so business can continue.

Well, Neil and Alicia are getting ready to sell their place and are looking or some temporary storage, so they came over to help us organize our garage and set aside some space for them. In the process, a bunch of things came inside. In looking through them in my office this morning, I opened a plastic storage container with a lid that had a bunch of files in it.

Bingo.

A year and a half later, mystery solved. Guess we changed the box it was stored in, throwing off the entire search.