Nearly There

I came close to giving up on the hamsters entirely. I'm supposed to be analyzing their cess pool of filth, filtering out the sex talk, and retelling humorous anecdotes about their antics in the Big Brother house. In reality, I filter out the sex talk, sure, but the hot topics of the house are bodily functions and other minutia related to grooming, exercising, eating, sleeping, etc. It's so freaking BORING. How many times can they happily share the news of their bowel movements and think it's funny? An infinite amount, it seems. Cheesy reality show or not, there's some kind of psychological force at work here because it happens every damn year on the feeds. At least there's not a nose picker this year like BB4's Ratbert.

We've been getting into Geocaching as a relaxing family activity...sort of. Wini's five, so she gets a little restless until we reach the point where we actually leave the car. She's learned how to read a compass since we started. Not only that, she can tell what direction she's facing by the placement of the sun in the sky. I never expected her to be interested, but she's quite good at it.

I haven't been on the geocache site enough to figure out if people just lie and don't put it up when they can't find a cache or if everyone in the world is cleverly sniffing out the hidden treasure with perfect efficiency, but we are at about a 60% find rating. We make silly mistakes, like dropping a digit when we scribble down the coordinates or forgetting to put the GPS in the car in the first place. We wandered around downtown Redwood City last Saturday for quite a while before we realized we were missing a digit in the coordinates. On the plus side, we learned that RWC had a slogan contest. The winner? "Redwood City: Climate Best By Government Test". Cool.

Nick's company had a kick-ass company picnic this year at a fabuloso spot: Saratoga Springs. We played in the pool, painted faces, made paper airplanes for a ad hoc contest, ate BBQ, waded in a stream, won a Spongebob Squarepants at carnival games, and watched Wini dance by herself while the rest of the company ate dinner. It turns out you can tent camp there, so maybe we can make a short camping weekend before the cold weather hits.

Saturday, we went to yet another five-year-old's birthday party. I've been to a slew of these now, and I appreciate the ones that are done right - like my friend Sonia's, who hired an entertainer for the kids and treated it like a BBQ for the adults. We had a blast and actually got to socialize for a change. Then there's the one we went to on Saturday. First off, a fairy party at the beach is a bit of a challenge because the beautiful outfits don't mix well with the dirty sand of a beach on the SF bay. But whatever, the kids had fun running around in their fluffy skirts and wings.

But why did the father have to pull out the cake before lunch? They decorated the empty sheet cake with all the girls watching, then took a hundred pictures of their kids posing by the cake while the guests got more and more antsy. During pictures, the birthday girl leaned over and started taking candy flowers off the cake. Other kids reached in but all of us normal parents stopped our kids from touching the cake. The birthday girl's mom thought it was funny, so she just laughed and watched as her daughter pulled off every flower, gave it a big solid lick to make sure it was hers, then threw it in a pile on the table. All the other girls watched in misery as the pile grew bigger and bigger, but her parents never said a word.

Finally, they cut the cake and passed it out to the girls - who had been watching the cake get decorated and mauled for a good 20 minutes by now. They had put tiny plastic butterflies all over the cake, and each girl got a few...until the dad walked around and took them back. Can you believe this bozo? It's not like they're going to use them again next year, is it? These were not special decorations, they were akin to a plastic paperclip. My daughter very politely asked if she could keep one of them, please - the dad snapped, "No. Sorry." and whipped it out of her hand. Jerkface idiot!

Another oddity: not long after we arrived in the park, Nick noticed a small squirrel shivering and covering himself with his tail. He didn't run away when people approached him, and you couldn't help but see he was ill. What with the wild press stories about the bubonic plague hitting California, we decided we should call animal control. Poor little guy.

The truck took its time getting here, of course, and a little while later I spied (to my horror) one of the dads at the party petting the sick animal. I was on the phone but I ran over and told him we'd called animal control as the squirrel was obviously sick. But he just petted the poor terrified thing and said he just needed "a little love and affection." In a while, the squirrel made a break for it, and he ran off to hide in the parking lot, dragging his hind legs. There was something very wrong with him; maybe he'd even been hit by a car, but thanks to that goober he was hiding in the parking lot where he was certain to be hit soon.

I never saw the truck come by, but Nick saw them pull away. He went to catch them but the dad who had been petting the squirrel had seen them first and told them it was a baby who just got confused and went off to his mother. *smacking forehead* So if the plague hits San Mateo county, we know who to blame!