Look, you get porridge!

When my alarm went off this morning I pushed Optimistic.'s nose in an attempt to turn it off. He did not seem very pleased.

James Earl Jones is a little girl in my ward

Today in Sunday School, during the prayer when everyone had their eyes closed, a small child was crying. Then there was a loud thud and the crying stopped. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

I would also like to take this opportunity to say that there are some very ugly kids in my ward. One little girl in particular reminded me of somebody I couldn't place until I realized that she looked like a boiled egg, and the only other person I equate with looking that way is Darth Vader with his mask off. Yeah, no amount of elastic bows on her head is gonna cover that up.

Shooting the craps

Optimistic. and I have gone crazy for poker since my birthday, so last week I bought a poker table top thingus and it got here on Friday! It has cup holders, a reversible top for blackjack and, wait for it......CRAPS! Craps is incredibly fun to play, just so you all know -I've never lost so much fake money in all my life!

I also started my new job last month, but I'll write more on that sometime later. For now just know that I'm getting better at my job, which entails making phone calls (I hate talking on the phone) and using a computer 9 hours a day (I hate using computers). Thank goodness for gambling or I'd go crazy living day after day with the endless drudgery of...I mean... I love you Optimistic. and the life we share together! Well, gotta go folks, there's church to be had!

Not the crappy play by Edward Albee, but the real American Dream

My sisters and I were talking the other day about the ice cream man. I said it was one of those things that's supposedly a part of every person's childhood, but that I didn't really think it was. It's just something the kids on T.V. do, which doesn't mean it's an accurate representation of how things really are. I'd never gotten to buy anything from the ice cream man growing up, so there was a good chance a lot of other kids hadn't either. I was never able to buy anything from the ice cream man because it was too expensive, and why buy a popsicle from a strange man in a van when we already have some in the freezer, was the reasoning my mom used. And she's right - it's not practical.

So in my head I entertained the idea that maybe only a small fraction of the population has purchased ice cream from the ice cream man. It's a myth I said- an "all children get their ice cream from the ice cream man" type myth. Except my sisters squelched that right away - they'd gotten something from the ice cream man as children. Apparently my mom gave them money one time when he came around. I have no idea where I was when this happened, but it was rather upsetting to think that they had gotten to get something and I had not.

Anyway, yesterday I went to buy groceries. I returned home, parked, took one loads worth of food inside, plunked it on the kitchen table, and headed back outside to get more, and then I heard it. The ice cream man music. I looked about wildly until I saw the van. He was coming right down my street.I didn't even hesitate - I took my wallet out of my purse and marched purposefully down the street, right toward him. I stayed close to the curb at first, so as to not be directly in the road, because Optimistic. said his dad handles a lot of insurance claims dealing with children who have been run over trying to cross the street to get to the ice cream man. So I waited until he was close, stepped out a little further into the street, and stopped. His eyes got big as he realized that here was someone who wanted to buy from him, and he stepped on the brakes.

To be honest, I was a little unsure of what to do. I told him I was trying to decide what to buy, and then asked him if I was on the right side of the truck to buy my ice cream. He assured me that I was. I didn't want anything too expensive, but at the same time I wanted to make the stop worth his while, so I settled on a $2.00 Jolly Rancher Watermelon sno-cone type treat. I knew as soon as he handed it to me that it wasn't really what I wanted, but I didn't actually care. I had bought something from the ice cream man. I was living the American dream.

I walked back over toward my house, tearing open my treat as I went, and I saw a little girl across the street playing in her yard. Or rather, she had stopped playing and was staring open-mouthed at the ice cream truck. Toy garden spade in hand she turned and ran for her mother, no doubt begging her to let her get a treat. I gloated a little in my head. I had a treat. Granted, I'm a grown up and I had to pay for it myself in order to live out a life long childhood fantasy, but I still had a sno-cone and she didn't - sucker face!

With Bony M's permission, I may tell another ice cream man story another day. It involves deception and enraged Canadians.