pollyblog

Sunday, July 1, 2007 – Driving home from the mountains
We dropped Olivia at camp this morning.

We made up her bed, took a couple of photos and said goodbye. Wow, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

But as we were leaving, just a few steps from her cabin – her cabin in the tall, lush rhododendron and shady trees – Jay dons his sunglasses. Call me Sherlock Holmes but I knew something was up. I could hear the counselors now. “Cabin One to base. Cabin One to base. Alert, alert. We’ve got ourselves a crier. Get the tissues ready.”

Zach made it so easy for us so we were caught a tad off guard by the emotions that surfaced when leaving Olivia. Then again, maybe I was ignoring all the signs. Like, when we were playing hangman on the car ride over and her sentence was                I  W I L L  M I S S  Y O U!

Don’t get me wrong. She wasn’t trying to make us feel bad or talk herself out of going. She was just expressing herself, very healthily I might add. She was a trooper, too. She was ready for us to go so she could get on with the business of adjusting and making friends.

The ride home has been a little quiet. “What should we do tonight?” we pondered. “I dunno. What do you want to do for the 4th?” I suppose it’s good practice for when the kids are grown and gone and all we have for regular entertainment is each other. We’ll HAVE to find something else to talk about besides the kids. Now I see why people end up getting so many pets.

I think next year – assuming our kids like this whole camp business and want to attend next year – we should coordinate with our friends. It would be really great to have our friends available to hang out and play with, too, with all the kids gone to camp. I mean, what’s the point of get-togethers with our friends and their kids when we are temporarily child-free.

Jay hasn’t stopped talking about Olivia yet. I might need to set up an appointment for him tomorrow to deal with his separation issues. I think he’s flashing back to when his parents sent him away for 8 weeks each summer. I’ll try to be gentle and empathetic.

  Later that day – still driving home from the mountains

So much for Camp Mansfield in the UK this summer. Now that, as of last count, 3 terrorist attack attempts have taken place, in the name of Allah of course, the UK is at its highest terror alert possible. I’m trying to be tolerant and accepting of this religion but it seems to me there are at least 2 camps – one that doesn’t believe they are to commit suicide and murder of innocent people in the name of Allah and one that does.

Call me dense but I have a really hard time understanding how one can rationalize that it’s the will of their god to, say, drive a vehicle into a marketplace filled with men, women and children and detonate a bomb killing half of them and maiming others. And then the said bomber will be insured a place in heaven for the act. If you can explain it so I can understand, by all means, have at it. Jay says it has something to do with the vestal virgins.

TRIVIA QUIZ: What song mentions the vestal virgins? First one with the correct answer wins.

So, on the lighter side…did you read about the guy in Illinois who was setting off fireworks in his yard and was killed when he picked up an unexploded missile and peered down the tubing to see why it hadn’t gone off yet? You can guess what happened next.

That’s just stupid. Let that be a lesson unto you this 4th of July now, ya hear!