What I heard: “What am I going to do when I turn into a zombie and Dina isn’t?”

Either is a valid concern, although the second has more far reaching implications.

This is what I wrote.

They published it.

So I guess someone liked it.

Guess which line is Bassie’s favorite. No, really. Guess.

On Board Game Day, Dina threw Rachel under the bus when she quit Monopoly, giving all her properties to Bassie. Rachel’s superior reflexes and spatial skills won the day in Make or Break (small victories), and Dina learned some excellent SET strategies (such as the “Sniff & SET”).

With Lee here, it was Science Day for two days. We made silly putty, cracked geodes, and looked directly into the sun (w/special glasses, silly!)

This week is off to a lazy start w/Pool and Patio Day, but Scavenger Hunt Day is tomorrow, and I’ll have the girls running all over town.

After waking up a bit late and missing the 9 AM “bus” (our couch) we still made it to camp in time for morning calisthenics (Bassie let us know that there are late buses at 9:30 and 10:00. Phew!) Then we filled up our water balloons, got a few old pillowcases and headed out to the park for the games. Here are the results:

1. Sack Race: Dina won the qualifiers due to a glasses mishap on Bassie’s part, but Bassie pulled through with a second to spare for the win in the end:

Everybody loves Camp Klein!

2. I won the Balloon Toss, but somehow that meant free tosses at me in the end, so I also got the most soaked. Dina made some great catches, though. I think I’ve got a couple of second basemen on my hands. And one goalie (Uncle Matt, I know your preparing a curriculum for Bassie for the summer).

3. Rina (the combination of me and Dina) won the three-legged race. Close second was Baschel, followed by Dasya.

4. It was no contest for the egg and marshmallow races, with Basya pulling off easy wins with her steady hand and steely resolve.

5. The long-distance run (if I had to eyeball it I’d say it was 300 meters) was an easy win for me, but I was disqualified for having legs twice the length of the other competitors. In a stunning last minute sacrifice, Basya flung off her flip-flops (yes, we were clearly prepared for a 300 meter run) and ran the last 30 meters bare-footed on the hot pavement, narrowly beating Dina by 4/10 of a second. And the crowd went wild.

In the afternoon it was reading and craft time (my friendship bracelet is going well).

Camp Klein is off for the weekend, but we’ll be back on Monday with Nature Expedition and camp t-shirts.

Stay tuned…

In the afternoon we read Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and wrote reader responses about whether or not we felt bad for Mathilde.

Of course, we took time to watch the end of the USA World Cup game. Go Landon Donovan!

Now we’re making friendship bracelets (hmmm…another theme: necklaces, bracelets).

All in all a great start to camp.

Tomorrow: Classic Movie Day.

Step #2: Pick out a bunch of Japanese erasers for your kids.

Step #3: When he tells you that “more are coming in this week: little samurai figures…in seven different colors,” respond, “Just what my kids need: a little Kurosawa.”

Step #4: Watch his brain explode as he tries to determine how a suburban Boston mother of two caught his slightly obscure reference to Japanese cinema.

Step #5: After he picks up his brain and puts it back into his head, chat with him about how he’s got almost all of Kurosawa’s films from the Criteron Collection and consider whether an in-depth knowledge of his work helps one appreciate Quentin Tarantino more or less.

Step #6: Pay for your erasers and exit the store.

Now, if only I’d somehow been able to sneak in a reference to LARPing…

* Bassie’s begun working on her first television script. It’s for the show Phineas and Ferb (which is quite possibly the only program that keeps me from thinking Disney in not pure evil. Really, it’s pretty awesome!) So far she’s got three lines of dialogue…but they’re a GOOD three lines.

* Dina has started playing a game in the dramatic play corner at school called “calling my ex-husband”. She picks up the phone, says “Fine!” irritably five or six times, and then slams the phone down. Oh, Parent Trap, how you’ve corrupted the youth!

* And the biggest update…Ahem…I’m, uh, well, I’m on Twitter! There, I said it! I know, I know: I fear the impending singularity when the machines start their own social networks and realize that they’re way less lame than humans as much as the next Neo-Luddite, but the future is upon us, people! I mean, Robert Downey Jr. and Mickey Rourke are once again two of our biggest living movie stars! If that’s not evidence of our powerlessness against the march of destiny, no matter how many drugs we do or how much we mess with our pretty faces, I don’t know what is!

Anyway, I figure it’ll actually be a good way for twitter-conscious AFers to find out when there’s a new post (and thus avoid the common problem of you visiting the blog all fired up for cute stories about the girls or a rant about the lack of foam on my recent latte, only to discover that, yet again, I have been remiss in my blogging duties). So, I’m new to this, but I think that if you go to this link and then say you want to “follow” me (creepy wording, I know), then you’ll get my “tweets”, which I will try to make as entertaining and informative as possible, with links to the blog where appropriate.

Happy Friday!

*I will, this time, allow this establishment to go nameless, since I rather liked the lentil soup I had last week and they make a pretty good Sunday morning latte. But I am not happy…

You see, on the way home from work, I thought I would grab lunch at b. good. It’s healthy; it’s fast; it’s… on the way home. So I went there, got a Southwestern Chicken Salad since it contained half the carbs as the chicken burger, and since this week I am pretending that my love of food and my abnormally healthy body image will not cause me to go back to eating whatever the hell I feel like, then thought to myself: “You know what would be good with this salad, self? Yes, a Grande Non-Fat Latte”. Now, I’ve been cutting back on my Starbucks purchases (my small but manageable and mostly symbolic answer to the economic crisis), so I hadn’t had one in about 2 weeks. But there was Starbucks, right next door, and I thought “I will treat myself”. Oh, and it was a treat. After drinking that (free) swill that passes for coffee at school, tasting this had me convinced that I must have ordered ambrosia by accident.

Now, I had brought the salad with me into the Starbucks. You see, at that point I figured, Why go home just to eat this? I have to pick up the kids in an hour, and I have some other errands to do. I’ll just stay out. Now I could eat my salad and drink my coffee in this little oasis of time. All I needed was a fork to carve it out:

Me: (to the barista) Hey, do you have any forks back there?

Barista: They should be at the condiment bar.

Me: There are spoons and knives at the condiment bar (but thank you for not thinking that I, the customer, was right).

Barista: Oh, I think we’re out of forks. I’ll check.

Well, of course, he must have meant there’s none out front; that he would have to go back into the supply room and dig forks out of that gigantic, bulk fork box they keep around so that they will never run out. In a few minutes, the barista reemerges from the back room.

Barista: Nope, sorry.

That’s all you have to say? “Nope, sorry”. Do you think that the fact that you are a cute hipster will absolve you of your guilt? Do you think the fact that you made some pretty damn good foam on my latte will counteract your sin? What happened? Did the influx of holiday customers catch you unawares? Were the forks stolen in a midnight raid by Caribou Coffee? Did you use them to build a model of Barack Obama’s head? Throw me a bone, because I cannot for the life of me figure out a good reason why a chain store like Starbucks would literally run out of forks.

Me: Um…okay.

Oh, if only I had just gotten the burger and fries.