Rowing Changes Lives

I had the day off, so of course I got up before sunrise. The Killer is ill with a mysterious virus and she and Nurse YHWH (hey, the kid asks for her) were up off and on all night so they slept in. Thankfully, Genie was available for Panera, so we breakfasted and knitted a couple of hours.

Also spent time with my teen today. She was out of school for April Day - as they now call it - and wanted to go thrift store shopping. I decided to take her to one of the ones that are in a different country and took the long way through Mulligan Flats, pointed out where the hobo camps were along the North Canadian - er - Oklahoma River before the sculls and Chesapeake Boathouse erased all traces of them. By the way, I can't tell you enough how much these recent geographic crimes annoy me - renaming a river something else for five miles (and picking something really mundane at that) and then plopping something called Chesapeake on a river 1500 miles from the bay. And to top it all off, the coach of the junior crew has the first name Tempe - yeah let's throw a desert town in there as well. The tagline for junior crew is 'rowing changes lives'. And from the kids I see depicted there it must be true because I'm sure that a Fortune 500 company would do everything in it's power to grab some of the kids from nearby Walnut Grove or Riverside and do some life changin' and yet the kids look like they arrived by SUV from Edmond - so rowing obviously does change lives. And yes, I know I'm judging a book by a cover and no, I don't know the life history of every kid in the photos. Work with me here. (EDIT - It does say in the Gazette that they have an at-risk program - they need to put that on their website!). Anyway, so I took the Self through Mulligan Flats, the ruins of Community Camp, and then Will Rogers Courts hoping for some kind of impact or reality check or I don't know what. Spur some charity, empathy, something. Can she come intern with you for the summer, Gouldie?

We had fun, though, we hit a couple shops and she found a flashy red number to wear to her first formal dance. I got The Killer some summer duds, though the coup de grace (already picking up that French) was a Green Lantern shirt big enough to be a sleepshirt. We were looking for a non-chain restaurant to dine in and decided on an unnamed gyro hole-in-the-wall in a largely deserted strip center. Though unnamed, it did feature advertising by the ubiquitous Gyro Girl. The new posters feature a Nia Vardalos lookalike, but I'm still partial to the wide-eyed pita-munching poster girl of the 80s. It was actually a disturbing dining experience, though. When we walked in there was a guy gesticulating and talking really loudly in Arabic on a cellphone (it was the bellicosity not the language that was off-putting) and of course, I'm always paralyzed when I go in one of those places because I know how gyro is pronounced 'over there' and I also know how it is pronounced 'over here', but I never know which one I should use because you either sound like a snob or a hick. Thankfully they had a dry erase board that outlined a special of the day so I triumphantly requested, "Two specials, please!" Huh? Pretty smoove, I must say. Well anyway, they had on some Iranian satellite TV thing and it was scary folks. I mean FDR put people in camps for less than what I was seeing on there. They did this one weird thing where they would show their armies marching (like the old Soviet Mayday parades) and then superimpose a scene from some old movie of Immortals marching. I guess what we thought was a vial of enriched uranium somehow was a Lovecraftian potion to reanimate Darius the Great. I'm betting their history books don't cover Marathon, Salamis, or Gaugamela. Anyway this went on for the hour we were there and included nukes and dead babies and all the usual Great Satan stuff and they kept running a number in Dallas across the screen (presumably to donate money). Not very appetizing.

I enjoyed being with my teen, though.