2007 October - the (mis)adventures of jenna

So I’m still grounded from The Kid, but I must congratulate myself in that I’ve done very good job abiding to all the parameters of my grounding . I haven’t called him, emailed him, sent him any IMs, and I’ve pretty much quit walking around the house muttering “The Kid” and crying.

THE KID, however, is not quite so amazing.

On Sunday night we were mostly asleep when that Kid called Joey’s cell phone. (On The Kid’s behalf, it was only 9:30. But we did have to get up disturbingly early so we could both be in our respective offices by 7:00 the next morning.)

I heard muffled sounds coming from Joey’s phone. Then,

“What? You need her to proofread an outline for you? And it’s due Tuesday? What did you do, wait until the last minute?”

A pause.

“Oh, youth in Asia? They have a pretty severe plight; that’s pretty depressing, I’d put it off too.”

Another pause.

“The Kid, I know you said ‘euthanasia’ and not ‘youth in Asia’. Duh. But the problem your sister is STILL grounded from you. I’m not sure she’s allowed to proofread your outlines, even if they are due on Tuesday.”

I perked up. Maybe….

“OK, fine. I’ll make an exception. You can send her the outline and she can proof it for you. You can even have two chat sessions to discuss the outline. But she’s still grounded until Friday night.”

I smiled. However, I was determined to see this grounding through…there would be no chatting coming from me.

Joey handed the phone to me to say something to The Kid about something I’d mailed him, but I yelled, ‘No, no, I’m grounded I can’t talk to him!” and buried my head in my pillow.

See how well-behaved I am? I’m even better at being grounded now than I was when I was in high school.

And when The Kid sent me his paper about euthanasia (which was depressing, he was right), I edited it and sent it back to him with the words, “I’m grounded, man.” And, thus, I have 4 days down and 3 more days of grounding to go.

I hope that Kid is enjoying his birthday present. GOSH.

First of all, it’s pretty much mom’s fault that I don’t like games that involve balls. Of any sort. Large, small, flying, rolling…I don’t know how to handle them and they generally scare me. (Especially when they’re flying through the air at my head.) Mom’s the same way only way, way worse; I figure I inherited from her.

Our SF group challenged another SF group to a game of kickball this last Sunday. Unfortunately, 4 of our key people weren’t able to make it. That meant there were 6 of us against the formidable 10 from the other SF group. (And I don’t really count, so it was really more like 5 on 10.)

Our odds were not good.

I managed to avoid kicking the ball entirely the first time we were up. This was done rather easily because I had made the mistake of bringing Henry to the park. I couldn’t very well just leave him while I kicked the ball, because odds were good that he’d jump in my way, make me trip, and then I’d fall and be out.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to leave Henry with the other team when we were in the outfield because we were barely up to kick for 5 minutes together. (We kept getting out.)

So I took him with me.

He sat there and cried as he watched everyone have fun but him. I stood there in the vicinity of 2nd base (but really not on 2nd base because who can hang on to a dog and watch a base at the same time?!) and watched Laura and Luke catch/chase all the balls that came my direction.

Danny kept yelling strange phrases that I didn’t understand like “Any face, any base!” and “2 down!”

I’d stand there and try to figure out what in the world he was talking about. Two down? Does that mean there are two outs, or does it mean that there are two runners on base? (Both were true.)

And about that time a ball would go flying past. A ball that, had I been paying attention, I’d have caught. Well, OK, that’s maybe a little bit of an exaggeration. I’d have tried to catch it.

I’m still not sure what “any face, any base” means. I’m open to suggestions.

I probably should mention, in all fairness and in a spirit of positiveness (is that a word?) that I did get to 2nd base, even though I couldn’t find it. (We didn’t have any bases which meant we were all running around like drunks trying to find the little dusty circles on the ground where the bases should have been, had we gotten the bases.) I think 2nd base is further than I’ve made it in a long time. Stop laughing.

Becca was a complete trooper at 1st base, about a million foul balls got kicked her way and she had to chase them down. I was kind of glad I wasn’t at 1st base. (It probably helps that she’s a 1st grade teacher and her students probably always kick foul balls.) She gets the Good Sport award.

Laura caught way more than her fair share of balls in the outfield. She was standing in my vicinity and I didn’t catch any. So she definitely gets the Good Game award for picking up my slack and being awesome.

Luke and Becca get the award for Good Newlyweds. Between Joey and I, we took 6 pictures of the two of them posing all cute and newlywed-like. Nice job, guys. Additionally, Luke gets an award for having to be in the outfield and look directly in the sun. He gets the Good Eyesight award.

Danny gets the Good Organization award for organizing the entire thing. I was trying to think of some award I could give him that had something to do with using phrases I didn’t understand, but I gave up on that.

Joey pitched for us every inning and I was quite impressed that not only could he make the ball get all the way up to the plate, he pitched it straight! (Two things I can’t do. I’ve tried, but really not very hard.) He gets the award for Good Pitching.

And these are some pictures from the event that we took with our new camera! We had lots of fun…even though we lost. Really, really badly.

Like, as in we never even scored badly.

Danny cheering Laura on