The week mostly consisted of attending class with my nephew Franklin, who turned 10 this week. I mostly tried to act as though I wasn't there in his class, just trying to be out of the way. His teacher is a month older than I am, but I wonder if she thought I was a useless person.
One day, one student's English grandmother visited and shared her childhood memories of World War II and the ensuing years. I found it fascinating to hear the British side of things, since I mostly hear the American perspective. She brought WWII British foods of Spam (6/10), digestive biscuits (7/10), and Marmite (2/10), which I was able to sample after all the students. (I was excited to sample digestive biscuits, because I remember an episode of Arthur that referenced them: "I guess it's like Reader's Digest or something." "What a weird flavor.") The grandmother talked about "Mickey Mouse" gas masks, bomb shelters, and rations. Then there was a Q&A session. Some of the questions were very good. Some of them were unimportant or irrelevant: "I'm part Scottish." (Cool story, bro.) "We watched this movie where..." I found myself with the same impatient feeling I get when the various autistic people in my ward go on and on during Sunday School. Franklin is very shy and quiet, so he doesn't speak up a lot in class.
He's a silly kid. One morning on the way to school, he kept saying, "What about the egg house? I don't know!" over and over again. One day during lunch, he drew a unicorn slug, a shooting car (make a wish!), and a rainbow walrus.
One day his parents took him to see a doctor for his headaches, so I was home with Preston (13) and Nathaniel (8). Preston put a picture of a creepy face on their sliding door. (I Googled "creepy face" to try to find the picture. I didn't find it, but I found all sorts of weird things.) Then he said to Nathaniel, "Can you open the blinds? I'm not good at it." So Nathaniel opened the blinds and saw the creepy face grinning at him. He yelled and ran away from it. It was pretty funny, actually, but he took it much too seriously. He began crying and told Preston, "You scared me! You need to lose all your game time." He cried for a long time. It was a great overreaction.
I looked at their grocery store's clearance section, and I have to make an out-of-season pumpkinundation paragraph. These Boulder Canyon Pumpkin Pie Flavored Kettle Cooked Potato Chips (whew!) are sweeter than typical potato chips. Mostly they're just sweet, but when I concentrate, I think, "Whoa, this really does taste like pumpkin pie." 8/10. (I can eat them out of season because they're potato chips, not candy or dessert.)
On Friday, Nathaniel found this rock at school. He said he thought it was granite, but it's too dark for that. I'm 90 percent certain it's a mafic intrusive igneous rock, so it might be gabbro or maybe even peridotite. It looks like it could be mostly pyroxene, but I'm no mineralogist.
Franklin had three friends over for a sleepover on Friday for his birthday celebration. One was from America, one was from Russia, and one was from Korea. The Bay Area is certainly more cosmopolitan than Utah. Franklin's class not only had a lot of non-white kids, but a lot of white kids with foreign names.
Saturday morning, it was time to leave. I hugged my nephews goodbye. Then they started giving me all sorts of stuffed animals ("fluffies"), pillows, blankets, toys, and even garbage to hug. I will miss them, even though all they talk about is video games, Legos, and fluffies.
On the plane ride home, I had what I thought was a waterproof water bottle. (I don't get water from the flight attendants, because it's wasteful to use bottled water and plastic cups.) I have yet to find a bottle that doesn't leak. With this bottle, the water somehow collects in empty spaces in the straw--not in the straw itself, but in the plastic straw structure. Then, somehow, a substantial amount of water leaked on me, and I was soaked. I worried people would think I was incontinent. [EDIT: I looked up "incontinent" when I made this post to make sure I was using it right. Now I keep getting ads for Depends. True story.]
I got home and found my parents mildly annoyed with my cat--my mom because of how needy and kneady he is, my dad because of the clumps of fur he leaves all over the house.
Today at church I mentioned I was searching for a job. A new guy asked me if I was willing to go out of my comfort zone and go door to door.
Big old NOPE. I ain't no bro.
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