Nobody Panic... a garlic shrimp story

It's always interesting taking Jeff to dinner at a restaurant. He has food allergies, and this makes ordering a challenge. Typically we find one or two foods that work, and that is what he is allowed to order. He talks to strangers, is really loud, chews with his mouth open, and is generally embarrassing to siblings and the occasional uptight fellow diner. Waitresses typically love him, because he is so chatty and friendly to cute girls. (C'mon, he IS sixteen after all.) So... Saturday.

It was late, we were tired and couldn't face cooking. Chinese buffet is our compromise between fast food and a sit down restaurant. And China Town in Powell has a really really good buffet. Jeff can eat about 4 things there, including the Garlic Shrimp. All the way to Powell (20 minutes) Jeff and Hannah were talking about the shrimp. Does mom need to help you peel the shrimp? Can you peel it yourself? How many can you eat? I love shrimp.

When we got there and started down the line... gasp... only 3 shrimp. "Oh no! There's not enough shrimp! Excuse me, we have a problem here. There's not enough shrimp. Um, hey. There's not enough shrimp!" Two waitresses, the hostess and the cashier were all informed, at full volume, that "we have a problem here".

I tried the "quietly reassuring" tactic. "It's okay. They'll get some more. It'll be fine Jeff. You will get some shrimp." But by this time, Hannah was alarmed. So we were getting it from both sides. "What!? No shrimp?!" Quietly reassuring was not happening. I think Chris and Alex were both measuring escape routes. I was pretty sure they would leave me there in another few seconds. I had to resort to a "not-so-quiet/ Commanding" tactic. "It's okay! Nobody panic! There WILL be more shrimp!Calm down!"

Sheesh. They both had shrimp. A lot of shrimp. All they could eat. It's always interesting taking Jeff to dinner at a restaurant.

Batter Up!

Ok, we lost by 2, but Alex hit a triple tonight. He also had a couple of good plays at 1st base. Gotta love it. Chris caught a couple innings before heading to work, I got sunburned and Hannah watched a movie in the backseat. She wasn't feeling well today. Yeah baseball!

Jeff didn't really want to go. He kept saying, "I guess you'll have to get a babysitter for me. I'm not going to baseball." No problem, he was going with Melissa today from 3:30 to 6:30. Game should have been done about 6:45.

Well, Melissa was planning on taking him to her son's game. Same time, same field. So he compromised... sorta. "Melissa, will you tell my mom I already went to a game, so I don't have to go to 2?"

(you see, Alex and Kyle were playing against each other.... same game, not 2 games.. get it?)

Dormouse rules!

Hannah has been practicing very very hard for her part in "Alice in Wonderland". After try-outs, we asked her what part she wanted. She said she didn't really care, she'd kinda like to be the Mad Hatter. She warned us that not everyone would get a speaking part, and said she would be happy to be a gardener or a tree or a mushroom. Then she casually mentioned that they "made" her try out for the part of the Dormouse. Chris and I looked at each other, trying not to laugh. Talk about typecasting!! She was the Dormouse in the tea party scene with the Mad Hatter. She did a fantastic job! We are very proud of her!!

movies

Chris and I have different taste in movies. It is a rare occasion that we completely agree on a movie. He is all about action/ adventure, with a healthy dose of guns and gore if possible. I prefer to laugh, but do NOT like gross or lewd. Stupid is OK, (Napoleon Dynomite), but not suggestive (4 Christmases). I love a good romance, and that brings us to my recent DVD purchase... Twilight. I bought this movie fully intending to watch it while Chris was working nights some weekend. Mostly I didn't want to hear any criticism about Bella and Edward. If you read the books, you know what I mean. Well... I couldn't wait. I stuck in the disk Friday night, and we watched it. Together. He didn't hate it.

Alex my hero

This kid can do anything. He is going for "knot master" in scouts Wednesday night, keeps up on his homework (straight A's), studies overtime for 100% on his Hunter's Safety quiz and does all the laundry to earn $$ for his trip to Hawaii. He also plays piano, guitar and flute and plays pretty well. His current scout project is helping me rearrange the furniture in the living room for a family project. This is turning into a 3 day project.... because he is a perfectionist, and because I can't make up my mind about where to put stuff. We spend a lot of time "standing back and thinking out loud." He just went to bed and I was thinking about how great this kid is, and the fact that I can't keep up with him. I am so blessed to have such a wonderful helper in him and I don't tell him enough. Here's a pic of him at a winter scout campout that his dad took. He is leading a flag ceremony.

BBC booklist

This one's going around, but I'm a reader, so I jumped on the bandwagon. lol The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

The ones I have read are in ital

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (i own it, does that count?)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare define complete?
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel- on my nightstand now
2 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime-Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Holy Cow! 28... Wonder why Jane Austin is listed seperately, but Shakespeare is lumped together, as are Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings? weird.