A Lot Happens In A Month, You Know?

Hi! I'm still employed, which makes me a tad busier than I used to be, so when a friend of mine raved about how her Roomba does all the vacuuming for her, my ears perked up, as it were. I mean, short of a live-in housekeeper, that sounds like the next best thing, right? She sent me her model number, and hey, Rachel has an employee discount at Best Buy...

Have I even told you folks that Rachel (she of the decapitated-stuffed-animal obsession) works at our local Best Buy now? Being a very confident and take-charge sort of person, she does an excellent job there, if I do say so myself. Only, at least once a shift, a customer asks if she is Australian.

No, we don't know why.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Roomba. So I let Larry know that I want a Roomba, thinking he'd be on board with anything that would keep the house cleaner than I've been keeping it the last few months.

Because I have a job now. Have I mentioned that?

"Did you see the link I sent you?" I asked Larry, as we walked to a local pizza place that evening, because I don't cook anymore.

"What? No," he said.

"The Roomba! I sent you a link to one at Best Buy and..."

I saw him starting to shake his head.

"What's wrong with a Roomba?" I asked. "I mean, it's a little expensive, but..."

"It maps the whole house and sends data back to the company, " Larry said, with his technology-is-evil frown on his face.

Sigh. Considering Larry's reaction to his Father's Day gift two years ago, I'm thinking I'm not going to win this one.

************

In other news, I made the kids go with me and Larry on Mother's Day to see The Diary of Anne Frank performed by a local theater group. Because what better way to celebrate your mom than going to see a play where almost everyone ends up murdered by the Nazis?

We Jews know how to enjoy ourselves, is what I'm saying.

Before that, at the beginning of May, Larry and Susie and Brian and I went to Alabama for David's college graduation. That's right - the kid who spent his childhood building rocket ships out of empty oatmeal containers and flying kites he made out of fishing line and plastic grocery sacks is now an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist.

An employed rocket scientist, no less...

We left Rachel at a friend's house, because she couldn't afford to miss that much school, and then she came down with a really bad cold and missed school anyway. So, just for the record, she gets sick for all her brothers' graduations. And we were secretly relieved that this time around, she wasn't breathing her germs all over us in the car for 11 hours.

Stopped at Sonic, because we were in the South and that's how you do

Happily, we managed to stay in hotels the whole trip (no risking a camping fiasco again!) without a repeat of the incident from Theo's graduation in 2013, when Larry and I were woken out of a sound sleep at 2 AM by a knock on our motel door (which opened directly to the parking lot). Larry leapt up with alarm and peered through the peephole, only to see a very confused-looking Brian standing OUTSIDE.

Really, staying at a motel next to a busy highway is not the optimal time to discover that one of your kids walks in his sleep.

So, yeah, no sleepwalking, no kid with croup - it was almost the way a family trip is supposed to be. You know, fun? And not terrifying? I could get used to that.