A call from the principal's office is never a good thing. This afternoon, the assistant principal at my son's elementary school called to say that my son and several other boys were sitting in his office, having been caught during recess throwing rocks at cars in the parking lot. These are not disgruntled teenagers. These boys are first-graders, all of seven years old.

A car belonging to a fifth-grade teacher was damaged. She's going to get some estimates for repairing the damage, and each boy's family will have to pay an equal share of it. Unfortunately, the car was a BMW, so I imagine it will not be cheap.

I'm mystified. Why do boys do lamebrained things like this? What were they thinking? My son is not home from school yet, but when he arrives, we will have a talk, and probably not a pleasant one.

If anyone out there has been a seven-year-old boy and understands the motivation behind such an act, I would really like to be enlightened.

Brag time. Tonight my son's elementary school hosted a chess tournament for students from three schools. The kids were divided into two divisions, one for kindergarten through second grade and one for third through fifth grade. My little boy was awesome. He was undefeated in every round, culminating in his triumph in the championship game for the younger division. He came home with the first-place trophy and a huge smile on his face.

I haven't played chess since I was a kid, and I don't remember the details of the game well enough to have realized just how good he is at it! I mean, I thought he pretty good for a first-grader. But apparently he's more than pretty good. The tournament organizer was wondering if he should have been put in the division with the kids in grades 3-5.

So technically it's Friday, not Thursday. But I started working on this last night. Really.

School starts on Monday, and as much as I love my little guy, I'm looking forward to having several hours a day to accomplish things without a six-year-old attached to my side. For today's Thursday Thirteen, I'm listing 13 things I want to spend more time on after my son goes back to school next week. These are in no particular order.

1) Work on the halfway completed time-travel novel I've had on the back burner for six years.
2) Complete the halfway finished short story I'm writing that's set on a glacier in Alaska.
3) Start on the Star Trek novel that klingonguy and I have talked about writing together.
4) Finalize plans for my home remodeling.
5) Go to the gym at least four times a week.
6) Finish organizing printed photos into albums.
7) Finish organizing and archiving electronic photo files.
8) File my 2007 income taxes.
9) Set up my basket system for organizing paperwork.
10) Visit local museums.
11) Upgrade my computer.
12) Volunteer at school.
13) Edit NobleFusion writing.


 

We came up with some fun and at least kinda educational day trips to take this week, the last week of my son's summer vacation.

On Monday we drove to York, Pennsylvania ("Factory Tour Capital of the World") for a tour of a candy factory. Wolfgang Chocolates is a small, family-owned business that makes various kinds of chocolates, including some of the ones that schoolchildren sell for fundraisers. My little boy was thrilled with the free chocolates he received for taking the tour, and he especially liked the machine that coated pretzels with different kinds of chocolate.

Today we headed west to the Shenandoah Valley. Our destination was the town of New Market, home of Endless Caverns, one of the few remaining tour caves in Virginia that we hadn't yet visited. Justin, our tour guide, was one of the best I've heard in a local cave; he seemed to have actually learned something about the geology, instead of just reciting a memorized script. We had a small tour group - only seven of us - which always makes for a better experience. And the cave was an interesting one, with more exposed limestone and less calcite than others I've toured in the region, but with some really interesting formations, including some magnificent rimstone and several large shields. It wasn't too commercialized, and some of the formations were still active, too. Sorry, I'm sounding like a geology nerd. My inner geosciences editor is struggling to reassert herself. (I was once an editor for Geotimes and Earth Science magazines.)

On the way out and back, my little music lover first requested his favorite Beatles CD. Unlike most six-year-olds, he's a major Beatles fan. He also wanted to hear (repeatedly) Lou Monte's classic song, "Pepino the Italian Mouse" and its little-known sequel, "Pepino's Friend Pasquale the Italian Pussy-Cat." This evening I even managed to find a translation for the Italian lyrics in "Pepino." I always wondered what they were singing in the lines of Calabrese.

Those are our last weekday trips for a while. My son's elementary school follows a "year-round" calendar, with an abbreviated summer break supplemented by extra breaks of a week or two spaced throughout the school year. So this week ends our summer vacation. First grade starts on Monday!