Crap, that reminds me that I forgot to take my Claratin this morning. This does not bode well.

But both she and his previous teacher are, I think, a bit frustrated, as their main emphasis is supposed to be on the weaker kids, with the stronger ones expected to take care of themselves.

Well, this is how the system is designed. I am not a good teacher for some classrooms, because I can rock pushing my smarty pants kids and dragging the dunderheads along with them. But if I have a class of just dunder, I'm screwed.

One thing that a friend did is she viewed school as the break from home schooling and she homeschooled instead, all around the school day. But she also sent her kid to a hippie dippie alternative school.

Eek! The house next door -- the one that there's ten feet of alley separating us -- is having its roof redone today. So there's guys yelling and banging right outside my windows.

The cats are correspondingly freaked (Chumley) and blase (Muppet).

Steam. Punk. Cork. Screw.

OMGWAAAAAAAAAAAAAANT.

Oh, that is so wonderful! Terribly terribly impractical, but a thing of beauty nonetheless.

In the future when I am a bazillionaire, I will have a special room just for drinking wine and in that room there will be that corkscrew.

I wonder if you could train chimps to operate that machine while wearing tuxedos. Sure, that machine would be fun to operate yourself, but after the 100th or 1000th time, you might get bored....

Sara, even though it sounds like it may be too late for this advice, you don't want to be emotionally invested in the house and you have to be prepared for the possibility of walking away from it if it's not a good deal. Honestly, it won't take a year to find another one, you've only been looking for a couple weeks, right?

Things can get tough if you are emotionally attached if the inspector report comes back with some nasty surprises, or if the owner tries to to play hardball in negotiating the final selling price.

I know we felt angry and burned after all was said and done in our negotiation, because I wouldn't walk away. And I think it led to a LOT of extreme anxiety experienced by Tom especially for at least the first year or so we lived there.

My buyer-broker was worth every penny of her sliding-scale fee and then some, because I got great advice and hand-holding as needed, plus reality checks about getting too attached and all that.

Okay, now I want to buy the 1-br apartment that's for sale in my building and open a wine bar with that corkscrew and a staff of trained monkeys. I WILL MAKE MEEEEELIONS!