Hippietown confirmation

If you've been reading this blog for very long, you'll know that we live in a particularly liberal part of a very liberal city. Yesterday we got another reminder of why we love our liberal neighborhood so much. Walking home from the library (and how liberal is THAT!--checking out books that the public bought--for FREE!), Margaret and I saw four boys playing on the corner of our street. They looked like they were all around 8-12 year range and it was obvious that they were playing war. However when we got closer to the action, we overheard one of them say, "I'm an Iraqi and I'm gonna get the Americans off my land." Margaret and I couldn't help but laugh. As we passed them, we heard another say, "Go back to American soil!" Now I won't be surprised when we run into a bunch of kids and one of them says, "Start implementing the Clean Air Act provisions, polluter!"

Speaking of playing in groups, I remember a particularly painful memory of my youth. It wasn't painful at the time; I thought it was the coolest thing. But now, looking back on it, I'm completely mortified and wonder how I ever got married given how much of a complete nerd I was. One year for a scout fundraiser, we had to go into the mountains and find squirrels' caches of green pinecones which we would then sell to a forestry company who would extract the seeds from them. Little thought was given to the poor, starving squirrels, scratching through the deep snow only to find their stash of winter food robbed so our troop could go to the jamboree. Anyway, it was fun work, because it just entailed running around in the forest looking for signs of a cache. Once a cache was found, we'd get our gunny sacks and load up on the stolen food. The green pinecones were really sticky from pine pitch and sharp, so after a bit, someone said he wished he had a dustbuster vacuum to just suck them up so he didn't have to handle them. The dustbuster idea took off--I told you full-on, code red Nerd Alert! Over the next couple of months, our patrol was named the Dustbusters, we even had a patrol flag that was the Peanuts character Pigpen! Fortunately it died out, because it was completely stupid and embarassing to go to campouts and get to the part of the evening when all the patrols would shout out their patrol cry. While EVERY OTHER PATROL had an animal, and the accompanying animal noise, our stupid shout was, "Who ya gonna call? Dustbusters!" (If you hadn't guessed, the movie Ghostbusters had just come out and we were still influenced by its coolness--especially that rascally Slimer!) Anyway, after that shame, we decided to change the name of our patrol to the hyenas so when we had a campout and all the patrols would shout out their animal cry, we could just sit there and laugh at them all--with the same derision that they laughed at us (albeit justifiably!)