Y’know, I keep directing people to this little neck of the virtual woods, usually with a note like, “Here’s what’s happening in our life.” But as I look over these entries, I realize I’m missing a lot of fairly major events. So I’ll touch on a couple just so I can justify calling this an account of our lives:

·         Syd’s reading like crazy now. She keeps asking the teacher to send home more and more books and I swear the teacher’s gonna send her home with War and Peace one of these days just to shut her up. I should be proud but I can’t stand it now when I’m reading to her and she keeps interrupting with stuff like, “Where does it say, ‘chocolate’? Why is that spelled with an ‘a’?” and useless crap that breaks the lyrical rhythm I’ve so meticulously built-up. Can’t she just keep quiet long enough to find out what a Zizzer Zazzer Zuzz is?

·         She’s in piano lessons now and, surprisingly, she loves it. I had visions of strapping her down to the stool every day with duct tape to get her to practice but it’s the opposite. I need a &$*%# crowbar to get her away from it. And again, I should be proud but the songs she’s practicing are driving me nuts. She knows only three notes so they’re amazingly repetitive. Plus it’s brought back a whole lot of painful memories. Syd’s asking about drum lessons but I think we’ll stick to instruments less likely to inspire a revolt from the neighbours. And I’ve grown increasingly sensitive to noise in the last five and a half years.

·         Syd and I went to the beach last weekend for the first time in, oh, I dunno, let’s say six months. Wandered down to the one next to the Atlantis resort and the first thing she said was, “Let’s go to the pool at Atlantis”. We did end up at the Atlantis but they allow you in only if you’re a guest (who all have these wristbands which has always struck me as a little Orwellian). Of course, you don’t exactly need Navy SEAL training to get past their crack security team so we managed to make it into the pool. Syd had a blast but I kept glancing over my shoulder expecting the Bracelet Police to come at me wielding little fluorescent strips of plastic. One alert lifeguard did look up from his book long enough to tell us to get a wristband which ended our fun at that pool. Luckily, the resort has three others…

·         Scott and Conchita were out again for a visit with two of their friends, Beth (“The Educator”) and Marty, and it was a good visit as it always is. On the last evening, we went out with our neighbours Andrew and Tara. Andrew invited us to one of his local hangouts assuaging Tara’s concerns with, “This one’s not bad; they should be okay.” Had a great time at Scoe’s Bar which is essentially a big room with alcohol along one wall, mix along another, and about half a dozen guys rotating through a continuous game of dominos. After a few mistrials, Marty and Scott learned the fine art of slapping dominos against the table without scattering the existing ones to the four winds, which is apparently the dominos version of “pissing for distance”. The evening ended with one of the neighbours yelling at us unintelligibly as we returned to our vehicle. This was a bit of a concern for me because although the seven of us technically outnumbered him, I was the only one in any condition to actually feel the effects of any ass-kicking, if you get my meaning. It didn’t help that everyone else was laughing hysterically at everything he said but Scoe, himself, escorted us out with the keen intuition of a bartender who recognizes the danger of losing potential repeat business in a drunken brawl.

I was going to claim that I didn’t touch on these things earlier because they wouldn’t make very entertaining reading but I sure had fun writing about them…