I believe we once had "the wrong sort of snow" as well

ptolemy, once?? I've heard that several times. I've heard most excuses going for trains.

We were on one delayed train on Monday which was delayed by 'extreme heat conditions'

Depends how you define okay, aac. ;-)

Each child is different. My eldest could always be disciplined by sending him to his room. but the middle one needs a slap to get anywhere. The youngest is a master of passive resistance and we haven't found a suitable punishment for him yet.

I don't know what that child mentioned by Dave R needs to get her to behave properly, but if she doesn't learn to do it very soon, she's in for a really rough ride. She comes from a very disturbed family background, but it's not just that; if you treat her brothers like human beings, on the whole you get a positive response, but no matter what you do with this child she is sly, manipulative and dishonest, and if she doesn't get results that way she becomes aggressive and vindictive.

I've done my level best for her, and frankly I am starting to run out of patience.

Trains not running incase the tracks expand apparently. Joy.

And I've never been to Crete. Love to, but haven't.



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

Not going to dive into the spanking/ no spanking issue, but here are a few of my observations. Like many things in life parenting is d*** hard work. And you can't walk away from or ignore it when ever you want. That's why I have cats :) They like to be independent. Parenting takes consistency, patience, manipulation, love, and follow thru 24/7. Nobody can be that perfect everyday, but it does take a commitment. It's going to mess with your life and some people adjust better than others.

In my store's children dept. we see alot of truely startling things good and bad. The time the child screamed for 15 min because mom wasn't done looking at her books. Children under the age 6 up at 10/11 pm. The parent who dropped off her two young kids and then left the building and went next door. The ones who let their kids chew on the books and then ask us if we have another copy. The woman who changed the diaper on top of a display of books and then told the bookseller where the diaper was.

We also have parents who get it right. The one who told us their child had thrown up and did we have something she could clean it up with. The ones who go home to take a nap when the children start gettting really cranky and tired. That when they behave badly in the store they don't get their book that day. The regulars who knew when the creepy pervert was hanging out. And my personal manipulation favorite:) We had this little girl who didn't want to leave and mom told her that they had to go because we were closing the store for naptime :)

As to the heat topic :) I live in Minnesota, which shares a northern border with Canada, and we don't handle heat well at all. It's know as the the land of 10,000 lakes, which are beautiful, but contribute to enormous humidity. It usually starts warming up the begining of June, gets ugly in July/Aug and starts cooling down again into Sept. I think it's because we don't have any real length of time to adjust that it's so hard.

Railway lateness excuses: Over in Japan they've had at least one incident of 'Centipedes on the line': Apparently a prolonged period of humid heat had allowed a species of large centipedes (growing up to about 6 inches long, if I remember the story correctly) to increase rapidly in numbers, leading to a mass-migration of centipedes that crossed the tracks, and any trains that tried running onwards over their squished bodies suffered a serious loss of traction.
Mind you, when some relatively minor problem on the Japanese railways about a couple of years ago caused a few minutes delay for a train on which their Emperor was travelling the manager who was responsible for that section of the route committed seppuku!

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"God rot Botchkamos Istochnik!"



Post Edited (08-08-03 16:45)

Do they still do that? Pull everything out and all?

I'm fairly certain that that's what the newspaper article said, although of course the journalist involved might have erroneously assumed this to have been the method of suicide used in this case (or might have used the term anyway, inaccurately, because he/she though it appropriate as the incident had taken place in Japan...) although the man concerned had actually killed himself in some other way. It isn't anything like as common as it used to be (the most recent other case that I can remember reading about being an author _ Mishima, wasn't it _ who did so as a protest against [IIRC] some of the post-war changes in Japanese society): That's probably one reason why this particular incident was considered worth reporting.

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"God rot Botchkamos Istochnik!"

Ever thought of posting as 'Simon the Oracle'? We have a 'Susan the Oracle',after all.

I'm thinking about it...

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[i]"God rot Botchkamos Istochnik!"