The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Kimberly:

Xopher: Sorry. Big virtual hug.

WOW.

Okay, my review is here!

Thanks again, Patrick!

I got it! Copy found.

I stayed up too late and got about half-way through.

It's excellent. I'm very impressed with the voice.

I'll probably finish it tonight. Review posted by Friday.

Bob Rossney at #25:

Your story sounds like it could happen at my house. I'm 37, and still game monthly with my friends. My son games too.

One day he had friends over for band practice (a gamer with a rock band! I'm soooo proud), and my Puppy was generally showing off, mouthing off, disobeying, and acting like the 13 year old he is.

Until his friend (a non-gamer) picked up my leopard-print dice bag in one hand and my block of six-sided dice in the other and started fooling around with them. I didn't see this happening; I was in the other room.

I heard it, though: My son, his voice low and careful, as if he were talking to someone holding a bomb, said, "Dude. Put my Mom's. Dice. Down. Don't ever touch my Mom's dice."

The other day after I saw this thread, I went out to the living room and said, "Hey Puppy, did you hear that one of the creators of D&D died?" And he said, "Gary Gygax? Really. Oh My God. What happened to him, can you find out?"

D&D has affected generations of my family and my friends' families, all for the better.

Peace to Gary, along with many, many thanks for the countless hours of super-fun, elf-on-orc, stabbity-stabbity, quality mother-son bonding and evisceration time his work influenced and encouraged.

Oh! And I remember Mt. St. Helens exploding. It really, really freaked me out.

Puppy (nickname of my now 13 year old son) remembers 9/11 very clearly. He also remembers the lead-up to the 2000 election, because he got in a very big fight with his best friend Ethan, who told him that "Al Gore is a liar and did not invent the web." My son's precocious response: "Well, George Bush is stupid and probably can't get on the web. I'd rather be a liar than stupid."

Then he ran home crying and said, "Is Al Gore a liar?"

He claims to remember all the hubbub over Y2K.

He ALSO claims to remember when the Detroit Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in 1997 and 1998 (very, very newsworthy in Detroit). I remember watching a game in the Colorado series in 1997 with him, that Colorado won like 6-0 or somesuch, and every time the red light went on, Puppy flung his arms over his head and yelled "He shoots, he SCOOORES!!!!"

I was born in 1970.

I have very clear memories related to the Bicentenniel celebrations and the 1976 presidential election, which I watched on television with my grandmother in the basement. She babysat while my parents went to vote. I also remember the Iran hostage crisis, the skipped Olympics (that's precisely how I remember them, as "skipped"), and the 1980 election (we had a mock election at school, and I carried a sign that said "Reagan will BLOW US UP!!").

I remember, also, more or less clearly but without a ton of context: seeing Star Wars at the drive-in on a double bill with Orca. Seeing Jaws at the mall movie theater. Charles and Diana. Challenger. Chernobyl. Luke and Laura. Reagan and the Pope being shot (I went to Catholic elementary school). John Lennon and Elvis Presley dying (my mom was so upset!). The first Battlestar Gallactica was my favorite television show the entire time it aired. The last episode of M.A.S.H. The first video on MTV. The cyanide in the Tylenol.

And if that all seems very jumbled together and in no particular order, that's because that's how I remember them. Pictures in my head that I can call up, but I'd have to spend more time than I have to order them precisely.

Xopher, I absolutely believed as an elementary school student in the 1980s that I would die as a result of nuclear war.

I'll put the things Puppy remembers in a separate comment, because this got all longish...

Checking in...

We left a day early. We worked all day, every day, well into the night, except when we had some fairly exquisite food and drink. And then some more drink.

I started feeling a bit, well, gunky after the first 15 hours. Still gunky now, but with lots of hydration it's clearing out. It was definitely not too bad, though--just a slow creep of a lung build-up,. The worst of it is my skin; it's still feeling very, very icky, even after a ton of TLC. Smoke ick. Greasy.

Serge at 171: Thanks!!!

Terry at 173: I wish I'd had time! If we would have been able to stay the extra day despite not needing to, I definitely would have. Couldn't put another night on the client, though. But I did get to see Puppy's hockey game today instead, which was also fabulous!

fidelio @ 124, PJ @ 128 & 145, Terry @ 141 & Kathy at 143: THANKS. ML commenters ALWAYS come through.

Looks like I'm going. I'm going, however, with a back-up presenter and my boss's awareness that we might have to hole me up in the hotel and/or put me on the next plane back. We called the hotel and they said it's not too bad. The focus group folks said it's like a "bad smog day."

We pretty much have NO IDEA how I'll be. There's a long range of conditions for me between "fabulous" on one end and "dead" on the other. But just inside the fabulous marker is the "unable to do oral presentation" marker. Turns out you need pretty much normal oxygen and respiratory effort to control pitch and rhythm in speech. We can't test the themes of the case if I'm not eloquent. But I want to give it a shot since they've decided to let me present our client's case to the mock jury. Pretty exciting stuff.

Terry, I'm in town from tomorrow afternoon until Sunday morning. We are staying at the Hilton by LAX. I'll have access to email and such.

Car tomorrow at 7:15, though, so it is now time for me to get with the sleeping. I'm not QUITE packed yet.

Thank you!!!

Hey everyone,

WAY off topic interruption looking for intelligence on the ground in SoCal. I'm supposed to travel to LA tomorrow morning to focus group a case. I believe we are staying at the airport, and the conference center we're using for the focus group is at the airport too.

My question is about air quality. I'm a severe asthmatic, well controlled with medication, but very sensitive to pollutants with particulate matter, like, for example, smoke. I'm trying to find out how bad the air is right now in LA near LAX.

I really just need to decide if I think it's safe for me to be there, because if I'm likely to end up in the ER I should probably duck out of this trip.

Thanks to anyone who knows.

Teresa at #131:

Teresa, my dear, you are made of win.

Here I am, casually (and, maybe, causally) refreshing the thread while working on the deck (first really, really nice, not-too-hot day in a bit), and now my neighbors must all think I'm nuts for all of the laughing out loud. That's my favorite joke of the day.

And, since I'm currently reviewing expert depositions in an antitrust case where the experts all purport to be economists, "favorite joke" is saying a LOT. And some of the deponents are having a hard time distinguishing btn causation and correlation, so the joke has resonance in real time. How's that for timely?

Melody at #16:

My heart goes out and my prayers are with you and your loved ones. I'm glad you're safe. I hope everyone else is.

Heavier than usual traffic?

Teresa at #2: I agree with you about magnitude. Maybe I just don't understand anything about what makes a bridge collapse, but I'm looking at the pictures of the bridge on CNN, and if "heavier than usual traffic" does THAT, I'm not driving anywhere, any more, EVER, until someone tells me all about the unique structural defects of that bridge. Because, um, oh. my. God.

In the view CNN keeps showing, there's a lonely white car that looks like it was one moment from plunging in over the edge of the collapse. How on earth did that driver keep the car from going over? There's an Explorer a bit further back that seems to have had the right idea and turned the car sideways to keep from sliding in. And it's all godawful. But that white car...we keep coming back to it. If I'm the white car owner, and I'm okay, well then I just got religion, writ large.

Yes, the "keep your children under lock and key at all times" attitude is alive and well in my area too. If the kids aren't being watched by the parents when they're outside, they are being enrolled in nonstop camps and classes so they have no free time at all.

This drives me crazy. Puppy (who is now almost 13!) goes to hockey for a few hours in the morning 3 days a week. We deliberately did NOT schedule him for anything else, so he could run around the neighborhood and be a hooligan. Nearly all of his "park posse," though, are scheduled to the max with one thing or another...and the expressions on the parents' faces when I said I wasn't getting a nanny for after school or summer (this is my first summer of single working mom), well, it's clear they are just this side of calling child control on me. :)

Puppy, of course, is perfectly safe, has a good head on his shoulders chock full of too smart for his own good and common sense. I expect he is capable of getting himself out of whatever trouble his not-as-nefarious-as-he-thinks schemes get him into. I'm not worried about abduction and such. I worry more about him thinking up some fabulous way to blow up the garage...

At one point in my life, about twelve years ago, my strategy of constant questioning, nagging, ranting and raving paid off a little bit with my parents. They started, bit by bit over the next six years or so, to open their minds.

Right about the time they moved to South Carolina, though, they started watching FOX News. We were visiting during the elections and had to debate for hours, and dig up evidence on the intar-webs (with fer chrissakes dial-up) to demonstrate to my Dad that the swift-boat s**t was just that. I had to have long, long talks with my mother about how countering verifiable fact with outright lies was not "telling both sides of the story." I still don't think I've convinced them. We've lost ground, now.

It is heartbreaking. I keep telling them, "That's me. I'm that raging leftist. It's me. I'm pro-choice. I'm anti-torture. I believe the administration is gutting the Constitution systematically and thoroughly for its own ends."

The constant propaganda is exhausting to keep up with. But it's necessary, and it's necessary to do it outside of our audience of the converted, too. If I just do it on my blog, and everyone there already agrees with me, and then I do it here...well, I guess I'll sign off and go call my mom, now.

Congratulations, Teresa! What a brilliant hiring decision. It sounds fun.

Caroline at #2:

Specifically, I thought pickles with cheese sounded suspicious.

I heartily agree. This sentence, though, is fabulous, if you set aside the thoughts of cheesy pickles. It sounds like a starter for a writing contest. It makes me want to write a murder mystery.

Well, that just sounds wonderful. In fact, it sounds like something my ex and I would like to munch during one of the sustenance breaks in Potterfest '07 on Saturday. And it has the benefit of sounding as if I could actually pull it off!

The boy will likely prefer Totino's pizza rolls.

PNH @ 146: I always read you, always admire you. But sometimes, you make me grin. It's a grin I haven't used a lot this past year, and I always love the way I feel when something inspires it. It's all teeth and crinkled nose. So thanks.

Fade @ 152: I think you're exactly right. At work (I'm a lawyer), I strike almost every "clearly," "obviously," and "simply," that appears in any brief I'm editing. My rule of thumb is that if you have to tell the judge that your proposition is clear, obvious, or simple, you either haven't done your job, and the proposition isn't any such thing, or you're being redundant and taking up space in my page limits...

I would love to go. How totally cool. How nearly local. But my ex is going to London this week for a month-long trip, which means my parents are coming in for a month-long stay (yikes!) and I'm doing the single-mom thing in a starker way than usual. No book-binges for me!

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