7 Quick Takes about Prehistoric Visitors, Unexpectedly Useful Degrees, and What Happens When You Kidnap Stupid People

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week? 

—1—

It's apparently egg-laying season, and the snapping turtles are out wandering around looking for a good spot. Phillip saw one on the road while running, and then we randomly spotted one in our driveway the next afternoon.

The 16-year-old was coming home soon and we didn't want him to accidentally run over it with the car since it was right in his parking spot, so the 13-year-old ran and got a cone to put next to it. But she didn't want to get too close, because snapping turtles look pretty creepy and we'd never seen one this close up before.

They're like a cross between a dinosaur and Jabba the Hut. The way they move their head around looks not quite real. And they have creepy eyelids that slide up over their eyes when they blink.

When we came out to look at her, she went belly-flat to the ground and just looked at us unnervingly for a while. After we went back inside for 5 or 10 minutes, she decided it was safe and high-tailed it to the woods. She was pretty fast, for a turtle.

—2—

For Mother's Day, Phillip and the kids made a fancy dinner of quiche, homemade crescent rolls, and a Waldorf salad. They also got sparkling cider (not even our standard issue New Year's Martinelli's, it was something fancy imported from Spain) and served it in goblets with our good china.

The food was all really good, but probably the highlight for the kids was that the bottles of sparkling cider came with real corks that we opened outside and let go flying into the yard. My mom found one of the corks a few days later while looking around the woods to see if she could find a snapping turtle nest anywhere.

—3—

A friend of ours went to France and brought home some French candies with jokes on the wrappers. Kind of like French Laffy Taffy, I guess.

My oldest two daughters who speak a fair amount of French explained some of the jokes to us, but there were a few that even they weren't sure about, and Google translate wasn't much help, either:

I guess humor often relies on puns that don't make sense in another language, which is why a video I once watched says that a political translator sometimes relies on the line: "The president has just told a very funny joke that is untranslatable. Please laugh now."

—4—

Our teenage son has been struggling with an increasingly growing collection of health issues that have gotten so serious we've had to meet with the school to talk about accommodations for his absences and exhaustion in class. I didn't really want to joke about it on the blog in case it turned out to be leukemia or something, but we know what it is now. And it's really dumb.

After being handed what felt like random guesses over the last 5 months (various doctors have ordered bloodwork and X-rays, referred us to a gastroenterologist and a cardiologist, and told us that he was depressed,) Phillip finally started wondering if it was side effects from a medication our teen has been taking for the last few years. We took him off of it, and he was himself again within the week.

I'm relieved to finally know what's been going on, but mad that the one who figured it out is NOT THAT KIND OF DOCTOR. This isn't the kind of situation that requires a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. 

Now we just need to find a replacement medication for our son that doesn't have all the side effects. I can only assume we'll have to seek someone with a Ph.D. in English literature to help with that, because I only have a bachelor's degree.

—5—

After many faithful years of service, our slingback patio chairs are all broken. We started out with eight, and now there's only one left. So we're in the market for new patio chairs, but I'm having trouble making any decisions.

Someone tell me, what patio furniture is durable but also stylish and comfortable? All the pictures I see online look like you took the world's most luxurious living room and just plonked it outside, which looks pretty but it's terribly impractical. By the end of the summer it would be a soggy, faded mess, unless you want your new full-time job to be ferrying around patio cushions every time you want to sit down.

But everything without cushions either looks uncomfortable or ugly. Sometimes both.

Is there a middle ground, or should we just buy another set of slingback chairs and replace them 10 years from now?

—6—

While my mom is here visiting, she took me and the 18- and 20-year-olds to an escape room. The premise was that you'd been kidnapped, and they brought you into the escape room blindfolded and handcuffed. You had 30 minutes to free yourself, figure out all the puzzles, and escape the room. 

It started out well: I found the keys to the handcuffs right away and relatively quickly got to work setting everyone else in our group free. But then we couldn't figure out what to do afterward and asked for a clue. The person over the loudspeaker hesitated and said "...Are you sure you searched the room thoroughly?"

Turns out there was a full-size briefcase sitting barely concealed underneath a cot, so maybe we weren't off to as good of a start as I thought.

Still, we ended up escaping from the room with 9 minutes to spare, and only asked for two more hints. (Neither of them were facepalms like the first one.)

—7—

It's been almost a month, and all of our Easter decorations are still up. Maybe putting them away will be my weekend project.

In my defense, the boxes where we store the holiday stuff are hard to get to because the storage area is full of stair treads and risers waiting to go on the basement steps. 

So it's not just our holiday decor we can't stay on top of, it's our DIY basement finishing project, too.

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