Katherine invents a word

"Fantastinating!"

When Becca's Mad

--Bites washclothes
--Bites her toothbrush
--Throws her toothbrush
--Bites the bathroom rug
--Spits on you (and gets even madder when she misses you and hits her leg instead)

Things That Take Longer to Prepare Than To Enjoy

--Rocket launches
--Chocolate mousse
--Snow clothes

Snow

Roofing Company: "Are you happy?"

Several months after State Roofing neglected to increase ventilation during our roof replacement last year, we found a leak in the roof and dampness in our attic. "I wish the foreman had called me," the State Roofing owner muttered, shaking his head as he inspected the damage. "He didn't know how to run the calculations." (Now you tell us? After you sent this foreman out to answer the question of whether we needed more ventilation?) Although they did install the venting and fix the leak, they refused to cover even a portion of the costs we had incurred. I personally spent hours crawling around and inspecting it in during the freezing February days, pulling out wet and moldy insulation.

Fast forward several months, after polite but fruitless meetings to request damages and several exchanges of letters with said owner. Suddenly, a lady in State Roofing's marketing department calls us. "Are you happy with your recent roofing job?" the lady asks. I assure her that we are not happy, that we not received reimbursement, and by the way the company had never replaced a section of broken plywood the owner had promised to have fixed immediately. (In February.) "Oh, really?" she gushes. "Let me give you the number for scheduling that." (Which, already drowning in the futility of the whole enterprise, I didn't do.)

Last week Laramie got another call. This was from a third-party agency, calling on behalf of State Roofing. "Are you happy with your recent roofing job?" Laramie assured them in strong terms that he was not happy, and explained why. "Oh," they said. "Did you try calling their 1-800 number?"

A few days later, State Roofing called to follow up. "Hello," says the marketing lady from the previous phone conversation. "We hear you're not happy with your roofing job." I gave her the summary of our dissatisfaction, and she took notes (though I assured her that the owner knew all about it already). She was astonished to hear that we had plywood that needed to be repaired, and called somebody to schedule the repair. He assured us they would get to it as quickly as they could, early next week. After giving us the same assurances in February.

We can understand the roofing company not wanting to pay us money. We can understand them committing to a minor repair in hopes that it will make us forget our major grievance. What we cannot understand is why they keep calling us to ask if we are happy when nothing has changed?

Maybe they're thinking of switching fields from roofing to psychiatry. They might be more successful!

Triple Feature Lunch

Alex's requested lunch today includes a

• Triple-Feature Sandwich (invented by Katherine): a sandwich with 3 layers of bread
• Triple Feature fruit plate: apples, pears, and oranges
  

Kid code?

Alex writes about something fun in class:

MeAT The HAOeNPrDBOB

NiGforDONUTS

Translation: "Me at the Halloween party bobbing for donuts"

Autumn Colors

Autumn Leaves

The kids' school has a huge oak tree that's losing all its leaves right now, and so every day after school kids go and build piles and play in the leaves. My kids played in those leaves about every day last week (good thing it wasn't raining the whole week). On the day of this picture, they worked on building that huge pile, and I called Mom to pass the time. She offered to come over and take pictures. While she was driving over, some bigger kids came and wanted to jump in the pile. At first I was a little concerned, but we let them, and they were really nice, taking care not to jump on Rebecca and building the pile back up again. It started to rain right as we were finishing with the pictures, so we don't know if we'll be able to play in the leaves again or if they'll be too wet.

On pile building: Katherine has definite ideas how leaves should be collected, and they don't always maximize for efficiency. At one point she was near the perimeter of the leaf spread, picking up leaves and handing them to her siblings to add to the designated pile. The siblings would carry the leaves to place on the pile, one at a time--wading through leaves up to their knees to get there.

AM Radio

We spent much of today listening to WCBS, a New York am radio station that interviewed me about candy experiments. They were supposed to broadcast the interview today, but we never heard it. Instead we heard ads for the play Wicked, info about a New York museum visitor's pass, lots of weather (highs in the forties), traffic updates every ten minutes (the George Washington bridge sounds like trouble), and news about the New York Marathon, whose runners included one of the Chilean miners who'd been running during his underground captivity. Go, runners!

It made me think New York sounds like a nice place to visit, but not to drive.

Telling Time

Rebecca, looking at the microwave clock which said 5:42, announced

"Two forty-five!"

Either she's dyslexic but brilliant, or she's a really good guesser.

Vampire Pumpkin