Tuesday Boos and Coos

This is my version of Cheers and Jeers. I don’t have much to say, but there were a few notable things, especially in the Coos category.

Boos

• April 1. Boo. Every year my kids try to pull things on me. They stink at it but I’m still on edge all day. They love April 1. I am not a fan. BOO.
• Stuffing 800 flyers into PTA teacher boxes. I don’t like counting. I especially don’t like dividing 800 into little groups of 22. BOO.
• Spreadsheets. Enough said. BOO.
• Trying to write a blog on a Monday and having nothing to say. If I am bored by it, I stop writing. If I don’t like the paragraph, why would anyone else? I started the year with the goal of writing Monday-Friday, taking the weekends off. That’s a good goal and I like that goal. The problem is, my typical style of post is essay or story-esque. I don’t know that I can keep up a standard pace of 5 of those a week. Well, clearly I can’t, because I haven’t. Little things like 104-page elementary school yearbooks and 5th grade banquets get in the way. So, boo to slacking. But coos to trying.
• Pretending that it’s normal to say boos and coos. Boo to that.

Coos

• Really cool doorways that I stumble upon while biking and then risk arrest or death as I creep close enough to get a decent picture. I suppose if I’d been shot while taking the picture, this might go in the Boo category. But as it stands, it was just a really cool doorway.
• Heres a big one. I’m 48 and just learned to use a bike pump effectively. I’ve never had any luck pumping up bike tires before right now. I even had to purchase a small compressor that I plugged into the cigarette lighter of my car that would pump the tires automatically. I did have to look up a YouTube video to pump the tires of my road bike because it had a Presta valve, which is smaller and trickier. After that, nothing could stop me. I carry the sucker like a 38 magnum now. Is that a real gun?
• Yesterday something amazing happened. More amazing that learning to use a bike pump and actually using it. Yesterday I witnessed harmony at the Temple Terrace roundabout by the country club. I’ve never seen anything like it. Prior to this, all I ever saw was people stopping like a 4-way stop. People hedging. Hesitating. People with a look of abject terror in their eyes. But not yesterday. Yesterday, on TWO DIFFERENT OCCASIONS, I saw people jumping in when they saw an opening, waiting their turn and merging into traffic, and then exiting like an Olympic dismount. It was beautiful. It created this whirly swirl of car colors and body styles, spinning around an island of flowers and grass. It was like people from all nations and cultures were holding hands and singing a remix mashup of Kumbaya and We are the World. It’s possible this was just an April Fool’s joke played by the universe. But it’s also possible people in this community are finally learning the ways of the mysterious, mythical roundabout.

Have a great April 2. Here’s hoping you have excellent experiences on the roundabout of life and that you don’t suffer trauma from anything that occurred on April 1.