playing with the site

I am SO going to make this site look so much better! That's going to have to wait til Christmas, after I make a LOT of headway into grading papers from tenth and twelfth grade students from Mother of Divine Grace. I really want to play with this, but I really can't let myself, since I'm now a month behind in grading.
The good news is, I did a few things on the to do list I posted previously. The bad news is, I really want to enjoy Christmas, and can't seem to find the time to remember the reason for the season. And the baby is still not sleeping through the night. Not at all...
So, to make myself happy, I'm going to copy and paste something that really made me laugh today from The Common Room. And then I found out my husband hasn't seen it. WHAT??? How did he miss this? "I don't watch Christmas movies, " he says. Bah humbug to that! It is now #1 on our Netflix queue. So ha. By the way, it's so nice to know Brandon is normal. He would totally try this. And we might stop the movie and make our brave attempt to tell him not to. But then again, our metal doesn't freeze here as often as it does in the midwest, where I assume, from my calculations, they live.
Enjoy!

A Christmas Story

Two or three years ago we watched this movie for the first time (I know, we're pop-culturally delayed). Some of y'all will remember this story, but I think it's worth trotting out at least once a
year.When we got to the part where the boy gets his tongue stuck to a frozen flag pole we knew that the First Year Girl would be tempted to lick a metal pole. This wasn't a guess, a suspicion or a concern. It was foreknowledge, though we didn't know just how prescient. We told her not to. We know her so well that we actually stopped the movie to say to her, "We are telling you not to do this. Granny Tea did it when she was little, and it hurt very much. You need to know that if you do this in spite of our warning, it will hurt, you might lose some skin, and we will laugh. There will not be a shred of sympathy, only laughter."I believe it was less than 48 hours later when our youngest two were playing outside in the snow and the FYG came in the house and said to me, "My tongue is bleeding. Only it sounded more like, "by tug ith beedig." She stuck it out, and sure enough, there was just a smidgen of blood where she'd lost a teensy bit of skin. I confess that I didn't feel much like laughing at her just at that moment, in spite of my promise. Well, not too much, anyway. I sternly asked her, "Did you stick your tongue on a piece of frozen metal?"She nodded her head in shamefaced way, and explained, "We were scooping up some snow in a metal pail, and the FYB held it up so I could lick some snow off the side.""And it hurt, didn't it?" I asked. "Just like we told you it would.""Well," she said, "It didn't really hurt that much. I was surprised that my tongue was stuck. But it did not hurt until I yelled and startled the FYB."And why would startling her brother bring so much pain?Because in his surprise he dropped the bucket.... and since it was stuck to her tongue....And, yes, I did laugh.