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I have obviously been reincarnated as the super domestic, early 20th century housewife.  You never hear about that possibility when you come across reincarnation.  It must be the hidden secret.  I need some help!  My son must be some sort of mitosis king, dividing and growing, redividing and growing all over again at an unprecedented rate.  He’s on a feeding frenzy.  How many meals am I supposed to prepare in one day?

I’ve sought a little help from the Be June Cleaver website.  I don’t have a husband, a pretty dress, or a string of pearls.  But coffee I can do, and a hearty breakfast (WHAT?!  ANOTHER MEAL?!), and if forced, I’ll drag the vacuum around.

I’ll let you know if any of it works.

My son turns the television on, and what should pop up on the screen, but the remake movie of Leave It To Beaver.  Who needs the internet for advice, when they can learn everything they ever needed to know the old-fashioned way, from tv.

I am considering the recommendation to hang feeders all around the house.  It’s one of those suggestions that sounds so promising - a real time saver.

But in the growing boy’s defense, I don’t have to poke pasta down his gaping mouth every time it opens.  Like just now.

“Dad, do we have outlines?”
“Outlines?  What do you mean, outlines?”
“You know - outlines.  Black outlines, like they have on Rugrats or Chalk Zone or The Wild Thornberrys.”
“What do you think we are?  Cartoons?”

Actually, I think he might have been trying to distract me.  For someone who didn’t own many of the properties on the Junior Monopoly board, he sure seemed to be accumulating huge sums of money.

I am a firm believer that when things look their bleakest and all hope seems lost, you will hear the sound of the cavalry off in the distance, rushing to your aid.  Maybe I watched too many old westerns as a kid, where the good guy was always the white guy, where anyone standing in the way better step aside, because truth and justice and all that was right was about to come blairing across the prairie behind the sound of a bugle.

Okay, I agree.  Nothing much has changed.

But I did hear the sound of hope this morning, as Keith (yes, we’re everywhere) of random thinks took the time to answer a distress email I had sent out only yesterday afternoon.  Or maybe he never received my email at all, but simply saw the smoke pouring from my test site, as I struggled to master the art of drop down lists.  Anything is possible.  My son, roaring around the house for two straight days in his underwear, refusing to get dressed, terrorizing and destroying the order of the house, was looking very much like a wild renegade to me.  We were very much under siege.

But whatever the reason, Keith’s email came charging across the hill and into my laptop, led only by the soft, soothing twinkle of the email arriving bells.  No bugle sound at all, just a little ding, ding, ding, DING.  I guess something has changed afterall.

I’ve crammed as much computer knowledge into my head as I can for one night.  I’m reminded of the torturous French class I was coerced into taking one summer, as my deceptively cruel alma mater dangled a degree just beyond my greedy little hands.  It’s only three semesters of French crammed into four-hour classes, five days a week, for six short weeks, they said.  You can do it.  My advisor, bless his now dead heart, only smiled when I told him the plan.  His gray, bushy eyebrows lifted in obvious lack of faith.  The man had no time for foolish students who insisted on walking straight into the mouth of disaster.  He said nothing, but his eyebrows kept on climbing right up his forehead, distancing themselves from me and my impending doom.

The difference between computer code and French is that there is no logical way to attack French.  So I would just fill my head up with as much as I possibly could, then hurry to class and hope that a respectable amount of it would come pouring back out.  I felt like I was literally trying to regurgitate my way into a degree.  I’d stumble out of the room after the four hours, holding my throbbing head, vowing that I when I’d clumsily muttered “répété, s’il vous plaît for the one millionth last time, I would go cold turkey.  No more French.  Abstinence.  Not one more syllable.  I was the original anti-French patriot, and I didn’t even know it.

My vow was easy to keep.  As a matter of fact, I am French-free ever since.  The language poured in so fast, that I’m afraid not a bit of it stuck.  If it did, it’s lost in there, and I’m not about to go looking.

Well, just like my French class, I sucked up everything I could tonight about rearranging blogs, figuring it would come spewing back onto the page with just enough orner et la beauté to earn me a passing grade.  And now that my night is winding to a close, I can see that arranging nearly incomprehensible code is not a whole lot different then learning French.  You breathe it it.  You breathe it out.  And then you push the “Publish” button and hopefully forget everything, because if you fall asleep and start dreaming the stuff, that’s when you start to get a little cranky.

So if anyone would like to put in their two cents worth regarding the design - feel free.  But don’t do it in French.  Just because I wrote a couple of phrases only means that I know my way over to Babblefish.