Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Archives for November 2006

If Only I Weren’t So Organized

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I started listening to Christmas music yesterday. We try to listen to religious music on Sundays and what’s more religious than the birth of the Savior? No, I’m not rationalizing, mom. It was a very uplifting Sabbath.

It sort of spilled over to today. The music wants to be played and who am I to stop it?

So, I got to thinking. I generally try to restrain myself from decorating until the day after Thanksgiving. But this year because of family in town, I won’t be able to decorate until a FEW DAYS AFTER Thanksgiving. I know. It’s horrifying, really. So my thought is that I need to decorate before the Thanksgiving festivities begin.

That means I should do it on Friday. But I’ll be so busy getting ready all week. I think I have to do it today so I can relax and clean the house for the holiday (the one with the pilgrims). I promise not to put the wreath on the door, decorate a Christmas tree or light the outside lights until after Thanksgiving…much.

Are we still friends?

The Karate Kid — A Retrospective

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Trapped in a house full of munchkins with a sinus headache and feeling decidedly less than lerious, I am reminded that I have yet to do a movie review of The Karate Kid.

I’m worried that once the night-time cold medication kicks in, I’ll be unable to remember all the details of the film that was such an integral part of my formative years. I must get it all down now. It may be hard to believe, but the following synopsical-review is from memory, with no source material of any kind. I have not seen the movie since I was a junior high student in Southern Alberta. Calgarians like sanding the floor and martial arts.

The film has an amazing cast including Elizabeth Shue and Daniel Laruso, also known as Daniel Son. According to the film, wise old Japanese men think every young boy is their son. It takes place in New Jersey or California. Come to think of it, everyone is blond in the movie and my mom is not blond and she’s from Jersey so either it takes place in California or it was directed by The Beach Boys or my mom is lying about her place of birth.

No, I think Daniel Son grew up in New Jersey and he moved to California with his mom in their station wagon so he could listen to Cruel Cruel Summer (not the Ace of Base version. It hadn’t been invented yet.) on a ghetto-blaster while people played soccer on the beach and ground his face into the sand.

His mom has a bad perm. Good then, bad in retrospect. Their station wagon has wood paneling and needs to be pushed to start. He works as a waiter/butler guy until he gets fired for throwing spaghetti on rich people and he’s skinny but highly attractive to 13-year old girls. These factors combine to make him a total loser and therefore the ideal underdog romantic leading man.

Come to think of it, I’ve always liked em skinny…and I’ve always liked em named Daniel.

So he gets beat up a lot. He walks to school. He gets beat up. He eats lunch. He gets beat up. He wears the coolest Halloween costume in history (a bubble-blowing shower stall) and consequently gets massacred. Everyone at his school goes around at night dressed up like skeletons and they’re all karate black belts at a local dojo where the sensei’s life’s work is to train evil high school skeleton bullies to rule the world.

They do.

Daniel-son gets saved by his apartment janitor. Oh. That also makes him a loser. He lives in an apartment and has come in contact with a janitor. I think you’re still okay if you happen to periodically rub shoulders with a butler but janitors are right out.

Luckily the janitor is a karate master who has been chillin’ in the basement, carving miniature shrubberies, eating flies with chopsticks and waiting for his next pupil to surface. He owns a beautiful home and a fleet of vintage cars but has no one to wax the cars, sand the floor or paint the fence. He sees Daniel as an ideal slave and sufficiently unwilling apprentice. It’s no fun to train a student who comes to you willingly. Half the joy of mentoring someone is humbling them into submission, while mumbling incoherent sound bites of ancient wisdom and watching them do all of your housework.

In some ways, I see The Karate Kid as a flawless parenting guide.

Another truth I found in this movie that’s served me well is that the best person to date is your boyfriend’s arch-nemesis. It ups the drama and you get to scream more. By the time the next movie comes around, you’ll probably be dating HIS nemesis so that he’s free to move to Japan and date Mr. Miyagi’s zucchini-farming relatives.

As he does his sanding, waxing and painting, Daniel-Son becomes a karate master and scores a sweet ride with which to take Elizabeth Shue on a date to a montage of amusement park rides.

My throat hurts.

He ends up facing down his enemies in the ring at some big tournament where the evil dojo master encourages his legion of Aryan-Nationesque foot soldiers to maim Daniel slowly so that he ends up like the black knight from Monte Python by the end, spurting blood and standing on one leg. The baddest high school dojo kid is encouraged to “SWEEP THE LEG” and others heckle to “put him in a body bag.”

Mr. Miyagi performs some black magic in the locker room and Daniel wins the fight, the respect and the girl, who proceeds to run him over with an overpowering hug. The skeletons cry, Mr. Miyagi almost smiles and someone in a suit gives Daniel Son the Stanley Cup.

A few more things I remember are that no one is impressed with Daniel Laruso’s fabulous BMX stylings. I’m not sure why. I think they forgot they were in the 80s. I also think there is something about Mr. Miyagi being a widowered WWII vet and I’m fairly sure someone burns his house to the ground. When this happens, Daniel Son may or may not yell “NOOOOOOOO!” and cry a lot.

It’s a good one. Rent it this weekend. No, I was not paid by The Karate Kid or any of its subsidiaries to write this post.

There is Blue

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I’m not sure quite what to make of it. It’s rained so much for so long that it appears to have done something strange to the sky. It’s all discolored and odd-looking with these large patches of a bluish color. They look quite pretty. I’m just wondering what kind of rain falls from a blue sky. Will the rain be blue? It’s unnerving to just sit and wait like this.

We still have power, though not much of the “will” variety. We ate too much pizza last night and I slept in and missed my date at the gym. I hope she still loves me. We’re waiting for the water to go down so we can see if there are still bridges and roads under it and I suddenly have a craving for a manicure and a trip to the mall. No, it’s not prom. I don’t think. I just want to go because I can’t.

Life in Atlantis

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By now you probably know that much of Washington has been swallowed up in the great waters of the Puget Sound apocalypse.

Our town is effectively cut off from civilization as the rivers in the area have swollen to gigantical proportions. Here are a few photos:

This was taken a couple of months ago. Notice the mint-green buildings in the top left corner accross the river.
flood before

Here’s a broad picture of the flooding today. The mint-green buildings are in the back behind the submerged picnic structures and floating trash cans. You can click to enlarge.
flood_Picture 010

Dan and his mom on a bench by the river:…

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Pop Rocks in My Carpet

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My Weekend in Poetical Free Verse

Pop Rocks.
Pop.
Rocks.
You pop, but you do not rock.
Why are you having a rave
In the corner of my family room
And on the bottoms of my feet?
Nevermore, quoth the Halloween candy nazi, nevermore.

Learning words, Magoo is.
Yesterday “hockey” and his own name.
He pronounces them exactly the same.
Never shall I know
Whether of himself he speaks
Or of the one true sport.

Drip drop.
Rain falls down.
The floods come up.
Please do not float away,
Oh my little house in the woods.

It Smells Like the Moon

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There are days when I feel like I’m raising Bill Nye’s daughter. Laylee is forever experimenting, probing and hypothesizing about the world. She has an uncanny memory and whips out scientific facts at the strangest times.

science

At the playground a few months ago, she pointed to the center post of the see-saw and said, “That’s the fulcrum. You need to have a fulcrum or the see-saw won’t work.”

It turned out that Dan had told her about fulcrums 6 months earlier and she had just stored the knowledge away, waiting to pull it out randomly and force me to download a copy of my Junior High science textbook to my PDA for future reference.

She’s been sniffing around outside at night and has come to the conclusion that the moon smells like smoke from a wood stove. She was shocked the other day when that scent was in the air in the middle of the day. “Why does it smell like the moon in the day time?” When I tried to explain what the smell really was, she promptly shut me down. “No, that smell is the moon.”

The moon may emit a rather strong aroma, but the sun does not smell like much of anything. In Laylee’s scientific universe, the sun’s job is to bring us night. “When the sun goes down, it’s night and when the dark goes down, it’s day.”

Her amazing discoveries teach me every day to put aside my backward notions about the nature of the universe. Since becoming her mother, I have learned that I am not flat, particularly in the abdominal region and that the solar system does not revolve around me. I wonder what other truths I’ll uncover on this amazing journey of motherhood.