Kibbles and Bits

Praise be! Summer is finally here! I was beginning to think it might never happen. We've had the most miserable, relentless winter in recent memory, followed by the wettest, coldest, most tortured spring on record. It never. stopped raining.
When they were predicting the end of the world a few weeks ago, I was beginning to think it wasn't the worst idea I'd ever heard....anything to put us out of our misery.
But on the weekend, it got warm. And yesterday, it got HOT. And today it got torrid.
It was 31°C with a Humidex of 41°C. (Translation: 88°F that feels like 106°F. That's not a typo.) The cat thermometer is registering a record 10 feet of cat. It's a bit of getting used to, this "summer in an instant", but even though I sleep in front of a roaring fan and haven't the energy to boil water, I'm not complaining. It's all I've been wanting for the past 6 months.
Toby is the happiest cat ever.....there's furniture to sleep on! Outside! The people are out; I have company!! There are bushes to hide in to surprise the birds!! (The birds are not so happy.)
Long may it last.

Thing 2 and her school band went on a feild trip to Canada's Wonderland, a big amusement park, north of Toronto, full of roller coasters and hellishly expensive junk food.
I volunteered to go along, mostly because I thought they didn't need me, and also, because if they did, I would get to go on the roller coasters.
I absolutely LOVE roller coasters. I would go on just about any roller coaster, ever, except, maybe one that actually might kill me.
(There is one at Canada's Wonderland called the Behemoth that seriously nearly made me cry. It was awesome.)
I've been on school trips before, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that in comparison to the bus trip there and back, the amusement park is an oasis of calm and serenity. Seriously, those kids get on a bus and they lose their shit entirely. For hours and hours on end; they scream and shout and carry on at the top of their lungs, and love every minute of it.
I've come to realize that for the kids, the bus ride is every bit as exciting as the actual destination. In fact, they would be just as happy to drive around on the bus for an entire day as actually go anywhere. I see the bus ride as a means to an ends; for the 14 year olds, the transportation is part of the ends.
I brought ear plugs, the same ones I use to go to sleep, and I was a much, MUCH happier Mrs. Loudshoes at the end of it all.

Thing 2 is an appalling speller; truly, she cannot write a complete sentance without misspelling something. She comes by it honestly, my mother and myself cannot spell to save our lives. My mother writes letters with a dictionary beside her, and I stumble over the words "licence" and "probably" almost every time I have to write them. Thank God for spell-check.
I don't know how her terrible spelling, (which is usually hilarious) came up, but she declared, somewhat indignantly, that there are "LOTS of words that arent' spelled anything like how they sound".
"Give me and example", I said, and she promptly replied "psychology". (She came up with it pretty fast, like she'd been just waiting to complain about it.) "And 'colonel', and 'rhythm'....a whole BUNCH of animals....like 'penguin'! And 'giraffe'!"
Clearly, I had hit a nerve.
"So, what words ARE spelled like they sound?" I asked.
" 'Zoom', 'melt' and 'tomato' ", she said. "And 'ketchup'. 'Ketchup' is spelled exactly what it sounds like. You can count on 'ketchup'." she said, firmly.
Apparently, this was something she had been thinking about for a long time.

Teenagers and cats....who knows what goes on in their heads?