You Know You're Old When.....(Part 1)

You know you're old when you want to tell off teenagers for making out in public.

I'm officially an old lady. If you thought the tea-drinking lady in her pajamas, cat in lap, listening to jazz music and going to bed by 10:00pm of last winter was old, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Yesterday I went to dollar bowling night with other Ivy and Ashley. Yes, against my better judgment, I went out bowling after 9:00pm on a Monday night with work the next day. Sometimes I like to remind myself that I am young and can do such things. It was kind of nice, too, because even though I didn't get home until after 10:30 (almost 11! Gasp!), I did not pay for it today. I was as chipper as ever, which was good because my students nearly drove me to the brink of insanity and back again.

But I'll get back to the original point.

For some reason, they put us three down at the farthest lane, and even gave us a buffer lane. In the lane closest to us was about 15 teenagers. I'm not sure why there were so many teenagers sharing one lane. Also, they were like 15 years old. How did they get to the bowling alley?

The fact that there were 15 year olds out past 9:30 on a Monday night, and so many of them were sharing one lane is not what bothered me. What bothered me was that they spilled over into our seating area.

Alright, even that would have been tolerable. I do spend the better part of my week in a room with teenagers.

What really bothered me was that they were sitting in our area totally making out and groping. Groping! Like hands where they shouldn't be grabbing, sitting on top of each other with visible tongue action groping! I mean, I was a teenager once, and sure I was kind of frisky with the boyfriend at the time, but I would never, NEVER, have been as handsy in public at that age.*

And then I knew I was old because I wanted to go over and tell those 15 year olds that not only were they too young for such shenanigans, but that no one wanted to see that and cut it out! Making out and groping is not to be done in public!

To top it all off, even when we left at about 10:35, those teenagers were still bowling and groping. Sigh. Golly gee willickers do I feel old.

*Not when people were watching, anyway.

Results of the "Hot Chocolate Topping" Survey

In an interesting twist, this time I let people choose more than one answer. I tried to choose things that I myself enjoy while drinking a mug of hot chocolate, so if you have a favorite that didn't make the poll, let me know.

Mini Marshmallows	(16%)
Regular sized Marshmallows	(16%)
(Real) Whip Cream	(50%)
Reddi Whip	(33%)
Cinnamon	(33%)

I thought it was interesting that real whip cream won overall. And I believe (but you can go back and check and tell me if I am wrong) that this is the first poll where nothing has 0%, so that is exciting. To be honest, I am shocked - SHOCKED - that cinnamon came out ahead of either kind of marshmallows. Who doesn't like marshmallows? Of course, you are reading something written by the person that munches on marshmallows while cooking dinner or boiling water for tea, so perhaps I shouldn't be considered representative of the average population.

In other news, some pretty awesome things happened this evening. While volunteering with my (because they belong to me) old people , I got the quote of the day. We were all doing charades and trying to guess what the leader was doing. Then we played a modified version of "Jive" where one person had to do an action, and all the others had to do it, too. One sister got very confused when another was pretending to milk a cow. She looked at me and in her slow, drawn out voice asked me, "Now what is she doing?"I responded, "She's pretending to milk a cow! Now you pretend to milk the cow!" She looked at the other sister, looked and me and made a big O with her mouth. "OooOOh!" she exclaimed, "That's not how you milk a cow! The cow would be angry!"

Once home after volunteering, I started to go about my decompressing routine (take off my glasses, turn on the computer, pre-heat the oven, etc.). I received a phone call from an unknown number in the area. Usually I only get calls from telemarketers or people I know. And I will tell you I don't know many people around here. "Hello this is Ivy." I answered.* The person promptly hung up.

The phone rang again as I was about to flour the cutting board to roll out the dough. It was one of my students (We'll call him "Oliver")! After a pause from "Hello this is Ivy", I heard in a small voice, "Is this Ivy McDougalhopper?"

"Yes, it is. Who is this?"

"Can Oliver come to the basketball game?"

"Of course. Is this "Devon" (name changed)?"

"No, this is Oliver."

"Didn't your brother tell you you were invited?"

"Yes. But I mean the other Oliver. Can the other Oliver, my friend, come?"

"Yes, of course!"

"Ok. Good. Devon wants to talk to you."

And it only got more interesting from there as Devon proceeded to ask me what I was doing and what kind of food people eat at basketball games and did I know he likes Mountain Dew? I gave my phone number to a couple of families so they could contact me whenever they needed, and some families have it because I call them from my home phone since they won't answer when the caller ID says our school. But I guess I hadn't anticipated it falling into the hands of the students and having them call me on a Tuesday night!


And finally, for the last bit of awesomeness tonight, I made cheesey calzone-esque things for dinner. The one I ate tonight was delicious, and I am already looking forward to lunch tomorrow! YAY!


*Did you see this week's episode of "How I Met Your Mother"? People make fun of me for the way I answer the phone, but Marshall does it, too! Someone must know that we Minnesotans have some sort of polite phone answering patterns.