oh deer

This weekend James and I had dinner at the Saturn Cafe in Santa Cruz, where the tables are sort of like shadow boxes--they've got all kinds of little scraps of paper and photos and trinkets and other stuff underneath the glass, and the space is ample enough to fit some interesting larger items. We sat at a table that had an old credit card verification machine in it, opened up so that you could see the guts of the printed circuit board assembly. James went into full-on Asperger mode and started naming all the different components complete with their technical designations. Since I personally fall way outside the autism spectrum I can't recall exactly what any of these were, but the (one-way) conversation sounded something like "That's the JFET-623, wow I haven't seen one of those in a long time, and that one is a MOSFET 2279R...interesting...and over there is the blah blah blah letters numbers blah blah blah" and so on. This continued for a couple of minutes and I finally said, "Oh my god, you're an attention whore! You're trying to get on the blog again, aren't you?" And as you can see, he succeeded.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the midwest, a friend of mine spent much of her weekend listening to her 3-year-old daughter's angst-ridden proclamations about deer: she did not like them, they were scary, they jumped through windows, etc. Naturally my friend and her husband tried to console their daughter by telling her that deer were in fact gentle and nice and kept their activities confined to the great outdoors, having no inclination whatsoever toward the comforts of, say, a foyer or sun room. "A deer jumped through the window at my SCHOOL!" the tyke insisted, only to be gently but just as insistently rebuffed with the assertion that surely that was just pretend. And then my friend arrived at the school Monday morning to find:

Dear Parents,

In case you are not aware on Friday afternoon about 4:15 a female deer
decided to jump through a window in room 117 and after a very short
visit turned around and jumped back out through another window in the
same room. The deer never left room 117 and there were no children in
the classroom at the time. I would like to say that we had a plan of
action, but realistically we never thought about writing one for a
deer jumping through the window.

(etc.)

And now my friend feels like the worst mother on the planet. However, another friend wisely pointed out that being the worst mother on the planet would probably involve something like noisily bursting into the child's room in the middle of the night wearing a deer costume.