Jack

Breaking bread with the Neanderthals at the Museum of History.
Standing in the bread line at the Roosevelt Memorial.

He's graduating from middle school next week. Mitch took him to DC for a week for a little educational vacation/graduation present/state dept. job interview. The state dept. did not hire Jack when they discovered his sarcastic tongue. We also got him one of those new-fangled gizmos that you can get the internets on and play music. I don't know how they get those tiny cassettes inside there, but he seemed pretty happy. I disguised the gift, however. I cut a hole inside a large copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and put the gizmo inside the hole, so he thought all he would be getting was a crappy book for maintaining perfect grades for the past three years. I know, I'm awesome like that. And it was a good use for that lame-ass book, I might add. And not to badmouth the school or anything (here is where you go, oh, she's about to badmouth the school, isn't she? And you would be right), but maintaining perfect grades while being completely bored and unchallenged is a pretty big feat, if you ask me. We'll see how he does next year in a big high school with actual AP classes (instead of being stuck in high school remedial math because they didn't know what to do with him in middle school math-oops, I did it again...). I'm pretty sure he can do it, because we have a lot of other crappy books around here to hide expensive electronic toys in for incentive. I've got my eye on Nietzsche next.