Ursprache! I caught the last 10 minutes of the national spelling bee last night. Good golly that is some good drama. Ursprache! Really. So much more engrossing than.. well, pretty much any of the wannabee drama on TV.
Truants Our neighborhood is *lucky* to have a high-school near by. It's great fun. If you are in the hood around 3pm, the streets are suddenly clogged with the teens. No, really. Traffic clogged. They travel en masse. ("en masse" means "whole mess of them") They holler. Yell. Fight. Normal teen stuff which was fun when we were puberty engorged hormone buckets - but now in grownup world, not so much.
The fighting is pretty bad, actually. (If I can bring it down for a second) There have a been a few teen riots complete with knives and mobs of teens literally taking over intersections. The cops, when they show up, sometimes seem surprised that the teens got out of hand. As if it doesn't happen all the time.
In the mornings, as I am smirking my way to the train with my stupid messenger bag ("messenger bag" means "stupid every white guy bag") I have been noticing a greater police presence in the area between the school and the train. If it's after 9am or so, the police are out there giving tickets to the teens. Ticketing! Teens! Truant!
It's kind of funny. Today I saw these six teens walking with a cop ("odd", I thought) and they approached the police van and the one cop says to his pal, "I caught these guys around the corner". The kids seem amused by it all. I wonder what kind of ticket you get?
Wrong Daughter That story about the family and the girl and the car wreck and now it's the wrong girl - that's the water cooler buzz here at Cubicle World today.
Family Cares for Lookalike Girl Believing She's Their Daughter Imagine being told your daughter has been in a terrible accident. You spend five weeks at her bedside, hoping and praying for her full recovery only to discover that your daughter has actually been dead and buried the entire time.
That's what happened to a Caledonia family who kept a bedside vigil next to a young crash victim who looked remarkably like their own daughter. But as 18-year old Whitney Clark began to recover, she made statements that made no sense to the family of 22-year old Laura VanRyn. Clark's family had been told that their daughter was dead and the girls funeral attracted 1,400 people. The family was stunned, but overjoyed to learn that their daughter was still alive.
The family has been keeping a web log. This poor girl - how nutso this must have been. One moment she's riding in a van and then the next moment she wakes up in a hospital surrounded by a loving family (not hers) who is calling her by a different name. How bizarre and tragic.
The weblog is some interesting reading now that we know that the girl wasn't their daughter.
Talking a walk down the hallway they happened to pass one of these doors and when Aryn asked her if she could read what it said, Laura read it perfectly to him. While certain things seem to be coming back to her, she still has times where she'll say things that don't make much sense. I wonder if she ever said, "my name isn't laura"
Yesterday we were looking at some birds and Dad said, "Laura, finish my sentence. The birds beak is.." And Laura said, "pink" which was pretty accurate. And if you ask her to look to her right of left she does that most of the time. As far as recognizing us... we think that sometimes she does, and sometimes she doesn't. Today she was asking for "my Dad" by name and when he went over to her and held her hand, she was satisfied to have him there.
