A hella cool pop in the city...

In California, one of the biggest culture shocks I had to endure did not involve anything involving a landmark or a saying, although those certainly could cause confusion to anybody visiting or a newbie Californian like myself.

I mentioned before that I worked in San Francisco as a video game tester. While I worked there nearly every day and visited San Francisco off and on with my wife when I wasn't working, it wasn't until after I left the state that I found out that people referred to San Francisco as "The City". My wife told me that you couldn't refer to it as "San Fran" or "Frisco" or anything close to it without people glaring at you. It was just "The City". Eddie Izzard, a British comedian known for dressing in drag onstage, taped his "Dressed to Kill" HBO special in San Francisco and noted that it sounded like snakes were in the audience from the people hissing when he didn't refer to San Francisco as "The City".

Looking on this now, it strikes me as odd that San Francisco got this designation. New York City is "The Big Apple", New Orleans is "The Big Easy", Los Angeles is "LA", but I never understood why San Francisco is so special that it out of any city in the country is "The City". It's still strange to me.

California is also the home for the term "Hella". I first heard the term on a South Park episode where Cartman, the fat kid, annoyed everyone in one episode by declaring everything "hella stupid", "hella lame" or "hella crazy". I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a joke on the California use of the term "Hella". If you look it up online, you'll see that "hella" is actually a slang term mainly used in the Northern California area. Some think it's a derived from the term "hell of a" meaning "very" or "a lot".

A lot of culture comes from California. For example, the Valley Girls with their own Valley Speak that once swept the nation. For some reason, Hella just has never caught on with the rest of the country. Not that they don't try.

I had seen the South Park episode years before my move to California. Suddenly, I became surrounded by it. At the video game company, some guys would declare things "hella cool" or "hella crazy". I thought it was rather funny to suddenly hear it all around me. Funnier yet, the kids that weren't allowed to say "Hell" substituted "Heck" at created "Hecka" for "Hella". I almost lost it in a video store when I heard that the first time. I heard a kid declare to his Mom that the movie he wanted to rent looked "hecka cool". I thought it was just that one kid, but I heard it several times after that, usually in a video store, by kids that weren't teenagers yet declaring anything and everything "hecka cool".

One of the hardest words for me to avoid saying lest I be labeled an outsider in California was the word, "Pop."

When I was working at that Pizza Hut for a few short weeks, I'd take people's orders over the phone and I'd ask them near the end, "Do you want any pop to go with that order?"
This was usually followed by a confused sounding, "What?"

I thought that maybe people had a hard time understanding me since I have a habit of mumbling, so I'd repeat with, "Do you want any soft drinks like Coke, Diet Coke, etc."
One night, it became clear to me why people were confused. I asked the "Pop" question during an order and the lady answered with a drink order. She then asked, "Are you from the Midwest?" I answered that I was indeed from the Midwest, Nebraska to be exact. She said, "I'm from Ohio. I figured you were from around there because I haven't heard the word "Pop" used in a while."

It became clearer at the video game company. They would stock free pops into a large cooler for us to drink. People called it "soda".

Now at this point, you're probably wondering what took me so long. I just had never heard people refer to products like Coke as "soda". All my life, it was "Pop" so forgive me if it took me a long time to figure out what term people used for their "sodas". I think it was when I would see guys get up and go, “Dude, do you want a soda?” or “Hey, they just restocked the sodas?” that I put 2 and 2 together to get to the “soda” variable.

Soda was a hard term for me to adopt. It felt weird to call soft drinks “soda” because in my mind, “soda” is the clear, flavorless stuff that you add to hard liquor to dilute it, like with a vodka and soda.

So I would find myself saying to my tester friends, “They just restocked the pop… err… soda cooler!” To which guys would give me a strange look as I had stepped off the train in San Francisco wearing overalls with a banjo on my knee and a piece of straw hanging out of my mouth.

While I did my best to adopt the “soda” slang, I was stymied by my wife at home. She refused to call the soft drinks we used “soda”. We’d be at the store buying our groceries and I’d say that we’d need some “soda” to which she’d either glare at me or glare and ask, “Oh, you mean, pop?”
She was bound and determined to get me to stop saying it, so I would have to remember to call it “Pop” at home, but then revert to the California term by using “Soda” while I was working in San Francisco.

I think my California co-workers were confused by it. One day, they asked for an explanation when I again made the unkind mistake of referring to their “soda” as “pop”.
“What’s this “Pop” thing all about?” one of them asked. I tried to explain that this how I’d always referred to soft drinks at home, but again they looked at me like I was a yokel. Thankfully, a co-worker who was originally from Ohio came to my defense.

“Hey, I’ll back Bob up on this. That’s what they call it in the Midwest. You don’t understand. It’s not as is this is just a local thing. It’s everywhere! The store aisles literally say, “Pop”. You’ll see a store ad in the newspaper and people will say, ‘Hey! Pop’s on sale!"

I should point out that when I was in California that a lot of guys that I worked with seemed to have no concept that there are other states outside of California save for Oregon and Arizona. Most never seemed to have traveled outside of California. Why should they? They have almost every pastime that you could want to do in California. Like tall trees? Go to the Muir Woods. Like hiking? There are plenty of hills. Like to surf? Go to the beach. Like to ski? Go to Lake Tahoe.

Because of this, the guys I worked with seemed genuinely shocked when they'd walk by me and I'd be listening to some music that they'd actually listen to. They looked like they wanted to ask, "So did you mug some Californian and steal his walkman?"

It sounds very stupid now that I write about this, and it is, but the soda story actually sets up my next story: How to lose weight and then gain it all back and then some by sitting on your but all day.

I once had a job testing video games...

I'm starting another new direction with this blog that no one reads since you're all on My Space.

By the way, I thought about going with a My Space page when I started this blog over a year ago and I was struck by something, that it looked like crap. My Space pages look like some beginning web designer who only had a budget of $50 and one day to design a page. The pages are just plain ugly. Very ugly. I thought that there is no way I'd get any traffic on a page that looks this crappy, but I guess I was wrong. Oh well...

In 1999, my wife and I moved to California. She got a job at a local newspaper. I couldn't find much for work save for my immediate job when I walked into the local Pizza Hut, told them I had over 8 years experience and then proceeded to make 3 pizzas to their regular cook's one pizza. You could say I nailed the interview (which there wasn't one).

I had told my boss that I didn't come to California to work at Pizza Hut, so he was aware that I was planning on leaving.

One night, I stumbled across an ad that read, "Do you like to play sports video games?"

I read it. It was for doing quality assurance on video games. All I needed was a resume and a list of every game that I can ever remember playing. The resume I had. The list of games I had to make.

It took a while, but I managed to get my list of compiled. Scanning my memory from Pong until that time, I came up with an extremely long list of games. Surprisingly, I got an interview with the agency filling the job. I then nailed the job interview at a well-known video game company.

It was an interesting interview.

There were questions like:
"What makes a quality game?"
"Do you like playing games?"
"What do you like in a game?"
"What's the worse game you've ever played?"
"Have you ever spotted a bug in a game?"
"How would you go about testing a game?"

I had never tested a video game before, but I managed to cite some examples in which I thought a game sucked and why. I also managed to come up with some examples on some bugs that I had seen in some games.

They nodded and murmured to each other, "That's a bug."

I was excited as hell when they offered me the job. It was very unexpected. I was making barely six dollars an hour at Pizza Hut and now I'd be making twice that amount (almost). Looking back at that, it wasn't much to live on, but it was a decent amount and more than I had ever been paid before.

I told my wife that I got offered the job. Her response: "Oh Lord!"

I told my brother, Joe, that I got offered the job with the line: "Prepare for me to suddenly become the coolest uncle your boys have."

He said that their reaction to the news of my new job was that they were "very impressed."

Thus we enter the first stage of getting a job testing video games: Excitement.

You see, just like the five stages of dying, there are stages that one goes through when getting a job testing video games.

The five stages of dying are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

I would say the stages of getting a job testing video games are: Excitement, Disappointment, Depression, Self Pity and Acceptance.

People look at me odd when I used to tell them that getting a job as a video game tester was like dying. It's because you go through several stages when you work this job.

The day I started, I was a little nervous because I had to suddenly commute to and from San Francisco. Besides that, I had never worked at a testing job before and I had no idea what was expected of me. I imagined that I would be sitting around playing the game and making notes on what I thought was wrong. As a matter of fact, that is mainly what I ended up doing.

I chose a really ass backwards method of commuting to work. Instead of driving down the insane Interstate 80 west to San Francisco, which is the most direct route, I ended up taking a much longer way. I wanted to take the subway, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, to San Francisco, but there wasn't a line in the east bay where I lived, so I drove about 40 minutes from Vacaville to Concord to get on a train. From there, it was a 50 minute train ride to downtown San Francisco. From the station, it was a 20 minute walk straight south to get to South of Market, where the company was located. If you do the math, it's about an hour and 50 minutes each way! That alone depressed me.

So I'm in stage one: Excitement and it's pretty exciting so far. The building has a fantastic view of the city from where we work. The people are friendly. It's a very loose atmosphere.

The first week, they check out a system to me and give me a game to get familiar with. I start testing with a guy named Johnny. He was pretty cool and had done some testing for the company before, so he let me in on what to look for in the games. We each had a TV, a VCR and a game system, but that first week, I was testing with Johnny. We were playing a basketball game together. He was usually the Lakers. I was usually the Kings. We'd play and he'd take some notes on what he thought looked wrong. I learned to do some of the same.

So I'm in the middle of the Excitement stage when I suddenly started to feel a little different. I started to wonder if I had made the right decision or if I had settled because I came to the Bay Area with dreams of being a web programmer, but I ended up testing games. I decided to stick with it, but it wasn't long before I entered the second stage: Disappointment.

I started to get a little disappointed. I was disappointed with myself for working there. I was disappointed with the job because I soon realized that playing games all day long ceases to be fun several hours into the first day. When you start exploring the games and generally doing things that aren't fun like checking statistics, misspellings, player animations, etc, it starts to get tedious fast.

I think that I didn't feel that I belonged there. I was surrounded by dozens of younger guys who all seemed to know each other all ready. They would laugh and joke amongst each other while I was quiet. Being a Nebraska guy around California kids can be a little intimidating. I think I expected to find people that I related to. I didn't at first.

Worse yet, I shared a cube with Rod. Now Rod was a cool enough guy, but like me, he seemed to be disappointed with himself for working at the company. Rod told me that he too had moved to the Bay Area with his wife. She found a good job, but he was having trouble finding a job doing 3D modeling. He had hoped that working a job testing video games would be a way to network to do other things, but it was only after he took the job that most of the games came programmed from Japan while a few were programmed in the states, but not at our building, so he started to sink into the third stage: Depression.

When I started, he was playing a game in which a guy goes around blowing zombies up with various weapons. You blow your way through the game until you get to the end of the level. Then a new level starts with the same thing. You shoot zombies, collect power ups and fight the end guy. Between levels you were treated to some extremely bad voice acting in the cut scenes as the mastermind behind the bringing the dead to life shouts, "Ha Ha Ha! Yooou Foooolllsss!!!"

Rod would mimic all of the dialogue because he knew it all by heart. He could literally finish the game in an hour. Watching Rod test the video game over and over was bad enough. He would sit there all stoic, finish the game and then simulate himself blowing his head off with an invisible gun. He'd finish the game, give a big long sigh and then start the game up all over again. That's all he did all day for a few weeks that I sat next to him. To make matters worse, the game was practically finished. He had written up a few bugs in it that wouldn't be fixed and he couldn't find anything else. It was usually after he had finished the game twice that he'd get up and take a long and extended break.

As funny and sad as it was to see Rod go through the Depression stage, it was shortly after the basketball game was released that Rod quit. I liked Rod and talked to him a bit when I was testing. To make matters worse than him leaving, I was assigned the very same game that he was assigned!

I liked the game at first, but soon after getting good at the game and then beating it after an hour or two; I started to sink into the Depression stage myself. Like Rod, I started memorizing the horrible game dialogue and knew every twice and turn in the game after only a few days. It was not fun at all.

As if Depression wasn't enough, I started to sink into the next stage: Self-Pity. Actually the Depression and Self-Pity stages go hand in hand.

I suppose I should have looked on the bright side of things, but I couldn't when I was staring into the face of a soul-crushing arcade port that was not meant for playing eight hours a day.

It was then that I started to question my employment at the company. I started to feel guilty because I felt that I was abusing them for getting paid to work there. There I was, with a college degree and two years of graduate school in hand and the best that I could do was getting a job testing video games. I would think, "What kind of loser am I that this is my stopping point in California?"

I was commuting 3 hours and 30 minutes roundtrip per day for pete's sake! I had to shell out 8 dollars a day in tolls and train tickets to get to work, let alone the gas money it took to get to the train station.

I don't think that everyone that gets a job in the video game industry testing games is like this. The fact that I was homesick for my home state coupled with the long commutes made me super depressed and feeling sorry for myself. Everything was not living up to my expectations.

I finally settled into the last stage: Acceptance.

It was two months in when I finally accepted my job status. I was a temp and there were rumblings that they were going to get rid of the temps. There were 28 of us and they decided to get rid of half of us. I made the cut because I worked hard, did what I was told and didn't complain about it. I was literally the last person to make the cut list. It was after this reprieve that things started to pick up for me.

I'm probably being whiny about this, but I think the fact that so much change was happening so fast in my life was what caused these mixed feelings about becoming a video game tester. I live for stability, but the move, the commute, the job search and the newness of the situation magnified the feelings.

I guess the cat had the day off from waking you...

I got a call the other day from my wife. She sounded a little concerned.

"Umm... I had a little problem today."

"With what?"

I panicked a little because she had her review the day before and she had told me how much her salary adjustment would be. I was now concerned that they had decided against it and would be getting rid of her.

"With my car."

I was immediately concerned and a little relieved at the same time. We had just fixed the car for over 500 dollars due to a leak in the rear engine seal. We had tried to ignore it, but the oil output in Laura's Dodge Stratus had jumped up from two quarts of oil every three weeks, to two weeks, to one week, to every three days, to almost every day! It got so bad that my wife's side of the driveway was filled with large droplets of oil that seemed to be leaking from every pore of the engine. We used to joke that she'd never get lose because she'd always have a trail to follow from the day before.

We finally decided to get it fixed. I guess the seal was only being held in place by the parts behind it and it was flapping back and forth, which explained why the oil output fluctuated.

"The car didn't break down did it?"

"No, the car's fine."

I now imagined my wife getting into a fender bender somewhere. It had been some years since she last had an accident, but considering that she drives like a trucker on a caffeine IV facing a deadline somewhere in America, I thought the worst had happened.

"Then what's the problem?"

She sighed, "I had to get it towed."

"It was towed? Why? What happened?"

"Well," Laura said, "it all started when I woke up late for work."

I knew she had to be at work at 11am. She usually leaves at 10:30 am.

"What time did you wake up?"

"10 after 10."

"How come you slept so late?" I asked.

"It's Susie's fault! She didn't wake me up this morning!" Laura protested.

Susie is our newest cat. She's about 6 months old right now. Laura had told me before Susie always woke her up between 8 and 8:30 every morning by walking around her on the bed while she's sleeping. Today, she must have forgot. I guess you can't count on cats these days to keep a schedule.

"You know they do make these things today that wake you up when you set them to a certain time. They're called alarm clocks," I muttered.

"Ha Ha Ha. I forgot! Besides, Susie usually wakes me up."

"I guess you can't rely on cats to wake you up these days."

"Whatever."

Maybe Susie slept in herself and after Laura jumped out of bed, she thought, "Oh crap! I forgot to wake up Laura! I'm hungry! I'm thirsty! Pet me! Pet me!" This would be as close to cat remorse as you'd ever get.

"So what happened. You were late and?"

Laura continued, "I was a little late, so to save time I parked in a ten minute spot near the building."

Laura usually parks in the parking garage a block away. Considering she pays for it, I think it would make sense to expect her to park there.

I guessed, "And it got towed."

"Right." Laura confirmed. "If I ever park there, I usually move it after an hour, but... today I forgot. By the time I remembered, it was gone."

"So let me get this straight. You got your car towed today because you overslept because a cat didn't wake you up in time. Then you parked in a ten minute spot instead of the parking garage, which was only a block further away, to save time, but then forgot to move it."

"And I had some unpaid parking tickets," Laura reminded me.

"How much did it cost to get the car out?" I asked.

"Enough," she said.

As much as I would be mad about this, and this is the second time this has happened, my other fear of her job status was put to rest.

To borrow a line from the Simpsons Halloween of Horror show when Bart and Lisa raised the dead and Homer was more concerned that the car was okay over the zombies, I felt like asking:

"Did you lose your job?"

"No"

"Did the car get towed?"

"Yes!"

"But the job is still there."

"Uh huh."

"All right then."

How many times do I have to tell you?

I think every parent goes through it. Kids just don't listen. They don't listen. You yell. Then they adjust and don't hear it until you yell it. Then you sound like you're screaming at them. You're standing right behind them telling them to do something. They completely ignore you and continue doing what they're doing, which is something that you don't want them to do! It's one of the most frustrating things about being a parent.

My Mom can certainly relate to this topic because, while you may find this very hard to believe, was a kid that had trouble hearing what my parents said to me. She'd come down and complain about our room about what a disgrace it was and how it should be condemned, we'd feel bad and then we'd start cleaning it. After a while, Bill and I noticed that it was the same speech, so she'd come down and we'd chime in with "room is a disgrace" and "it should be condemned." My Mom would either ignore it or try not to laugh. Thankfully, she had a sense of humor about it and I lived to see more days to be a smart ass about it.

Where we have a hard time getting Julia to listen is when we try to get her in bed. She goofs around and generally does everything that she can to prolong to process. The nighttime ritual involves me walking her upstairs to the bathroom where she's takes a vitamin, takes a chewable asthma medicine, a liquid allergy medicine, brushes her teeth, rinses with water and washes her hands.

I'll give her the medicines and the vitamin, leave to grab something with a message to "Take you medicine" and come back and she's busy pulling the gummi vitamin apart and jamming the chewable tablet into the gummi vitamin.

I prompt her, "Take your medicine."

She continues merging the two objects into a super medicine.

"Take you medicine."

Still no progress.

"Take you MEDICINE!" I exclaim.

"Fine!" Julia finally says.

I help her brush her teeth and the same results happen with the rinsing and the washing of the hands. I'll turn on the water, hand her a cup and tell her to "Wash your hands and rinse."

I'll leave to grab her Teddy or grab something that I'm going to need later, come back and she's busy making a fountain with two little cups and the faucet. Julia just stands there with me behind her filling up one into the other and watching the results go down the drain.

"Rinse and wash your hands." I prod her.

She continues with the makeshift fountain.

"Rinse and wash your hands." I prod her again.

Still with the fountain action.

"Rinse and wash your HANDS!" I exclaim finally. "Why do I always have to tell you these things three times?"

"I don't know. Jeez Dad. Don't worry about it."

That's her new thing. I don't know where she got it, but for some reason, every command of disapproval is met with a "Jeez. Don't worry about it."

The next night. It's time to rinse and wash her hands. I tell her so and wait behind her. Nothing. I prod again and then a final exclamation.

I sigh.

"How many times do I have to keep telling you to do something."

"Three times?" She answers helpfully.

I have to stiffle a laugh and tell her to just do it.

Now that's a Dad yell...

It was a little late on a Thursday night. I was going to be helping my friend, Jeff, the next day moving some stuff. We were on my cell phone talking about details of the move when I heard Julia call out from upstairs.

I was in the basement on the couch and I hear, "Daddy?" faintly.

Then it gets louder.

"Daddy?"

"Daddy!?"

"DADDY!"

I tell Jeff, "Hold on a second."

I pull the phone from my ear and put the earpiece down by my stomach.

I suddenly yell, "WHAT?!"

I normally wouldn't yell, but Julia has gotten into the bad habit of getting into bed and then suddenly calling out to us for odd requests.

Here are a list of her requests in recent weeks:

"I'm hot."

"I'm thirsty."

"My leg hurts."

"Where's my little dog?"

"I need a baby blanket."

"Moe (the cat) wants in my bed."

"I want to tell you something (usually a question about the next day)."

"I want to show you something (usually a small toy she's placed in a bag."

"I didn't give you a hug (not true)."

"I didn't give you a kiss (not true)."

"I want the hall light on."

"I want the laundry room light on."

"I need to find (some toy)."

and so on...

It wouldn't irritate me so much if it wasn't almost every night. You can barely leave and walk downstairs without a request from her highness. A lot of times, we're downstairs and she yells, but then doesn't wait for a response it goes like "Daddy! Daddy! Da(What!)ddy! Da(What!?)ddy!

I'm writing this because while some of the requests are cute, a lot of them are just wastes of time. My hope is that when she becomes a teenager, I can keep waking her up in the morning when she's trying to sleep with odd requests.

"Where's my toothbrush (in my hand).?"

"I'm hot."

"I'm thirsty."

"Julia! Ju(what?)lia!"

I suppose I shouldn't be so cruel. After all, I can recall many nights when I'd get out of bed and my parents would be mad at me for being out of bed. At one point, I would feign a stomach ache in order to get some Pepto Bismol from my Mom because I liked the taste and it allowed me to be up for a while. That trick didn't last too long, though.

I guess I could just end up as the corny Dad that makes the kids laugh, but mortifies the daughter with remarks like, "Hey kids, don't get all... wack on me. I can (makes air quotes) dig it."

Julia will be all, "Oh no he didn't!"

I can't wait! (rubs hands evily together)

Back to Jeff...

I get put the phone back to my ear and Jeff says, "Oh my God! I'm deaf! God!"

I say, "Oh, sorry."

"Now that's a Dad yell!" Jeff said laughing. "I haven't heard a yell like that since I was living at home!"

"Now let me switch to the ear that isn't ringing..."

Kindergarten memories or why can't I stay home and watch The Price is Right?

We recently had to decide whether or not to send Julia to kindergarten this year or wait another year. Julia is one those lucky individuals who has an August birthday, so she's on the fence about whether or not she can go after just turning 5-years-old or wait until she's 6.

It's a double-edged sword. If she goes at 5, she'll be one of the youngest kids in her class. If she goes at 6, she'll be one of the oldest kids in her class. Either way, she'll probably end up hating us for some reason relating to her age, like the fact that she can't celebrate her birthday during the school year, which will undoubtedly make it a lot harder to track down kids to know who to invite. It was a snap when I was in school. I had a March birthday, so it was easy to just bring all of the birthday invitations to school and invite kids that I wouldn't normally call friends to Bill and I's birthday party.

I used to think that having my birthday in March was pretty nice until I hit college. It was then that I realized that it sucked ass. Because Spring Break landed in the middle of my birthday week almost every year I was in college, I never got the obligatory "Let's go out and get Bob wasted because it's his birthday" night because my friends were home because the stupid dorm was closed that week.

Having a summer birthday will suck while she's in school. Then it will become cool when she's an adult because she'll get to plan a great summer party that's also her birthday part. See how it all works out in the end? I'll have to keep reminding her when she complains about her August birthday during grade school that one day she'll be throwing some kicking summer parties and she can thank me then.

It's not like she has the lame birthday on Christmas, which means she'll be getting Christmas/Birthday presents for the rest of her like. I always felt sorry for that poor bastard in my school with that situation.

But this post isn't about birthdays, it's about Kindergarten.

While I've been struggling about when to send Julia to Kindergarten, I thought back to when I went to Kindergarten.

Bill and I were 5 and 1/2 when we went to Kindergarten. I don't remember much about the build up to Kindergarten except for a few days when my Mom sat us down to practice writing our names.

The first day of Kindergarten was a little traumatic. I didn't realize that day that it would start a trend on never getting my Falls and Springs off again. I just figured that it was a short-lived experiment.

I remember the first day of school vividly only because of what I did wrong. I went into the wrong bathroom. It would start a trend where I would worry about bathrooms and their locations, but that's a different story.

In our grade school, the Kindergartens had bathrooms inside the classroom at the back of the class. I guess they figured that if you left the room and took a wrong turn, you'd never be heard from again. Maybe they were afraid we'd be hazed inside the bathroom and then we'd never want to go there again. Whatever the reason, we had them.

Unfortunately for me, they were not labeled as Boys and Girls. Rather, there was a picture of Charlie Brown on one and a picture or Lucy on the other one. Seeing as the Charlie Brown one was occupied, I had to go, so I went in the Lucy one.

I remember almost gagging because the last person that went there did not flush a number two silo. I still remember that it was pretty big. To make matters worse, after flushing the mess and then going myself, I had to answer the door with two girls outside telling me that I was in the wrong bathroom.

I'm sure that the teacher explained which bathroom was which, but giving the distracted nature of kids, it's a miracle that 90 percent of them hear your instructions let alone all of them. I should know. I student taught seventh and eighth graders. I don't know how many times, I would not only tell the kids at least two times what the assignment was AND wrote it on the board only to have them come in the next day and have several go, "Homework? I didn't hear about this!"

Another distressing thing about Kindergarten was the fact that I couldn't understand why I couldn't stay home and watch my shows, especially the Price is Right.

I loved watching the Price is Right when I was a kid. It had a format that was consistent, but the games the contestant played were also changed up to keep the show fresh. I loved them all: Plinko, the Rock Climber game, the big-ass dice game, the switch the prizes around game, the wheel segment and the Showcase Showdown.

Besides the Price is Right, there were other game shows like Password to bide the time over before the useless soap operas hit the screen at 11 am. I never could figure out why they ruined a great run by breaking into boring dialogue all day long.

So I'm sitting there thinking about my shows and wondering how long this was going to last. I literally thought this was going to be just a few days and then it was back to TV, but that was a wrong answer. We were stuck there... at least until lunch, when we went home. We were on half-day kindergarten schedules back then and I used to envy the kids that had it in the afternoon after we left. At least they got to see the good shows!

You may laugh at my feeling about kindergarten and it's show-blocking technique on me, but I mentioned this to a friend at work and he had the same realization.

"That's what I was thinking, too!" he exclaimed when I mentioned that I couldn't understand why I had to miss my shows.

Kids today don't have to worry about that as much. They have their DVRs, their DVDs and hours upon hours of cartoons and kid shows that run all morning into the evening on a handful of channels. Lucky bastards. Like any piece of technology that gives me a choice of more of what I want, I would have given my left nut, whoever small it was back then, to be able to have access to all the choices kids have today. Back then, if you didn't like it and it was the only thing on, you'd watch it anyway because it was better than nothing.

At least Julia won't have the transition period like I did. She already goes to a school-like day care in which she doesn't get to watch much television.

Her entire class (six kids) will graduate Pre School and go on to Kindergarten next year, but Julia will not. I hope she enjoys the extra year without the pressure of succeeding and moving from grade to grade. I think I would have enjoyed it when I was a kid. At least I would have gotten to see The Price is Right one more year.

I hope no one saw that...

So I was telling my Mom about the last story. The one in which my 4-year-old daughter snapped the cat's collar on her and took off running to show how far she can run. The one that ended with the rope snapping taught and my daughter getting pulled back. That one.

It was a little scary, but also a little funny after the fact.

When I told my Mom the story, her response was, "I hope no one saw that!"

I laughed, "Why?"

"Because someone might have gotten the wrong idea and called the police."

I started to get a little mad.

"Who would call the police on that?"

"You never know," she said.

I understood what she was getting at, but I was still mad at the paranoia.

"Hey, if anyone ever tried to take Julia away for something that stupid, I would make their lives a living hell."

It got me thinking about today. People are sooo protective of the children. Sometimes, we go a little far in some areas and not far enough in other areas.

Think about it, when I grew up, it was common practice that mothers would go into the store and leave their kids in the parking lot. I ought to know, I was left out in the parking lot in my Mom's van with my other siblings. Rather, we were victims that were left out in the hot sun with no air conditioning and no water, with only each other to cling to for comfort. Just kidding Mom!

Actually, if one was to come across the scene, it would look us kids were having a great time!

Sometimes, we would come up with activities to amuse ourselves. A popular activity was steering wheel rides. One of us would sit on the bottom part of the steering wheel and hold on with our hands. A sibling or two would spin the steering wheel back and forth to give a nice ride. It was great... I mean, it was a great way to misbehave, and now completely impossible what with the locking steering wheels that cars have today.

Another activity while left in a hot van while your Mom shopped was to honk the horn. Oh sure, it doesn't sound too fun, but it became a game by seeing how many times you could honk the horn before our Mom came out pissed off. You could play this with a defiant sibling honking or daring someone to honk. Invariably, my Mom would be checking out when someone at the checkout would comment, "Your kids have been honking the horn." She'd come to window and glare out at us. We'd stop right away. We pushed buttons, but we weren't stupid.

Nowadays, you're just asking to get reported for child neglect if you leave your kid out in the car for just a second.

I was witness to this taken to extremes. When I worked at Pizza Hut, our shift manager at the time called the police on a customer, whose kids were waiting in the car outside some 10 feet away while their Mom sat inside waiting for the pizza. It's a good thing he came too because what with people coming and going the Mom that far away, they might have been without aid for 30 whole seconds.

It's amazing how far we've come. We've come from kids being left out in cars, kids in no car seats and kids not even buckled in to every type of safety device holding our kids into something. Don't get me wrong. It's probably a good idea, but as the attention Britney Spears is getting for her hair-brained child seat techniques shows, people are just a tad sensitive.

I joked to my Mom that today, she'd be put in jail many times over for her actions in the past, but that's just the way it was back then. Leaving your kids in the car was convenience. Now it's abuse.

Same with the leash story. Back then, it was always funny because kids do silly things. Now it's your fault for not anticipating their silly actions.