"We can't tell Rose or Sun, not yet. We've got to keep moving. I promised Sayid we'd keep moving." - Jack, Lost

 

The Boy, after a dive, er, jump into the pool. At night. From underwater. Oh, sure, you say, this is a crappy picture. And, you would be right. But, I took it underwater.

There are several sad Wilders today, but we are sad in the way that the Germans would call Obersaddenbenfronchslich, which would mean that we are saddened, but happy since Alia S. Wilder has left us to go off to college to get some highfalutin’ knowledge.

The degree of difficulty still remains that Alia S. has no idea whatsoever as to what she’s going to study, except that it’s either astrophysics, early Sumerian dance techniques (gotta love that one that celebrates Ur), or creative kitten knitting. I’m not sure if you have to knit an actual kitten or just spin its fur into wool. Dunno.

Regardless, it was time to kick the kitten out of the nest, or the poodle out of the gilded cage. I got home from work on Friday. The Mrs. and I went shopping, and bought some steaks.

Let me put it to you straight: Texans love steak. And, at an average of $3.21 a pound for t-bones or ribeyes, it might sound expensive, but Texans still love it. I know that might sound high, especially with gas all the way up to $0.79 a gallon here in Texas, but we decided to splurge anyhow.

I burned some ribeyes and T-bones on the grill, The Mrs. sautéed some mushrooms, and, well, what more do you need for dinner if you have that? Oh, beer. Check.

So, after finishing dinner at 8PM, it was time to load up Alia’s stuff in the truck. Alia has odd things that she wanted to take, like couches and beds (silly girl) so we loaded those up first. Then, well, then there was all the stuff. Fuzzy girl things, like slippers. Swords made of wood. Cats. Her Perry Mason® poster (apparently, that Raymond Burr fellow is still quite the hotty with the young girls).

You’d think that at night it would cool down, so that we made the right decision to load her stuff up at night. You’d be wrong. It was a hot, muggy night, so muggy that if you took just two and a half steps outside the door, your cotton t-shirt proclaiming your love of Battlestar Galactica© would be saturated enough with water that you just gained ten pounds. Fun moving a couch in that? No, not really. In retrospect, we probably would have had an easier time loading her waterbed had we taken the water out first. Live and learn.

At about 2am we were in that weird part of moving where we’d loaded most of the stuff, but the end required Alia S. to pack it all up and put the finishing touches on it. You’ve been there, with the lingering questions of where, exactly, did you want to put those cinderblocks . . . ?

I think Alia S. finished loading her things about 5am. Dunno, I was asleep. I talked to her briefly in the morning, and she was off.

Thankfully, she took her cats, and her wooden sword. Because, really, the it takes a lot of time to care for wooden swords.