I lied slightly yesterday and brought my phone to Great America after all. I even used it to let Diane know about when we’d be coming back. But that was it; otherwise, I had a nice, non-technological, low-brain-drain day with rollercoasters.
When Jeffrey was in kindergarden and first grade, I was able to spend time in his classroom fairly often; I’d come in and read stories or talk about travelling, and the kids seemed to enjoy it (and the teachers appreciated it, too). But after that, the classes change and the kids seemed to be less interested (and they could read for themselves, anyway!), and I pretty much stopped going to class except for organized events. And the YMCA Child Care and Day Camp is, by its nature, at times when I’m at work, so I’ve never been particularly involved.
But Jeffrey really wanted me to come along to Great America, so I did. And I’m glad I did — even though I passed on some of the rides (someone had to keep the kids who didn’t want to ride the scary rollercoasters company, after all), I had a blast. It was fun being around the littler kids, and especially fun being with Jeffrey and seeing how competent he was, and how some of the other kids wanted to be with him. We drove to Great America on our own (the idea of spending an hour on a school bus for a 15-minute trip didn’t appeal), and so we were able to spend some time in the park after the others left, and hit two of the rides I’d had to miss — twice each (there are advantages to going on a Thursday). I plan to make another chance to go there with Jeffrey again this summer. But next time, I think I’ll bring aspirin — it’s not clear that I really should have ridden the Grizzly twice after bashing my head a month ago (though Jeffrey comforted me by telling me that he had a headache, too, and he hadn’t fallen down ice-skating!). And I won’t ride Orleans Orbit right after lunch again, either.
Pictures? Maybe in a couple of weeks; I decided to go lo-tech and brought the single-use camera (sounds better than “disposable”, doesn’t it?) they’d given me in Montréal instead of the digital camera — I worried a lot less about getting it wet, that’s for sure! We didn’t use up the entire roll of film, so it’ll be a while before I develop what I shot.
That work stuff…
I’ll probably work from home tomorrow; that should give me a chance to play with my test Frontier server some more, and perhaps start writing some code on it. I have gotten a couple of notes at work asking when I’ll have the real server up — I hope it’ll be next week. And if there’s anyone wondering which David Singer at IBM I am, I’m the one at Almaden — feel free to drop me a line (I’m not giving my work e-mail address here in the interest of spam reduction; I’ve noticed quite a bit coming to my Hotmail address since I started this weblog. *sigh*) and I’ll let you know when the server is ready to go.