so this is what it feels like...

...to fall off the face of the earth.

It's been a seriously busy summer, but I suppose that's no excuse for being undisciplined.

It's swim team season, and I'm one in the core group of parents that does all the work. Swim teams and all the necessary fundraising, pep rallies, banquets, breakfasts, field trips, working the meets, etc. etc. etc...requires a lot of parent volunteers. It's a very intense season, a little more than 2 months of daily practice and meets.

Among my duties are meet announcing (apparently I have a flair for it, or so people tell me, although if they really listened, my South Jersey squonky accent is ear-splitting, if you ask me), ribbon labels and ribbon writing, writing uninspired website copy, designing the t-shirt, some database crap, and creating the annual banquet slide show.

This thing takes an extraordinary amount of time to create, hours and hours and hours over about a two-week period. I root through thousands of photographs on dozens of CDs of largely unidentifiable kids in goggles and caps and create an entertainment extravaganza consisting of about 150-160 slides.

The music selection is critical...it can't be too mainstream, can't be too thrash metal, can't be too sexually suggestive (although I used Hump de Bump by RHCP. I mean, I suppose THAT could be sexually suggestive, but if you read the chorus--"hump de bump do bodu"--it just sounds like a big, fuzzy green dinosaur-type TV personality. )

"Kids, get ready; it's the Humpdebumpdobodu show!"

(For the sake of comparison, the guy who did this before I took it over used Paul Anka's "The Times of our Lives," which haunts me to this day. I want to hit something when I hear it. "The shadows of misty yesteryears..." just THINKING about that line is like a razor blade cutting through my sinuses.)

I chose five songs--started it with Miserlou (Dick Dale), which was perfect. Then Punk Rock Girl (Dead Milkmen); Hump de Bump; The Ataris' version of Boys of Summer--an obvious choice, perhaps, but it has that happy Green Day sound the young kids like; and finally...yeah, ok, Hot Fun in the Summertime. That's just a great song, regardless of its decade of origin.

But the most challenging part--aside from losing hours of sleep and watching my house slowly transform into a crumb- and trash-infested pig sty--is writing the jokes. The adults love the jokes, although they can't be too...sophisticated. Beer jokes are good. The kids just like to see their pictures.

This year the bulk of the snarky jokes focused on one dad who tortures us all with his stories about his years at Penn State. I photoshopped the Nittany Lion mascot head on this guy's head in the photos. The kids loved that. The adults were howling. I missed most of the show because I'm squatting behind the laptop and projector in a skirt, so I won't block people's view, while the dj is talking to me NONSTOP about his dj business, his dj website, and gas prices.





It takes a lot of work, but I really enjoyed putting it together. I always do; it's a rush to have an audience laugh and holler at something you've created. (Well, then again, maybe it's not.)