And a chaser of Apple Jacks.

There's a box of Apple Jacks in my cupboard, hanging out with the more sober cereals, as well as a slumped bag of frosted flakes that are out the door, come to think of it, as soon as I write this blog post. The Apple Jacks have almost concluded their performance. Which is to say, when I had a small bowl tonight, dessert-like, after dinner, and then a judicious sprinkling more to finish up the milk, I thought, they're almost gone, thank God, and then felt a small pang because they're almost gone.

But let me start at the beginning.

Tonight, I had my first two online orientation sessions of the semester. I logged in, clicked Share My Screen and let Adobe Connect do its fiddly little thing, uploaded my pdfs, and waited. I waited, and went to the inbox and refreshed it to see if there were messages--none--and went back to the chatroom. No one. So I checked this and that, read a great article about Serena Williams by Claudia Rankine, and another great article from The Guardian about the North Coast 500, a road along the northerly coast of Scotland, which sounds like I better do it. And another article about how if you eat late at night--which they defined, variously, as after 3 p.m. (! what?) and 4:30 p.m. (come on!)--you are basically doomed. Well, anyway, that's what I got out of it.

I refreshed. Nothing. Chatroom? No one.

Until about halfway through the putative session at which no one was in attendance, or so I thought. Then, I got two messages from different students that were all, Hey, we're in the chatroom--where are you?

Adobe Connect! Your fiddly business!

I should have closed and reloaded. Live and learn. Anyway, I hustled over to the chatroom where the students were, and we had a highly efficient orientation. I scrolled back through the chat--they had been talking about the favorite authors! What good students!

While I was refreshing and checking on the no one that was in my chatroom, whilst the everyone was elsewhere, that was when I got up and got that bowl of Apple Jacks. I finished it before I realized what was what with my chatroom fail, which, good thing, because once I had to hustle to the real chatroom and start orienting, I needed both of my hands and also my mouth. I had no time for Apple Jacks!

Why do I have Apple Jacks at my house? Because when my son and his family were here this summer, we had some Apple Jacks. I bought a box because it would remind me of summer and childhood and the mornings when children at breakfast at my table, when sweet cereal tasted like freedom.

Moviegoing fail.

Tonight, after a long day that was the end of a long week, we agreed we would go see Lincoln after we ate Mexican food like it was our job. Which we did, the Mexican food part. It was good, although maybe the time-sensitive nature of our dining timetable meant I felt a little stuffed as we drove down the road-equivalent of the backbone of the valley, State Street, wending movie-ward.

When we reached the theater, we hustled in, only to be told that the seating for Lincoln was LOW. There it was, the word flashing intermittently with the time: 6:45, replaced by LOW. 6:45 LOW 6:45 LOW.

"When it says 'LOW,' what exactly does that mean?" the historian queried.

"Pretty much just the first row," the ticket counter woman said.

Nope. I will not be looking at the monumental head of Abraham Lincoln, in the grand personage of Daniel Day Lewis, from the front row. I, Lisa Bickmore, do not watch serious movies with gigantic heads in them from the front row.

Alas. 

So we headed home. On the way, I had a moment to ponder the better parts of our nature, I mean my day. Including this:

This week, my son has been looking for his immunization records, because the University of Reproach and Prohibition will not let him register unless he puts his immunization records on file. Yesterday, my son Facebook-messaged me this information:

Question: How long will I have to be held responsible for stuff like this? Also, is it crazy that I kind of feel like immunization records is a weird thing for a university to be demanding? (Oh, spare me your public health lecture. I know. I'm just saying GOSH is all.)

Important subtext and a continuation of our story: looking for anything in my study is a fool's errand. I began hallucinating about all the places I might have put his immunization record. I summoned up its very image in my mind. Then I thought about where it might be: stashed in between two books on my Shelves of Chaos? In some secret file in my Filing Cabinet of Chaos? Perhaps I moved it from my study into my bedroom? And stashed it in between two books on my Auxiliary Shelves of Chaos?

This sort of search leads to a line of thinking that inevitably spirals downward, until I am castigating myself for all my moral failings. All of them. The Several Moral Failings of HTMS, or perhaps The Myriad Moral &c &c until I am ready to cry or huff around or cry and huff around or just quietly, softly scream.

And then I went to bed, where kept on hallucinating/summoning up the very image &c/dreaming about the Lost Record of the Immunizations of Son. There may have been Book of Mormon characters in there, I can't say that there weren't.

This morning, when I awoke bleary-eyed and self-reproaching, my son came up and said, "Would this be the thing they'd be looking for?" The thing in his hand was the immunization record.

I said, calmly as all hell, "I think it is."

"I thought so," he said. He thought for a moment, and said, "I guess you gave it to me to keep."

"Huh," I said.

Immunization Record Finding WIN.