In the news

I'm in Orange County. And in fact we're having a great time. I drove down with my kids on Monday and they were spectacular for the seven hour drive. The key is gum. They like to chew gum and I don't usually let them but I gave them all the gum they wanted on the way down and it kept them very quiet. The other trick is duct tape. Just kidding.

And it's lovely weather here too. We've been enjoying ourselves. I even got to have a mini reunion with a few friends from high school who live in the area. It's fun to reconnect now that we have kids. Whenever I see old friends I'm reminded of the mean trick that although we age on the outside (which actually isn't even the case with these friends who look as beautiful as they did in high school) we are basically twenty-five years old forever on the inside. I'll never forget when I hired a sixteen year old babysitter who called me Mrs. Rosen and I was like what the hell, I'm not that much older than you? Until I realized I was twice her age.

Anyway, I've been taking a lot of pictures this time around which I will share when we're back home and I have a cable to download. I have a lot of "blog entries" in my head, one of which is the fact that I've started to store things in my brain in terms of blog entries which sometimes makes me want to stop blogging altogether. Today and yesterday I've been thinking a lot about television and how I'm glad ours barely works. My mom has a nice TV plus cable so I have my pick of a zillion channel which means I can't excape the news. If you can call it news. This is what's topping the headlines in Orange County:

1. Tiger Woods and his mistresses and fortune and whether his wife will try to take the kids to Sweden and if he'll fight for them or if she'll try to get half of his billions or just settle for 55 million. Really, people? Who gives a fuck. My mom's boyfriend told me that this story hit a record for the most days on the front pages of major newspapers, beating out 9/11.
2. A man in Brazil stuck more than 40 sewing needles into his two year old son over the course of a month at the prompting of his mistress to get back at is wife. I don't even know what to say about this except that I wish I didn't know about it.
3. A nineteen year old woman from Anaheim threw her newborn in a dumpster behind a Mexican Restaurant in Stanton. She delivered the baby in a restroom stall and then put her in the garbage. Alive. What is wrong with people.
4. Sean Goldman is headed back to the US from Brazil to live with his father David Goldman. I guess the boy was taken to Brazil by his mother five years ago and they never came back. And then she died in childbirth a few years later. And he's being raised by his stepfather. Hopefully New Jersey won't be too much of a culture shock. Right.
5. Did I mention Tiger Woods? He's on again.

So I'm happy to live in my NPR bubble where I don't have to know about philandering golfers, voodoo inflicting fathers, dead babies in dumpsters or poor kids caught in the middle of bi-cultural marriages gone bad.

Merry Christmas.