We got a new front door. Not because we wanted to, but because we're grown-ups. And sometimes after living for five years with a door that is peeling (okay, more like vomiting)paint and literally rotting around the edges and sagging in its frame, it's time to take a tremendous amount of money that could have been used on something fun like a vacation or groceries or puppies or new socks for Mort who seems to make holes in socks just by looking at them and agree that the door has to be replaced.

And see kids, those are the things that you think you can't wait for when you're all yelling about how you can't wait to be a grown-up and eat ice cream for breakfast every day. It comes down to buying new doors, learning to reset your car's computer every season because you drive such a specialized car that it needs to know that the weather has changed and therefore the tire pressure will be a little different and when you call the people at the dealership and ask them to do it, they insist it's easy and you can put on your big girl panties and do it yourself. Which is absolutely true, but that's not the point. The point is that I don't want to do those things.

Nor do I want to have to hunt around for the fancy pants impossible to find oil that my high performance car eats like I'm driving on the Autobahn and have to learn to check a dipstick and put in more oil, when in reality I'm just a mom driving her kid to school in a teeny station wagon and going to the gym. Can't relate? Oh, it will happen to you, too.

Just like 107 years ago when I went to the Homecoming Dance my senior year, I wore an extremely daring off the shoulder dress that reached the middle of my calves. And flat shoes. But it was off the shoulder, people. Scandalous. And then this weekend I saw oodles of kids going to their Homecoming Dance, and even though I could swear some of them are in Mort's 1st grade class, the girls were wearing dresses that made me oh so glad I have a boy.

Except someone's mom bought those dresses for them, so I guess their moms were okay with their daughters looking like that. And by that, I mean whores. Do I have to spell out everything? I have a rule of thumb(terrible expression if you know its origins, but you probably don't and I don't feel like going into it right now) and it's pretty simple: if your underwear shows when you bend over, it's not a dress. It's a shirt. And you need to wear pants with it. Apparently high school girls do not share this rule. Also, if you have to wear double stick tape so that your still undeveloped cleavage isn't on display but you aren't on MTV, you shouldn't be wearing it. Again, I am obviously an old fogie in this department as well.

Also, I like freedom of speech very very much, but if you're going to hold up horrible signs while people bury their children, shouldn't you as a grieving parent have a right to freely shoot those people with rubber bullets at the very least? Or taser them? How about BB guns and attack dogs? Vats of boiling oil?

I have to go clean the woodwork and help Mort make a boat for Columbus Day now.