Our bus route is “backwards” this year. That means we are the last stop instead of the first stop. That means my kids get on the bus at 8:40 instead of 8:20. Some might not think that 20 minutes is much of a big deal, but it seems like an eternity when I have already been up since 6:30 with all of them (My oldest is in middle school now and has to get on his bus at 7:40.) and need to get started in earnest on my business day. It means I can no longer schedule 8:30 conference calls. It means that the price I have to pay for joining someone else’s 8:00 a.m. meeting is very high. Today it was water all over the living room floor and Bakugan and their accessories strewn everywhere an subsequently confiscated and put in abeyance, which is really just a holding period prior to donation to the goodwill bin. (Speaking of the good will bin, my friend informed me the other day that the bin in front of the supermarket is not placed there by a charity; that it might be owned by a *for-profit* organization…but I pretty much don’t care as long as they will do something useful with my mismatched flip flops, confiscated toys, and outgrown clothes. They are doing me a great service by taking these things off my hands.) This means I can’t walk to my volunteer greeter job at the elementary school (getting a mile’s worth of exercise was part of the original allure of this job), rather I have to drive – which will really be silly in the winter if I have to clean off the car and shovel the driveway out (but I am sure my kids don’t want me to hitch a ride on the bus…they don’t even want to wait at our bus stop with me – today they ran down the street to the second-to-last stop.)