Lost in Translation

After spending the past several days preparing "book stuff" for publication, I had a little down time today and chose to spend it in the yard.

First I plucked the spent blooms from all the lilacs and rose bushes, weeding as I went along, then took my collection to the deck where I set up drying trays so that I might later make the castoff flower materials into potpourri.

With that accomplished, I looked over my to-dos and found two strange items on a grocery list:
*wh wh lauga
*maxim frista
Not knowing what those were supposed to be, I decided to give them definition. I mean, who wouldn't like to sit beneath the spinning palm leaf fans of the beachside "Wh Wh Lauga" and knock back a nice, cool "Frista"? ("Maxim" is the equivalent to grande in this scenario.)

Propelled by my curiosity and the desire to mine for more golden handwriting misunderstandings, I looked back over my son's notes from this past school year since I was using up the left over pages in his agenda for my notepad. Turns out there are some pretty interesting items in their curriculum. One entry seemed to suggest they had "Studied Idiots", something I think we have all done at one time or another. Near that scrawl was another missive: "Bead a boat and Otter June". I suppose they have a class pet in Art. And for some reason he felt the need to write the following: "Dorito, rent an ocean". (If this is a middle school euphemism I have no clue to what it refers.)

There was a holiday I had not heard of, "Owen's Day", and that same week he noted, "Animal Screeches". (Perhaps they no longer have that class pet.) Evidently they are teaching the kids some common sense skills--while getting free labor, if this odd mention holds up--"paint blinds". And in the event that someone begins solving equations too loudly, they seem to have implements called, "Math Mutes".

Sure, these are tricks the mind and eyes play when we cannot decipher another's handwriting, or remember the aim of our own, but exploring them is much more interesting than whatever was really written. (Though I won't know until I am in the middle of food preparation what those two mysterious grocery list items really are.)

But that's okay, next time I have an afternoon off, I'm heading straight for Wh Wh Lauga. Nobody mixes up a Maxim Frista like theirs!