So then there was the part where Detroit lost to Pittsburgh in triple overtime after holding a lead until 30 seconds before the end of regulation.

It was a nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat game. Okay, it’s gonna happen – it’s gonna happen — IT’S GONNA HAPPEN — and then nothing happens. I now appreciate how guys feel when they wind up with a case of blue balls after a date.

I felt bad, especially, for Sam. He watched the entire game with me, beginning with the second period, rooting for Detroit. Why? Because I had promised him it would be raining octopus if Detroit won. I think he was more disappointed with the Pittsburgh victory than I was. Sorry, honey, I told him. It’s all over. There won’t be any octopus. (I’ve decided the word “octopi” really fucking annoys me.)

So the series goes back to Pittsburgh for game six, and now we face the Octopus Conundrum. There won’t be too many Detroit fans in the building, and the ones who are there are going to have a tough time smuggling in an octopus to throw. In fact, according to a Pittsburgh blogger, there is a local fish merchant who refuses to sell octopus to people with Midwestern accents or wearing any apparel suspected of being Red Wings-related. If Detroit wins game 6 and takes the Stanley Cup, it will be cool, but it won’t happen in Hockeytown, and that would be a shame.

I don’t really want to go to seven games, but I would like to see Detroit win the Cup on their home ice. Because of the octopus.

I have been keeping a daily weather blog for, I don’t know, ten or eleven days, and already I am bored to tears. Despite the fact that the weather around here has actually changed! in the past week. There have been clouds, and temperature shifts, and wind! Even a spot of rain. Which is about as much excitement as I’m likely to see.

My older boy, Sam, is the king of being bored. Usually at least once a day he tells us I’m bored, and we have dubbed him the Chairman of the Bored. I am always quick with the mom-type suggestions to relieve boredom (if you’re bored, why don’t you clean up your room? scrub the toilets? pick up the dog shit?) but of course he rejects all such suggestions.

The poet John Berryman, of whom I am terribly fond despite generally hating poetry, wrote in his Dream Songs that Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. I was an English major, and I have never, to this day, read a literary line that struck me like that one. Is this the human condition, or is it just Sam, John Berryman and me? Berryman committed suicide by throwing himself off a bridge. I dare to hope Sam and I will end better than that. He may have gotten the knack of boredom, but not living? Unthinkable. You’ve got to find out what happens next, don’t you?

Sam, my first grader, has tended all year long to play soccer at recess. This is made possible by Southern California’s temperate climate; when it’s not raining, in which case they’re confined to their classrooms for recess anyway, it’s warm enough to play soccer.

But in May, when the weather grows even warmer, the stink bugs show up. For the duration, therefore, Sam and five or six of his cohorts have abandoned soccer in favor of what they call the Stink Bug Patrol.

Each recess, the Stink Bug Patrol roams the schoolyard and grassy areas searching for stink bugs. Yesterday at lunch recess they found four! They have no hesitation about handling the things, and yesterday one crawled up the leg of Sam’s jeans before he shook it out. They give them little-boy names such as Toilet and Boogerman and Boba Fett, then release them to fly away as a giggling group of little girls lurk nearby to watch.

Every day when I pick Sam up, I am treated to the daily stink bug recap, with an account of how many bugs they found, how many people they “stinked”, and how many little girls they grossed out. Clearly, this is the highlight of his day.

God, I love having little boys.

URGENT STINK BUG UPDATE: Sam came home this afternoon to report that the Stink Bug Patrol has been disbanded by disapproving teachers who don’t want them poking at the stink bugs. What a bunch of buzz kills. Shame on women who don’t understand that LITTLE BOYS MUST. DO. THESE. THINGS.

There’s nothing for it but to start a Stink Bug Patrol at home.

For the past month and a half, Sam has been mad at China. This is for the simple reason that he’s awaiting the release of a new action figure which is, of course, being manufactured in China. The release has been pushed back several times, and a toy that we ordered online in November, expected to receive by Christmas, and were then told would arrive in early April, is now slated for delivery at the end of May. Sam and I are skeptical, especially what with the earthquake and all.

But Sam is a guy who takes things seriously, and he is mad at China. Not the toy manufacturer, the entire nation and everything related to them. Ben brought home Chinese food tonight, and Sam railed at how late he got home. He blamed China. And a few days ago, when the massive earthquake struck China, Sam said Good.

This is exactly the snarky sort of thing I would say, but since it is my role to teach him proper values, I explained to him why that was not a nice thing to say. He conceded that the earthquake was, and is, indeed tragic.

But he is still mad at China.

My older son, Sam, is just getting over a particularly nasty case of strep throat and has been out of school for the past four days, ergo my absence from the screen. The hell of it was trying to figure out whether he just had a virus with a sore throat, or whether he had strep and needed medical treatment.

Y’see, I am categorically opposed to dragging kids to the doctor for each and every sniffle. I have three little ones, and if I did that, I’d spend my life running one or the other of them to the doctor. Especially do I resent making a sick kid sit in the doctor’s waiting room for an hour, probably picking up every other bug that’s going around in the process, only to be told “It’s a virus. He’ll get over it” and then charged $20.

So I try to figure things out for myself, with the help of Dr. Sears, whose website is my childhood illness Bible. On the subject of sore throat, he mentioned that the signs of strep include fever over 101, red spots in the throat, swollen glands, and a lack of pain during swallowing.

Well, Dr. Sears is awesome and all, but Sam’s symptoms were fairly different from those. So, as a public service, I offer you a list of the features of his strep:

• His fever reached 101 only once, instead hovering around 99-100 degrees and sometimes coming down completely.
• He had no red spots in his throat. His tonsils were mightily swollen, though.
• He had extreme pain on swallowing.
• His glands were not swollen or tender.
• Oddly, he was salivating heavily and spitting repeatedly. He said his throat was too sore to swallow his spit.
• He had constant nausea and occasional vomiting.
• He had absolutely no appetite whatsoever. None, and usually that boy is a real snack hound. He also refused to drink anything, including diet 7-Up, which is his favorite.
• He was nearly catatonic in the mornings, sleeping until noon or so, then perked up considerably in the afternoons, thereby fooling me into believing he was getting better.

When I finally took him to the doctor on the third day of his illness, the doctor did a rapid throat culture which was positive for strep. He started the amoxicillin at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning he bounced out of bed wanting to go to school, which request was denied on the fear that he would infect everyone else, whose parents would then hate us forever. Today, 48 hours after appearing to be at death’s door, it’s like he was never sick at all.

So, you know, it’s a dicey thing. Illnesses don’t always follow the common course, and it’s often tough to determine how sick a kid really is. Word to the wise. Have a good weekend, and watch out for spitting kids with sore throats.

Oh shit, enough about rain. In other news:

Yesterday I brought the boys home in my van when Matt announced he urgently had to pee. As we’ve allowed him to do this in the past, he ran over to a nearby streetside tree and proceeded to pee on that. Sam must’ve thought it looked like fun, because the next thing I knew he had run over and was also peeing on the tree. So here I am in the middle of the street with my arms full of packages and my two male offspring marking their territory like dogs.

Did I punish them? I did not. What I did was tell them You know, if you pee on a tree, you might accidentally pee on a BEE, and then the bee will fly over and sting you on the peepee.

Without further ado, they agreed that peeing was better done indoors. Psychology: It really works.

First-grader Sam is perfecting his reading skills, meaning that he is meant to read out loud every day at home. I try to turn this into family fun by having Sam read aloud to Boolie from her baby-oriented board books, most of which depict happy babies going about their daily routine with a few words about what they are doing in each picture.

Sam can read the words with ease, but he’s not content to leave it at that. Instead, he looks at the picture and editorializes. For instance:

Oh, look at me; you think I’m a nice sweet little girl, right? Well, the minute you leave my room I’m going to throw this bear out the window. And by the way, I did a big fudgie in my diaper. A great big one, really stinky. Just for you.

Boolie just listens, wide-eyed. And I prompt Sam, what does it REALLY say?

Teddy bear, he admits.

While he’s getting educated, Sam is nothing if not educational. I can only wonder what his sister makes of the stories he tells.

It’s happened: Sam has learned to use the Internet.

He’s been using a computer since kindergarten, but now he can read and write well enough to type a search term into my Google window. And what does he use it for? So far, to shop for action figures, of course. I’ve got to get up to speed on parental controls and filters and so on, before he discovers porn or even (God help us) anime. I have to harass him to get the hell off the computer and do his homework.

Simultaneously, although I have a general “no video games” policy, he dug out my ancient Game Boy (from 1992, in the old putty grey color) with the Tetris cartridge in it, and has become addicted to Tetris, just like his mother and father before him. It’s as though some mysterious electronics hormone has kicked in, and suddenly he’s a full-fledged tech-head geek. In a strange way, I’m proud of him for it, probably because I’m such a poindexter myself.

Sam has been sick with some sort of flu since last Friday, and I’m now down with it too. My mission today: To get this kid to stay in bed already so he can return to school tomorrow and go trick-or-treating tomorrow night.

See y’all in November . . .