I somtimes have problems with late May and early June, because I spend the whole time waiting for things. Waiting for the NHL finals to be over, because every year that is a super-huge deal to me. Waiting for the school year to be over, because although the last day of school isn’t until June 19, this is the fuck-you time of year, commemorated by Open House — which is tomorrow night, and which is the annual Woodland Elementary aren’t you glad this crap is almost done? celebration. We are looking forward to lots of late nights goofing around, watching too much TV and playing Wii. Oh wait, we’re doing that shit already. We’re all about late-spring fever.

The year goes by so quickly — I don’t mean the calendar year but the school year, which starts at the first breath of Labor Day and ends approximately now (or five minutes ago, if you ask us). The summer goes by in an eyeblink. We have a trip to Sequoia planned for the Monday after school ends, followed by a trip to La Quinta [Palm Springs area] for July 6-9 to celebrate Sam’s 8th birthday. No sooner do we get back from La Quinta than the Orange County Fair starts, lasting a month, on the heels of which are Boolie’s 4th birthday, Erika’s 25th, and then — gasp — the first day of school. All this is punctuated with trips to beach and pool. Summer is always a blur.

So I guess we’re lucky to have a pause right now. The boys’ school rather wisely suspends and/or lightens homework for the kids in June, and waiting out the end of the NHL season always goes by too fast. Meanwhile, we’ll welcome home our new baby, a juvenile pink-toed tarantula, who is due home tomorrow morning. You gotta love spider babies: they don’t require expensive car seats and don’t scream in your ear all night. Which is appropriate for the time of year when we all stop to take a breath before the next round of family life begins.

Wait. Do I still have a blog here? Well, my God, of course I do. Except when I don’t. But Woodland Elementary School has gone into its usual end-of-school-year posture of standing on my neck and standing on it hard.

California has a legally mandated free school guarantee. Theoretically, my children are meant to attend school for free; due to the fact that Ben is disabled and I’m presently unemployed, they even get a free lunch. (And they say there is no such thing!) But even public schools always have their hand out. At the end of the year, for some reason, they hit us up especially hard.

Today was the Woodland Elementary Jog-A-Thon, where kids run laps for money with nothing to show for it but the free T-shirt. I pledged $25 per child — a pretty typical amount. Just this past Saturday, the Kaiser-Woodland carnival was held, whereby all the kids at both schools were exhorted to eat and drink and play, proceeds to benefit both schools. Last week I shelled out $10 each for two Woodland T-shirts for the boys. Every Friday they have Spirit Day, at which time (surprise!) everyone is expected to wear their Woodland shirts.

Next week is Open House. That will involve the Book Fair, which benefits both Scholastic and the schools, and a burgers ‘n’ chips dinner supplied for free by a local merchant and paid for generously by the parents, proceeds to the schools. Not to mention the end-of-year teacher gifts and the snacks for Jog-A-Thon and so on and on and on.

I’m not really complaining. (Or am I? I believe I’ve just kvetched at length.) We are fortunate to have a world-class school district with extraordinary teachers and maximum 20-child classes. Compare that to LAUSD which has teachers who border on illiteracy and class sizes of 30 or so. Newport-Mesa USD relies largely on local property taxes, which are hefty, meaning that we haven’t been touched by the waves of teacher layoffs that have touched other districts in the county. The fallout is a bit daunting — I had to attend a brief meeting and provide three forms of proof of residency and property ownership last month just to keep our boys in NMUSD schools — but the benefits are considerable.

Still, I’ll be glad when a month has gone by and they stop squeezing us for this year. The last day of school is June 19. For my boys and for my checkbook, it can’t come early enough.

Over the weekend we again went to San Diego for a mini-vacation — to please Sam, we chose a less Mexican part of town. We stayed at the Embassy Suites San Diego Bay, near to Seaport Village, sort of near to the Gaslamp Quarter. It was the best compromise I could find between a potential flophouse and the fucking Ivy.

I have to admit, I was gratified at how kid-friendly the place turned out to be. The desk clerk wisely put us on the 12th floor, at the very top of the hotel, and all three of them adored zooming up and down the atrium wall in the glass elevators. There is an indoor pool, which impressed them, and the hot tub was relaxingly full of parents and kids rather than yuppies sipping cognac. The evening manager’s reception (happy hour) and the morning full breakfast, both of which are complimentary, were enough of a free-for-all that no one paid much attention to my little darlings.

The biggest challenge of the weekend was helping Boolie to navigate. The hotel and Horton Plaza were full of sights that boggled her little mind, and she walked around with her head in a swivet the entire time. What she forgot was to face forward while walking, with the result that she walked smack into a number of people and things. The worst of these was a solid palm tree trunk in Horton Plaza; I narrowly steered her away from a nasty-looking metal signpost just before she made painful contact.

The main purpose of the weekend, really, was to meet up with an old undergrad friend of mine I hadn’t seen in upward of 30 years. And not just any undergrad friend, either; he was one of my classmates in the Freshman Honors Program at the University of Delaware, an experiment in what would happen if you took a bunch of propellerheads out of high school a year early, plopped them together in a rarefied university setting away from home, and fed them a diet of all-honors courses and colloquia. (The answer to this was Lots of partying, allnighters and sex, but it’s also true that many lifelong interests and friendships were formed in the process.)

(Editor’s knote: For those of you who may be wondering, the classmate in question was one Philip Stanley. Take a bow, darlin’.)

Anyway, it was a fun reunion. I don’t go to school reunions, and when you’re seeing a classmate you haven’t seen in 30 years, you’re understandably nervous, hoping they don’t think you’re too decrepit or too much of a fuck-up or that your kids are fucking obnoxious. Philip was — is — a dear friend, and therefore not prone to the sort of snark that infests most reunion situations. Either way, he seemed to like my kids and hit it off with Ben, and there was none of that long-pause awkwardness that can happen when two reuniting old friends discover they don’t really have much of anything to say. True to FHP tradition, we stayed up way too late drinking white wine, and duly felt like walking dogshit the next morning.

But the true highlight of the weekend — sorry, Embassy Suites and sorry, Philip — was the she-crab soup. I have already had on about this on Facebook, but like anyone with a new love, I’m over the moon and must speak and speak of it. There are very few foods you want to eat in a dark room with your eyes closed; much of the time, I really don’t like food all that much. It is messy and time-consuming and often not worth the trouble. This stuff, though, rocked my world. I had it at the Harbor House restaurant at Seaport Village, and I’m eternally grateful to my Southern friends for tipping me off that such a thing exists, and that it is probably the food they serve in Heaven.

I’ve spent a few hours in the ensuing days Googling and Googling until my fingers are sore to find a place in Orange County which serves the stuff. The best I’ve been able to do is a fish market on the Redondo Beach pier which sells not the soup, but actual she-crabs, according to rumor. You probably don’t want to imagine the spectacle of me struggling with any crab more complex than a king crab leg; substantial swearing and cut fingers are involved in the process, with very little actual meat as the reward. Still, it may come to that. Honest to God, if you haven’t had the stuff, go out and correct this mistake immediately. You’ll thank me.

So today it’s back to reality, the boys back to school and me to my loads of laundry and neglected housework. Our next getaway isn’t until Sequoia National Park right after summer vacation starts, and now that we’re getting the family travel thing down to a science (and have time on our hands due to our unemployed and/or disabled states), it’s hard to stay home. Plus I’m such a lazy bitch that the prospect of having people make the beds and pick up the towels is really, really appealing. Either way, it was a good weekend, and I imagine we’ll be back. If only for the she-crab soup.

Sometime after we arrived solidly in middle age, Ben and I separately became aware that we each had become invisible to the opposite sex. You know, when you’re younger, guys or girls passing on the street meet your eyes, they smile. As you get older, you don’t look to strangers like someone they’d like to meet; you look like their dentist. I’m 48 and have had four kids. Ben is 53, somewhat overweight, and prematurely grey. We look like someone’s parents. He’s invisible to girls and I’m invisible to guys. It’s been that way for so long we can’t remember any other way.

Except that recently I picked up some black capri pants. They’re really sort of an exercise tight, I suppose, which is sort of funny if you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen the inside of the gym. But they’re comfortable, and rather form-fitting. Ben opened his eyes wide the first time he saw me in them. Those pants are very flattering, he said. And I caught him staring at my ass for the first time in years. Strange.

Then today I wore those same pants to the grocery store and noticed that suddenly I was visible to men. Every guy I encountered who wasn’t actually in the company of a woman smiled and said Hi to me. Not just senior citizens, either. Guys in their 20s, even. Seven or eight of them. At first I didn’t even realize it was me they were talking to, but unless they had imaginary friends, it was me. I hardly knew how to react anymore. After a few minutes I got the hang of a faint return smile and a quiet Hi back. It was insanely freaky.

Because, of course, I didn’t suddenly turn human. I didn’t suddenly turn female. I just put on some pants that made my ass look good. Those guys weren’t saying hi to me; they were saying hi to my ass. They didn’t even care, apparently, about the clearly fortysomething woman accompanying that ass. And I don’t know which is more pathetic: that fact, or how secretly pleased I was at the attention.

Meanwhile, of course, I’m buying seven more pairs of these pants and will not take them off until someone pries them off my cold, dead ass.