Saturday gems

I love Saturdays. For some many reasons. One is getting to go visit Juanita, who provides endless entertainment. Another is DC bucket list activities.

As a bucket list activity, we headed down to the National Building Museum. Though it was family engineering day, we didn't let our child lack stand in the way. Besides, I think that a group of 20-somethings qualifies for the nouveau family category. (We're oh-so-modern.) We found ourselves at a table-making station, surrounded by all the newspaper and tape you could ever want. So there we were, in the midst of half-hearted 8-year-olds and over zealous fathers, making a newspaper table to see how much weight it could hold. We really poured our souls into this table. JP even brought out his knife, so we knew it was serious business. We drew up schematic after schematic and divided into task forces. When we were ready to proudly present our table, we brought it up for its moment in time. The weighing guy looked at us incredulously, but with no kids to be found, he accepted our over-achieving table.

Weighing guy: "You realize that you're competing against 5th graders, right?"

Me: "Yeah, this is how we get our kicks. We are utterly unsuccessful in normal life, so we have to compete against kids to prove our worth."

John: "Has anybody's been able to hold all the weight yet, or will ours be the first?"

Weighing guy: "Who do you think you are? Just because you're all adults, you think you have a market on strong newspaper tables? Of course others have withstood all the weight!"

Well, all right. Maybe he didn't say that. But his look said it all. Anyway, our pride was merited: our table held all the weight they could bring. In our excitement, we got a tad overconfident and told a 10-year-old boy to stand on it. Now the weighing guy's laughing.