Essays, Quotes and Hell's Kitchen

Last night, Simone was determined to get to bed early. The scheduling for "Hell's Kitchen" has the show on Thursday nights, well past Simone's bed time. She was going to sleep on the couch. She was going to sleep in bed. She was even going to sleep on the floor if nothing else was available.

After baby went to bed, Simone took the dog for a long walk in the snow-infested wonderland of Barrie (yes, it really DOES snow like this every single year). She returned to a quiet house, save for the sounds of the hockey game on the television. At least it wasn't "Toupie and Binoo" and their theme song... Perhaps she could fall asleep soon - hockey on tv puts Simone to sleep. Except that this game was actually pretty fun to watch! And then the real work began.

"Mom?" the 19 year old called from his apartment in Toronto and wanted to know whether the 10 year old had given Simone his message.

"Nope," said Simone, trying to watch the game.

"Well, I need your help. When you edited my essay, you said I needed to use footnotes but I don't know how to put in footnotes."

Luckily (!), Simone had not put away her computer for the night yet. "I'm sure it's 'insert' or something like that."

"I've got the latest version of Word. It's different."

Simone sighed and clicked on each tab at the top of the Word screen. "It's under 'Reference'," she told the 19 year old.

"Oh, yeah!" he says, somewhat sheepishly.

"All I did was look for it," Simone pointed out.

"Thanks, Mom," said the 19 year old.

"Hey, check out my outfit for my grad pictures tomorrow!" the 13 year old bounced down the stairs, wearing red shorts, a white dress shirt and a silver tie.

"Very nice," said Simone. "I especially like the shorts. Do try to wear something over them tomorrow. We're supposed to get a bit of a snowstorm."

As Simone tried to shut down her laptop, an email came in from her father.

"Can you help me with this quote?" he asked. "It's for the general public."

So Simone, being a good (albeit tired) Samaritan, looked at the quote. She did what she could, consulted with her hubby, and rehashed the quote, hoping against hope that the fatigue she felt did not leak through into the quote.

Lo and behold, the hockey game went into overtime, digressing into a shoot-out, and Hell's Kitchen came on. So Simone began answering emails from her flickr site and... boy oh boy, missed her bedtime yet again. Since the alarm clock invariably rings shortly before 6 am every weekday morning, Simone was doomed to another short sleep. Hell's Kitchen captivates in a "Oh boy, these people actually volunteer to get tortured!!!" sort of way and Simone, while having no aspirations to get on the show (What would she cook? An egg?) absolutely loves it.