Chairman Mao

On today's Vanpool!:

* Nick/Saul always gets to the stop at the very last minute. Imagine, every day, watching a 55-ish Middle Eastern man sprint across a major state highway. To make things even more comical, it's a grassy highway median. This grass hasn't been cut since the Goo Goo Dolls topped the charts -- the weeds and grass are seriously like cornstalks at this point. So Nick/Saul runs across this every day.

Today, everyone was laughing as he did.

"It looks like a commercial for a weedkiller," one of the guys up front said.

Then when Nick/Saul entered the van, the same guy said: "We all just had a laugh at your expense."

* Barbara is on a cruise in Greece/Turkey. This prompted me, Jennifer and Nick/Saul (who sounds like Count Chocula) to do our best Barbara impersonations.

* Traffic was awful today. I still made it to work at 8:20. This is because Charlie was a complete lunatic on the road and I thought I was going to die at several points.

* The guys up front were talking about new advents in waste disposal transportation technology.

* In the back, we started talking about China somehow. Jennifer's sister is in Beijing on business for the rest of the year.

"She asked what she could get my son as a gift. So I told her that it might be cool to have a communist red bookbag," she said. "But she sent me a bookbag that had Mao's face on it. There's no way I could let my son carry a bookbag to school that had Chairman Mao's face on it."