The Office

I always thought I was pretty cool when I could invite my friends to a pool party at dad's office! There was a slide, a diving board, soda, candy, and a jellybean-shaped pool. What more could a bunch of kids ask for? Even if it was just a family party, it was awesome. We would yell for mom or dad to watch as we did some amazing trick for the bazillionth time, and our voiced would echo loudly. I remember taking one day of swimming lessons there with Larry Jone's wife as the teacher. She had us blow bubbles through our noses with our faces in the water. That was enough for me. I wouldn't take another lesson (I didn't learn to swim until I was forced to in after school classes with Ms. Painter in the Municipool in the 6th or 7th grade...brutal). I much preferred getting around with a life jacket. Then, there was the time we all remember when mom jumped into the pool with her clothes on because of a dare/bet. It was awesome. It was really fun to swim there in the winter time because you could open the doors and the whole room would fog up until you could hardly see a thing.

Cleaning the office was such an ordeal for me! I remember going and "helping" mom do it back in the day. I think I mostly read magazines. Slowly, I was given more and more responsibility. Finally mom stopped coming all together. Us kids had to clean it all by ourselves. The task was enormous and took hours. Often we would sit in the kitchen and think of how we would divide up the cleaning. One proposal would get rejected after another until an hour had gone by and we had done nothing to show for it except drink a soda and eat crackers. It was pathetic. Somehow we managed to get it done, even with garbage juice in most of the bins from all the half empty soda cans that would get tossed in them. YUCK!