Comedienne

I read some of my posts and thought they were a little too sober-not bad at all on its own ,but if you start writing posts with the aim to emulate Erma Bombeck and end up sounding not at all like her,I think you have succeeded,but not how you wanted to!
And then it strikes me-I am not Erma Bombeck-so I don't have to write like her.I can write what I want to the way I want to.The idea is that you feel satisfied with what you have written,you feel strongly enough about what you have written,and of course hopefully somebody famous will stumble upon your blog and go,"Wow!!" and have you on their TV show!!
So here is my 'so not Erma Bombeck' post.
Yesterday we volunteered at the Oregon Food Bank-repackaging peas into 2 pound packs.The process went thus:There was this huge tub/bin filled with maybe 25 lbs of frozen peas at one end of a table.Two volunteers scooped them into smaller plastic bags,weighed them to see if it was 2 pounds,adjusted the amount of peas and passed the bags onto the next set of volunteers who wrung the air out of the bags,twisted them and shut them with tie-twists.These were then packed twelve to a cardboard box by a third set of volunteers and sealed and taken off to be weighed and placed on huge pallets and moved into storage.There were volunteers whose job was just to keep an eye out for replacements-boxes,plastic bags,ties,peas....the work went on uninterrupted because you did not catch a break-the peas kept coming,you never ran out of supplies and well, it was too efficiently run!!
At our table-there were two ladies to pack the peas,but it was just me to tie the bags up and my son and another little boy to arrange them in the boxes and seal them and take them away.The two kids also had to do that job at two other tables.All in all it was a busy two hours!I went crazy tying the bags up.I even managed to spill some beans-no pun there!-but overall,I survived.
Oh!Did I mention that this was all inside a cold storage room where the temperature was ,well low enough that the peas did not defrost?
I did not notice how much I had frozen up until we walked out to take a tour of the facilities.Returning warm circulation of blood caused this itch in my fingers that was unbearably torturous!And the temperature in the Pacific Northwest was below freezing all through the day yesterday,so I did not feel much better afterwards either.So now,my son and I are nursing sore throats and this vague sense of a chill somewhere in the core of your body,which the resident scout says,indicates hypothermia.I know a thimble full of whiskey or some such spirit will probably revive my 'spirit'-but I am planning on sticking to chicken soup and  an Indian style concoction made of ginger,pepper and such noxious herbs and potions that will keep this from becoming a full fledged fever.Anyway,I digressed.
The table in front of us was made up of volunteers from Intel,and at one point the tween that I bore declared in a voice loud enough for two more tables to hear that they (the software engineers who probably have enough education between them to fill up a  Masters degree classroom at PSU) were not packing the boxes efficiently and proceeded to remove every pea package and repack it just so,so that all the bags fit well without bulging out ,while my eyes did.The sheer temerity!!Full disclosure-he was taught by another kindly volunteer who, it seemed, had done this a million times.
The image from the book 'Outliers' came to mind.The "Concerned Parenting" where you foster the child's natural curiosity rather than let natural growth take its course?Confident children take charge-yesterday's episode seemed like that to me-but it also reeked  of disrespect-he was right about the packaging but not very good at conveying the message to elders-so my praise was tinged with disapproval-you cannot get away with talking to elders like that!But obviously I did not ask him to apologize because then I would be considered a over-controlling mean Mom who does not encourage her child in his independence!Ah,the vagaries of life!!To be or not to be-a concerned parent-that is the question!!I wonder if the aforementioned 'spirits' might guide me in this dilemma!