Rain, The Minotour, Mrs. Braddock's Laugh and What's Baked

Raindrops on roses
and echeverria
Dear, dear Jesus
thank you for rain 
and the plumeria.



Do you remember The Efforts To Acquire The Chariot and then Busgate? In a nutshell, it took about eighteen months and some serious Insurance and MediCal wrangling to get a wheelchair for the girl (because, you know, I might have been making up her disabilities and trying to acquire a $10,000 piece of metal for the hell of it), and then too many IEPs and phone calls to LAUSD that brought to mind an episode of Monty Python to get a lift bus for her. Sophie is supposed to have been riding in her chariot on a lift bus for, basically, years, but it wasn't until this week that one mysteriously arrived at her school. I got a call on Tuesday afternoon from her bus aide, Saint Charles, at about 3:30.  The lift is broken, Charles reported, we're going to be late because we're waiting for a mechanic. I threw back my head and laughed, Mrs. Braddock-style (watch this scene, if you don't know what I'm talking about). God, I love that scene. How about her psychedelic shirt, Mr. Braddock's robe, his drink, the half-baked comment -- hmmm, I digress. I told Charles that rather than wait for the LAUSD bus system mechanic (visions in my tiny little mother mind™ of The Man Behind the Curtain in Oz pulling all those levers to get the bus mechanic ), I would drive over to Sophie's school and pick her up myself, so by the time I got there, picked her up and brought her home it was about 4:15ish, and just an hour after she had been dismissed. At 5:30, the telephone rang, and when I picked it up, the Efficient LAUSD Robot said, This is a call from the LAUSD bus system. Your daughter PAUSE Soooophie is on a bus that will be approximately 75 minutes late.

Go back to that link of Mrs. Braddock's fantastic laugh.

Today, the lift bus pulled up while I stood at attention on the sidewalk and then waited as The Busdriver did some kind of maneuvering inside, walked to the front of the bus and then down the stairs and came out. I told her that I didn't think the lift would clear the curb, that she would probably need to back up to the driveway, so she stood and stared a bit and then walked back to the bus, shifted it into reverse and backed it up. The beeping sound emanating from the bus was so loud that I had to cover my ears. When the bus driver climbed back out of the bus to deal with the lift, the beeping continued, and as the lift lowered, I saw that Sophie had startled into a seizure so I asked the bus driver to please turn off the beeping sound and simulataneously put my hands over Sophie's ears to muffle the cacophony. I also noticed that the bus has a name, and it's Minotour. You can't make this shit up, as my old writing instructor used to say. The letters, spelled exactly like that, are right above the door. Now, I am prone to metaphorical flights of fancy, as you know, and I know you lovely Readers are, too. Let's have a game about a bus named Minotour.

Give me what you got.