kamikaze balloon shapes and laffy taffy

You look like crap says my husband from the safety of the kitchen. Thank God because I feel like crap and would not want to appear unbalanced to the world.  Once again I am spewing over with germs and I woke up in a cocoon of misery, congested and dry-throated, the head a solid block of phlegm. The only solution to this viral invasion is to sequester myself on the couch with Kessler's and Puff's Plus and the Coen Brothers.

And yet being the good grandma I can sometimes be I agreed to take three boisterous boys to a warehouse behind a Walmart on the city limits. The place used to be a strip joint until the good Christian citizens of the community found some legal schmegal zoning ordinances that forced the women-objectifying slobs out of town.  Now it is visited by children and there are large air-filled kamikaze balloon shapes designed to lure kids into their inner chambers and allow them to be pounced and trampled upon by even larger kids. I had to sign a waiver the size of a mortgage contract and I'm not sure just what it all contained but I did need to verify we were all wearing socks.

At any point during our stay a child is crying somewhere and some of them quite intensely.  Trays of ice cream and sliced birthday cake go by, kids are eating  foot-long pieces of Laffy Taffy and the sugar load of each minor child here must be quadruple the diabetic limit.  All that concentrated energy is comparable to the blood levels of methadone junkies and kids are literally bouncing off the walls. I really want to go home.

The boys are fighting again and that is to be expected due to the variables listed above plus the fact they have been in constant company of each other for the whole of Christmas vacation.  I announce, we might as well go home and they quickly become angels with red sweaty faces and innocent expressions that ask, whadda I do now?  Oh hell, here's a buck, go buy some taffy.