Girls' Night

Do you remember when I invited the four local women over to my house in December?  Well, they invited me back! This is exactly the third time, in my four years here, that I've been invited to a native, or even long-term Restignon's house. When I moved to London it took me six months to get an invite. New York took three months. Even so, I think that three invites in four years for French country people ain't that bad.

It was Isabelle, Max's teacher who called me with the invite, although the event would take place at Monique's, the other pre-school teacher whose class I sing with on Monday mornings. The other invitees were Sabine and Gwen (the framing class teacher). Fabienne, the adjoint-mayor of a nearby town, couldn't make it.

When I heard the food would be Mexican-themed, I knew I had found the right folks to hang with. Gwen was making margaritas, and Isabelle quesadillas, so I volunteered to bring home-made guacamole and mango salsa.

I was told to arrive any time after six p.m. So around seven I drove up the winding dirt road to Monique's, which was kind of weird because I knew my kids were just next door, across a field, spending the night at their grandparents' house. Only Isabelle had arrived before me, and she, Monique and I sat around the kitchen chatting while Isabelle made quesadilla dough. An hour later, Gwen and Sabine wandered in, with Sabine's kids in tow since she hadn't been able to find a babysitter.

Gwen got the blender going and the party officially started. We tried to avoid the topic of our kids (all of us have two or three each, ranging from Lucia's age to a twenty-four year old). We tried to stay off the topic of our men, since one divorced a few years ago (I don't know the details); one's husband ran off with another woman and became a shepherd in the Alps; one's husband ran off with a farmer's wife last year, and she just recently took him back; and the last found out her husband was cheating during and after her pregnancy, but almost two years later she hasn't decided if she's going to kick him out or not. Next to them, Laurent seems like a saint. I couldn't even complain about his snoring without sounding ridiculous.

So with the topics of kids and men on the "banned" list, what did we talk about? Believe it or not, about the same things my New York friends and I used to talk about at Stingy Lulu's on our weekly girls' nights: drink recipes, beauty tips, hot men (just not our hot men), embarrassing things we've done, and what we do on the rare occasions that we get extremely drunk (cry, leave the party and go wander outside, get up on chairs or tables and dance, and take our clothes off...I'm not telling you which one I am).

My only big "outsider" foot-in-mouther was when Monique was talking about seeing the movie "Last Chance Harvey"* and I was so surprised to hear the name of that film in that setting that I blurted out, "Oh, that's my friends Nicola and Joel's film!" Bragging that you are friends with the director and producer of a film someone just saw has got to be the single best way to ensure you will not fit into a group of women in small-village France. I quickly said something lame about how it's impossible not to run into all sorts of interesting people when you live in New York, and then kind petered off awkwardly because I was afraid I sounded like I meant that you didn't meet all sorts of interesting people when you lived in Restigne. But besides that and telling them my reaction to extreme drunkenness, which I don't think they will soon forget, I didn't make any other major bloopers.

But even though it felt SO GOOD to sit around on the floor with a group of women, drinking margaritas and scooping up salsa and guacamole with Old El Paso chips, I couldn't really loosen up. I couldn't shake off my awkward feeling. It was actually a somewhat difficult five hours for me. And the reason was the language.

I have my work vocabulary down pat. I have shopping vocabulary, veterinarian vocabulary, hair salon vocabulary. I have phone-answering vocabulary, speaking to in-laws vocabulary, and polite conversation vocabulary. What I do not have is a vocabulary that allows for making fun of things, the slightest bit of sarcasm, or the word "g-spot". 

Besides the girls from Laurent's Group, none of whom I see very often since they live in Paris, I have never had a French girlfriend. When I lived in Paris, back in the Paleolithic Era, all of my friends were Irish. I tried to make French girlfriends, but no one was interested. Which I hadn't really facilitated with my vocabulary black hole.

Mind you, I didn't have boyfriend vocabulary when Laurent and I met, but it didn't really matter since all we did in the beginning was make out. However, since I wasn't planning on using that tactic to make friends with the local women, I'm a bit stuck.

When Sabine and I hang out, once a month maybe, I always feel a bit bad because I can't even make her laugh...except at my faux pas. And when she talks, I have to stop her every once in a while to ask what she means because she's using a word she would use with a girlfriend - something casual, slangy or abbreviated. Unless she uses normal, formal language, I don't get it all. The nice thing about girlfriends is not having to think when you chat, laughing about anything and everything, and making fun of the hard things in life in order to make them a bit easier to take. And I don't yet have those skills.

So I have a plan to learn French girlfriend language - or simply "friend" language, for that matter, so I can stop speaking English all of the time with Nicolas. This is the point where those of you who know me well can laugh. Because, as I usually do when facing a challenge, I've made a list:

1. Buy some French chick-flicks and watch them over and over again.

2. Get some Bridget Jones-type of books in French and memorize the dialogue parts.

3. Subscribe to a couple of fashion or trash magazines and comb their pages for expressions I don't know.

For my regular French, I already listen to books-on-tape in the car and France Inter (similar to American "Public Radio"), peruse some news-sites, and read nice, well-written fiction. But none of these have equipped me with what I need: to have a discussion that doesn't make my cerebral cortex send off puffs of white steam, to laugh until I have margarita coming out my nose, or to tell a really good story to someone I like and be hit with that warm fuzzy feeling I get when I know that, just for a moment, I made them smile.

*Called "Last Chance for Love" in France

Farmhouse Non-Update: A Photo-Journal of Despair

The last time I wrote you about The Farmhouse was July 2008. And I wasn't even writing about The Farmhouse. I was writing about the little house on our property that we call "The Boulangerie". (The post in which I showed off my top-notch Photoshop skills). 

Several of you have been asking me about what is going on with The Farmhouse. I know...it's not fair: after giving you all of those juicy progress reports in the beginning, I haven't served up anything to quench your house-restoration thirst.

Well, the reason I haven't told you anything is because there hasn't been anything to tell. Nothing has happened. Nada. For yonks. And I've come up with two reasons why: one certain, and one suspected. The certainty is that we spent our entire house-restoration budget in the first two years. As usual, everything cost more than planned, and we had to stop at a point somewhere in between "camping out" and "all done". 

And the second reason, the suspected one, is that Laurent got a mean case of House Restoration Burn-Out. And you all know what the remedy for that is: hiring someone else to finish it for you. Which takes us back to reason #1: no money. 

The only real progress has been on a stairway that we started building two years ago, but I didn't want to show you photos until it was completely done. (Which will be another month or two or five, depending on how motivated our stonemason friends are feeling.)

So I thought I might change things around a bit and instead of showing you the things we've done, I'll show you the things we haven't done. The things I have to look at every day. The things that are giving me a permanent eye-twitch. 

Numero Uno on that list is this:

I wake up every morning to see this bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, above my bed in what is now our bedroom, but will one day be the library. 

The bare lightbulb is my fault. I painted the room in those nasty shades of blue that you see to the left, after being completely fooled by the test-patches I did. It looked grey to start with, not merry-go-round blue. I kept telling myself that, as the room got bluer and bluer, and finally I was done and it was awful.

So I'm painting over the blue in white, but not as a final solution. The final solution will most probably be this:

which, unlike its predecessor, does not offend the eye when juxtaposed with the dark grey marble fireplace and beige and reddish terra-cotta floor tiles. But I will also be putting this Farrow & Ball wallpaper on two of the walls: 
above and around the bookshelves. Which haven't yet been built. So I don't know how much wallpaper I'll need (it's expensive) and until the wallpaper samples arrive, I'm not absolutely sure about the paint, which is also too expensive to just slap on the whole room. And until the ceiling moulding is painted, I shouldn't really re-hang the Art-Deco light fixture that is original to the room. Renovation is a complicated science. I suspect they offer a degree in it at MIT.

Moving on to the other ocular offenses...

We still haven't stripped the white paint from the 18th-century shutters that are serving as our cupboard doors. I know that some of you voted to leave it on, but since the day that I decided not to, it has bugged me to look at them. And apparently there is some technical difficulty to getting the paint off. The wood is too old to sandblast without damaging it, and with the several centuries of paint-layers coating them, it took Laurent six hours to do just one by hand. I am willing to put thirty hours of sandpapering in just to get the five remaining doors done. But between kids and teaching, where the hell do I find thirty hours, much less thirty minutes?

Which brings us to the two upstairs bedrooms. I am actually fine with this...

and with this...

since I realize that I will either need to write a new "Twilight" series or win the lottery in order to get these bedrooms done. What I am not alright with is this:

which is what I see every time I walk out my front door into the garden. It gives me flashbacks to rural Alabama. It makes me feel like I'm living on the "before" set of The Beverly Hillbillies.

We are leaving the old hangar up in order to protect all of the building materials it is sheltering. But how many years of sheltering will those materials require? Any additional year feels like one too many to me.

Last year, in a frenzy of despair, I tore all of the rotting and sagging roof tiles off of the front half of the little stone building on the right. I was going to continue with the other half when Laurent stopped me. He felt strongly that we should leave up something to protect these ancient farming machines from the elements:

Exactly what we will do with the ancient farming machines has not been clarified. But respecting his wishes, I carted this one into the barn myself.

However, the others are so heavy that it took several large men to move them to where they are now, and I haven't been able to round up several large men to dump them in a place where they can inoffensively await their mystery fate.

But almost worse than the hangar's hanging slates and rusted metal siding (which makes one hell of a racket when it's windy) is this:

Look on the far left. It's a big white van. Completely broken down, sitting in my front yard. Some junk dealer happily gave it to Laurent and his dad when they needed to move something big. We can't take it to the junkyard because Laurent can't find the paperwork. So now it's ours. For eternity.

Here's a better view...

I have a broken-down car sitting in front of my house. If only it had a tree growing through it, it would look like I was copying my parents' neighbor's yard in the mountains of Tennessee. 

You can take the girl away from the rednecks, but you can't take the redneck out of the girl. Or so it seems.

The Best Toys Are Not Toys

We have toys. We have swings. We have books. We have costumes. We have bicycles. We have computers. We even have a sandbox, for god's sake! 

So someone tell me why my children's (and dog's) favorite past-time is sitting in a stationary car.

Lucia's got the emergency kit ready, 

in case Max succeeds in hot-wiring the car.

Ella doesn't even like the kids. She stays as far away as possible from them. Unless they're in the car, and then she's their best friend. 

I'd love to know just where it is they want to go so badly. I'd take them. Really. If only they would tell me.

Max practicing his cursing and gesticulating skills. 

(Both necessities for a French driver's license.)

Photo of the Day

How French boys pick up their "culture" at an early age.

Sorry for the bathroom humor,

but this was definitely one of those

"run for your camera" moments.

And I swear I didn't buy the "Gala"!

The Ghost of Classes Past

A few weeks ago I had to attend a training session at the university on creating English lessons on iPods for our new high-tech language lab. Meetings are one of the things that we teachers are expected to do without pay, and in our free time. 

In the beginning, I resented this kind of thing, especially because my driving time is two hours round-trip. The meeting inevitably starts a half-hour late, and once it does, everyone begins asking inane questions or sharing past experiences of theirs that are of no benefit whatsoever to anyone else. You end up with a two-hour session that could have been communicated in fifteen minutes or even by email. And as you begin fishing for reasons to leave early, you realize that a few people seem to be enjoying themselves. Like this is the only social interaction they ever have.

Finally, I decided to skip any meeting where I wouldn't personally profit from what was being discussed. Which has been most of them. If input is needed, I send my contribution ahead of time by email, along with my excuses. But when the iPod training was announced, I thought, "Maybe this time I will actually learn something." I made the long drive into town, showing up at the meeting place fifteen minutes late, so as not to be the first person to arrive. I wasn't the first. I was the second. Out of ten.

The other teacher and I hung out for a while until we spotted one of the heads of department, who said that our tech guy and the Mac trainer had gone to lunch at Buffalo Grill and may be a little bit late. An hour later, all ten teachers were sitting around waiting for the missing tech trainers. "I'm not going to smile and say, 'Oh, that's OK'," grumbled Tania. "I'm always too polite. This time when these guys show up I'm going to tell them what I think!" "Me too," I said, trying to show some solidarity.

Long after the scheduled meeting time, the trainers walked in. "Well, you finally made it!" said the head of department to the men as we filed into the training room silently. That wasn't good enough for me. I walked up to one of them and said, "Do you know what time the meeting was supposed to start? You kept us waiting an hour and a half." "But our training classes this morning ran a bit late, and we had to go to lunch!" the sheepish twenty-something boy protested feebly. 

"You had to go for a two-hour lunch at Buffalo Grill? I ate my lunch in the car during my hour's drive here. Couldn't you have just bought a sandwich across the street and started our class on time?" The boy looked at me in shock, as if I had just uttered the most offensive of gastronomic blasphemies, and walked away to skulk behind his computer. "I consider this the height of rudeness!" I called to his retreating figure. He shrugged his shoulders at me, looking surprisingly frightened for an on-the-defense Frenchman. "That's the way to tell him," Tania said, emerging from her hiding place behind me.

I stayed an hour and then drove back to Restigne to pick up Max from school. It had been just enough time to learn one or two new tricks, but certainly not worth wasting half of my precious day-off.

Afterwards, I learned that the guy I had chewed out was the new audio-visual support technician for ours and a few other departments, and the other, older, man was a traveling trainer sent by Apple as part of our purchase of the iPod teaching system. I suspected that the trainer had insisted on being taken out to lunch, and that it probably wasn't our guy's fault at all. Except for the fact that he could have grown a backbone and told the traveling trainer, "No". But he was really young after all, I mused to myself, and I didn't have much of a backbone at work at his age either.

The next week I was in the language lab when the young technician walked in. I gave a polite smile and nodded my head at him as he talked to the lab monitor. Then he made his way over to me. I decided that whatever he said, I had to stand my ground. I wasn't going to be a pushover and apologize. He looked at me uncomfortably and said in French, "Were you a teacher at the University of Blois around three years ago?" "Um, yes...?" I stuttered, completely thrown off. He nodded, gravely, as if confirming his suspicion. "You were my English teacher."

I was speechless. You mean, my students don't drop into a black hole of non-existence as soon as they walk out of my classroom? The thought that they actually went on with their lives after I got through with them was a troubling revelation. And the thought that they could show up years later and be my audio-visual technician was even more disturbing.

"I was?" I finally stammered. "I have so many students, it's hard to remember everyone," I replied feebly, racking my brain for any memory of his face. Was he one of the bad guys I threw out of class? Was he the one I lost my cool with and said, "Are you planning on chatting for the rest of class, or are you going to finally shut up?" drawing laughter and "Oohs!" from the rest of his classmates. No, I had a very slight memory of an extremely shy guy who sat at the back of the class hoping I wouldn't call on him. I breathed a sigh of relief. At least he wasn't stalking me, waiting for his moment of vengeance.

I forgot my grudge, and began chatting with him, congratulating him at landing such a good job right out of university. Now I see him from time to time, and give him a smile and a wave. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't upbraid him again if he made me wait another hour and a half. And he must know that too. Because every time he says, "Bonjour", I see a little glimmer of fear in his eyes. Oh, yes. I've become the scary schoolmarm.

Operating Instructions

5:55a.m. The Farmhouse, master bedroom…two people lying in bed with eyes open.

“Is it 6 yet?”

“It will be in five minutes, when the alarm goes off.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Not much, how about you?”

“Not much.”

Get up. Take two Advils. It’s rare that you wake up with a headache.

Even though you had decided to go the solidarity route with Max, who isn’t allowed to eat or drink until after surgery, decide that what he doesn’t see doesn’t count, and gulp down some coffee and toast.

Load the bags that you packed last night into the car, including:

• In-hospital bag: slippers, toys, books, extra pajamas, Cat (Max’s “doudou” – the stuffed animal he sleeps with), and the dragon figurine he’s been inseparable from ever since I brought it back from Writing Week in Saintes.
  
• After-hospital bag: pants, pirate underwear, and button-up shirt and jacket (so as not to pull on his ears)
  
• Electronics bag: camera, phones, computer, plugs, and three DVDs (one of which new)
  
• Presents bag: (based on Max’s favorite things) two dragons with matching knights and the Biggie Gift…a Spiderman costume with built-in muscles.
  

6:00
Wake Max up, throwing a jacket and coat over his pajamas and, wrapping him in his Spiderman blanket, strap him into the car seat. Tell Laurent, who is driving, all of the gossip and news you can think of, because you’re both nervous and want to take your minds off of what is happening.

Max is not amused by his early-morning wake-up.

Unfortunately, you only have about ten minutes-worth of gossip and news, so turn the radio on and listen to the news the rest of the way. Max sings his own interpretation of the “ABC” song in the back seat (Max’s alphabet has over seventy letters, only six of which actually exist), and then spends the rest of the time asking you where Lucia is.

“She’s at Papi and Nanny’s.”

Silence from the back seat.

10 minutes later… “Where she go, Lucia?”

7:00

Arrive at hospital, check in, stow mountain of baggage in room, which is being shared by nine-year old Clement and parents. Nurse tells you that Max won’t be taken until mid-morning. 

"Let's see...we're putting tubes in his ears and taking his adenoids out, right?" You nod, worriedly. She takes his temperature with an under-arm thermometer, and gives him the hospital bracelet, which he claws at in annoyance for the rest of the day.

Max watching the Smurfs as if our lives all hang on the plotline.

7:30
Watch the Smurfs on the wall-unit mini-television with Max, who obviously thinks that the little blue men hold the meaning of life, seeing the intensity with which he watches them. You, yourself, are mesmerized by Clement’s mother’s makeup, which consists of pink lips outlined in blue and eyelids that are half-silver and half-blue (we’re talking vertical halves). She likes to talk. A lot.

Tickling contest. (I'm winning.)

8:00
Take a walk with Max down the hall and identify all of the animals that replace room numbers on the doors.

8:30
Open up first present, and go into hallway to play dragons and knights, then watch Max ride tricycle up and down the hallways. Pass a woman in the hallway who has obviously been crying all night. Feel extremely grateful that your kid’s problem is so minor.

Max plays dragons while Laurent plays nervous father.

9:00
Clement and his mother tell us that there is a game room. Spend the next hour there, in the company of seven other kids and their parents. Do your “invisible force-field” trick because everyone’s staring at you like a Martian for speaking English with your child.

10:00
Max is bored. You are bored. Let him take photos with your camera. Take turns tickling each other. Consider getting out next present, but hold out. Clement invites Max to watch him play Gameboy. That uses up another fifteen minutes. Check with nurse twice to see when Max’s spot is coming up on the schedule. She tries valiantly to hide her annoyance.

Max's photo of me and Laurent

11:00
A nurse has us strip Max down to t-shirt and pajama bottoms. We kiss him goodbye, and she takes him down to surgery in her arms. Thank the hospital gods that Max got such a cheerful and cuddly nurse, because he didn’t look worried at all as he left. Of course, that’s not the case for you and Laurent, who collapse into sniveling messes as soon as he turns the corner.

11:01
Laurent leaves to get some lunch and undergo a heart attack in peace. You begin writing your blog so you won’t have a meltdown in front of Clement and his parents. Clement is taken fifteen minutes later, and his parents leave for lunch. You stay, since it isn’t really clear when Max will return. The surgery is supposed to take fifteen minutes, and his stay in the “salle de reveil” (“wake-up room”) a half-hour.

12:00
The last hour of listening to children crying pitifully as they walk past your door has you on the edge of your nerves. They all sound like you think Max would, if he were under anesthesia. Finally, a nurse comes in and says that Max will be brought up soon. You and Laurent pace the hallway for the next ten minutes because you want to be near the elevator the second he gets off.

Max waking up from surgery

12:10
Max is wheeled off of the elevator on a rolling bed. He is crying. “He had a little ‘colere’ (‘fit’) in the wake-up room,” the nurse says, “so we took out his drip.” Max holds up his bandaged hand as evidence of the torture, and, as you arrive in the room you decide to pull out the big guns. Show him the Spiderman costume. He is too groggy to do anything but caress it in its plastic cover and watch t.v. Start up “Aladdin” on your computer, which you downloaded (legally) last night, and which is new-to-him. It holds his attention for the next hour and a half…

12:40
but you aren’t there to see it, because Laurent has sent you off to have your hair done since your regular salon is just down the street. (You suspect him of trying to get rid of you, since you're probably making him more anxious than he would be on his own.) Your beloved hair-magician, Estelle, tends to your tired tresses, and throws in a free seven-minute head massage since your son is in the hospital. You try to enjoy it, but can only think about getting back to Max's room.

2:40
Buy some chocolates at your favorite chocolate-maker. Max isn’t allowed to eat them, but you figure that if you and Laurent do, it’s basically the same thing. He has your genes, for god’s sake. There should be some kind of metaphysical chocolate-benefit osmosis between-generations. Shouldn’t there?

3:00
Chocolate osmosis must have worked because Max is in a great mood when you get back. He ate his lunch (pasta and ham) and the doctor said he has no fever and looks good. Laurent takes a break while you watch the after-school special about teenage pregnancy that Clement’s father and Max are watching.

Max in his Spiderman costume, driving his father to distraction 

by playing with the bed controls.

3:30-5:00
Nurse stops by. Gives Max three pots of yoghurt, which he wolfs down. Max feels good enough to get up and put on Spiderman outfit. Wander around floor to show him off. Come up with story that Max’s surgery was actually to turn him into Spiderman to tell to the nurses you pass. They buy it (or at least Max thinks they do).

5:00
You are finally released to go home. Breathe communal sigh of relief, pack Max into the car with a mini-pot of Haagen Dazs. He falls asleep and wakes in a foul humor when you get back. But when the grandparents show up with Lucia, and she begins laying sloppy kisses and hugs on her big brother, our bodybuilding superhero comes around.

THANK YOU to everyone for your encouragement and stories of your own experiences. You don't know how much that helped. Yes - I would have been an even bigger basket case without you!

Bilingual Baby

Arrgh...the same in every language.

I’ve made the dramatic announcement on this blog that Max, now 3 ½, has finally started speaking about...five times now. And each time followed up a couple months later with a confession that I was wrong. At the moment, it seemed everything had just magically fallen into place, when in actuality Max had only moved up to a slightly higher linguistic level, but still wasn’t really talking.

That’s how it is with Max. Instead of moving in an upward slant, he’s more a plateau guy. He steps up a notch, and then stays there until you’re about to despair, then leaps to the next level, leaving your head spinning.

Last time I wrote about it, I was at wit’s end when I chaperoned his school field trip and realized how far behind everyone else he was and how discouraging it seemed for him. A few of you suggested taking him for a hearing test, which I hadn’t yet done. And the reason I hadn’t was because he seemed to hear just fine. I even did the “whisper” test, where you stand across the room from the child and whisper their name. He always heard me.

But just to be sure, I took him in December to an ear, nose and throat specialist. And she told me he had significant hearing loss.

The loss is reversible, but even so...talk about mea culpa, I felt like Bad Mommy of the Year. Like I should have gotten a Best Actress Oscar for my own personal remake of “Mommy Dearest”. How could I have not known that my own child had hearing loss? Sure, the whole “bilingual” thing threw a huge question mark into the speech delay equation, but holy cow, the doctor said it was like he was constantly wearing earplugs!

I let myself wallow in the guilt as I gave him a ten-day course of antibiotics that the doctor prescribed to clear up an ear infection. Then we went back a month later and she tested him again. The eardrum pressure bell-curve was still flatlining, and the test where Max put pieces on a puzzle when he heard a sound wasn’t much better.

Since Max was on antibiotics again for yet another ear infection, the doctor wanted to wait to see if that helped at all. It didn’t. So he is scheduled for surgery at the children’s hospital next week. He’s having tubes put in and his adenoids taken out.

But even in the midst of this medical maelstrom, Max has once again proven his mettle and improved his speech significantly in the last couple of weeks. He now repeats words after us, which he rarely did before. And, more dramatically, he has begun differentiating between the languages people speak.

I’ve always wondered how this bilingual thing worked. Would we have to tell him to, “Say ‘duck’ to Mommy and ‘canard’ to Daddy?” Was it up to us to make the distinction between English and French? 

Apparently not, because Max has begun speaking English with me, and not to anyone else. (There are no other English-speaking people around, of course, besides Elmo and Dora, and they obviously haven't proven to be very good listeners.) However, if he says something in English and then I ask him how Daddy says it, he can’t make that connection.

It seems innate. Like, as I’ve read, the linguistic center of the brain is dividing into in two separate sections, instead of, for someone who acquires a language later in life, being a mere branch off of the main mother-tongue tree. It's as if up until now Max’s two languages were swirling around within the confines of the tree-trunk, and have finally burst through the bark into two distinct limbs, shooting out in different directions at a rapid rate. 

And, in this foot race towards speech and literacy, after we've taken care of the basics (like making sure he can hear*, reading, talking, games, and all that) he's taking the baton from our hands and we can only jog on the track behind him cheering, “Go, Max, go!” as he speeds towards the finish line.

Please send our little pirate good vibes next Wednesday!

*And yes, that IS self-flagellation

 that you hear in the background.