Susan, her little sister and cousin Lisa were on their way to commemorate cousin Veronica's final days of single-ness when they saw something on the NYC skyline they had never before seen. 

'What is that building?'

And the answer thrilled them.

It was the new 1 World Trade Center , still under construction and all illuminated.

Stylishly Practical

Susan's not one for cruises, being trapped on the ocean would be a big issue for her since she's claustrophobic and can't swim. But, when her lovely pal, *Kate sent her this photo she almost reconsidered.

Susan loves safety orange and would be the envy of everyone bobbing around in the ocean as she paddled past them toward the Italian coastline.

Afterward she'd be all ready to go out dancing.

*Ph.D., professor, writer, mom, conversational user of words like covetousness and prolix.

Sweet Sixteen dancing with his cousins

HAPPY birthday

Sixteen years ago this most wonderful of boys was all rolled up inside his mother and hurt like a sonofab*tch coming out.

Happy Birthday. 

Susan spent a relaxing Sunday cleaning and reorganizing her pantry slash laundry room which is really just an alcove off the dining room.

Susan knows that a few might mistakenly assume that a dining room implies some sort of expansiveness to her home and she doesn't want that to happen here.

Having the washing machine and dryer so centrally located ensures convenience as well as the opportunity for Susan's dinner guests to see her dirty laundry anytime she has to get a new bottle of ketchup.

The pantry slash laundry alcove gets reorganized two to three times a year, and when it's not being reorganized it's a wreck. Sometimes the reorganization takes longer than it should because it sparks side projects like reading, taking long breaks or napping.

Peace, Love and Soul

OMG, would everybody please stop referring to California as Cali!
F*cking stop!

Susan's daughter responded to the question put forth by her mother of can't anyone in this house do some laundry? by getting up to do some laundry.

What a good girl.

She put dark clothes into the machine, filled the tub with water and took a plastic bottle down from the shelf.

Is this what I use, mom?

She was holding the bleach.

Susan clutched at her heart then traded it for the detergent.

Susan baked a tofu cheesecake using a recipe she's held onto for a few years. It was a pretty easy recipe, just honey, pineapple juice, lemon, unflavored gelatin and a brick of soybean curd.

She even made her own crust which she doesn't normally bother with.

Everything was humming along except that the batter tasted like tofu.
It's one of those flavors that you don't even realize exist until you taste it again, and then you remember.

Tofu.

Susan added a teaspoon or two of vanilla extract (rum and vanilla beans, go make your own), three tablespoons of sugar and felt she was in good shape. She poured it over the crust & stuck it in the fridge to set.

The next day Susan served the bean curd pie to her dinner guests without revealing the secret ingredient then requested their assessment. The flavor was lemony, they could taste the pineapple but the consistency was a little more congealed than they cared for. It reminded them of flan, which gave Susan an idea for individual honey drizzled tofu-custards.

Post script:
Frugal Vegan Mom provided Susan with this tofu based dessert recipe. Thanks, Kelly!

Susan now has a new standard for paper towels in her house. Gone are the days when she'd purchase the cheapest ones, also noted to be the scratchiest ones. She didn't pay attention to to paper towels because who really cares what one grabs to clean the evidence of a sick dog?
That was until Susan was felled by a thick soft thunderbolt called Viva.

How did she live so long not caring about paper towels?

Well, that's not entirely true, it's more accurate to say that she had no brand preference. She hates designs on her paper towels and she double hates that new choose a size where she's guaranteed to tear off less than she needs.

Happily, everything is her world is brand new now that she has found a home in the plush embrace of Viva paper towels.

Kirsty Scared of (Name redacted because she's a b*tch)

Susan's dog got beaned on the head with a can of clam sauce.

It happened when Susan opened the tall cabinet over the stove, ducked when the can came at her and watched it bounce off Lucy's head.

The can sustained a large dent but Lucy's cement hard pit bull head was undamaged. Thank goodness.

Susan made a minestrone soup for dinner using the final few vegetables wheezing in the back of her fridge.

She encouraged the family to pile on the Parmesan to distract them from noticing what she knew already, that dinner was doomed. The kids were fooled but the husband eyeballed her from across the table with a look that conveyed why are you feeding this to me?

Why not? she shrugged.

Susan was in an expensive grocery store looking in the gluten free aisle.

$7.99 for a 5.5 ounce bag of chocolate covered pretzels, really?

Nonetheless, she wasn't purchasing them for herself so she put them in the basket and took another ten minutes thoughtfully considering what else she would need then set off toward the sign which read Formaggio.

Susan walked past all manner of gorgeous packaged foods, fresh seafood laid out on tables, beautiful breads and baked goods, but she didn't have the time to stop. She had come directly from work & had a limited amount of time to run her errand then get home ahead of  her company.

The Formaggio sign lied, there was only yogurt & assorted dairy items. She started walking away in search of the cheese when she passed an employee in a white apron.

Where is the cheese? she asked and was directed back to where the cheese wasn't. She more specifically asked the employee if there was a cheese department?

Oh, I thought you wanted like, shredded cheese in a bag the employee said and pointed her toward the other end of the store.

So now Susan knows how she must appear as she walks through an upscale marketplace, like someone in search of bagged cheese.

Super.

Another January and Susan's going cold turkey with the sugar.
Well, not one hundred percent cold turkey, she'll still eat cereal, peanut butter and whatever she bakes, she just won't do it to excess. But, the dark chocolate has already been removed from her little office fridge and she's started telling people not to feed her sweets anymore.

Susan had an epiphany on the first day of the new year, if anyone can remember that far back.

Susan was in cousin Lisa's kitchen peeling turnips and squash for soup with a vegetable peeler so f*cking magnificent it was like a piece of surgical equipment.

The oversized soft grip handle provided excellent leverage and control and the peeler easily removed the hard skin of the rounded winter vegetables in a way that mesmerized Susan.

The vegetable peeler got into her brain and started a chain reaction of thoughts leading her to the conclusion that she was just as deserving of a beautiful vegetable peeler as anyone! Susan's own vegetable peeler is a decade old and of basic construction, it has never occurred to her to trade up.

Susan thought about a few of the lower end items in her kitchen such as the plastic mat on which she chops her vegetables and the utensil drawer organizer she made out of shoebox tops. It's very practical but looks like it was made out of shoebox tops.

Often Susan likes to make do with what she has on hand instead of spending money, particularly if it's very utilitarian. That's how she ended up with her dining room seating. But this vegetable peeler went to the core of her self worth. She peels vegetables on a regular basis and why shouldn't she have a f*cking magnificent peeler to aid her in that drudgery? Or a beautiful cutting board on which to chop her vegetables, which she does even more often? Or a bamboo drawer organizer for a drawer that she opens more often than she peels or chops vegetables?

She should have these things, and as soon as her current state of being broke ends she will!

It's almost HAPPY New Year, Everybody!

.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .  

Click here


And here!
.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

Susan’s computer decided to work in one more F*ck you, Susan! before the end of the year.

OMG, Susan can’t wait till the husband gets paid and buys her a new laptop.

Can’t wait.

She’s going to throw that 1.5 year old m*therf*cker into the toilet then pee on it.

Until that magical time arrives, let Susan use an entirely different computer and catch you up on all she’s been doing through the holiday season.

Susan looked forward to watching each of her children perform in their school concert, although she had difficulty remembering which instrument her daughter played. Initially she told an interested party that it was the violin. Then she told a different interested party that it was the flute. However, the instrument that her daughter has been practicing and playing for two years is actually the clarinet.

It was much easier for Susan to remember that her son is in the chorus because she loves him more.

Twice that week Susan sat in the high school auditorium stuffed with wretchedly dressed parents. There were sweat pants, mens’ tee shirts, sweatshirts and ball caps a plenty…on the moms.
The women of Susan’s neighborhood now all dress as if they came directly from blacktopping the interstate.

On Christmas morning as is their custom, Susan’s family met at the local diner for breakfast with her little sister’s family, minus one brother in law. Susan lost count of the number of families who wore their pajamas out to eat eggs in public, including one college aged girl who wore fleece footie pajamas.

Alas, there is no longer a dress code in Susan’s neighborhood.

Later, Susan rolled out a twenty pound pan of butternut squash, carmelized onion and spinach lasagna using a recipe that she found in the November issue of Cooking Light. Her little sister and nieces, all good sports, excitedly exclaimed ‘I’ll try it!’

She sobbed real tears as she scraped the remaining 19.75 pounds into the garbage an hour later.

During Susan’s computer black-out period she also met a favorite girlfriend for dinner, smeared moldy chapstick on her lips, failed to reorganize her pantry, planted an amaryllis bulb and stayed home sick one day.

Thanks

Nick Holmes!

After Susan spent an hour on Sunday evening listening to the dreamy and wonderful Nigella, she fell asleep all warm and giddy imagining herself as one of Nigella's guests. Twinkly Christmas lights, bubbly prosecco & cranberry cocktails and impossibly rich gravy swirled through her head all night spinning her round and round until the alarm woke her up Monday morning.

Brrrr, it's cold in Susan's house.

She layed in bed long enough to put her behind schedule then resigned herself to the routine of her morning. She got ready for work, packed up the *brownies she made for the staff, and took her cup of coffee from the husband on the way out the door.

In the car she drove through the grey of her neighborhood, looking at the sky and the trees and the garbage cans and the kids waiting for the bus. She pressed all the buttons on the radio. She wasn't in the mood for music, she wanted to listen to people talking so she stopped at NPR.

At that precise moment Steve Inskeep was beginning an interview on Morning Edition and welcomed Nigella Lawson.
CLICK HERE!

*Susan made peanut butter and jelly brownies by swirling microwaved peanut butter and raspberry jelly through prepared brownie mix.

Lest anyone forget, Susan would like to remind you that she is
SMITTEN 
with 
NIGELLA!

Susan and her daughter enjoyed a lazy weekend by themselves. The daughter finished up her Advent calendar, folding and decoratively numbering 25 little construction paper boxes to be filled with candy. However, in the time it took her to complete this overdue Xmas craft the family had ransacked the candy leaving only a few dark chocolate kisses.

They made some pretty unspectacular gingerbread cookies causing Susan to reconsider going back to this recipe and just keep the lubricating ingredient a secret. Much better was Pam's big linzer cookie.  

Falafel dinner was provided by Kelly's blog. The daughter is now a falafel eater, even opting to use the yogurt sauce over ranch dressing while Susan was impressed with her own substitution of peanut butter for tahini.

Yes, it's obvious that there's nothing much going on at Susan's house, but she doesn't mind. She likes spending a weekend in her stretchy pants doing very little. She knows folks who are currently wrestling with terrible, awful losses, for whom the solace of a boring weekend is light years away.

Susan may even treat herself later on and bust out the ironing board.

Susan was in the midst of deep cleaning the bathroom when she took a break to have a bowl of cereal.

During this time the son came home, headed for the bathroom and called out 'What's wrong with the bathroom? It's all messed up!'

Obviously Susan's family is so used to the filthy bathroom that they can't recognize when it's being cleaned.

Susan grabbed this from Patti's blog, go over & say hello.

HAPPY December, everybody!

Now that Susan's free of the constraints of NaBloPoMo she'd like to jump right in and tell you about the gurgling misery that has become her stomach.

A week of takeout punctuated by wedding food at one end, bridal shower food at the other and Thanksgiving in the middle along with two batches of homemade pumpkin seed candy really f*cked her up. Seeds and nuts are like plutonium to Susan's digestive ability.

Get her some vegetables stat.

John Singer Sargent

Here is Sargent's El Jaleo which hangs in the wonderful Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

The lovely Madame X hangs in Susan's tip top supreme all star favorite place in the world, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Chupa Chups

Susan's got a favorite lollipop; Chupa Chups.

She can't always find them, so she stocks up when she does. 

Susan favors the slow release of sugar that hard candy provides & keeps a stash of suckables in the bottom of her bag, in her car, on her desk and in a back up bag locked in her drawer. She's happy to share, so come on by & maybe you'll score some little espresso candies, or Werther's hard caramels (nothing sticky for Susan's delicate dental situation) or mints with chocolate in the middle.

She doesn't generally share the Chupa Chups.

Walking Dead

The last zombie killed on Sunday night looked eerily like Susan's daughter.

Chipotle Peppers

Behold the object of Susan's undying adoration!

Tiger Lily Cafe

Susan and the daughter like this little vegetarian cafe so much that they willingly overlook the unfriendly counter help whenever they eat there.

Footnote: Earlier this year Wild Bill's daughter declared Susan's carrot-ginger soup "better than Tiger Lily's".

Milk!

SUSAN LOVES MILK but didn't appreciate when her mother would mix it with powdered milk, warm it on the stove & dump it over her cereal.
OMG, yuk mom.

HAPPY Thanksgiving

Scary Sounds Machine

Susan loves her scary sounds machine, press a button and you might hear a woman screaming, a bloke being strangled, a creaky casket lid, crashing thunder, a laughing lunatic, the psycho knife, a howling ghost...

Fresca

Susan's heart leaps for joy whenever she sees this in a vending machine.
Grapefruit soda is muy fresca!

Slaughterhouse Five

'Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,' said the loudspeaker.
'Any questions?'

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last:
'Why me?'

'That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?'

'Yes.' Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three lady-bugs embedded in it.

'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.'

Stonehenge

Stonehenge is Susan's favorite surprisingly anticlimactic neolithic monument.

Twenty five years ago Susan and her little sister took a lovely side trip from London to visit Stonehenge.

They learned two interesting things that day; Stonehenge is set in the middle of rolling farmland and surrounded by sheep blueberries.

Thanks for coming and have a safe drive home!

Red Sweetie

Susan's palate leans toward cartoon penguins and twist off tops.

Unobstructed View of the Water

It's a real treat anytime Susan gets to go over the Robert Moses Bridge because for 2 miles she gets a clear view of the Great South Bay through every window.

There's also a set of black tire marks that she likes to look for which go from the left lane over to the right and bounce off the guard rail.

Stargazer

The Stargazer is Susan's favorite accessible six story sculpture which she's lucky enough to pass every time she goes out to visit Cousins Andy & Melissa.

Chili Cheese Dogs

Susan has no fear of eating a chili cheese dog purchased from a truck on the side of the road or from a carnival although hers never look this good.

Blood On The Tracks

Susan's been listening to this moody record since 1976.

This is Susan's newly discovered favorite silly painting by Roy Lichtenstein that was just auctioned for $43,202,500.

Isn't it fabulous?

Susan could absolutely imagine this hanging on her living room wall, making her smile every time she saw it. She'd set a line of chairs before it and invite friends over to sit and look. 

However, she thinks forty three million dollars is a bit much for a silly painting.

Susan would like to take a day off from her Nablopomo inspired favorites and catch up with her bloggy pals because she misses them, and she misses keeping them informed of the mundane minutiae of her life.

First, she'd like to send all her animal lovers over to Maggie's blog to read this post.

Next, she feels like she's on an ice floe floating toward the Department of Labor website. It appears that Susan's best is not cutting it at Acme Sweatshop.

Of late she has fantasized about being unemployed; greeting her medium-large sized children when they get home in the afternoon, working through all the recipes in her binder, throwing sticks in the yard for Lucy to fetch, reading a book, keeping the bathroom clean.

Anyway, she'll keep on keepin' on and see what happens.

Islip Art Museum

The Islip Art Museum is Susan's favorite little local, imaginative, always at the edge of being broke, hundred plus year old house which used to be an orphanage and is now a four room art museum.

Santa Clara Pottery

Susan fell in love with Santa Clara pottery while on her honeymoon.

The pottery is made from one long coil of clay which is wound into shape then smoothed over and carved. The designs are specific to the potter's family and reach back for generations. If Susan remembers correctly the clay starts out as red and turns black during the firing when the pot is placed in a pit and covered with dung.

Susan and the husband went to the Santa Clara pueblo in New Mexico and bought a pot from the person who made it. Afterwards they drove over to Abiquiu to see where Georgia O'Keeffe used to live but her house was surrounded by an adobe wall too high to even peek over. Instead, Susan settled for admiring the view that Miss O'Keeffe used to paint then left.

The BIG Duck

The Big Duck is Susan's favorite local example of novelty architecture.

Doctors Without Borders

One of Susan's favorite charities is Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). It provides independent, impartial assistance in more than 60 countries to people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, exclusion from health care, or natural disasters. These folks go out to help the neediest of the needy and sometimes get kidnapped or killed.

Please consider sending Doctors Without Borders some cash because they'll send you a BIG map of the world so you can finally see where everything is.

The Onion

The Onion is Susan's fave fake newspaper, but she doesn't like to read it online, she prefers to fold one up and put in her bag for later. Susan tries to score it anytime she's in NYC, sometimes that means giving a homeless guy five bucks for his.

Burberry Rain Boots

Susan favorite utilitarian footwear are her Burberry rain boots. They may start the day as part of a stylish outfit and end up slogging through the backyard while Susan picks up dog sh*t.
And when they are left out on the front steps all summer Susan just hoses out the spiders and beetles and sets them upside down to dry.

Livingetc

Susan has already received the December issue of her favorite magazine. It's BIG, glossy, colorful and filled with all sorts of ideas that Susan can replicate on the cheap.
The magazine is so much better than the website & she never has to hunt down her magazine then chase away whichever family member is using it.

Cousin Lisa

Susan's current favorite picture of Cousin Lisa and the husband.

The Old North Church

Susan's family loves Boston and Susan really loves the Old North Church.

Euphoria

Susan is a BIG fan of Calvin Klein fragrances, this is the one she's been wearing for almost two years.
She's very loyal to her smells.
Don't think that sniffing it at the perfume counter is going to be enough to pick up the smoky undertones. Give it a spritz and smell like Susan for the afternoon.

The Endurance

Do you know this story? OMG, it's fantastic and unbelievable and comes with pictures!

Read about the book here.

The Menaced Assassin

This is one of Susan's favorite paintings, you can see it at the MoMA, which is not really one of Susan's favorite museums although lots of people seem to love it.

Susan is going to fulfill the obligation to provide a post a day by revealing thirty of her favorite things. She's not quite sure of what they all will be, and they may be as simple as oatmeal, but she'll weed 'em out.

Day one is done.

Susan prepared to begin her month of daily BLAHging by drinking coffee and thinking up gimmicky stuff to post for when she can't come up with anything better. She also ate three pieces of pie and watched the wind bend the tree branches in her yard as far as they could go then snap back into place.

Susan thinks it's worth noting that she made her first online purchase for Xmas.

Susan saw these rings in a magazine a few months back and felt the first rumblings of excitement. That ended when she looked at the website.

Very recently she found this on Etsy and the feeling came back.

However, Susan finds herself so attracted to this ring that she can’t stop thinking about it. Except when she’s thinking about the gold Etsy ring.

Thank you all for suggesting that Susan's brief lapse of time and space is excusable, but she must respectfully disagree.

The 20th can be mistaken for the 21st and a Wednesday can feel like a Thursday but the very least that Susan expects of herself is to know which month it is. She had three weeks of October under her belt, why would she think that it was November?

She understands wanting to fast forward past Halloween, she likes the Day of the Dead motif but can't stand the endless interaction with the front door and the fake enthusiasm for her small neighbors' costumes.

Plus, doesn't November feel uniquely like the excitement of Thanksgiving mixed with the dread of Xmas and the monotonous anticipation of being able to kick another year to the curb?
 
Then comes the cold, inescapable, hopeless misery of January and February. Ugh.
 
March isn't much different from February, but at least one can say it's March. April is really the first month that isn't horrible, then it's smooth sailing through the spring and summer till the cold weather comes again.
 
God help us all.

For a few minutes Susan thought that Thanksgiving was next week. It was odd that she didn't realize earlier how close Thanksgiving was, but she got excited about having next two extra days off. Susan ran through a quick mental checklist of everything she had to do; find out what Aunt Eileen wanted her to bring to dinner, get the old folks from the airport, prepare their subterranean guest room and cram a week's worth of work into three days. She moved a pile of office debris from her calendar and saw that it was still October.
OMG, what a dopey a**hole, of course it's still October.

Is there something wrong with Susan for not caring about BlogHer and blogging events? She wouldn't mind increasing her modest fan base but she won't go out of her way to do so. She doesn't want to improve her BLAHg or advertise along the edges. She has immediately regretted signing up for everything she initially assessed to be a good idea but makes an exception each November for NaBloPoMo because she likes to punish herself with the Herculean task of writing a post a day.

The husband doesn't read Susan's BLAHg. It holds no value for him because it doesn't generate income. Can you believe that?
Even though she finds this ignorantly limited viewpoint frustrating it provides her with the freedom to say what she wants about him.
For instance; the husband likes to dress up like Liberace and dance like a butterfly.
It's true!

Susan couldn't sleep last night.

She was in a rustic cabin in the Adirondacks without a television, internet access, cell phone service or even radio waves.

She had a few cocktails at a family wedding and crashed early, but her unconscious slumber ended sometime in the middle of the night while everyone else in the universe was asleep.

The creaky cabin was silent except for the sound of her family snoring.  Lying on the rock hard mattress she was the most awake she'd ever been. Tossing to the left then turning to the right didn't help, she felt like a prisoner lying on a jailhouse bunk contemplating her crimes.

She got up and moved through the darkness in search of a book or newspaper or cereal box to read but found nothing to occupy her brain. In desperation she slipped outside to shiver in the rain and contemplate how many more hours till breakfast.
Too many.

Susan took the day off to drive around with the husband and look at wedding bands. You may recall that she lost hers last year, if you don't then Susan won't hold it against you. It's unreasonable to think that everyone can remember everything.

Anyway, they got a late start because Susan & the husband have a recurring house guest who sat around all morning drinking coffee and talking. Susan used this time to stay in bed and watch Joseph Cotten look for Orson Welles.

Susan wants a ring that is similar to her original ring in that it's a thick band of yellow gold with colored stones and some amount of detailing. Well, that's not so much similar to the original as it is exactly like the original. But, she doesn't want the same ring even though it was perfect and she wishes she never lost it. That being said she's open to other options.
But, it has to be yellow gold and it has to be thick.
It may or may not have colored stones, she doesn't want diamonds.
She'd like it to look hand made, maybe even a bit rustic.
Or maybe totally modern.
She's not sure, she assumes she'll know it when she sees it.

They drove to a good shopping town with lots of stores and places to get coffee. Every store they went into made custom jewelry. They could make Susan whatever she wanted using the material and finish that she liked with the stones of her choosing. She could add detail or take it away. They'd make her a wax replica so that she could see just how it would look on her finger and work with her until she was happy. She could have a ring that was uniquely hers, imagine how special that would be!

Susan has zero interest in designing her own ring, she just wants to find something she likes and buy it. She doesn't do well with an limitless array of options and doesn't want to be responsible for figuring out what it should look like. She'll be happy to wear someone else's vision.

She ultimately stopped listening to the jewelers describing the endless possibilities available because she could only wonder how much will this cost? She doesn't need a two thousand dollar ring, she's been very happy to wear her twenty dollar silver ring from the craft fair. She'd just like to find something that's more appropriate as a wedding band and then marry the husband again with their kids in attendance.

Susan's tired so she's just going to post a picture of her brother in law and call it a night.

Susan and her daughter spent a lovely day together in the East Hampton cemetery. They took a pad of large sketch paper and a cookie tin filled with crayons that have been in use for the last thirteen years and did some grave rubbings.

East Hampton is a wonderful cemetery for this sort of thing, it’s got primitive headstones, soft grass, and is a very relaxing place to spend time. Susan doesn’t think much of East Hampton town however. Over the years all of the interesting little shops have been devoured by Tiffany, Coach and Juicy Couture, but the cemetery is reason enough to visit.

Susan is in love with old headstones and is always willing to walk through a cemetery to see some. One Veteran’s Day Susan, her little sister and their kids took a side trip to an upstate cemetery to visit an old pal from the neighborhood and spent time cleaning off all the veterans’ headstones. On another occasion Susan and her daughter spent an hour in a witheringly hot cemetery in Maine where they read the headstones of seven children who all expired over the course of a few months.

Sad stuff, but not today.

Happy Birthday, Wild Bill

Susan opened  her laptop to find an e-mail from her son's Italian teacher. Wonderful!
No doubt she was writing to let Susan know how much she enjoys  having the kid in her class.

Hmmm, that wasn't the case.

The most notable aspect of the communication, other than the son's collision course with failure, was that she was the first teacher to ever give Susan a heads up to anything. Honestly, the first.
Susan has always had to contact the teachers to talk about her kid, never the other way around.

Anyway, contrary to the way she was raised, Susan had a calm conversation with her non Italian speaking underachiever. They established that he would attend weekly extra help, study for all tests and quizzes and be plunged into a black pit of despair if he fell below a predetermined grade point.

Susan  misses  Joe  Strummer.