Dudleys Diary

and her best friend Melissa. This was taken at their Soccer Banquet the other night. The girls had a fun time as usual. Melissa is going to go to Cozumel in June with Dudleys wife and daughter. Melissa's seems to be real excited about the trip on the other hand, Dudleys daughter makes a point to not show the least bit of excitement. Whey would a teenage girl act this way to her parents? It must be a common trait as I remember a commercial for a cruise line which featured a teen aged girl who cracked a smile on a fun filled cruise and the girls parents made a big deal out of it. I can guarantee you if we went on a vacation and Dudleys daughter was told she could not go, you would see some emotion at that time. I don't think I will ever understand teen aged girls so I might as well quit trying. Come to think of it, I know I will never understand grown up teen aged girls either. Wait a minute, Dudley may be on to something here. Dudleys daughter is anxiously awaiting the end of school as are all of the kids though probably not nearly as much as their teachers. Dudley has observed one thing about the local high school. It seems that as the school year begins to wind down each year, the school officials must run out of money and they frantically look for new and creative ways to secure additional funds to keep the school functioning till year end. About this time every year, they start cracking down on students who park in the school parking lot and don't have an official parking sticker prominently displayed on their windshield. The sticker costs fifteen bucks I believe and it gripes Dudleys ass that we have to buy a parking sticker. Dudleys and all of the other parents who own homes or property pay thousands of dollars in property taxes each year to support the school system. Then the school has the audacity to charge the parents to rent their kids a parking space, the same parents that paid for the damn parking lot in the first place. Another creative way the school extorts money from the parents is regarding the cell phone policy. Students are not to take their cell phones out during class which is a good rule. However, the kids are all experts at secretly using their phones during class to send text messages back and forth to their friends. Earlier in the school year, if a teacher catches a kid with a cell phone out during class they simply tell the child to put the phone up or the teacher gets the phone and holds it to the end of class and returns it to the child with a warning not to do it again. Now the school administrator has mandated that on any offense the phone is to be taken up and turned into the office. Then the student/parent is forced to pay a ransom of five dollars the first time, ten dollars the second time and fifteen dollars on the third and subsequent offenses. All of this is a cleverly disguised plan to replace money in the school budget that the school administrators foolishly overspent before the end of the school year.