June 29

Mollie was recovering from surgery, the same kind Linnea had five years before. Hopefully by the time Independence Day rolled around, she would be feeling back to normal.
Rose didn’t wake up till 11:30 that morning.
“Yeah, it got a little crazy last night,” Collette was telling Mom and Carrie.
After the boathouse, Mom and Grandma Combs had picked up Carrie to meet with Malaya at the Elvis concert at Jefferson Barracks.
Rose was still a little baffled as to how both teams had known the answers to most of the questions.
“I didn’t even know the answers to some of those!” she said.
Some were mildly easy:
“What is the name of Rose’s outdoor pet toad?”
“Buddha!”
Others took some thought…
“What do these numbers represent: 20/200.”
“Rose’s underwear size,” one of the boys suggested.
“What!” Rose screeched.
There were some lucky guesses.
“Three!” Ben-Hur yelled, before the question had been asked.
“How many cell phones has Rose destroyed to date?”
And somehow, three was the correct answer.
When the question arose, Magnus knew not only that a collection agency had contacted Rose because of her enormous library fine, but also knew to the penny what the fine had been.
Then, when the infamous question was asked:
“On what river was Rose unexpectedly given a back massage from a Canadian model?”
Either Ben-Hur or Augustus asked Rose loudly:
“Was he handsome?”
“Well…”
“More handsome than me?”
By the time the category of “Ultimate Humiliations” had arrived at the question:
“Rose spends a rather large percentage of her annual income on what clothing item?”
And Curly and Wally both blurted out together:
“Underwear!!”
Augustus scolded them:
“You both lose 40 points for knowing the answer to that question!”
But on Sunday, things had calmed down a bit. About the most exciting thing of the day was Rose requesting Cecil Whittaker’s pizza for her birthday lunch. Then Carrie wrapped ponytails into a mohawk line on Puck’s head while he stuffed himself with raisins.