New school year exactly the same as last school year. With extra cheese.

Another school year has begun pretty much exactly the way the last one ended in the Kamikaze household: short on money, house keys and patience; overflowing in paperwork, scheduling conflicts and leftover pizza.

But experience tells us such things are only temporary glitches in the well-oiled machine we call family life, soon to be replaced by an entirely fresh batch of glitches and half-eaten pizza liquifying on the basement countertop.

Which represents our entire claim to "well-oiled" status.

Also - the boy would like to note for the record - this is NOT the same half-eaten pizza he was told to clean up last week. It is, in fact, an entirely different pizza. To his way of thinking, this constitutes a completely unassailable defense.

Who can argue with such logic? You may as well argue that those are his wet towels on the staircase. Of course those are his towels. The point is, what difference does it make if he picks them up today or tomorrow? Either way, there will be an entirely different wet towel on the floor faster than you can celebrate No Wet Towels on the Floor Day. Which is probably overrated anyway.