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Dad wasn't too happy that I turned somebody's driveway into an ice-skating rink yesterday, and he said he was disappointed in me for using "poor judgment." That's the exact same phrase he used a few weeks ago when I scratched up his car. It all started when I won Student of the Week at school. When you win Student of the Week, they give you a bumper sticker that you can put on your family's car. The bumper sticker is pretty corny, but it was still cool to win it. My child is the STUDENT OF THE WEEK and I'm MIGHTY PROUD! I'm not sure why I won, but I think they just give it to everyone eventually. Fregley won Student of the Week this past Friday, and I'm guessing it was for not biting anyone for five days straight.

Mom wanted to put my sticker on her car, but her bumper is so overcrowded that I knew it would just get lost on there. So I asked Dad if I could put it on his car. Dad recently bought a new car, and I thought my Student of the Week sticker would look really sharp on his bumper. But Dad said he didn't want to "junk up" his new car. At first I was disappointed, but I guess I could kind of understand where he was coming from. My family doesn't have anything that's really nice, and when

Dad came home from the dealership with a sporty car, I was pretty surprised. Mom wasn't happy that Dad picked out a car without talking it through with her, though. She said the car looked "flashy" and that since it only had two doors, it wasn't "practical" for a family of five. But Dad said it was the car he wanted, and he kept it. After I talked to Dad, I didn't know what to do with my bumper sticker, so I just ended up giving it to Manny and telling him he could put it on his wagon or something.

But Manny turned right around and put it smack in the middle of Dad's driver's-side door. I freaked out because I knew Dad was gonna think I was the one who put it there. I tried to peel it off, but they must use superglue on the backs of those things. So I got some soap and water and tried to SCRUB it off.

But after twenty minutes of scrubbing, I'd barely made a dent. I started looking for different cleaning supplies in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and I found some steel wool pads that looked like they might do the trick. Those things work pretty good on the pots and pans, so I figured they were worth a try on the car since it was metal, too. Sure enough, the steel wool made the bumper sticker come off the car as easy as pie.

In fact, it was so easy that I kind of got carried away. I used the steel wool pads to scrape off the bugs and bird poop, too. I figured Dad would be pretty happy I was cleaning his car for free. But when I rinsed the car off with the hose, I got a huge surprise. The steel wool didn't just scrape the bumper sticker and bugs off the car. It scraped the PAINT off, too. I panicked and started filling in the bare spots with a permanent marker. But the area where the bumper sticker had been was too big, so I wrote a note in Mom's handwriting and taped it over that spot.