Weekend Recap

At some point Sunday afternoon Thalia commented that it was going to be really hard to deal with Monday because it had been such a different weekend.

She started out with a camping trip -- in the rain. And cold. She said she was toasty warm in the sleeping bag, though -- the long underwear, 2 pairs of flannel pants, nightshirt, 2 sweatshirts, socks, gloves, and wool hat, plus flannel sheet and fleece blanket might've helped. We do NOT own one of those fancy sleeping bags that keeps a person warm, but the sheer application of fleece, wool, and silk seems to have done the trick.

I picked her up Saturday evening. The camping trip was supposed to last until Sunday, but she needed to come home and put more tanner on her legs and generally get ready for the Oireachtas rehearsal that our Irish Dance studio was having on Sunday.

In the meantime, Rick spent Saturday painting the family room woodwork. If you've been in our family room you know what an undertaking this is. And yes, I do mean that panelling. Half of it is now antique white, and it looks fantastic.

Before:




After:




The peeling wallpaper that is stapled to the wall will eventually be torn down, the old carpet replaced, and we'll have a pleasant room. Finally.


I ran errands Saturday, one of which was at Hancock Fabrics where I picked up some flannel on sale. I hate that store, but it was convenient and like I said, SALE. Anyway, with the onset of cold weather I realized that I'd thrown out all of my casual sweats, probably because they'd reached that level of skankiness that I didn't even want to wear them at home. And I needed something warm to wear around the house in the early morning while doing traffic control with the cats, who don't seem to understand that on weekends we're allowed to sleep later than 6a.m.

Saturday night I made flannel jammie pants for myself:



They're big and baggy, but I only washed the fabric once before I cut, and I think it has more to shrink. I picked the fabric because the groups of white Christmas trees sort of looked like Totoro. As a matter of fact, when Rick saw the finished pants he thought the images were ghosts or Totoro.

Rather than sewing flannel jammie pants, I should've been preparing for the Oireachtas rehearsal -- laying out all of our stuff. And reminding the kids to polish their shoes. Ah well.

The Oireachtas rehearsal Sunday was at a local hotel. It's a sort of dress rehearsal for the Big Competition that each region of the Irish Dance community holds in the fall. All the dancers from our school who are going to Oireachtas participated, and were judged as though they were in a real competition.

AnnaBeth had a chance to try dancing in a borrowed solo dress:





She loves this dress, and her teacher would really like her to wear it for Oireachtas.

(By the way, this was the only photo I got all day that didn't include people other than my kids, so it's the only one I'm comfortable sharing here.)

We were thrilled to get out of there earlier than expected -- about mid-afternoon. We loaded up all of our baggage -- dresses, wigs, shoes, snacks, an extra dress I'd offered to alter since I now know how to lengthen sleeves, etc. etc. -- and I had a nagging feeling that I'd be driving back there looking for something we'd left.

Later than evening I realized that what I'd left was my PURSE! Rick headed back to the hotel to retrieve it (we tried calling the hotel, but they said housekeeping was closed ... he thought he could at least look around). As soon as he walked out the door the phone rang -- one of the other moms had it. She'd been trying to call me on my cell phone, which had apparently gone on the blink and stopped receiving calls (really, we had to mess around with it for awhile afterwards and finally got it working again after a hard boot of taking out and replacing the battery) and finally decided to try our regular line. Rick was at the gas station filling up before he went to the hotel, so a quick call sent him over to their house instead. Wow. That's all I can say -- WOW.

So, the kids had planned to sleep in a bit, I was relieved that I wasn't going to be spending Monday cancelling credit cards and getting a new driver's license; and planned to spend a quiet morning doing yoga and puttering around ... too bad the smoke alarm decided to spazz out and go off at 7a.m. Thus we find ourselves hurtling into yet another week ....