Things We Did This Weekend

While Annabeth and I were at dance on Friday night -- the 7-8pm session, not the 4-5:30 session (yes, we spend our life there) -- Rick and Thalia went to a redbox video thingy and ended up getting Get Smart, which we've never seen. When we got home the kids put on jammies, popped popcorn, and made ice cream sundaes; we stayed up watching the movie, then. It felt like we were at a slumber party. And it was a fun, silly movie that was just perfect for that sort of thing.

Saturday we spent enough time poking around in the vents and raising bits of the basement's dropped ceiling panels to finally figure out why the vent in Annabeth's room has such poor airflow -- it had detached at the joint where it goes up the wall from the basement ceiling on up. This probably got jarred loose while the contractor was doing some wiring this past summer. We spent an amazing amount of time getting it back together.

The kids decided to learn to do handstands. They watched the appropriate video on this page and, yes, clickered/tagged each other for those points.

We decided to roast a boneless turkey breast for Sunday lunch. For the past year I did this sans thermometer or any other sort of gauge (having lost them in various household moves), but decided I hate the uncertainty of whether I'd cooked it "just right". I had gotten one of those re-usable pop-up gauges to try, but when I tried it last spring it NEVER popped up. So I'd gotten a brand new meat thermometer, which I stuck in the turkey Sunday, carefully following directions. And when I checked the turkey after the appropriate time, it showed no temperature whatsoever. When I nudged it a bit, the thermometer fell apart. By which I mean, I had to cut the end out of the turkey because the entire top had broken off. And I've decided that if Ma Ingalls could cook without so much as an oven gauge, timer, and precise weight information, surely I can figure it out too. (By the way, turkey is one of the proteins most of the family can eat without issue -- we can't have soy, most beans, proteins derived from grains, several kinds of nuts, peanuts, beef, dairy, halibut, haddock, various other seafood I can't remember off the top of my head, etc. etc., so it's worth trying to figure out).

And for supper we had a fire in the firepit again, mostly because it was so amazingly cool out. Rick was reminiscing about when he started working for Anheuser-Busch years ago on this very date, and was living in a flat in a fourplex in south city near the brewery (and even nearer the intersection of Chippewa and Grand, for those who wonder about stuff like that), and his very first shopping trip was to buy a window air conditioner because the temperatures were in the 100s and people were dropping dead from the heat (as opposed to the following winter when people were dropping dead from the cold -- gotta love St. Louis weather). Further fueling the nostalgia was a newspaper ad for Mateker's -- didn't they used to be in south city? Because I swear every time we talked to Grandma she would tell us the price of bananas at Mateker's, and also tell us how she loved using their ground beef because it had so little fat that you wouldn't get more than a tablespoon of grease off of a meatloaf.

Thalia and Annabeth decided that the cool temperatures made it a perfect day to bake cookies. They did not find it the perfect day to wash the cookie sheets when they were done, mostly because by then the fire was going outside and they needed to set sticks on fire.

And I discovered a new obsession which replaces the clicker/tag training obsession -- floor barre. I spent much time surfing the internet reading about Zena Rommett and Stephane Dalle , as well as others who claim to have the "best" floor barre. We may need to invest in a DVD. Which will probably be by Rommett, because although I like how Dalle keeps exclaiming voila!, his accent is a bit too thick for me. So, of course, I couldn't wash the cookie sheets either because I was watching at every single youtube video and googling every permutation of words like "floor barre".