Weekend Stuff

This weekend has included adventures such as:

Thalia used her new sight for archery, and it's really very, very different to shoot with a sight. Also, she's decided that it's a lot harder to shoot from the 20 yard line than the 10 yard line. She got less than 100 points. She speculates that if she hadn't been messing with the sight she would've gotten closer to 200. The teacher spent about an hour working with her -- very excited to have a student trying something new. Her teacher is amazing -- spending hours and hours patiently teaching these kids about archery with no loss of enthusiasm or patience as the day wears on. The woman truly loves inspiring the next generation of archers.

Both kids got the results of their choir auditions, and got the parts they wanted in the Christmas concert.

We went to another dinner party for which I once again needed to wear a dress because it was at the Saint Louis Club, which has a dress code. It was surprisingly okay for a social occasion in which a shy person (me) is forced to stand around chit chatting with people that person doesn't know well. The food was okay, the entertainment was entertaining, the people who sat at our table were charming, the gift bags handed out at the end of the evening were emblazoned with the Coach logo. A different slice of the socio-economic pie than I usually talk about here, but I've been thinking about one of the conversations all weekend, and it might turn into a blog post, so now you have a bit of back story.

The leaves are tapering off, and only required a couple of hours of work. Amazing!


I read a book on Kindle (Maximum Ride, which Thalia had a hold on at the library and was dying to read, and it was a free download, so we decided to give it a whirl). As I suspected, it really bugged me to read the pages sequentially, which is how a Kindle works (you know -- first you read page 1, then page 2, etc. until you get to the final page). I'd rather skip around, fan through pages and pause to skim bits, and generally not feel constrained by someone else's concept of how books are to be read. Other than that, though, it was a fun book and the presentation was pleasant -- the screen is easy on the eyes, the weight and shape is easy to carry. We had been given a cover for it, so it's pretty easy to through in a bag on the way out the door to archery or choir, so that's nice.

We cooked a turkey breast since Thanksgiving Day is going to be weird ... I thought maybe we could get sick of turkey now, and avoid the last-minute rush of waiting until Thanksgiving to decide we've had enough for the year. One of the cats is in heaven, as Large Dead Bird is his favorite food; he's refusing to eat the turkey-flavored canned catfood and holding out for the real thing.

And we put up some of the outdoor Christmas lights. The weather is nice, and it seemed like a clever thing to do. We won't turn them on until Advent, but at least we're ready for a flick of the switch no matter what the weather. Usually we do this in the dark and snow and ice, all shivering and wet.

And now we launch ourselves into a particularly hectic week. Not sure when we'll have a moment to post again, or how coherent it will be if we do ....