Things Going on Here: Other Stuff

Approximately 250 boxes of Girl Scout cookies have been delivered. This was pretty much all we did for 2 weekends in a row. I would rant about the local council's position on not collecting money until delivery (which is stupid, and makes the delivery so much tougher), but I don't feel like giving that much energy to thoughts about Scouts right now.

Also, AnnaBeth worked at a cookie booth. She'd never done that before, and was pretty excited about it. They had a great spot -- a popular grocery store on a Friday night during the post-work rush hour. And the weather wasn't too awful, which was nice since it was an outdoor spot (yeah, it was a Dierberg's).

Irish Dance show Friday morning at an elementary school. Small show -- maybe 10 dancers, about half an hour long. During which my cell phone rang -- a friend wanted to go ice-skating. So we zoomed home, dumped off the dancing stuff, grabbed skating stuff and random food stuffs (Girl Scout cookies, corn chips, cheese, crackers) and headed to the ice rink.

Saturday we skipped the parade (but don't tell anyone, okay?) Thalia had been asked to dance on the float, which was quite an honor and she really, really wanted to do it; but the rest of us were mightily opposed to spending the afternoon slogging around downtown for the entertainment of a bunch of drunks (sorry, I don't have a great impression of the crowds at this parade).

We drove to St. Peter's for a show in the early evening -- when we got out of the car the smell of boiled cabbage nearly flattened us, and the place was wicked smoky, but the people were nice, and very appreciative. It was reasonably fun -- well, as much fun as you can have dancing in a room full of boiled cabbage and cigarette smoke. They did River Dance (that's the one in the green skirts), 3-hands, reels, St. Patrick's Day ceili, Lord of the Dance (that's the one in the fluttery multi-colored outfits), jigs, slip jigs, hornpipes, Traditional Sets, treble jig, treble reel (that's the one at the end in the black outfits). Lots of costume changes in a closet behind the "stage" area, plus one of the zippers on a dress had popped so we had to continuously safety pin/unpin that girl in her dress (okay, true confession -- I broke the zipper last week at a show when she was literally stuck in her dress and needed to rip it off quickly for a costume change at the end to switch over to the Treble Reel costume, after which we all forgot about it so it never got repaired).

From there we drove to Ellisville (somehow ended up being the first ones there -- I guess I'm a more aggressive driver than most of the dance crowd -- who knew?) to put on virtually the same show, but with even more people, and the girls could wear their solo dresses for the hard shoe dances. Somehow it didn't occur to me until this weekend how many World Qualifiers (that is, dancers who are qualified to compete in the World Championships in Glasgow during Holy Week) are on Thalia's team. It's really pretty cool, although fairly meaningless outside of the Irish Dance community. Anyway, another fun show; plus the guy who set it up gave each dancer a green carnation as they took their bow, and also handed out pizza to everyone, which was nice considering we'd been running around to dance shows for 5 hours straight at that point (one family hadn't eaten since before the parade -- yikes!). We'd wanted to do this show last year but ended up assigned to the one at the Cathedral (which is also a nice place to dance, but no free pizza and flowers!).

We skipped Sunday's show since we wanted to spend Time Change Sunday being slugs (also skipping rant about stupidity of changing the clocks). I worked on sewing up a Vogue pant pattern V7881, Claire Shaeffer's Custom Couture Collection -- seeing if it could kinda sorta maybe fit decently with some alterations -- it turned out wearable, much to my surprise. I hadn't even bothered to purchase buttons for it, since I thought I wasn't really making pants I'd ever wear. So I took a couple of buttons off of a pair of Docker's Rick was throwing out -- they don't match, but considering the pants are made out of super-cheapo twill and have some fitting problems still to be resolved, they're good enough.

Anyway, that's most of what we've been occupied with. Today we'll go get Fang from either the library or the bookstore (Thalia was hold #4 out of 170 holds, but the library got 100 copies of the book, so not a big deal). Tomorrow we have 3 more dance shows, then more on St. Patrick's Day.