Shakespeare Family Festival 2011

Time once again for the Shakespeare Family Festival at Millenium Park in Creve Coeur. Last year the festival lasted two days. This year the Powers That Be decided to try having it all on one day.

It seemed to work pretty well, particularly since the weather was about 30 degrees cooler than last year.

So, we had many of the same entertainments as last year, such face painting, crafts, fencing demos, the Tower Grove singers performing music of the era, and people dressed as Shakespearean characters:



And at 11am we had a performance of Comedy of Errors:


Then an break for the early afternoon where the concession stands shut down and the various performers took some time off (many of the kids in the play went to someone's house for a swimming party, which I heard was fairly crazy).

Then the fair resumed at 6pm with Morris dancers, roving musicians:


the Classical Guitar Society


Only one clown this year, but he's very noticeable:


Then the mayor of Creve Coeur welcomed us all


And we had another performance of Comedy of Errors


After the bows


the kids struck the set and the concessions packed up. I got all the costumes (I have become Official Costume Transportation over the past couple of years), lightening and thunder started as they were loading the pieces of the set onto the truck, we packed kids into cars


and everyone came to our house for the cast party.

(very small sampling -- I think we had about 30 people running in and out, up and down the stairs)

Which was supposed to last until 11:30, but accidentally lasted until 1am.

What a day. Can't wait until next year! And if you live around here, you really should stop by next time. Free admission, and lots of fun.

More Lunches

Okay, right now I'm peeved at an insurance company (Allstate), so I'm going to breathe slowly and think about something bland, like what we've packed in the bento boxes the past couple of days.

The kids were really impressed with the look of the Chicken Kijiyaki Bento in The Just Bento Cookbook, but I wasn't really inclined to actually MAKE Chicken Kijiyaki. We decided that it bore a strong visual resemblance to chicken drummies, so we decided to use the package of frozen crispy, spicy chicken wings we had from Trader Joe's (I don't recall the actual name of the wings and have thrown out the package).

Thalia also wanted the cucumber and turnip salad with yuza, except I've no clue where to find yuza around here and wasn't interested in running all over town looking, so I used lime instead since we usually have plenty of limes in the house. Also note that I figured the kids wouldn't want the sliced pan-steamed sweet potato, so I used the stash of mini-muffins. And for fruit we used raspberries and blueberries, mostly because they're in season.



For Annabeth I just chopped up baby cucumbers, since she thinks these salad-type things Thalia is trying are weird.



Then today was the quick-and-easy Orange Mandarin Chicken from Trader Joe's.

Sliced red peppers and chopped green onions for garnish on the chicken, rice, and some chopped up apple for a fruit.

Okay, I'm fairly sure my head isn't going to actually explode as long as no one says the word "Allstate", particularly if I can find something else to distract me, like, say, vigorous, vengeful housecleaning. Thus we move ahead through our days....

Lunches

B: So, is your mom Japanese?
My kids: Uh, no ... and you've met our mom before, remember?
B: Well, she keeps making all these bentos, so I just wondered.

Monday the kids each took basically the same thing -- mini-burgers, cheese flowers, veggies, grapes plus blueberries (on sale for a really good price last week), rice.



The rice has a face because when I asked Thalia what she wanted in a bento (as opposed to a plain ol' sack lunch) she said, "food with faces on it." Which certainly wasn't the answer I was expecting.

The mini-burgers were based on the Idea from The Just Bento Cookbook by Makiko Itoh, which suggested that they be made more like little meatloafs, with bread crumbs and egg, since that way they wouldn't be so tough and dry when they were served room temperature. She also suggested that they could be wrapped in bacon and fried up that way, so we tried that for Annabeth's:


She said it was really sort of disturbing when it came time to eat them. But it was pretty easy to just take the bacon off and eat the burger plain. Both kids had a side container of Ranch dip.

On Tuesdays they are allowed to bring peanuts and tree nuts into the building (those are outlawed on MWF due to allergies of another student in the building those days). Annabeth wanted an almond-butter-and-jelly sandwich, so I made a couple out of thin sliced bread, then cut them into butterflies. Down below on the "ground" are tulips made out of hotdogs, skewered with cucumber leaves, and a couple of apple-slice bunnies nestled in lettuce leaves. Some grapes and grape tomatoes fill in some of the gaps. A garden theme.


Thalia wanted something more exotic, so she selected a box pretty much straight out of the Just Bento cookbook:



Soba noodles with nori strip garnish; also toasted sesame seeds and snipped green onion for garnish (I put these in Saran wrap because I didn't have any appropriate little containers). A hardboiled egg -- first time I tried cutting one so fancy, which was sort of fun (she was supposed to do it herself this morning, but by the time everyone got showered and dressed I'd already done it -- Annabeth was covered in paint from painting sets yesterday, and it's held up to repeated showers and scrubbing). Slaw of cabbage and crab. Grape tomatoes. An extra apple bunny (I wrapped this in Saran wrap also since I didn't trust the slaw to keep to itself during travel). A side container of dipping sauce made from dashi stock and kaeshi. THIS was the type of thing I expected her to ask for -- she's more adventurous about food than Annabeth. But they're both trying new things this week, so that's great.

Weekend

Sleeping in to the decadently late time of 6:30am Saturday morning, I awoke with a start when Rick asked, "Is that the tornado siren?" I couldn't tell over the sound of the storm outside and the sound of the fan inside, so I went a window to listen. No siren. But I decided to check the weather maps since the tour bus was driving through the night to get home that morning, and I wondered if they were in the wicked weather. (Side note: they drove through the night partially in order to save money on a hotel stay, partially to get home earlier.)

Let's see, their estimated time of arrival is 10am, so they should be just east of Kansas City now ... the map shows KC is clear, so they must be on the west side of the storm ... the worst of it should be past us by the time they get here.

About 5 minutes later the phone rang. "Hey, Mom? We're passing the mall now, just to let you know. We'll need to unload stuff when we get to the church, though, so no big rush."

Apparently the tour leader likes to pad her trip estimates quite a bit (her daughter was chastising her about this, saying she does this every single time they drive home from Colorado. "But we had to change bus drivers this time, so I added more time." "Mom, it doesn't take 2 hours to change a bus driver!")

Anyway, the kids were all home safely. They had slept some on the bus overnight, so Thalia was reasonably coherent. And after she unpacked and we started laundry we took a trip to Animeggroll to get bento supplies. Thalia had been wanting to go there, and this was the only time we could go that they were actually open in about a 3 week span.

In addition to a beach towel from a favorite manga, she selected a bento set:



bento box, chopsticks, and bag. I know I've seen this one on Amazon.com because I remember the reviews commenting on the mysterious wording on the top:



Lube Sheep? Really? Boggles the mind.

And Annabeth got a new 2 tiered box that matches her old box and bag, plus we found the matching chopsticks:


which has the more sensible phrase of


on it. We also saw this one on Amazon.com, but would rather support a local merchant. Plus it was cheaper at Animeggroll, plus that instant gratification thing. So, a big win.

Then, having satisfied our bento "needs", the kids sort of hung around the rest of the day while we go usual Saturday stuff done, although no yardwork due to all the rain and storms.

That night I took Thalia, Annabeth, and a friend to the park in St. Charles to see Much Ado About Nothing.



Pretty good crowd, thousands upon thousands of mosquitoes, and, wow, it was insanely muddy -- standing water in spots. But we enjoyed the show. Dogberry and the watchmen were FANTASTIC -- definitely our favorites of the evening.

I'd forgotten how angsty the play gets in spots. Sheesh. Scene from Hero's wedding and supposed death:



The last time we saw this particular play was a high school dress rehearsal for a Shakespeare-in-a-week performance, and we were struck by the fact that 1. it's much more fun to watch when everyone remembers their lines, as they did this weekend (which I should've said more loudly in earshot of Antipholus of Syracuse, who was with us and will undoubtably forget his lines during Comedy of Errors next week), and 2. we actually thought the high school Benedick was better in the part, interestingly.

Then up the next morning for the final performance of the 2011 choir tour


which was also the final performance ever for this director, who is now moving on to other things. The performance was fantastic, reflecting that the kids had been on the road with it for a week -- it had that amazing energy you get at the end of a good run of a show. And was followed by a reception for the director.

Father's Day was spent relaxing, playing Stratego, and going to the pool. Good weekend overall, but many complaints of tiredness and sleepiness this Monday morning. Woops.

Friday's Lunch

When we remodeled the kitchen a couple of years ago I streamlined what I put back insofar as gadgets, pots and pans were concerned. And I apparently got rid of the mini-muffin pans, little realizing that less than 2 years later I'd be baking batches of them while thinking about how much easier my life would be if I had a bunch of nori punches and silicon baran tucked away in the drawers. So much for streamlining.

But I found a fairly cheap new muffin pan at Walmart, and have moved ahead. Another of Annabeth's favorite foods is cornbread. So, why not tiny little corn muffins? And, while we're at it, why not some little banana mini-chocolate chip mini-muffins?

So today we have 2 of each kind of muffin -- the brighter yellow are the corn muffins, which have been carefully split and spread with butter, then reassembled (by Annabeth).


Also, celery sticks, a hotdog cut in half and made into 2 octopi (only eyes for a face per her request), grapes and blueberries, and a couple of monty jack stars. I offered a side container of dips -- ranch for the celery or ketchup/mustard for the hotdog -- but she declined.

I froze the muffins for use as the weather heats back up (that would be today and tomorrow) but she ate a ton of them anyway, giving them a quick thaw in the microwave. Wow, mini-muffins are so fun to eat. What was I thinking when I got rid of those pans?

Prissy Food

We're now in the midst of Shakespeare camp, which meets all day MWF this week, then daily next week. This means the kids (or this week "the kid" since Thalia is currently in Denver where she sings somewhere at noon, then goes to Estes Park to perform tonight) need to pack a lunch, which is sort of a novelty for homeschoolers.

Another novelty this week -- cooler weather. We're talking a high of 78F, which is about 20 degrees cooler than last week. That means we can use the oven without worrying about how much we're heating up the house.

So I decided to prep some things for Annabeth's lunches this week. Given that her favorite foods are potatoes, cheese, and bacon, I had the inspiration to make some miniature twice baked potatoes out of size B red potatoes.


I based this loosely on the directions here except I didn't bother slicing anything off of the bottoms -- my potatoes were pretty flat. And I simply stuffed them with things I knew Annabeth would use on her own potatoes -- she prefers Monterey Jack, for example, and feels any sort of onion or chives are an abomination. Also, bacon makes everything better in our household. And all the proportions were eyeballed.

I didn't tell her about this until this morning when I packed it all up in the Bento box:


Also appearing with the 3 potato halves: blanched broccoli, stars cut out of Monterey Jack, and grapes (which are actually the most astounding part of the lunch considering the U.S. grapes aren't in the stores yet and I usually don't buy imported fruit).

She ate one of the potatoes for breakfast, and gave it a thumbs up, saying she couldn't wait until lunch. I'll freeze the rest of the potatoes for future lunches.

Coming up: whatever happened to those mini-muffin pans we used to have?

Books

Continuing the Adult Summer Read program:

4. Star Wars Fate of the Jedi: Conviction by Aaron Allston. Book 7 of a 9 book series penned by 3 different authors. Actually, I've not been a big fan of Star Wars books -- I generally get about 7 pages into them and then quit due to the crappy writing. But I was reading the free short stories on Kindle -- Lost Tribe of the Sith -- that tied into this series, and decided to give the books a try. Very, very fluffly and fun. Here it is 30 or 40 years after A New Hope, and Han and Leia, now married, are still going on about things that happened when they met. Hee.

I will say that you can't read book 7 without reading books 1-6. I've been blasting through them, getting them from the library. Don't worry about the new characters you've never heard of -- you can look it up on the Star Wars Wiki if you really care. I find myself skipping through certain story lines because I'm not invested in the characters and I think they're boring -- like the babe on the cover of this particular book, who I think is named Tahiri, is on trial for something or other that happened in an earlier series, and, really, I don't care ... so I just sort of skim those parts. The babe on the back cover? I looked her up on the Wookipedia, and, wow, what an incredibly absurd life she's had -- glad I missed THOSE books. Also glad there's not much about her in this book, since her very existence seems silly. I think her picture is on the cover to appeal to the Star Wars groupies.

Longtime fans seem to hate the series, probably because they've read too many books in the Star Wars universe for too many years, and are starting to realize that they've been at this too long and need to get a life. This series isn't so bad if you skip all the intervening stuff. Plus by skipping all the preceding books and series I was unphased by continuity issues -- I've no clue what Jedi Grand Master Luke Skywalker's been getting up to in the past 30 years, and don't much care if his character is consistent (or redundant) with earlier stuff. He's still reminiscing about hanging out with Yoda, and that's good enough for me.

5. Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Brennan. I kept thinking there was something or other I read BEFORE I read the Star Wars book this week, but was totally blank on what it could've been. Then I found this book in a stack -- aha, that's it. And that sort of sums up the book for me -- very forgettable. I had it on my to-be-read list after seeing a review of it on someone's blog a couple of years ago. Wow, I'm so glad I didn't run out and buy it, even though it's been on my Amazon wishlist all this time. For one thing, the US hardback cover is incredibly, embarrassingly dorky (the cover shown on Amazon is much better).

And, frankly, the book is sort of repetitive and predictable. I had read a bunch of reviews of it (I love book reviews) which all mentioned The Big Plot Twist, so I thought, "Okay, this thing I've figured out about a third of the way through the book? That was pretty obvious because the author foreshadows it on about every single frickin' page? That must not be The Big Plot Twist, because it's easy to figure out." But, alas, it WAS the Big Plot Twist. Disappointing. I had checked out the second book in the series from the library, but can't bring myself to read it because the characters were so very dippy.

So, 50% if the books read, about 33% of the time elapsed. No clue what to read next -- too much drivel in too short of time, and I'm starting to get sick of it. The next Star Wars Fate of the Jedi book isn't due out until mid-August. I might have to switch over to something thought-provoking, heaven forbid.