A new week
In four hours, the kitchen contractor will arrive, and the major aspect of the remodelling will commence. My oldest is eager for his assigned task of cooking for the family using the dutch oven. He fell in love with this manner of food preparation while at Scout camp earlier this summer, and so is tickled to get a week of opportunities for practice.
Swim lessons continue; fortunately, the weather and water have come up to temp, making it a much more pleasant experience. Son Three is developing his Butterfly and Breaststroke; he is aiming at becoming a lifeguard himself some day (about 4 more years); Daughter One and Only has at last become a swimmer, having mastered treading water in the deep end late last week, hurrah!
Daughter One and Only sat on the couch yesterday beside the pile of perused periodical (otherwise known as the Daily Times-Call) and observed "It's time to go shopping for back-to-school stuff, Mom." Indeed. There is deep inside me that little girl excitement, thinking of my own shiny new pencils and spiral-bound notebooks with no dents or kinks in the wire. The last time the coming of autumn meant that I was going to school was 1986; the thrill of anticipation is still sweet.
The whole family went out to the Church bean farm east of Fort Collins Saturday. We had to pull Sunflowers out of the bean rows (birds leave seeds from nearby fields). The sunflowers grow tall and shade the beans, keeping them from drying, which makes harvest impossible. Thistle and bindweed die in the heat, but Sunflowers, bless 'em, thrive in the parching weather. So, up and down the rows we go, pulling sunflowers. Many hundred people showed up, so the three big fields (each one being one of those circles seen when you fly over the prairie) were finished by 8:30 AM.
When we came home, we finished painting the living and dining rooms, and watched a couple of movies. Son Two was a greeter for the Humane Society Pet Food Drive at the PetSmart during the afternoon. Daughter One and Only was thrilled to find that Only-Other-Little-Girl-In-The-Neighborhood had at last returned from her month long vacation. Only-Other-Little-Girl-In-The-Neighborhood had herself had a near-panic, having come over early in the morning, and finding no one home and peeking in the windows seeing all things boxed up and stacked; she thought we were moving away... she ran home crying to her mother, inconsolable. So when those two little girls caught up with each other, there was much rejoicing... and Daughter One and Only spent the next eight hours playing at Only-Other-Little-Girl-In-The-Neighborhood's house.
I borrowed an organ key yesterday, I've been asked to substitute at the organ for church services on the 24th, so I'm gonna have to make some time to go practice and pick my registrations. I've never been adept on the foot keyboard, but I can manage the two manuals, so I fake it by linking the 16' and 32' pipes to the Great. It is a cool thing to get to do this, since it's a real wind-blowing wood-and-metal soaring pipe organ. Opportunities like this come up most every July, because I don't usually go out of town on vacation (or in other words, if I do, it's in months more amenable to visiting humid places, like Iowa, Indiana, or Tennessee, ie, anything but July) but most everyone else does (while the vast majority of Mormons may not live in Utah anymore, a big percentage have kin there, and everyone seems to go out to Utah in July). So all of July, I find myself subsituting somewhere, someplace. I even had to jump up out of my pew at the beginning of meeting yesterday to cover for the music director on the opening hymn. July is always such fun.
Swim lessons continue; fortunately, the weather and water have come up to temp, making it a much more pleasant experience. Son Three is developing his Butterfly and Breaststroke; he is aiming at becoming a lifeguard himself some day (about 4 more years); Daughter One and Only has at last become a swimmer, having mastered treading water in the deep end late last week, hurrah!
Daughter One and Only sat on the couch yesterday beside the pile of perused periodical (otherwise known as the Daily Times-Call) and observed "It's time to go shopping for back-to-school stuff, Mom." Indeed. There is deep inside me that little girl excitement, thinking of my own shiny new pencils and spiral-bound notebooks with no dents or kinks in the wire. The last time the coming of autumn meant that I was going to school was 1986; the thrill of anticipation is still sweet.
The whole family went out to the Church bean farm east of Fort Collins Saturday. We had to pull Sunflowers out of the bean rows (birds leave seeds from nearby fields). The sunflowers grow tall and shade the beans, keeping them from drying, which makes harvest impossible. Thistle and bindweed die in the heat, but Sunflowers, bless 'em, thrive in the parching weather. So, up and down the rows we go, pulling sunflowers. Many hundred people showed up, so the three big fields (each one being one of those circles seen when you fly over the prairie) were finished by 8:30 AM.
When we came home, we finished painting the living and dining rooms, and watched a couple of movies. Son Two was a greeter for the Humane Society Pet Food Drive at the PetSmart during the afternoon. Daughter One and Only was thrilled to find that Only-Other-Little-Girl-In-The-Neighborhood had at last returned from her month long vacation. Only-Other-Little-Girl-In-The-Neighborhood had herself had a near-panic, having come over early in the morning, and finding no one home and peeking in the windows seeing all things boxed up and stacked; she thought we were moving away... she ran home crying to her mother, inconsolable. So when those two little girls caught up with each other, there was much rejoicing... and Daughter One and Only spent the next eight hours playing at Only-Other-Little-Girl-In-The-Neighborhood's house.
I borrowed an organ key yesterday, I've been asked to substitute at the organ for church services on the 24th, so I'm gonna have to make some time to go practice and pick my registrations. I've never been adept on the foot keyboard, but I can manage the two manuals, so I fake it by linking the 16' and 32' pipes to the Great. It is a cool thing to get to do this, since it's a real wind-blowing wood-and-metal soaring pipe organ. Opportunities like this come up most every July, because I don't usually go out of town on vacation (or in other words, if I do, it's in months more amenable to visiting humid places, like Iowa, Indiana, or Tennessee, ie, anything but July) but most everyone else does (while the vast majority of Mormons may not live in Utah anymore, a big percentage have kin there, and everyone seems to go out to Utah in July). So all of July, I find myself subsituting somewhere, someplace. I even had to jump up out of my pew at the beginning of meeting yesterday to cover for the music director on the opening hymn. July is always such fun.
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