On the Ropes

Busy weekend. Saturday morning was YG's ice skating lesson. At 11am, Sarcasm Girl went off to meet friends to go see a movie and eat pizza, as a delayed birthday celebration. YG and I came home from skating, packed, and drove up to Sebastopol, home of Spouse's sister and her family. Sebastopol is a pretty little town, and this was a gorgeous weekend to be there--there were flowers everywhere, and it was (during the day, anyway) warm and sunny. Saturday evening we went first to hear Jim (YG's uncle) play at a kirdan--a sort of family-friendly performance of Indian devotional chants--with some decidedly non-Indian instruments (mandolin, violin, guitar, bongos, hurdy-gurdy) which was both fun and curiously energizing. Then we left to go see a performance of Bye Bye Birdie at the local high school, which was, over all, very nicely done. The girl who played Rosie was clearly the star of the show--a dancing, singing, acting triple-threat--but there were several other players who were quite good. Unfortunately, the girl who played Kim was singing outside her range, and had trouble hitting most of the high notes. But it was a nice, high energy show with a lot of good stuff in it. We took the young back to the house and put 'em to bed.

Next morning we got up, got dressed, and I drove for half an hour over tiny twisty hilly roads to get YG to the Four Winds Ropes course--the reason for this excursion, a Girl Scout outing that lasted from nine to four--by which time the poor kid was suffering significant car sickness. With a couple of minutes of rest and the sight of her friends dancing around outside the car, she recovered, took up her sunblock and her lunch, and went off to have a grand time, leaving me to drive back over the tiny twisty hilly roads to Sebastopol. Spent a lazy, pleasant day with the in-laws, reading the paper and sitting in the hot tub, then returned up those tiny, twisty hilly roads to pick up the kid (tired but pleased) and begin the drive back to San Francisco.

And today everyone is back in school. Tonight, YG gets to go sell Girl Scout Cookies at a dinner being given for Madeleine Allbright, whom she may get to meet. Wow.

Input

This morning I was trying to figure out why I've been having such odd dreams of late. It might have something to do with the variety of things I'm currently reading: just finished Adam Stemple's Singer of Souls, working my way through Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, by Nancy Siraisi, reading Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic with YG, listening to The Golden Compass in the car on the way to and from Sebastopol this weekend, I've just started paging through Hildegard of Bingen's Physica (if you think I'm doing research, you're right), and I started reading The Witch in the Well by Sharan Newman. So I've got an interesting mix of steam-punk England, medieval France and Italy, and WW II Poland mixing in with central Massachusetts elfland. Bizarre dreams.

No Allbright, alas

YG got all dressed up in her Scout best and we went downtown to the St. Francis Hotel for this big dinner at which Madeleine Allbright was being feted, and I dropped her off and came home...and then I got a call. Despite (as her scout leader said crankily) repeated confirmation that the troop was supposed to sell cookies at the event, the person organizing the Girl Scout presence at the event wasn't there, and the troop was not permitted to sell cookies. YG was deeply disappointed; she'd been looking forward to meeting Madeleine Allbright. She said she didn't want to go to school tomorrow because all her teachers would be so disappointed. I offered to write a note essentially saying "please excuse YG for not meeting Madeleine Allbright; it was due to circumstances beyond her control," but YG felt that was overkill.