Pre-Beltaine

Wednesday I got home from school and set about prepping for Beltaine.  This involved a trip to the store and a whooooole lot of kitchen time.  The store trip was for strawberries, whipping cream, cream cheese, hot dogs, eggs, ice cream, and other treats.  At home, I made a batch of cookies and a complicated strawberry pie with a cream cheese base.  I did cheat and use a store-bought crust, but hey--I'd already taught all day.

 

I watched DOCTOR WHO on a portable DVD player while I worked, which was fun.  Mackie, for once, didn't really want to help.

 

By the time I was done, it was bedtime for the boys.  Once they were asleep, I put out candy baskets and set them out at their places on the dining room table.  I was exhausted and went to bed soon after.

Beltaine

The boys found the candy baskets fairly early in the morning and thoroughly destroyed their breakfasts.  But that's the way it works.  Kala and I slept in, and when I got up, I offered to make pancakes, but Mackie and Sasha didn't want any.  So I made them for Aran and me.  (Kala rarely eats breakfast.)  Naturally, about an hour later, Mackie came into the kitchen begging for food.  I turned him away.  "You refused breakfast, so you'll have to wait until lunch."

 

Next we colored eggs, the symbol of fertility and spring.  While they were drying, we went downstairs and disassembled the altar.  Everything was dusted and cleaned, the cloth changed from the dark winter one to the green spring one.  Then it was back up to set up the outdoor altar and bring the Goddess statue out to it.  We trimmed the grass and cleared out dead leaves and set up candles and other accoutrement.

 

That done, the boys went inside while Kala hid eggs for the Beltaine egg hunt.  The boys liked that quite a lot.  And then it was lunch time--grilled hot dogs, potato salad, baked beans, home-made foccacia bread, and soda.  We were so full, we decided to have the pie later.  It was delicious!

 

Joyous Beltaine!

Karate Show

Friday I returned to school and had the usual slightly-frantic day you always get when you come back from being absent.  Got home and got stuff together for the karate show.

 

The students at the karate school have been rehearsing for a show, and Friday was the big day.  It's the karate version of a dance recital, but probably more exciting.  Because of my teaching background, I had been tapped to be the announcer.

 

To tell the truth, I was dreading the whole thing.  I'm decent enough on stage, but I don't look forward to it much, especially under these conditions.  It was a show full of kids under ten, and it was going to be chaotic and probably filled with mistakes and difficulty.  I know the audience was expecting this, but it didn't make me feel much better.  The school had also rented a middle school auditorium for the performance, but we didn't have access to it until just that day, meaning none of us had any idea what the space was like.  We hadn't even done a full run-through of the show, and even though I was supposed to be the announcer, I only had a vague idea of what was going on.  I had written a partial script, but was going to be winging a large part of it, and I hate winging it.

 

Aran, on the other hand, was looking forward to the entire thing with great enthusiasm.  So I kept all my reservations to myself.

 

My mother and my in-laws were going to be coming, but Aran and I had to be at the auditorium rather earlier, so we left soon after Aran got home from school and before my mother arrived.  Drove over to the school and found various karate schoolers unloading equipment for set-up.  We got mats laid down on the floor, and I got a clip-on mike so I could run sound checks.  I also worked out the light board so we could get some decent lighting on the stage.  I also assembled the kids and gave them a lecture on backstage safety.

 

"Do you have a background in theater?" one of the instructors asked, noticing that I knew my way around an auditorium.

 

"I have a degree in it," I told her.

 

"Oh!  If I had known that, I would have tapped you a lot earlier."

 

"That's why I kept my mouth shut," I said with a wide smile.

 

We did a quick run-through of the cues, got the kids set up, ran the music through the amplifier, and chewed our nails.  Eventually, it was time, and the show began.

 

I announced from backstage as a disembodied voice, partly because I didn't have the material memorized and partly because I didn't want to stroll on and off stage every few seconds.  I introduced the school, gave the "no cell phones or flash photography" rule, and the kids went into the show.  They went through various forms, acrobatic moves, board breaking, and weapons demonstrations.  Some of the adults demonstrated self-defense in some skits.  One of the black belt instructors broke a stack of six patio bricks.  It went mostly smoothly, really, and the audience was appreciative.  Aran loved it.

 

Afterward, we got all our family together.  Aran's birthday is in a few days, and he got presents from my in-laws--a stack of Goosebumps books, which he loves.  My in-laws headed off, and the rest of us went to a late supper with my mother.  At supper, Aran got more presents from Grandma Penny--the Mario Kart game and a much-needed new remote, both for the Wii.  We monopolized the table for quite some time, really.  Aran got a small birthday parade with his free sundae, which also precipitated dessert orders for Sasha and Maksim.  It was a good dinner out.

 

At last it was time to go home.  Arrived at nearly 10:00.  Mackie was wiped!  So was I.

House, Garage, and Iron

Saturday, we hit critical mass.  For various reasons, the housework had been rather neglected lately.  The house was a =mess.=  And then there was the garage.  It was piled with junk, a lot of it garbage that had been too big to break up easily when it was cold out, and some of it stuff that just hadn't been put away properly.  It was almost impossible to get around in there.  The house and the garage had hit critical mass for me, and it was time to Clean Up.

 

First came the house.  Everything was put away properly.  The bathrooms were given a good going-over.  The shower curtains were taken down and washed.  Floors were mopped.  It wasn't really spring cleaning, but it was close.

 

Thence to the garage.  First was the dreadful job of disposing of the border rails of the garden plot we'd torn up two weekends ago.  The trash company had refused to take them, so they'd been sitting on the front lawn.  I piled half of them into the hatchback--they stuck out like a mutant rooster tail--and Sasha and I drove to the dump.  The car was riding very low, and I was glad we hadn't tried to put in more than half.  The dump charges by the cubic yard, and when we got there, the guy in the office told me the charge was $22, minimum.  Per trip.

 

"Oh," I said.  "Look, the rails I have in the car are all I could safely haul, and that's about half of what I need to dump.  They're also half a cubic yard.  Can't we pretend it's all one trip?  I'm going to do both trips right away.  I really don't want to pay a charge for two cubic yards when I'm only dumping one."

 

In the end, the man let himself be persuaded.  Sasha and I dumped the rails, returned quickly back home to load up the rest, and drove back to the dump before he could change his mind.  Whew!

 

Then it was the garage proper.  The boys and I hauled everything out into the driveway.  M----, one of the neighbor kids who Sasha and Mackie sometimes plays with, wandered by and offered to help.  I put him to work.  We crushed cardboard for recycling (a huge job), dumped trash into the garbage bins for pickup, put sleds into the back shed, and more.  The pushbroom handle was broken, so I used the leaf blower to clear the floor.  Then we started putting everything back in.  A pile of stuff ended up at the curb, including two car seats that we can't use anymore and a tricycle Mackie outgrew.

 

Now there's plenty of clear space in the garage!  Yay!

 

Afterward, we went to see IRON MAN.  We offered to take M---- with us, since he helped so much.  He dashed home to get permission, and his mother came over to confirm.  Off we went.

 

The movie was really good.  I wasn't a big Iron Man comic reader, though I was familiar enough with it.  The reviews I'd read were overall very positive but said the movie lost focus in the end, being unsure who or what Tony Stark was fighting.  I disagreed with that assessment, but that may be because I was familiar with the comic.  The movie's third act came straight from the comics.  I loved Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark.  He was wonderful in the role and captured the character extremely well.  I wouldn't have thought to cast Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts, but she was fantastic as well.  The timing and energy in their scenes together was excellent.  The Iron Man armor was a treat to watch, too.  Highly recommended.

Behavior Update

We got through an entire week at school without having a single behavior problem from any of the boys.  Sasha did all his homework every day.  Aran collected his stickers and did his work in class.  Mackie's worst day was when he got on yellow on the traffic light and earned two stickers, which means he doesn't get in trouble at home but doesn't earn a "good job" sticker, either.  The rest of the days, he got three stickers and was on green or was off the light altogether.

 

It was a good week.