Since the Pumpkin Carving Party

Our lives have not exactly calmed down. This week, along with going to work every day and attending the usual complement of rainy soccer practices, evening meetings, and Saturday work parties, we also:

-- Hosted two grandmothers, who overlapped in the kitchen for fifteen minutes on Friday afternoon while we were all at work & school.

-- Drove to Snoqualmie Pass for a meeting of King & Kittitas County historical societies about a cross-country Model T race that will hopefully pass through our towns next summer, and tried not to roll our eyes at barbed comments from the rural organizations about the plentiful funding and personnel available to "big city" heritage groups.

-- Stopped at the Issaquah Target on the way back to pick up a Bakugan Starter Kit for a certain birthday boy, discovered they were sold out, panicked, called around to discover that everyone's sold out, wandered the toy aisles despairing at the large array of unsatisfactory alternatives, then stumbled upon the amazing Build Your Own Lightsaber Kit, which turned out to be pretty much the best present ever, given our boy's current obsession:


-- Shepherded an ambitious 6th grader through the writing of a report on her great-grandfather, Learned Hand. The paper included this marvelous quote, from a letter Hand wrote to Clarence Day in 1924:

Do you know anything about disorderly conduct? That is one of the strangest crimes of the law. As far as I can learn, though I don’t know much about it, the petty magistrates are essentially kadis, who can put you or me in jail for no more than thirty days whenever we do what they think will cause offense to our neighbors. I should think outrageously unconventional dress would fall within that category. If I wear a light pink tunic and knee breeches striped with lavender and black, red silk stockings with a skull and cross-bones on them, and shoes with musical buckles, and to cap it I wear a hat with a bird cage full of canaries on top and carry a blue parasol, on which sits a stuffed rooster, I guess it is a crime. It would stir up too much feeling. There is no law about it but in practice I should find that the law was against me, even though I could prove beyond doubt that I was a social philosopher and not at all crazy. People would say that I attracted too much attention and made riots likely. Well, is that an undue suppression of my impulses? Are you against it or for it?

-- The above vision became the basis for a ridiculously labor-intensive Halloween costume (many thanks to Granny Shan for late-night assistance with canaries, musical buckles, and rooster attachments). It was all worth it, we think:



-- Procured cinnamon buns for 28 children and 1 teacher, delivered them to school in time for Simon's class birthday party. Stayed for birthday wishes & singing before departing only three minutes late for work.


-- Hosted a Halloween night birthday party; guest list included Pac Man, Michael Phelps, three Beijing Olympic Mascots, and a mother whose basement remodel had just failed its third inspection, who was in dire need of large quantities of wine; crashers included two more Olympic Mascots, a mysterious lavender octopus, and a couple of borrowed grandparents.

-- Baked a birthday cake from scratch, decorated it with a drum kit drawn by birthday boy himself, had moment of panic upon realizing we had forgotten to buy birthday candles, found a forgotten pack in the back of a drawer.



Whew!

(We're trying not to let our sense of accomplishment be diminished too much by the fact that during the same period we failed to fulfill an equally long list of professional & personal obligations...)