So Friday, I go on my annual shop hop with Whizgidget. She comes to town for the Sundance Film Festival (work event) and we get together and shop hop. This year we had a full day so we hit Shepherd’s Bush – where I had no intention of buying anything but ended up finding the Shepherd’s Bush Olympic Pin (which I didn’t have), Just Nan’s Christmas Peace, and a kit for a friend who needs a pick me up, and then with 25 yards for just $3, we went nuts on Fibers to Dye For. The next shop was Needlepoint Joint which is on “Main Street Everwood.” In fact, the Everwood town hall is across the street from Needlepoint Joint. Yep, Ogden, Utah is the Everwood set. At Needlepoint Joint, there is a Christmas stocking that I have had my eye on for awhile. In fact, I think that going there and wanting it for 5 times and having it still be there (this time marked down) means that it was time for it to come home with me. It’s Oriental Poinsettias. I’m thinking it’s great for my DD.
Next stop was lunch (did I mention that it was snowing? First time in ages and I’m driving in it). We went to Crown Burger, which is known for its onion rings and “heart attack on a bun.” The Crown Burger is a beef patty, cheese, pastrami, tomato, mayonnaise, and lettuce. They have the standard ¼ pound size and the smaller size known as a junior.
Following lunch, it was Stitching Station where we discovered that Fibers to Dye For also puts out patterns. By the way, Fibers to Dye for are $3.50 here but they have different colors. Whizgidget found a great canvaswork pattern that doesn’t have a colorway, it’s designed so that you can use leftovers from other projects to make a patchwork of specialty stitches. I bought canvas to start mine and I should have gone with 16×16 instead of 15×15 because I don’t have any 15 inch stretcher bars and I really wanted to get started. After Stitchin’ Station it was up to my house where I had to confess that I hadn’t cleaned before she came. Richard looked through my DH’s newest gallery prints (which are incredible) and Ann looked in the doorway of my stash room, and asked what I had done to it. I was forced to reply, well besides tossing things in the general direction of the cupboard, umm, nothing. You see my husband has decided that the stash room is a great place to put all the paper that accumulates in the kitchen. He finds boxes, pushes everything off the table or the telephone counter and deposits the boxes in my stash room. This means that over the course of a year, it gets quite cluttered and at the time she visited, it was not possible to walk into the room.
We coordinated with the kids for dinner and headed out to the next shop. Gardner Village is a tourist trap, but they have a great candy store and Pine Needles which is the home store for Pine Mountain Designs. Following that it was the traditional dinner at Braza Grill and back to Park City. It was starting to snow when I dropped WG and her DH at their hotel and I knew that I needed something to help keep me awake so I took the Phone a Friend option. I didn’t tell my Meandering Friend that I was on a mountain pass, during a snowstorm but she did know that I had her on speakerphone. She got me home safely and I switched to the land line to continue the conversation and I started cleaning the stash room. The telephone conversation ended at 12:30 am my time which would be 2:30 am her time. But I wasn’t done, I kept cleaning and about 3 am I decided I should head to bed (DH was out winter camping with the scouts). Just to give you an idea, I hauled 3 bags of garbage out to the can, put one box of papers in DH’s study, and I have 2 bags of paper left. One is the financial info I will need for the 2005 taxes and one is things that should either be set aside for scrapbooking (which I do not do) or filed someplace safe (which I don’t yet have). Beyond that, I could vacuum in there now. Since cleaning and organizing isn’t on my focus goals until next week, I can stop here and not feel guilty. After all, what I did in there wasn’t on the schedule until next week.
(For those of you who thought I was going to talk about movies, sorry, I don’t like the line at Trolley Square and that means no tickets.)

DH shows up at my office on Wednesday and apologizes that it’s been so long since he’s given me flowers. He didn’t realize how long until today when he decided to go get some for me. I love getting flowers and honestly, I didn’t realize how long it had been until he mentioned it. It seems that there were 3 places he liked to go to get flowers for me. One is closed and when he went to the other two; both buildings had been torn down (one is now a Walgreens). He said that it made him realize that he had taken way too long between roses.

I should explain that in my house, when you are tall enough to reach the washing machine, you wash your own laundry. I’m lucky in that my husband does my laundry. This week, however, he’s been focused on a project that has the possibility of a very high professional payoff so the laundry is piling up and overflowing the hamper. In a classic, distracted mom move, I gathered it all into the hamper and got the hamper halfway to the laundry room before being distracted by another task. At 11 pm, it hit me that I would have no clean underwear in the morning because I still hadn’t done the laundry. The hamper wasn’t in the hall where I left it. I found it in the laundry room with only darks in it. The underwear was in the washer and had already been run. I tossed it in the dryer, threw the darks in the washer and went to thank my incredible husband. He appreciated the kiss and the cuddle but confessed that he hadn’t run the laundry; he even apologized for forgetting about it. I thought, it must be my daughter but she was just walking in the door apologizing that shooting the basketball game for the school paper kept her out late. That left my 12 year old. All I could think was, “Wow, my 12 year old just ran the parents laundry without being asked.” We must be doing something right. So would it be spoiling him to get him a thank you present?

Sunday I taught a lesson on organization and self reliance. Now the self reliance part I know I’m more than qualified to teach but the organization part, well that’s one of the reasons that I’m participating in the Life Change Mini Challenge. I got thinking about the best way to teach the concept and I remembered a Catherine Aird quote, “If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.” I came rushing into the class late, apologizing that I forgot to get a substitute for my regular library job. I then started unloading my stuff from 2 of my daughter’s bags. One said “Bag of Holding,” I started pulling out books, a floral arrangement, and handouts. One of the younger women said that it reminded her of Mary Poppins. Then I went to the other bag. It read “Bag of Devouring” I said, “I know my notes are in here somewhere. The first item I pulled out was a towel that read “Don’t Panic!” I pinned it to the bulletin board with tacks from a sub-pocket of the holding bag. I went back to digging. I pulled out a credit card statement – “Oh shoot, I should have paid this Friday, now I’ll have a $30 late fee.” my cell phone – “ Maybe I can reach DH and see if he has the notes, oh, dead battery”, another bill – “Uh-oh this one went to collections”, a day planner – “This would help if I ever got it out to write in it” and I showed everyone the blank pages, then I pulled out my notes along with a sign for the board that read, “Organize yourselves, prepare every needful thing.” At that point, everyone laughed and I asked how many others had a “Bag of Devouring” and a “Bag of Holding.” Devouring is all the things you’ve misplaced and Holding is all the things you’ve put off for “Someday.” The rest of the lesson went pretty well from there, I had even been organized enough to pass out quotes and scriptures for people to read.

So my dad calls today from Hawaii. “Have you been picking up my mail?” “Why not? You’re the only family member in town. I just assumed you would take care of it.”
Hello? It’s bad enough that the family went to Hawaii leaving me and 2 brothers in town but now he’s mad that I didn’t read his mind about picking up the mail. For heaven’s sake, my brother that stayed home lives one block from my parents. I live in a totally different suburb. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have him pick up the mail? It turns out that his wife wanted to go with her family to Liberty instead of Hawaii. My family doesn’t even get invited to go with the rest of the family because someone has to stay home and take care of the family business. On the good side, I understand that some of the island roads in Hawaii are closed today because of snow.

The beach in Mexico was warm as we walked along the shore with our friends. We could see the fishing fleet on the horizon with the exception of one small boat coming into the shore. It pulled up on the shore and one man got out with his catch. The men in our party walked over to look at the catch and the man in the boat offered to sell us three of the four fish he had. The couple we were with pointed out our party would need four fish. The man said only 3 fish were for sale. His family needed the other fish and he was done working for the day.
The salesman in our group immediately saw an opportunity.
“So, how long do you work every day and what do you do when you are not working?” he asked.
“About 4 hours, I go out before dawn and come back when I have four fish. It’s usually about 10 in the morning.” Our fisherman continued. “I will take the three fish to the market and take one home for my family. Then I will play with my children while my wife prepares the fish, when she is done we will take a siesta together. After the siesta, I will play with the children while she finishes dinner. After dinner, I walk into town and drink tequila with my friends. I walk home and sleep until morning when I go fishing. It is a good life.”
I could see the wheels smoking in my friend’s brain. He waited a few minutes and then burst out, “Just think, if you did fish all day, you would soon have the money to buy a bigger boat and hire other men to fish for you.”
“Why would I do that? What would I do if other men fished for me?”
“You would supervise them and with all that fish, you could sell not to the village but to the cannery and that would earn you even more money. If you saved that, you could build a cannery here in town and provide jobs for everyone in the village.”
“I can see that could help my neighbors but what would I do with a cannery?”
If you had a cannery, you could contract with distributors to take your products to the US and then you would make even more money and could become a distributor and move your family to the United States.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Well in the US, you could expand your distribution networks until you had millions of dollars and could retire a rich man.”
“What would I do then?”
“Whatever you wanted,” shouted my worked up friend.
“What I want is a small home in Mexico, a fishing boat, time to play with my children, siesta with my wife, and drink with my friends.”
“You could do that when you retire.”
“gringo loco,” said the man as he walked off with the four fish, “All that work just to do what I do now.”

The school finished the testing on DS#2 and we had an IEP meeting today. DH went in loaded for bear because he was positive that it was going to be “medicate him.” The resource teacher brought in the test results and started with, “We didn’t waste time testing any of the areas that we already knew your son was strong in. That would have been an insult to his intelligence.” The classroom teacher then piped up with , “I do wish you would reconsider testing him for ADD. He has such trouble focusing, I had to tap him and get him back on the page with the rest of the class several times during science today.” The resource teacher replied, “Page? You were reading together? Of course he was off task then. The behavioral section did show that he was on task 74% of the time when the other kids were 98% of the time but the school counselor did note that she noticed either a start of a new sound (such as people in the hall or the furnace) or that the assigned task involved reading.” She then looked down her nose at the teacher, “It’s easy to see why so many children in this school have been misclassified.” She then turned to DH and me and started going over the testing. I thought DH was going to jump up and hug this woman.
Needless to say, she finds that DS#2 has a classic reading disorder defined by extremely high Thinking Ability, Visual – Spatial Acuity and his Fluid Reasoning is just down right spooky. (He did more of the computer generated problems in his time frame than she did when she pre-tested this exam). Given children of his same age, if they were all given this same exam – he would score 95 to the average of 90. His Auditory Processing, Visual Processing speed, Basic Reading and Written expression are below average and on a test he would score between 30-43 compared to a peer score of 90. So, without admitting that he is dyslexic, they are going to work with him on reading, language and spelling.
I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off me. We did decide that he would still get the regular classroom language page and the spelling word search over the weekend and the resource teacher would grade them since both projects are good for him even though he finds them difficult.
I think the resource teacher really won DH over when she asked him when he was first diagnosed and what he did as a child to compensate. I’ve already had one friend tell me that this resource woman is a gem and to thank God that we’ve found her. Believe me; I’ll be on my knees cheering in prayer tonight.
On a final note, since she feels we haven’t any time to lose, she starts working with DS#2 tomorrow.

So tomorrow President Clinton is eligible to practice law again. His 5 year suspension for lying under oath ends on 1/19/06 so once again, he can legally take cases and go before juries as the questioner instead of the questioned. But would you really want him as your attorney? After all, I would have a problem with hiring someone who can’t remember what he was doing and asks for the definition of is.
But then again, the American legal system works on cronyism. It might be good to have as your attorney someone who stacked the appellate courts with his friends and school chums. After all, many cases are truly decided on the golf course and over dinner rather than in the courtroom.
Luckily, since I probably won’t need an attorney in New York, I won’t have to worry about these questions.

My son joined the Utah Quilt Guild last night. When I got home from work, he loaded 2 sewing machines in my truck and said, “Hurry, we’re already late.” At the meeting, he went to town on the class project (Mile a minute quilting). By the end of class, he had completed 2 strips and picked up on how the system works. He wants to quilt on his break from school this weekend. At the end of class, he had been such a hit again that the teacher gave him all the scraps and strips that she had brought for samples. So again, he leaves class with more fabric. I think I’m going to make him keep his own stash away from mine. He wants to start his fat quarter quilt this weekend. I suggested that he finish the quilt that he started at the guild meeting first. He just looked at me, disgusted, and said, “The queen of unfinished projects is asking me to do one at a time?” Okay, round one to him.
I just worry about him becoming too overwhelmed with the fat quarter quilt, his strip quilt and the guild contest quilt. I forgot to mention that didn’t I? The reason that my son joined the quilt guild is so that he could enter the annual challenge contest. The challenge is either a Drunkard’s Path or a quilt or wall hanging using ½ square triangles. I have an idea for my quilt but I have at least one or two projects to complete first.

My husband pointed out that what my son is learning is not quilting but how to wrap women around his finger.