Weekend Update

Well, it was a very, very busy weekend. A good kind of busy, to be sure, but …

Friday I was home with Kitten, while Margie was in the office. I monitored office e-mail and got a few things done during the morning. The cleaning people showed up late morning, so I bundled up Kitten to run errands, primary of which was getting a flash memory unit for myself, since Margie rather unreasonably wants the one that I got her for Christmas. How ungrateful. I wanted it in time to go off on business for the week tomorrow, since I suspect it will come in handy in transferring applications back and forth.

Circuit City: limited selection, high prices. CompUSA: bingo. I bought the “house label” one for cheap. Good stuff.

Then off to the park for some play time for Kitten. Lots of fun, cut off by complaints about cold hands. Well, yes, it was in the 40s out, and, yeah, I guess I was keeping my hands in my pockets, as opposed to grabbing formed metal tubing and climbing all over it, but, jeez, kid, suck it up …

Well, no gloves in the van. Suggestions we go home were met with the tormented cries of the damned (all the more plaintive because there was another kid there and she wanted to play). I cast my override to her veto and went home, looking for mittens.

No mittens to be found.

We eventually went back to the park for a while longer, then back home for a nap. That was Margie’s cue to call that she was coming home, and we decided that she should do the last shopping for the Big Party on Saturday, and the Alpha course on Monday, on her way home.

The big flaw with this plan: she had my little Saturn coupe. It’s amazing, though, how many groceries you can fit into one of those, and still be sort of able to use the manual transmission.

The evening was the resumption of Doyce’s Star Wars campaign, Ten Years Later. Dag, my character, got promptly sucked into a frame-up for the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend. Hilarity, I suspect, will ensue.

Saturday was for one thing, and one thing only: our annual Twelfth Night party. Margie was a whirling dervish in the kitchen, whilst I did much the same around the rest of the house, picking/clearing/cleaning/putting away. We actually managed to avoid the usual Box of Extra Stuff in the garage, which usually in turn becomes the Box of Stuff We’ve Been Looking For after a year or two. Instead, we were able to actually put a lot of it away.

Biggest problem: everything takes 30% longer when Kitten is around. Which would explain why 7 p.m. arrived and we were about an hour behind schedule in party prep.

Our early-arriving friends, as usual, pitched in to help, especially Doyce, and we managed to get things rolling pretty normally by 7:30.

It was a disappointingly light turn-out, though — only 20 guests (we’ve gotten close to 50 in the past). The biggest gaps were Margie’s office (one couple) and my office (two couples). Fortunately I’d invited my cohorts on the church vestry, since that made for another three couples. A passel of our “regular” friends rounded out the crew.

One problem with the light turn-out was that there was plenty of space for folks to sit, which meant they tended to congregate together. The church and Margie’s office folk took over the family room. The folks from my office hung out by the kitchen. Our friends occupied the dining room (where there was food), but eventually moved to the comfy furniture in the living room (nearly unheard of at our parties).

Still, a good time was had by all who were there.

I must say that our gaming friends were very cute about not “scaring the normals” with all sorts of weird “Dungeons & Dragons” talk. That included, at one point, Doyce saying in the kitchen, “Hey, Dave. You know that thing we were doing Friday night? We’ll probably be doing it again Sunday.”

I think the knowledge that those were all Church Folk made such circumspection — well, if not necessary, at least perceived to be such, Just In Case. I’ve occasionally mentioned to people at church that we play “Dungeons & Dragons” (the catch-all phrase that “normals” recognize better than “role-playing games”), just as I’ve mentioned that I collect comic books. I think it’s considered part of my eccentric charm — I haven’t had any of the folks I mentioned it to cross themselves or drag me away for deprogramming or anything.

On the other hand, you never know how some folks will react to such things. So maybe it was just as well.

On a related note, at one point, all three of the clusters were talking about The Two Towers, so go fig.

The “normals” were all gone by 9:30 or so, which meant conversation could free up some (“D&D — the Pastime That Dare Not Speak Its Name!”). We all hung out in the family room, drank more glög, watched one of the “hidden” tracks on the FotR DVD, and enjoyed ourselves.

Sunday came too early. Shave, shower, clothes, and off to church. It was the Annual Meeting for the congregation; Good Shepherd is (as, I suppose, many churches are, though I never thought of it that way in the past) a formal non-profit organization, whose by-laws require a meeting of the membership as a whole once a year to get the financial and budget reports, re-elect the officers (the pastor as president of the NPO, the secretary, the treasurer, etc.), and to elect the board of directors (a/k/a the Vestry).

I’ve run for the Vestry twice in the past. There are nine members, each of whom serves three years, so each year we elect three new members. Last year, out of a field of four, I was the odd man out. One of the existing members, though, resigned in the spring, so I was chosen to fill out his term, which ended this year. That meant that, like Gerald Ford, I could still run for a new, full term of my own.

The suspense mounted. I seemed to have a lot of support from the folks I’d worked with. Would I actually get elected on my own, especially with a slate of eight candidates (all of them good) running?

The answer, surprisingly, was yes. Though, for what it’s worth, neither of the other two folks I voted for was elected.

So I’m committed to another three years of church leadership and monthly meetings. I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet; I was really psyching myself up for not winning (I don’t think I’ve won an election of that sort since, well, junior high), so I have to sort of mentally shift gears on the whole thing. Huh, whaddaya know?

The meeting, aside from that bit of excitement, was interminably long. (Indeed, it sort of resembled a Vestry meeting …). Three hours plus later (!!!) we managed to bring it to a close. That meant it was time for …

… well, it was supposed to be time for driving up to Evergreen for a going-away party for one of the local office VPs, who’s been promoted to a position off at Corporate. Unfortunately, since we had friends coming to the house at 3, and it was already after Noon, we decided to blow it off. Instead, breakfast, and yet another run to CostCo for another load of food for Alpha.

Alpha is a basic Christian education and Bible study course that is done in a dinner theater/small group sort of setting. Margie and I did the course together in 2001, and last year I was one of the small group co-facilitators while Margie (for the second year) cooked everyone’s meals.

The past few years, we’ve had about 50-60 folks sitting down to dinner, including the class leadership. Folks used to stare at Margie when she mentioned cooking for that many.

This year, fearing that we may have saturated the demand at Good Shepherd, we decided to do it in conjunction with Holy Spirit Lutheran, down the road, who had expressed an interest in doing the Alpha course.

That’s why the current tally, between the two congregations, is about … 175. With Margie cooking for the bunch of them, and me being one of the main group leaders.

It’s going to be interesting. Expect our Monday nights (and Sundays) to be pretty full up for the next quarter.

Sunday afternoon we had friends over the the annual Thirteenth Night Left-over Fest, wherein we try to get everyone to eat all the food that wasn’t eaten the night before. I’ve done this previously in conjunction with games I was running, but since I’m not running anything at the moment (I know, I know), we had an Open Game Day.

Which, as it turned out, meant playing many rounds of Apples to Apples. Which isn’t a bad thing, to be sure. There were ten of us, and there aren’t a lot of games that will support that many, and we didn’t want to break up into multiple groups.

People finally were out the door around nine, we cycled yet another load though the dishwasher, took out the trash, and readied ourselves for a new week — Alpha tonight (as noted), and then, for me, a business trip out to California for the rest of the week (which means Margie playing Single Mom for that period — keep her in your prayers).

Which is about enough of all that for right now.