When Life Gets Crazy....

My apologies for not posting for over a week. Life has been more than busy; it's been crazy! A week ago I wrote a long, beautiful post on our sailing excursion around San Diego Bay, and just as I was posting it, it blinked and disappeared,; it's traveling around cyberspace, very lost and lonely. In frustration with computers in general and Blogspot in particular, I closed my laptop and haven't had time to draw a deep breath, much less post, in the week since.

So what have I been up to this past week? Allow me to give you a glimpse.....

Wednesday, October 3: We studied our lessons until 11 AM when I dropped Judith's birthday present by her home before driving myself and the three kids 50 miles to the coast where we met my parents and brother at the Harbor Island Yacht Club where my parents have a membership that allows them to put the majority of their monthly fees toward boat rental. We sailed a Coronado 27 from the yacht club, around Harbor Island, then south through San Diego Bay between downtown and Coronado, between the skyscrapers and the navy ships (USS Reagan, USS Nimitz, among others). We turned around just after we sailed under the Coronado Bay Bridge, then started tacking our way back through the bay. The day was gorgeous, and as it was a weekday, the bay was almost empty of sailboats so we had free reign. We had to motor back most of the way as the winds weren't favorable for getting us back within our four-hour rental time. It was such a lovely, lovely day -- I grew up sailing as a kid on my grandfather's sailboats, so my parents and brother know how to crew well. I'm very fortunate in being able to share an important part of my childhood experiences with our children today, and they all seem to be as hooked on sailing as I am.

Thursday, October 4: I was out the door by 8 AM so I could be at the dentist's office near College Avenue before nine for the joyous experience of a root canal. Oh, joy! I came home with a vanilla shake to sip and stayed on the sofa most of the day, supervising the kids' school work. After dinner, E and I packed up our overnight things and drove to Mom and Dad's place in Pacific Beach where we spent the night in order to attend Dad's Rotary meeting in the early morning.

Friday, October 5: E and I were up at 5:30 (unheard of in our household!) to follow Dad to the La Jolla Marriott for the 7 AM meeting of the Golden Triangle Rotary Club where my brother Tom met us. Tom and I were both recipients of the Paul Harris Fellow award for Dad's donations to Rotary in our names. Pam and Geoff, good friends of my parents (Pam was my mom's maid-of-honor and Dad had dated Pam first before settling on Mom in their college days) were there also, with Geoff receiving the same award. The speaker was especially interesting, a professor from my grad school, University of San Diego, who had helped with the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit currently at the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park. His talk was absolutely intriguing. After the meeting, we met with several great Rotarian friends of my dad, and then E and I hopped into my car and scuttled from La Jolla to Alpine for Friday morning Anglican services with Father Acker. We missed the beginning of Morning Prayer but weren't too late, fortunately. (I had warned Father ahead of time that we might be late.) After the service, I dropped E in El Cajon at Keith's office so she could meet with Johanna, her algebra tutor, and I proceeded to Dr. Burns' office for my chiropractic appointment at 11 AM, then studied a book on the Dead Sea Scrolls at Starbucks until my return to the chirooractic office for meridien testing. Afterward, I picked up the kids and we drove back home to finish our school work for the day.

Saturday, October 6: Usually Saturdays are a day of rest for me -- I just put the laundry through its paces and rest as much as possible, after sleeping in for the vast majority of the morning. But in this busy week, of course that didn't happen. I was up before 9 AM and on the road with the kids to the SDG&E Old Timers' Picnic at Lake Poway where we met my dad and my brother Tom with his two kiddos. It again was a lovely fall day, and the cousins plus a few other kids played happily on the playground equipment, and we enjoyed a nice hamburger/hot dog lunch. Some of the people there remember me as a toddler and small child when my dad sued to bring me to his office. As Tom took all six kids for a hike around the lake, I snapped a few photos and then changed from jeans into good black slacks. I had to leave early to attend Miss Ellie's memorial service at Lake Murray; Miss Ellie was the wife of Pastor Bob, our seniors pastor, and I didn't want to miss her service. Since Dad's convertible didn't have enough seatbelts for the four kids, I drove his car to La Mesa and later he followed with the kids in our Sienna and we switched cars back. The service lasted for two hours and was a beautiful memorial of a life well-lived despite great pain and suffering. Our former pastor, Kirt, gave the opening prayer -- it was the first time he had been at Lake Murray in four years. Trust Miss Ellie to bring people together; it was truly her gift. We didn't stay long after because the kids and I were all getting tired, so we hauled on home around 4:30 PM, and we continued our usual Saturday evening activities of bathing boys, making up the menu and grocery list for Keith's shopping on Sunday morning, etc.

Sunday, October 7: Sunday was my mother's birthday, but she was on a cruise to Cabo with 27 other women from my dad's office; we had given her cards and gifts the day we all sailed together. We were all out the door by 8:15 for church as usual; the kids and I attended 9 AM Sunday School and Keith joined us for 10:45 worship. As it was the first Sunday of the month, Communion was served by the elders. I always have my 1928 Book of Common Prayer in my lap during Communion at Lake Murray because the prayers of preparation and the thanksgiving afterward are so reverent and beautiful. We came home and I rested most for the afternoon, and in the evening I wrote our lesson plans for the next week. I should have been grading the stack of papers for Class Day, but I really needed to rest a little after such a busy week.

And this week has been busy as well:

Monday: Keith's birthday was Monday, and he wanted no gifts. It was also the observance of Columbus Day, so I gave E a make-up day as she had become a little behind becuase of all of the activity of the past week, and the boys had a day off after helping to clean the house. While she studied and the boys vacuumed and cleaned bathrooms, I baked Keith a double-batch of his favorite Snickerdoodle cookies, per his mother's excellent recipe. At 2:30, Erika came to watch the boys while E and I, dressed in skirts and nice jackets, drove to the city, picked up Keith, and arrived at the San Diego Natural History Museum to meet Dad. He had purchased tickets for the four of us to see the Dead Sea Scrolls with his Rotary Club, attend a reception, then enjoy a lecture by the scholar who had first opened the Psalms scroll. The scrolls were fascinating -- well over 2000 years old, and, as the scholar told us, with only about a 5% difference to the Biblical manuscripts we already had. God has definitely guarded His Word throughout the millennia! I was especially impressed by the scroll of the Ten Commandments and the long Isaiah and Psalms scrolls. The scrolls were much smaller than I had imagined, and at the lecture I found out why: most of the scrolls had been sliced up by Roman swords when the area of Qumran was overrun by the Roman army in 68 AD, two years before the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, sixteen miles away. I had learned quite a bit about the settlement of Qumran through the children's Advent books Jotham's Journey, Tabitha's Travels, and Bartholemew's Passage, all of which are currently out-of-print. I had to hurry through the last room of the exhibit because we had to rush to the reception at the Prado restaurant then back again to the museum for the 6:30 lecture which was fascinating. After leaving Dad and Balboa Park, Keith decided he wanted Round Table Pizza for his birthday dinner, so we three stopped at the restaurant in Santee and enjoyed a delicious, gluten-y pizza with all the toppings.

Tuesday: Yesterday I had to flip around our usual school schedule because I had to be at the PV Library by 12:30 for the board meeting (every two weeks) of our creative arts council. As secretary, I had to bring along copies of the minutes for review and approval, something I had forgotten to do at the last meeting so we had double to attend to at this meeting. Judith picked me up on the way and gave me the lovely tea cups she had bought for me on her recent Colorado trip and from which I'm sipping Irish Breakfast tea even as I compose this lengthy post. She also had some old issues of Touchstone, my new favorite magazine, some informative National Geographic and US News & World Report mags for the kids on history (Jamestown and Eqypt), and even some gently-used black handbags for E and me. After the meeting, we stopped by Myrna's place to visit her as she's been either in the hospital or in residential care since early June and just returned home in the past few days. Myrna is our creative art council's youth coordinator, and she's simply so much fun! Now in her mid-fifties, she was in a terrible car accident in her early twenties and has been in a wheelchair ever since. Myrna is such a card, and we all want to do some stuff for her as far as fixing up her house which is crumbling around her and taking care of her heating needs, which is especially important here in the back country where even this morning at almost 9 AM we were still in the thirties. After visiting Myrna, I came home and helped the kids finish their lessons. In the evening, I attended our small writing group in PV at the library where we shared and discussed our attempts at flash fiction and also discussed Jess' seventeen-page long short story. Next month I'm on the spot, having to bring along some of the beginnings of my book. I definitely have my work cut out for me!

Wednesday: Today I have nothing on besides our normal school day plus grading papers for tomorrow's Class Day writing courses. At least all my prep is done! I also have to catch up here as well as on my 365 blog which hasn't seen a new photo in a week; they're all still in my camera. I also have a few phone calls to make and the minutes from yesterday's meeting to type up, e-mail to the other board members, plus print, sign, and file in our notebook.

So what's ahead for the rest fo the week?

Thursday: Class Day from 9:30-1:30, plus I need to drop off some baby things (stroller and portable crib) at church for some missionaries returning from Russia to stay here for a while. I have grading to finish for Class Day, plus two classes to teach. One class will be doing an in-class timed assignment, so I hope I can grade most of their papers they're turning in while they're writing. I'm teaching the compare/contrast format to the college-prep class.

Friday: Chapel at 9:15 AM in Alpine with Father Acker. 11 AM chiropractic appointment where we'll discuss my meridien results and also pop my neck back where it belongs. Then after a quick stop at Trader Joe's, I need to have the boys at Oma's Pumpkin Patch in Lakeside by 12:15 for a field trip with our school. We will also need to finish up the remainder of our school lessons after the field trip.

Saturday: I hope that I'm not doing a thing except laundry! If Kitty gets my poems back to me by then, I'll be frantically revising for my poetry reading on Tuesday where I am the Featured Artist at our monthly creative arts council meeting. I'm not sure volunteering was such a good idea after all ....

So that's what I have been doing, what I am doing, and what I will be doing. And that's why I've been derelict in posting over the past week and why you may not see another post until, say, next week, possibly....