Checking In

by Stephanie Black

Okay, yeah, it’s nine-thirty at night, and I haven’t yet posted a blog. But it’s still Wednesday for two and a half more hours, so I still get full credit, right?

Tonight was back to school night at the high school. You go through your child’s schedule and spend ten minutes in each class. They give you five minutes to get from class to class, which is not always easy, since the campus consists of a bunch of different buildings. Since this is my fourth year with children at the school, I’m getting a teensy bit more familiar with it, but I still needed my map and a little guidance from a kind teacher. The tricky part this year is that I have two daughters in high school, so I couldn’t do two schedules. Last year, my husband and I each took a daughter’s schedule, but tonight, he’s in China on a business trip, so I was flying solo. My oldest daughter, a senior, volunteered to attend her sophomore sister’s classes. She was excited to see several of her old teachers again. I made it to four out of the six classes on my list, then bailed out so I could go home, grab my son (who just turned twelve) and get him over to the church for a temple recommend interview for Saturday’s temple trip.

Isn’t my life fascinating? Is anyone still awake out there?

We stopped at the library today where, to my bewilderment, the parking lot was cram-jammed. Turns out that children's author Marc Brown and another author whose name escapes me were there signing books and there were a huge number of mothers and children there to meet the author. I didn't join the queue, but it's pretty cool that he was at our library (he wrote the Arthur books). And Jeff, if you come to our library, I'll be first in line.

In other updates, we’re not completely unpacked yet, but we’re getting there. Unfortunately, you can’t put the rest of life on “pause” while you go through those boxes. The kitchen floor will get still get dirty and the laundry will still pile up. You’d think the butler and footmen would keep things in better order, but it’s so hard to find good help these days.

Have you ever noticed that moving involves a lot of little odds and ends? Once you get the “real” boxes packed, you’re left with a scattering of small, random items, and when you’re unpacking, you get to deal with finding a home for them. Let’s call them “crudlets,” the kind of things that tend to collect beneath couch cushions. When we were packing up the old house, I had a bag where I could throw crudlets. Game pieces, dimes, screws, little toys, whatever. Needless to say, I haven’t attacked the crudlet bag yet. I hate crudlets. Okay, maybe for you, moving doesn’t involve crudlets because you’re organized and all the game pieces are in the game boxes and your loose change is all together in a cute ceramic jar shaped like Shakespeare’s head, but my life has been besieged by crudlets. But come to think of it, Halloween is approaching. When the doorbell rings, I could just take my crudlet bag, and here, kiddo, have a Scrabble tile, a plastic toy shaped like a slice of onion, and a little baggie of metal washers.

We also have a great many electronic bits (bitlets?). I’m always afraid to throw out any cord or connector or gizmo or gadget, since I’m usually not sure what they go to or if they’re still useful. I fear throwing something away and then having my husband say, “Have you seen the xyz? It looks like (description of item I just chucked).” So I just save all that stuff. Plus, I’m not sure what all you can throw away these days—we aren’t even supposed to put household batteries in the trash here. We just took two boxes of old batteries up to the household hazardous waste disposal facility. Yes, indeedy.

I gotta go to bed. I have jury duty in the morning.