Whew!

I started out today with a trip to Fred Meyer. I bought ten pairs of gloves. Now, you might be tempted to wonder if I have suddenly grown several extra appendages, but alas, it was nothing quite that cool. Instead, it was cold, and I was going to chaperon a field trip full of high school kids, and we were going to a cemetery. It seemed like a good time to have extra gloves on hand (pun intended) and after all, the gloves were $1.01 a pair, with my 15% off coupon. For those of you keeping track, that means I spent $10.10 on my gloves, and I even had exact change. The lady who checked me out was very impressed.

I then got to the school, listened to the last 10 minutes of my mom's class, and then helped get the kids loaded up on the bus. Then, while mom explained the rules of the field trip to the kids, I took the tags and little plastic holders off of all ten pairs of gloves. By the time we were at the cemetery, I was all ready for any potentially frozen hands. After walking around the cemetery for about 10 minutes I had my first customer, and before we were done, seven pairs had been borrowed. The kids were relatively well behaved (cold, wet weather seems to have that effect on high schoolers) and we made it back to the bus, and the school early.

I had a little before the hearing at the court house, so I went home to shower and change. I remembered not to wear my boots this time, so I didn't even set off the metal detector. Once I got there we found out they were running really late, so I got to hang out for almost an hour before we even went in. I will spare you all the details, but we have permission for Maddy to stay with Michael, as well as for him to bring Maddy back for a short visit in December to see me and the older kids. YEAH!!

One might think that would be enough excitement for one day, but the excitement-gods had other plans. At 6 pm I got to go to a neighborhood meeting at the police station to talk about the fence, or lack there of, at the end of our street. It was a meeting filled with an assortment of characters, from the two yelling bullies, the drunk lady who kept talking about moms who couldn't drive and had strollers, to the apartment manager who kept trying to explain that she couldn't evict people just because some neighbors didn't like them. (Darn those housing laws. lol)

Anyway, I stayed for the first 45 minutes and then had to leave for my next exciting event. (Props to my mom who stayed for the entire meeting. I am not sure I could have lasted the entire hour and a half.)

My last hugely exciting event of the day was going ot a training for FOS (Friends of Scouting) which was held in Milwaukie. (Just for the record, the Amtrak train comes through that time of day, and so if you go down the main hill, you will be even later for your meeting.) I got there twenty minutes late, to find that there were three trainers and four other people there. They were waiting for "everyone else" to arrive. Even after waiting another twenty minutes, it became obvious that I was the "last to arrive," and so we got started.

They did feed us a fairly nice dinner while giving us a completely boring training. I think that ten minutes of talking, ten minutes of reading through the materials and another ten minutes to answer questions would have been sufficient. Instead, it didn't end until after 9:00 pm, and I am still not sure what I am really supposed to do. I was promised at the end of this excitement-fest that the next meeting in January would be even better because they would actually be giving us the information we would use when giving presentations, as well as our unit goals. (I had thought that was what this meeting was for, so I am still not sure why I was there.)

So, I am home now, and heading to bed. I made it. I think.