High School Remembered

The past few days in California have brought back a lot of memories! First, I attended the "20 years of Main Street Singers party" on Saturday night after driving up to Los Altos from Pasadena. Tonight, Dan, my father and I drove up to Belmont to walk (part of) the Crystal Springs cross country race course that I ran many times each fall with my high school cross country team. Man, I was in much better shape back then!

I also began sorting through letters that were written to me when I spent my exchange year in Germany! What fun memories!!! When I turned 17, I asked some people in my family to write about their memories of being that age. My parents were refacing the cabinets in the kitchen that year (they have since been totally replaced). I found a letter from my headmaster commending my work ethic (nice to find those sorts of things!).

I never like to throw out cards I've been sent, so I had to sort through cards going back to camps I went to in elementary school. I did finally toss some things, including a big teddy bear and some very gaudy jewelry. We saved old dance costumes for my cousin and saved the fronts of the nicest cards to recycle as postcards. All reasonable letters will be saved.

For the resalable stuff, we're having a garage sale with Beth's boyfriend on Saturday. Whee!

Hot Hot Hot!

The weather has perked up after about two weeks of cold, rainy weather. Saturday, Dan and I went to Home Depot to get the materials for a raised bed garden and rabbit-resistant garden fencing. (Yeah - I should have done this a while ago but we've been too busy!) We have lots of critters in our area and I freqently see rabbits hopping around the backyard, so this is absolutely essential. Although there are a lot of deer in the general area, I've never seen any (or signs of any) in our back yard. I think this could be because we are bordered on two sides by extremely busy roads and a number of blocks from any open space. (Maybe I'll know there are deer by the end of the summer... Hope not!) Since Dan and I are going away to California for two weeks beginning tomorrow, I won't be doing any planting until I come back, but I hope to make it easy to plant upon my return.

Dan and I went to the birthday party of a child we used to babysit yesterday. He turned eight. The birthday party was held at Chuck E. Cheese's and we took John with us. Now, I know that John can hear (he follows my voice around and such, as well as having had his hearing tested at 2 days of age) but days like yesterday make me question my assumptions. Chuck E.'s is loud and crazy and young children were running around and screaming near us. Did it bother John? Not at all. He sat and listened to our conversations without flinching. (Being a somewhat uptight first-time mama, I did make sure I held him with him facing away from the multitudes of televisions, but even those flashing lights seemed to not matter to him when others held him towards the TVs.)

Remember PARCOURSE, that fitness course with stations around parks (ie balance beam, sit-up boardsl, etc) ? Dan and I went to a park yesterday afternoon that had such a course and it had two signs for every station. One was for people with full abilities, the other was for people in wheelchairs! Speaking about political correctness, some Princeton area parents sued Princeton High School under Title IX and Princeton HS is being forced to build two new softball/baseball fields, one of which must have attached locker rooms! Dan and I are glad our rent money doesn't go towards Princeton property taxes!