Working weekends and glowy golf

We've had a couple of pretty chill weekends (aside, of course from more cookie sales... see below... this was Izzy's last booth of the season... she makes an excellent cookie doesn't she?)

The past three weekends I have had to work for at least part of the day each weekend, so mostly we were hanging out. We did get in a pretty rockin' game of glow in the dark mini golf last Saturday with some friends and their kids.

In my working weekend world, three weeks ago I was finishing up my training to get my "red card" so I can go out and help with fire season. It turned out to be a lovey day to go outside and learn how to dig fireline, it had just snowed in the mountains and the weather was amazing. 

We must have hiked up and down coons bluff at least 4 times learning all of the techniques, and then the exercise ended with a simulated attempt to escape the fire and then deployment of our practice fire shelters... it was quite stressful.... and why even though I am now qualified as a type II firefighter I don't anticipate digging any line anytime soon :)

Then last weekend two of my co-workers and I drove out to the Angles National Forest for more fire training - this time to serve as something called a REAF (resource advisor fireline). In at nutshell these are the people who are the "ologists" who go out to fires and provide advice on sensitive areas, take notes when resources get damaged by firefighting (e.g., dozer lines used to stop the fire), and then write plans to repair the damage from fire suppression activities. The class didn't start until noon on Monday, so we took the opportunity to go for a little hike to a waterfall.

Sign on the trail... grim but true

Then this weekend I spent part of yesterday out with volunteers planting trees and making seed balls on the Lower Salt River....(the photos were taken by my friend who works for the National Forest Foundation... which is why I am in them for once...) Whew! Good thing it is almost spring break!

Cookies Galore

Well folks in case you haven't been to a grocery store near you in the past two weeks, or have and are immune to the call of sweetness (in human and confectionery form), I am here to tell you that it is Girl Scout cookie season. In our house with two girl scouts it means a cases and cases of cookies and a plethora of appointments with cookie booths. In the past two weeks the girls have set up a booth in front of our house twice, womaned five booths at locations ranging from AJ's to WalMart to Bookmans to Safeway, hit up an Italian car rally, and did a little bit of door to door work. The lesson learned? Selling cookies is hard work - all of this effort has led to about 300 cookie boxes sold between the two of them.

How many boxes they can sell at any one time seems to vary quite a bit. Izzy had one booth at a Safeway with 3 other girls from her troop where they sold over a 100 boxes in two hours and Evie had an evening booth at AJs with a friend where they only sold 20 boxes in two hours. The lackluster sales in that case was most likely attributable to the fact it was a Sunday night and during the Super Bowl. But hey, at least there was a rainbow!

My favorite so far was the impromptu booth they did at the Il Giro di Phoenix Scavenger Hunt and Car Rally. For this one the girl's french teacher helped them sell cookies while Patrick and I ran the rally (she also gave them their weekly lesson while we were rallying, a pretty sweet deal for us all around). 

Patrick and I were far from the victors in said rally, but man did we have fun! Best of all, the Julietta made it for the whole trip w/o stranding us anywhere!

Overall with cookie sales, the good news is that is seems like they are (mostly) having fun and I am getting plenty of time to work on my crochet. :) I suspect the cookie clip will ebb here over the next few weeks (cookie season ends March 3rd... now there's a fabulous b-day present for me) but should they continue down this path I promise to be there, crochet hook in hand and green GS t-shirt on ready to assist!

Bringing Back the Blog

 For the sake of probably no one but posterity I am going to revive our blog. Funny enough though this was inspired not by the copious amount of time I had on my hands due to the furlough, but rather the twin occurrences of a dad and his daughter (who was in her 50s) out for a beer last night reminding us that the time goes by so fast and a notice that another web-based tool I used was going away. Something about having a person remind me of how fast time passes and the idea of an online tool going away made me realize how much I would miss having the stories I write here to look back on.  Unfortunately, there will always be a story gap now, and that gap was in part why I couldn't bring myself to bring the blog back. I always had a feeling like I just had to be contiguous in order to write a new post. I hereby throw off the chains of contiguousness and summarize the last year and then some in a haiku:

"Swamp" to desert flown
Jaunts, junior high, B. Jaguar
Ever happy chaos

Swamp - 4th of July on the National Mall

Desert

40th Birthday Jaunt to NYC

Spring Break Jaunt to NC

Random Jaunt to Florida - Disney World and Universal Studios

Junior High - Evie the JV Jazz Band Trombone Player

Pre-B. Jaguar Kitty Interviews at a Cat Cafe

The Actual B(lack) Jaguar.

And just a little bit of happy chaos...

Whew, with that out of the way, let's talk about January 2019!

So, in case you haven't heard (ha!) the government was shut down for 35 days..... The initial two weeks of said shutdown were actually quite pleasant for me because I got to spend the whole time with Evie and Izzy.

We spent quite a bit of our time together exploring our new Phoenix home. We went to the Phoenix Children's Museum one day. It was funny, and just a little bit poignant, to realize that not only was Evie too old for it but also that Izzy was on the verge of being too old. (Evie did, however, greatly enjoy the exhibit where she could build a series of tunnels for a ball to travel through...)

Then the next day we came downtown again and went pretty much just across the street to the Arizona Science Center (I found a groupon for a membership that I am pretty excited about).  The girls did a battle of the brains where the more relaxed they were the more the ball moved to one side or the other... the had an epic battle of the relaxed and ended up in a tie due to the prolonged relaxation and a line of other kids wanting to try.

They also tried out the Cosmic Playground, which was pretty darn awesome.... climbing through scaffolding covered with lights and what looked like saranwrap designed to be like worm holes.

 And moon landing face-in-picture things (what is the name for those things anyway?)

And (not pictured here) a big ball pit that Isadora in particular thought was the bees knees.

At the end of the break I had the privilege of being the Mom in the Mom and Me weekend at Willow Springs Girl Scout Camp. We rode up with other daughter and mom combo from the troop and made some new friends, saw snow(!) and got to spend a whole day doing crafts.

Crafts like making penguins from socks and felt...

 

And not so crafts like "winter" games inside involving fake snowballs and toilet paper that could be used to turn each other into snowmen (or just throw at each other).

 

There was, of course, s'mores... fortunately toasted on a fireplace inside because it was super cold and snowing that night.

 But best of all was sledding and fresh snow!!

Once the break was over and the girls went back to school I found myself trying to fruitfully fill my days.... so I taught myself how to crochet.

Exercised a lot.... and did all sorts of other little piddly things that did not involve deep cleaning the house (much to the disappointment of Patrick :P) Above all the unemployed month of January taught me that I am by no means ready to retire. Whew... here is to hoping come two weeks from now I am still working because goodness knows I cannot entertain myself long term via crochet needles and treadmills.

Soccer, Chaparones, and Spookiness

Given that our current plan is to head back to Arizona at the end of the school year we decided to make a "DC Bucket List" of all the things we want to make sure we do before we leave. One of the big ones on my list (for reasons I cannot wholly explain) was attending a DC United Soccer Game.  The whole fam (albeit a bit reluctantly on the part of the smaller ones) indulged me last weekend and we went to a Sunday afternoon game versus the NY Red Bulls. 

It also just happened to be the last game ever for the team at RFK stadium.  Our team may have lost, but it was still a good game and a lot of fun (and with soccer there is always hope to the very end, provided that you are only a goal down like we were :)

Then this Friday I took the day off of work to help chaperone Evie's 5th grade field trip to Annapolis. It was a great (albeit short) trip to Maryland's capitol, complete with a walking tour and a boat ride. My favorite fact from the walking tour was that George Washington was 6 ft 2 in...

Evie told me afterward her favorite was the story of the Maryland flag, which has two coats of arms (or was it crests... Evie would remember :) on it for the family that founded the original colony.  The fun(ner?) part of the fact is that the flag just had one crest up until the civil war when the state was quite divided over staying or leaving the union.  After the war they decided to put both crests on as a symbol of unity... pretty cool.

Overall the kids were surprisingly well behaved (except for a few too chatty/borderline rude boys in my group) and it was pretty funny watching a whole gaggle of 5th graders whip and neh-neh (no idea how you spell that) on the boat at the end of the trip.

Then on Friday evening we participated in a trunk or treat at the Unitarian Universalist church that we've been going to the past few weeks. Patrick had the idea of make the trunk like the day of the dead (seeing how we have so much of that sort of thing around the house anyway, we were all a little sad not to be in Tucson for the All Souls Procession, and I wanted to make sugar skulls with the girls regardless).

So Thursday night the girls (mostly Evie) and I made the skulls and then Friday before school Evie, Izzy and I all decorated them. They turned out pretty well I think!

Luckily for us Vivian is just as stellar of an artist with faces as she is with cakes, so I was able to have a face to match the part. The girls were given the option, but wanted to stick with their costumes and Patrick had intended to join me in the calavera face, but we ran out of time. (He did, however, sport his bolo tie and boots...). 

As part of our altar/car we also set out a picnic to eat dinner and passed out candy and milagros.  It was a pretty small crowd, but a super nice bunch of parents and kids. And... perhaps most excitingly... our trunk won the most creative award! (I actually am excited by this, but you don't want to see the pictures of me smiling with my face painted, it is really scary :)

Then, to keep the spooky going, last night we made our second annual trip to Garrett Park's Spooky Woods.  The line was quite long until about 8:30, but definitely worth it. 

Genevieve had a ton of fun going through the spooky woods with her friends Maggie, Cielo and Fiona. Izzy had to be convinced by Patrick to go and then finally at the last minute made her way through too.  Probably the best parts were the toilet paper leaf blower/mummy thing and the creepy Santa...

Whew... nothing quite like the 4 (or 5!) days of Halloween! (and that isn't even the main event yet!)