Thursday: new things

I did a bunch of new things today.

1. I played Captain's Ball.  It's a mix between basketball and ultimate frisbee.  It would have been nice if a few more people showed up, but it was still a nice time to meet new people, see Natalie, and get some exercise.

2. I had a door malfunction during my second class.  One person came through the door and it never shut all the way.  When the door doesn't shut all the way the alarm goes off after 30 seconds.  The TA and I took a look at the door and we didn't see any obvious reasons for it to not close.  We did learn that if we swiped our ID card at the card reader it would stop for 30 seconds.  So for the next 30 minutes my poor TA's job was to swipe her card at the card reader every 20 seconds so that the alarm wouldn't go off.  I did call the secretary right away and told her what was going on.  She realized the problem immediately and, while she didn't know exactly what to do, she knew where to start.  People came after 20 minutes, but didn't have the right parts to make it stop.  Then they were going to unplug the door at the control box, but whoever wired it up didn't label any of the cables like they were supposed to.  They did finally get the door to stop beeping; I'm not really sure what they did but I was relived.  I was able to easily survive the first thirty minutes without the TA, but there were a lot of questions as the students were working and it was helpful to have her walking around too.

3. I passed my lead belay class.  Today was practicing more of what we started last week, practicing falls, and trying a different belay device.  Falls were more fun than I was expecting...I get pulled way up into the air too.  I also really liked the other belay device for lead climbing as I didn't get the rope stuck so much.  I was surprised about that too as I was determined to like the device that I started with.

 

Wednesday: Trunk or Treat

We signed up to host a trunk at church this year.  Amazon has some great trunk decorating kits so we chose a cheap one.  We, and by we I mean Joshua, added a few embellishments and we ended up with a bunch of compliments.  The kids also made some swords from Lego.

It ended up being a lot more fun than I was expecting - the kids were cute.

I had gotten four bags of 75pc candy, two boxes of 75pc granola bars, and about a dozen mac and cheese packets.  SNAP is set to expire soon and my guess is that some of the kids that went by us are food insecure.  The mac and cheese packs went slowly, but they disappeared in the first 45 minutes.  The granola bars were taken pretty consistently: we went through a box and a half.  We also finished all the candy I had brought in the first hour and needed to restock a few times from the traveling candy bucket.  (I knew it would be available, so I wasn't worried about not having enough candy.)  That does mean that we had over 400 trick-or-treaters and probably closer to 500!  The post-event email said they had record candy donations and thought they were well stocked but still needed to make a grocery run for more candy part way through - they estimate there were over 1000 people that came on the campus over the night.  (They also ran out of hot dogs.)  Since the goal was just to get people on campus in a welcoming way, I would say it worked.

Last Sunday: Grandma's party

 

Tuesday: mad lib

Today was XLOOKUP day! 

One of the activities we do is a madlib.  This semester I realized that the students are surprisingly consistent on the words they select.

Number: something less than 100.  Today I was surprised when someone chose 16281
Verb (ends in -ing): running.  This one is chosen at least 50% of the time.
Noun: this one changes all the time.  There isn't a consistent noun.
Animal: dog
Dwelling: cave.  Again, this is chosen about 50% of the time.
Sport: lacrosse

Monday: life

It was a pretty normal Monday.  I started with some chores.  Sometimes I get exciting chores on Monday,  but today was not that day.  The kitchen had been ignored all weekend and there were other normal things to do.

Pat and I met for coffee in the morning and that was nice as always.

Isaac tried to get his COVID shot, but after we got to the doctor's office they said they had just run out of the vaccine.  The office isn't too far away, but it was still a bit annoying.

I made homemade applesauce with dinner.  It was yummy and Isaac was really excited about it.

Karate had a few more black belts show up tonight that haven't been there for a while, which was nice.  That being said, it wasn't a very good workout and that was a little disappointing.  We did a lot of self-defense and that is not very exercise-y.

Saturday: party

It was Great-Grandma's birthday today, and there was a party.  Isaac gave her some of the rocks that he's polished lately.

She also played a game of spot-it with Isaac and Joshua.

Joshua carved a pumpkin.  He did a really nice job of doing it by himself.

One of Isaac's chores was to fill up the tires with air.  It was his first time doing it.  The air compressor is really loud and he was surprisingly jumpy around it.

Friday: rock climbing

 After a half day of school, we went rock climbing.  It was actually Joshua's first time climbing at Scrapyard since the expansion; he's taken a bit of a break.  I think the current plan is actually to bike once a week and rock climb once a week.

Isaac also worked really hard to get the route of the week.