Raising Money

Our St. Mary's Parents Group had a very successful fundraiser yesterday. We sold bowls painted by our children. Prominent chef John Folse kindly brought some members of his restaurant staff up from Baton Rouge and prepared gumbo to be eaten from the bowls. Actually, we gave folks plastic bowls to eat from after thinking through the hygeinics of the situation. Also, several businesses and individuals donated some very nice auction items; DW purchased a beautiful little necklace donated by a nun from Bangladesh.

I spent about two hours on Saturday afternoon rooting through almost all of the bowls, trying to find the three of our kids' eight that weren't in our reserved stack. I was able to find them by going through all of the unsigned bowls and examining the painting styles very closely. Once I assured myself beyond a reasonable doubt, I put three of the unsigned bowls in our stack. Because I became rather familiar with the bowls, DW and I were put in charge of distributing them.

Here I am in a white shirt and a green apron. Moving right along . . .

Bad-ass Texan

I picked up these two University of Texas ball caps at a truck stop on the way to Alexandria, LA, the other day, and placed them atop the table for A to choose the color he preferred.

As his mother predicted, A picked the black one.

We had very nice visits with our boys this past weekend. T got to swim in his very favorite outdoor pool, and he said his first whole sentence--"Look at the train!" A spent about two hours in the hotel's indoor swimming pool. We all had a lot of fun.

I'm becoming Tim Taylor

I've spent the last couple of weeks immersed in a gargantuan home improvement project that involves our bathrooms, our living and dining rooms, and our rotting back door. We've lived here almost 10 years and hadn't done a thing to the house except rip the carpet from the bathrooms (about 8 years ago), which left us with more functional but arguably less attractive concrete floors. I took this past week off of work when it became clear that our flooring project wasn't the picnic in the park I had thought it would be. We did our dining room a couple of weeks ago. This week it was the living room, which is rather large and full of little engineering challenges. We've got some finishing work to do, but the hard part is finally done. I spent as much time figuring out how to solve those engineering challenges as I did putting down flooring planks. Also, cutting moulding is way more difficult and time-consuming than I imagined it would be. Fortunately, it all worked out nicely. I started off rather lax, but became obsessive about craftsmanship towards the end. Shouldn't that work the other way around? What scares me is that I actually enjoy doing this. Now that I have dozens of new tools, I may become a (gasp) homeowner. It's a good thing that I only rented the nail gun that I used last night. It's pneumatic, but uses a tiny gas cartridge and a rechargeable battery instead of a clunky compressor. It is so cool that I would be nailing stuff just for fun if I actually owned that particular model. Hmmm. Pneumatic tools. I said in the title line that I'm becoming Tim Taylor. Perhaps Anton Chighur is a more apt comparison.

Of Baptisms and Beaches

I had a moment of panic a few days ago when I was told that T. is scheduled to take first communion on Mothers' Day, something that evidently is a tradition in the U.S. Catholic Church. As a lapsed non-Catholic Christian, this is a tradition I previously knew nothing about, and, no, my panic had nothing to do with anti-papism. We agreed to his Catholic religious education generally when we enrolled him at St. Mary's, and to his more active participation in the ceremonies a few months ago when we discovered that he actually enjoys the formal aspects of the Catholic service. I pointed out then that he hasn't been baptised, and that this might need to be remedied. I thought that maybe someone had forgotten or assumed that some church or other had baptised T. at birth, so I pointed it out again and asked whether we could arrange something. Such a panic is not unreasonable in a New Orleans area resident; in New Orleans, you are presumed Catholic until proven otherwise. However, T's baptism will occur on Mothers' Day also. On reflection, I told myself, "duh. Well, of course. They don't recognize any other church's baptisms, and they have it on record that our family is LDS. And with Benedict reiterating the stance that all other Christian faiths are heresies, they sure as shootin' ain't gonna have no heretic takin' no communion." So soon we will have three faith/spiritual traditions in our little family, with A. left to suggest whether he will follow any particular tradition. Seeing as how he has bit people during mass and has refused to kneel when we've attended the service there, I still regard him as a small-"p" protestant.

A.'s mother is very happy to know that I let him play on only the cleanest parts of the beach.