Mama Ball Says

September 17
Well, we started soccer again, this time at the field at Byram Beach. Jake's team this go-round is the Storms, but today they were more the Passing Showers. They didn't score a single goal! They did have lots of fun with us though. Coach Mickey is the official head coach of our team, and I just run around and shout encouragements (and occasionally kick the ball back into the field for the kids). Jake had a good time. Coach Lame came over to harass me about needing to run around and run off some of my lunches, so I laughed and smacked him. Coach Lame is really Richard Lane, who is on staff at CMS and works with me. He's running the soccer program for the town.

The refrigerator is working on a slow death, so Mike is coming over this afternoon to help Steve move the upstairs apartment fridge down from the attic. I really want a big freezer for the basement so I don't have to crowd the kitchen one or cross my fingers that the garage fridge will stay cold enough. We'll see is vacuuming out the coils and cleaning the outside pieces of the fridge will resurrect it for a little while -- it may become my basement fridge if that happens.

Sadie is doing better with Miss Lillian at preschool. She didn't cry at all Friday when I dropped her off, mostly because Lillian had her holding hands with Maeve and the three of them went to go see the fish tank in the office to say good morning to the fishies. :)

Work was a disaster zone all this week. I never want to hear "Read 180" or "corrupt printer groups" ever again. Our nice new Tiger servers are apparently eating our new staff preferences and new student information for midnight snacks, as I haven't been able to keep those stable at all. Scarlett keeps popping into my head: "After all, tomorrow IS another day!" Naturally, Rhett shows up when everyone starts moaning about things: "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." With luck, things will settle out some over the next week or so. If I didn't have Nicole and Freya, I would be so far down the rabbit hole I don't think I'd ever surface again. I'm loading some new software, OmniGraffle, on my laptop for use in building websites, so we'll see how that works. The new machines at school have the new version of Dreamweaver on them and there are plenty of quirky little differences. We'll see if we can find all the things the kids need to build their websites.

Good reads this week: Finished The Riddle, which is the second book in the Pellinor series (sequel to The Gift). Excellent fantasy, very strong female protagonist who is shaping up to make some difficult choices in the next book and looks to have some amazing powers/abilities and secrets at her disposal. I've also loved Eldest, sequel to Eragon. My kids who have read it have more often than not been disappointed at the ending and mad about part of it, but it seemed very much like The Empire Strikes Back to me. Definitely necessary for the progression of the story and pretty much a setup for the third book rather than a story on its own. This is one that you really have to read Eragon first to understand and "get". Have started the third book in the Mortal Engines series, Infernal Devices,which is shaping up to be another roaring adventure like Mortal Engines and Predator's Gold. I'll let you know what I think.