Warning- LOOOOOOOOONG Post
This is going to cover Saturday thru Monday. It’s big, it’s busy but if you want an update on my GED progress, just skip to the end. And just to apologize at the beginning, I’m tired and my punctuation and probably my spelling are awful, I’m just warning you now.
Saturday: Sunburned and Cranky I get up for Saturday’s fun filled, have-no-time-for-anything day. I actually had a blast this weekend but I was tired to begin with.
It all started with the glorious shower I got to experience with my slightly severe sunburn. Then I dragged the kids up to go to our stake pioneer activity at 10am. We had to be there at nine because I had been asked by my primary president to teach the dance our ward had been assigned to teach.
I’ve mentioned before that each congregation is called a ward. There are several wards included in a stake. Kind of like how there are several counties in a state. As each ward has different auxilery presidencies, there is an auxilery presidency at the stake level. They over see all activities that the whole stake has to partake in. They also help support the presidencies at the ward level. So for this stake primary activity day, the stake primary presidency gave assignments to each of the ward primary presidencies. Since my ward’s responsibility was to teach a dance, (the Virginia Reel) and since I being a Dj teach group dances, my ward came to me. And I said “yes, of course, I’d love to help”
Now, I actually loved doing this dance, it was fun looking up the moves and I found a version of the Virginia Reel that was relatively simple to teach and dance. And I had alot of fun teaching all the kids to do this dance, even the 3yr. olds got involved. Parent’s and kids had a great time and we became one of the favorite spots. My only problem stemmed from the fact that I was sun burned, and they had put us in the sunny part of the parking lot because it was the closest to a power source for our music, so I got more sunburned and I was tired from the beach trip and tired from yelling and dancing for two hours, and even with drinking alot of water I was getting dehydrated. I had a great time, I just pushed myself to hard.
But it doesn’t end there, because I still had a wedding to do three hours later.
The wedding and reception went off without a hitch. The ceremony was beautiful, Nottingham’s was glad to see me and treated me well, I’m finally used to their “pace” so I didn’t step on their feet this time. The reception went smoothly and I even got Mom (of bride) to relax and let me run things. Turns out that the groom and a large portion of his friends and family also went to Franklin High School, where I went. Now they all went there after I had left but I came back and helped out at enough drama events that several people recognized me or remembered my brother or sister who went there. I always think of myself as forgettable, but just when I think I’m becoming invisible I run into someone who should NOT remember me, someone I only knew in passing who remembers me nearly 10 or more years later.
Anyway, everyone had a great time and they tipped me 75 big ones. Biggest tip so far to date I think. I don’t get tipped everytime, I didn’t get tipped on Sunday, but I don’t do this for the tips. I count my success by hugs. If you do well you get hugs from the bride and groom, if you don’t, they say “thank you” and move on. I got home by 11:30pm and read myself to sleep. I think it was about 12 when I finally got my light turned out. (I’m just too wired from my events to fall asleep right away)
I did come home from the event mad at Karel, made some snippy remarks which I apologized later for. Just because I’m mad doesn’t give me the right to pick fights, especially since I’m not quick enough in an argument to fight anyway. The only reason I mention this is because of what I heard on …
Sunday: Woke up at 7am to start getting ready for church. We forgot to do laundry for church so I had to hope the kids and I had something to wear. I’ve been too out of it to do laundry in the last week. The kids were fine, I ended up wearing a dress I bought 7 years ago that I’ve tried wearing twice since I hit 220lbs and didn’t like it because it was way to tight. I’m bouncing between 200 and 205 now and I had an inch of fabric on each side of the dress! WOOT!!! I got so many compliments at church about how I’m looking alot thinner and how happy people were to see me not wearing alot of black. The dress is mostly green. I don’t shop for clothes much so when I do I go for basic stuff you can wear with anything. Which means alot of black and white.
At church I swear all the talks and lessons I sat in on were written just for me. Every now and then when I need to remember something, I swear everything I hear, read, or experience all sit there and home in on one idea. And that happened in church. Alot of patience, compassion, sticking to what you believe is true and being strong. Yes, Lord, I believe I got the message. I’m glad though, I was starting to slide down that numb and angry path for a bit, now I’m back up where I should be. Patient, Caring, and able to support Karel but walk away and take care of me.
I got home just in time to change clothes and start getting ready for my next wedding and reception. Yes, make that two events in one weekend. This time we were at McMinamins Edgefield. (I know I spelled it wrong) What a really awesome place this is. It’s right next to the Troutdale outlet shopping center. It has all sorts of things to do and visit and it’s a hotel, event location, vinyard, museum, restaurant. Yup, your all-around good time location. The food of course was wonderful, and the staff extremely helpful and on top of things.
The bride and groom were going for a 30′s/40′s feel to the place. They had an unusual request of me. They wanted the dance floor open the whole night. They started off the reception with their protocol dances and then it was dancing for an hour before dinner was served, and then dance floor was kept open during dinner as well. Usually people want soft background music for dinner, I was to keep to big band stuff or music that had that time period flavor but to keep it loud enough for dancing. Good thing my speakers are on stands.
The wedding party had clearly taken some dance lessons in the moves of the day because they danced most of the night. Which was great because it meant my dance floor was almost full all night long, and it was pretty good since my dance floor was open for five hours instead of the usual 1 to 3 hours. The bride and groom gave me lots of hugs, and so did the wedding party for that matter. To cap the night off though, it turns out that the father of the bride is one of Nike’s VP’s. They have many VP’s overseeing the different departments I know, however the father asked the Nike event coordinator to be the wedding coordinator. She was a hoot of a woman, and I enjoyed working with her and her assistant alot. She took my card and said I did a fantastic job. Woot! If the gods are nice to me I’ll get additional business from this. I came home tired, exhausted, not dehydrated because of excellent air conditioning, even with doors open, and fell asleep with my light on.
My only worry was that not once all weekend did I get a chance to study for my math test on monday.
Monday: Nerves got me up at 6:00am. Don’t we just LOVE nerves? I took another glorious sunburned shower, immediately doused myself in vanilla extract, which DOES work, and started my morning. I pulled out my math workbook and started reading through it. I had to stop though because I had to find my paycheck, which I had misplaced again and Karel was wonderful enough to help find it for me, go get food for the day and get Karel some pants. His had ripped yesturday, both pairs! (I don’t think I want to know what he was doing. ;D)
Anyway, after buying him the wrong pair of jeans, which I didn’t find out about till later, I scadaddled off to school hoping I was awake enough to handle taking all five tests at once. I wasn’t too worried though, I had passed all the pretests, so my nerves while in evidence, didn’t send me into a panic. The dreaded math test turned out not to be a big deal, the pretest ended up being harder. I actually fell asleep once during both the social studies and science tests for about five minutes. I had about an hour between the science test and the reading test so I took over a couch and slept. The staff was nice enough to come wake me up for the next test. The reading and writing tests weren’t difficult although I was definately feeling fatigue when I was writting my essay. I hope I didn’t ramble to much.
I should get my results from the first four tests by Wednesday. The essay grade won’t come for three weeks. So I won’t know my final grade for another three weeks. However, we’ll have a pretty good idea by Wednesday if I did well.
And I think I did. Now it’s time to start getting everything set up for my fall term of college.
Long enough entry for you? If you actually read all of this, please feel free to give me a “boring” rating on this entry. 10 for “So boring I use it instead of Nyquil to sleep” to 1 for “I didn’t fall asleep, but who am I again?” I feel like Striker from the movie “Airplane” who everytime he started telling his story his listener tried to commit suicide. *laughter*
