The second half of my week

I posted on Thursday afternoon last week that the week was only half over. I then realized that my blogging schedule falls right into the trap of paying excess attention to Monday-Thursday, and not enough to Thursday-Sunday! I will often post four times between Monday and Thursday, and then not at all in the second half of the week. In my defense, I know my readership is a lot lower over the weekends (because, hello, people are off their phones and computers — which is a good thing!) but given that posts can be scheduled in advance, it’s not even that I would have to write them on the weekends.

Anyway, this weekend felt like fall. The leaves are really changing, and we did a lot of things off my fall fun list. Since the second half of the week officially started Thursday night, I’ll start there. I went to choir rehearsal from 7-10 p.m. The first part (7-9 p.m.) is the main choir, and then 9-10 is the chamber choir. I am really enjoying the chamber choir — it’s a small group, pretty tight on vocal range, and since we have six professional singers helping us out, it’s got some major advantages over your average church choir. We’ll be singing Faure’s Requiem during the service on November 5, so I have been practicing away on that.

I came home, chatted with the big boys, and read more of War and Peace, which is progressing along nicely. I’m currently 55 percent in (per my Kindle counter). Since I’ve been at it for 8 days, that’s a rate of about 7 percent per day, suggesting it will take me 2 weeks to finish. I may slow down a bit this week, though, since I’m traveling to St. Louis next weekend for a speech, and I’ll need something to read on the flights!

On Friday I had a rather relaxing morning: a massage (I’m a Massage Envy member, so I go once a month) and then I had coffee with the woman I’d met the previous week at Leadercast in Atlanta, whose son turned out to go to my kids’ elementary school. This was definitely a work/life integration moment, as we discussed the professional speaking circuit AND our kid school experiences. After, I taped a webinar, and tried to get through a lot of emails to close out the week. I took the 3 big kids to meet my husband at Maggiano’s Little Italy, which after an unfortunately long wait (my husband was late and they wouldn’t seat us until our party was complete) we made it through a dinner with minimal fussing. The waitress was really good. My daughter ordered mac and cheese, which turned out to be pasta with real cheese and the waitress could see she was pouting and said “Ok, princess, tell me what’s wrong.” Yes, my daughter thought it would be Kraft, with its normal orange color, but she re-ordered and got plain pasta with butter shortly thereafter. Since we were right by Costco, I took off there afterwards and somehow, thinking it would be a quick trip buying minimal things, managed to spend…a lot. Does anyone get out of Costco buying only a few things??

On Saturday morning I went for a long run with Jane (8.1 miles). The leaves were pretty, and the temperatures were great for running, though it was misting a bit. My husband did the karate run, so I wound up playing with the 2-year-old for about 2 hours. We built a lot of Lego towers. Then we knocked them down. In the afternoon, my daughter had a class playdate at a local playground, so we went there, and then all of us took off for Longwood Gardens. We saw the garden railway — which was Thomas! And Percy! And James! — and had dinner at the beer garden. Pretzels for the kids, pulled pork for me, and some sort of beer, and listening to bluegrass. It was kind of nice, and the 2-year-old didn’t run off anywhere, which seems like a milestone to me. We saw the chrysanthemums in the green house, and then watched part of the fountain show, before making our escape before everyone else did (thus avoiding traffic).

Upon arriving home, some people watched the (taped) Texas A&M football game. I attempted to construct a toy storage unit from IKEA from my daughter’s room. I did this several times over the weekend. I did finish. It involved a lot of swearing at those stupid wooden dowels, though.

On Sunday, I went to church, taking the 2-year-old with me. We sang The Promise of Living, by Aaron Copland, which is not really a normal church music kind of thing, especially with a 4-hand organist part. After, we had some downtime until my 8-year-old’s class playdate at the same playground the 6-year-old had been to. Then we all went to a local farm for our church’s young family group’s fall fest. The kids pet bunnies, and goats, and rode ponies, and we all took a hayride, and picked out pumpkins. We had six small pumpkins, but only five managed to make it into the house from the van so I’ll have to go hunt for the other one at some point.

Then, dinner: fondue for the kids, lamb for us. Finally, we ended the weekend with the romance of a calendar meeting: chatting through who was covering what, our travel schedules, buying Halloween costumes, etc. The upside is that we determined our top choices for the parent-teacher conferences at our school, and the date for breakfast with Santa at Longwood in December. So, when the links for both went live this morning, I was able to swoop on it and get our first choices. Three conferences back to back on our preferred evening! Reserved seating in the room with Santa on a late December Saturday morning! And reservations for the two of us for dinner on Friday night. Yay.

In other news: My TED talk crossed 5 million views. Not that I’m counting or anything…

Best of Both Worlds podcast now has its own Instagram page! Its handle is best_of_both_worlds_podcast.