A few months ago I agreed to 'teach' a Sunday school class called "The Gospel According to Harry Potter". It's actually based on a book by the same name, and the gist of the six-week class will be to go through the Harry Potter books and discover just why they really aren't the evil devil-worshiping civilization-defiling works that the right-wing fundamentalists are convinced they are. This is an attitude which, frankly, completely confuses me because after all, they are just books – highly entertaining books about kids who encounter some real life problems (albeit wrapped in some rather fantastical events) and who have to learn how to handle them.

I've been struggling with how, exactly, to 'teach' this class since my goal is to make it mainly discussion. Of course this all depends on how the rest of the class acts (and is it cheating to say that I have begged Richard to be in the class at least the first week so as to help 'seed' the discussion just in case everyone else sits there and stares at me like little lumps?). Today, in preparation for the class, I read through the book on which it's based, plus another one my mom got me for Christmas called The Spirituality of Potterworld and I took notes and flagged a few pages in each, and then to top it off I read through first book in the series again and decided that I'd stop there, even though there was still plenty of time to make it through the remaining four. No matter how much I might like the books, there is only so much Harry Potter even I can take in one day, and three books of it was enough.

So instead of focusing on Harry Potter I decided to take care of a few things I'd been putting off, like mailing off the duplicate gift we got for Christmas, taking a much needed nap, and making some design changes to the Stonegoose site. Except that Richard wrote the Stonegoose site in php, and I do not speak php. I speak HTML only and am rather proud of that fact. I have, in fact, not ever really wanted to learn php. So this is why it is that I managed to break it, and quite spectacularly, just by doing something as simple as adding and removing a few links and reformatting the link lists. Luckily, at least, Richard came home from helping his dad set up DSL and a wireless network at his parents house shortly thereafter and figured out what I'd inadvertantly done, so now all is well. Plus I took out the little 'stone' goose my mom-in-law gave me for Christmas and dressed it in all twelve of its seasonal hats and posed it cleverly on paper bags so it looks as if it had an actual backdrop, and then Richard did something nifty so that every time you load the main page you see a different picture. We have already established that I am easily amused, so I am sure it is no surprise to you that I have, since he did this, sat here and hit 'reload' numerous times just to giggle at the goose in all its various hats.

Last night was the first craft night of the year. I had fully intended to bring my nephew's sweater with me so I could get help from my knitting guru on how to fix it (I'm going to unpick one of the shoulders and then sew on another few rows to include some button holes. Or at least this is the theory. I have yet to do it to see if it will work), and to that end I made sure to grab the correct size needles and the correct color yarn. Naturally, however, I forgot to bring the sweater itself, so instead I worked on the sweater I'm knitting for myself, and chatted with the others and it was very noisy and there were small people dashing in and out and really, I wish we could do this craft night more than once a month because it is so fun.