We got up this morning and I hastily scribbled out my notes for the Harry Potter class (sin and temptation were the topics today), and then we headed off to church, still sleepy and yawning from getting back so late last night from our evening of dancing and haggis. It made for some interesting choir practice, trying not to yawn in all the important bits of the song, but enough strong coffee will get me through almost anything so somehow I managed to hold it all together.

It is Girl Scout cookie season, so after the service I was very happy to see one of the church youth dressed in her green vest, clutching a cookie order sheet in her hand and eying the people in the social hall nervously. Luckily for her all she had to do was just *be* there because most of us are so desperate to find a source for cookies that our eyes are trained to immediately pounce the instant we catch sight of anything resembling a cookie order sheet. There are a few new flavors but Richard and I have to stick with our favorites – Thin Mints and the chocolate covered cookies with the peanut butter filling. There are now four boxes of each coming to us, and we will put them in the freezer and then dole them out in ones and twos and play the yearly game of ‘how long can we make them last?’

The rest of the day has been nice and quiet. I crashed for a few hours after lunch in a futile attempt to recover from the lack of sleep last night (dancing and haggis, remember?), and then we went online and finally hashed out all the details for our trip to Ashland that we are going to take in May. I made hotel reservations after dithering over whether we should do the Bed & Breakfast thing, or pay less than half as much for a cookie cutter hotel room a little further away since we probably won’t be spending enough time in the room to care one way or another. And then we scribbled out the schedule of plays and figured out which ones we want to see and what times work best, and bookmarked links for other things to do in the area. I am trying very hard to not end up planning this thing out to the last minute because I know we would both prefer to have time to just relax and wander and not have to stress, but I also knew we would have to reserve our seats for the four plays we want to see sooner rather than later. So now we are set. There will be plays and there will be a trip to see stalactites and stalagmites and there will possibly be a trip to the Harry and David farm and I am really looking forward to this because it has been an awfully long time since I have gone on a vacation that wasn’t a rushed weekend-only affair.

After putting large sums of money on credit cards in preparation for a trip that won’t even happen for another four months (sigh), we decided it was about time we tried out the newest restaurant in town. We’ve tried before, but for whatever reason we’ve always managed to go when they are closed. I was half expecting it to be closed tonight as well, but to my surprise, the Open light was still on. So we went in and had tempura and teriyaki and sushi and are now fervently hoping that this new place sticks around, because it would be awfully nice to not have to drive to the next town over to get decent sushi for a change.