Today was a good day. It started with sleeping in and ended with gaming and in the middle there was a few hours of being very girly, so it covered all the bases. Plus there were even, at one point, root beer floats, so how much better can a day get?

Richard went off to work out this morning. I suppose I could have gone with him but I decided I would rather take advantage of the fact that Saturdays are the one day each week I get to actually try to sleep in, so he went without me. When I finally dragged myself out of bed there was only about an hour or so left to dress in something pink and floral and inhale some breakfast before I headed over to the church for the annual Women’s Tea Party. I should mention that not only was the dress very, very pink, so were the shoes. Plus I even painted my toenails for the occasion. Will wonders never cease.

This year the theme was teddy bears. Most of the tables were decorated with some kind of little bears, and people had lent out some of their favorite bears as part of a teddy bear museum. We thought at first that my grandma’s bear was the oldest one there since it was from the 1910’s, but there was one bear from 190-something that was almost a hundred years old and thus got to be the most ancient one. People brought in all manner of bears, from thread-bare critters that had obviously been well-loved in their day, to pristine bears that were more likely the sit-on-a-shelf-and-don’t-touch variety. I’ll admit that I prefer the well-loved ones, just because they have so much more personality.

There was tea to drink, of course, and a very light lunch of chicken salad and grapes and a dense whole wheat and seed roll that was probably negative calories based on the effort it took to chew. This was followed by poppy seed cake, and then they brought out the entertainment, which turned out to be the owner of the local florist shop, who showed us how to make floral arrangements in teacups and teapots and old tins. Or rather, she took flowers and containers and did magical things and then tucked a teddy bear among the blooms and told us that we, too, could do this because it was so easy. She was so lively and charming and funny that we all let her keep her delusions that floral arranging is easy, even though I know ours wasn’t the only table possessed of full recognition that if we had been given the same containers and flowers, our versions wouldn’t have looked anything like the gorgeous creations she was producing.

At the end of the tea there were the usual door prizes, although in this case they were all teddy bears. I did not win a door prize, which was probably for the best, although I had my eye on a few of the very small ones because I thought they looked like just the right size to add to Rosemary’s slowly growing collection of Things To Carry Around The House While Beeping Pathetically, and one should always encourage this behavior in one’s cats. But alas, the only thing I came home with was some extra poppy seed cake to share with Richard.

There wasn’t much left of the afternoon after the tea, so we slumped around the house half-awake until we realized it was almost game time. I zipped off downtown to get root beer floats and also picked up some KFC, and then as we were setting up the dining room table I suddenly remembered that I had promised my knitting-enabling friend that I would return her yarn winding contraption to her today and I still had three more rather messy skeins to wind. Shortly thereafter the others showed up at our house for the monthly gaming session (in which, among other bits of excitement, I got to take out half a city block with a fire ball. Oh yes I do love playing a sorcerer, and also yes, I know I am a big nerd). Throughout the entire session I hunched over the winding contraption which I hooked to one of the chairs and squeakily wound the rest of my yarn, sometimes even without any feline assistance. Somehow I managed to get it all done, and now there is a large bag of yarn balls in the guest room upstairs, just waiting for me to finish up this sweater and start something new.