Allegra’s been sliding slowly downhill over the past year due to the kidney failure, but in the past few weeks it feels as if this thing has picked up its pace. She is so thin now, and her face looks old. She still falls over and trills a greeting when she sees me and she still wants to be held, especially when I am trying to do anything else, but I cannot remember the last time she raced around the house for her daily snit. These days she mostly just sleeps, curled into a tiny ball somewhere warm. And we are deliberately leaving out blankets and making places for her, just to make sure she can find whatever works best for her.

We have a new medication to give her that is supposed to help make her feel a little better � assuming I could convince her to take it willingly. They originally gave it to me in liquid form, but she immediately made it clear she considered it foul and poisonous (the foaming at the mouth was a dead giveaway as to that opinion) so the vet found someone who could compound it for us into capsules. She�ll only get to try them out for a few days, however, because Thursday we leave for DragonCon, and while I�ve talked my dad into giving her her daily fluids, I am not sadistic enough to ask anyone else to try to feed her or give her the pills. And I am also logical enough, despite my not wanting to admit it, that at this point a few days with or without the new pills are not really going to make one bit of difference in the end.

At night she comes up to crawl into the bed beside me, and there she stays, most of the night. So there I stay too, sometimes in one cramped and awkward position most of the night so as to avoid disturbing her, because I realize that time is precious with her now, and I want very much to bend over backwards and keep her warm and happy and safe, and most of all I want to somehow find a way to turn back the clock on her failing organs so she will get better instead of worse. Because we are no longer counting months with her, and I am not so sure we are even counting weeks. I strongly suspect that for her we are down to counting days – not until she dies, but until I am strong enough to call the vet to come out and put her to sleep.

I still have far too high a vacation balance from work, and Richard and I wanted to go to the State Fair, but also do our best to avoid most of the crowds and the craziness that usually ensues on the weekends. So to that end we took yesterday off from work, and instead of getting up early and poking at computers and searching for the state of the construction market in various parts of the country, we instead slept in a little bit and then went to the fair. Or rather, I still got up as early as I ever do because my mom and I were going to do Curves, except she called to cancel so I took that as the perfect excuse to go right back to bed for another few hours of mostly-uninterrupted sleep (there is no such thing as pure uninterrupted sleep in a house with cats, after all.

We got to the fair around 11, still early enough to get parking close enough so we wouldn’t have to hike too far, and headed inside. It was hot yesterday, but not as hot as it’s been in years past, so we decided to wander through all the outdoor things first before heading into the exhibit halls, which would hopefully be air conditioned relief from the weather.

We wandered the midway and Richard spotted one of those cheesy haunted house rides, so we forked over money to get enough tickets for the ride. It turned out to be short and mostly dark, interspersed with the occasional dim light flashing over some kind of monster-like creature trapped in a cage growling at us as we rode by. But one does things for nostalgia sometimes.

We next headed for the livestock exhibits and found a huge barn full of cows, and a smaller one beside it full of goats. I’m not sure where all the other livestock was housed; we never made it out that far, unfortunately. Not being farmers, we didn’t stay very long because when you’ve seen one row of cows you’ve seen them all.

One of my favorite places to go in the fair is the vendor’s mall and the county exhibits, because they are so much fun, and they didn’t disappoint. The county exhibits ranged from large and flashy and spectacular, to tiny and primitive and dull. It was obvious which counties set aside money in their budget for the State Fair, and which ones really didn’t feel the need to bother.

There is a garden area nestled between the buildings that house the vendors and the county exhibits, and every year they do it up with a different theme. This year was pirates and hidden islands with buried treasure, including a volcano in the middle of the garden with glowing red lava, and the occasional puff of smoke from the top.

I’d heard that this year there was going to be sand sculptures but we never found them. By the time we were heading for the art and culture exhibit halls we were running short on time, so I know there was a huge part of the fair we never made it to. But we did make a quick run through all the displays of artwork – textiles, industrial art, the kids’ art, and of course the food art, where they were judging preserves as we walked around the displays.

I was a little disappointed because there was no large animal built entirely from dinner knives, like there has been in the past, but there were other really fun sculptures and paintings, and a quilt full of monsters that was quite possibly the coolest quilt of all time.

Then it was time to leave, so we hiked back to the car and drove home to collapse for a very short time, just long enough to rehydrate, and for me to grab some knitting, and then it was off in the car again, this time to Campbell, for Richard’s parents’ annual play. We weren’t sure how much time to leave since traffic in the Bay Area is very unpredictable on Fridays. We gave ourselves a lot of time, which meant we ended up getting there over an hour early. This was okay, however, since we tracked down a nearby coffee shop, bought sandwiches and chai tea for dinner, and had a chance to sit and relax and knit (me) or write (Richard) and catch our breath before the play.

This year they did Suessical, which was impressive mainly for the way the authors managed to compile as many unrelated Seuss stories into one vaguely cohesive plot. Richard’s dad was a wonderful Horton, and Richard’s little sister played a very energetic Cat in the Hat, and the woman who played Gertrude McFuzz and the little girl who played JoJo were outstanding.

By this time Richard and I were pretty much exhausted, but there was still post-play pie, which was delicious, even if I was ready to fall face forward into my plate. Luckily Richard was willing to drive home because I think I might very well have dozed off somewhere on route and really, that would not have been a very good ending to an otherwise fun (busy) day.

We did more yesterday then just go crazy buying hand puppets. I feel as if it is important that I mention that. We also got haircuts so now I have my cute style back again and do not feel nearly as frumpy as I usually do. We tracked down a music store in Vacaville and discovered that they really didn’t have much of a selection of recorder music after all. We picked up a new bottle of epigen for Allegra because we could not possibly be done with the three-times-a-week injections yet (did I mention she is now getting these injections? I can’t remember anymore). I chatted with my vet, yet again, about why it is that in my house, meals versus free-feeding is not an option (the fat ones get fatter, the skinny ones get skinnier, and the ones who need to be on a special diet are always the skinny ones who keep on losing weight). I admit that sometimes I feel a little guilty about the situation because yes, it would be better for Allegra if she was only eating her kidney diet. But this would require that she be isolated 100% of the time, and she would be miserable without constant access to pets and sunbeams and my lap when I am at my computer, so I weigh the choices between quality of life and quantity, and yet again, quality wins, hands down.

Most of the rest of the day we spent camped out in the living room watching the SciFi channel’s miniseries of the new version of Battlestar Galactica. We started watching the series late last season, and really like it, so it was interesting to see how the whole thing begain and why some of the characters are the way they are. We are now eagerly awaiting the release of the first season on DVD so we can catc up on all the bits of plot that we stll have yet to see, and in the meantime, have been careful to make sure to set the VCR so we can tape it on Friday nights when we are not around.

Today was recorder rehearsal, where I revealed that I am an idiot and was under the impression that the alto recorders play in an entirely different key (they do not – duh) than the rest of the group. Admittedly I’ve never attempted to find out one way or the other, it just got into my head somehow and I simply assumed it was true. Now that I know this is not the case an entirely new world of music possibility is opened to me, if only I could convince the rest of the group that they really *are* good enough to play it.

And this afternoon was a new (to me) knitting group. They meet at a bakery in downtown Vacaville, near the new library, and one of the attendees *told* me this at the knitting night at the library two weeks ago, but when I looked up the address and directions rom the bakery’s website, we ended up off in the industrial park area of Vacaville, nowhere near a library or a downtown or anyone wielding sticks and yarn. Luckily Richard and I decided to go there for lunch so we had plenty of time to find the real meeting place, order sandwiches, and chat with a few other early arrivals. By the time the meeting was in full swing (and by that time Richard left, since he needed to be home in time to catch a phone call from the instructor of the writing course he’s taking at DragonCon) the table was surrounded by knitters. And we knitters were a loud and boistrous bunch.

The annual Men’s Barbeque and Silent Auction was tonight at the church but we sort of lost track of time (okay, so we were feeling really ambivalent about going, so let the time get lost) and did not go. Instead made Kraft Macaroni and Cheese because sometimes nothing else but nuclear yellow cheese will do, and we watched La Bouche, which is an incomprehensible movie that claims to be a comedy but is not remotely a comedy, and in fact has no defnitive ending except that it just sort of cuts out without resolving anything. I’m not sure why we stuck out the whole thing, except that we kept waiting for it to be funny, like it claimed it was.

But such is the chance you take with putting strange foreign films on your Netflix queue. Sometimes you get something wonderful and sometimes you do not.

After the weekend where my nephews came down to spend the day with their grandparents working on the puppet theater, and after how much they really seemed to like the little set of water creature puppets I got them from CostCo, I decided I had to go back and get them all the rest of the puppets available. I swung by CostCo the following Tuesday night and picked up what I thought was a set of the cast, a set of the birds, and a set of the buggs. However, my parents came by Thursday night to borrow a sleeping bag (they were at some sort of choir retreat this weekend) and my mom saw the puppets, which have been sitting on the kitchen counter because I hadn’t gotten around to moving them upstairs yet, and discovered I’d actually bought two sets of the bugs and no cats at all.

Naturally I was immediately intent on getting back to CostCo to return the extra set of bugs and swap them out for the one remaining set we didn’t have. I worried that maybe they might have run out of them. Heh. I had nothing to worry about, as it turned out. Turns out in between when I was there the first time, and today, they lots more of the adorable hand puppets – not only of the five original sets, but also a few more. Wild animals! Cats *and* dogs! Farm critters! And best of all a set of reptiles that are just about the cutest things ever.

I suppose it is no surprise that I immediately dove into the pile and made sure to grab a set of every kind they had. The boys are going to get a huge pile of hand puppets for Christmas. And I think between now and then it would be better if I didn’t wander the toy aisle in CostCo, because I think 7 sets of puppets may just be critical mass and maybe I should just pretend that they don’t really make more of them, and considering that my brother-in-law says that every puppet show the boys have put on since they got the theater includes an introduction of each puppet, and I have now purchased 28 more characters who just might need introductions at the beginning of each show, I think it is better if now I stop.

These past few weeks I feel as if I have been walking around in a constant state of exhaustion. I cannot ever seem to get enough sleep, yet I can’t sleep in on days when the time is there to try. It’s hot outside – and it’s been hot for weeks and it’s only now that the temperature shows signs of dipping a few degrees. I don’t know if that’s the reason I am so tired, or it’s just adding to some other underlying cause. Ugh.

I have also been mulling things around in my head for this journal. I think it’s safe to say that it has been many, many months since I’ve updated regularly – without serious back-posting, that is. I still have the need to write, but sometimes I dream wistfully of having someplace where I can just dump short snippets of thought, instead of feeling as if I need to flesh everything out into something longer and possibly more meaningful. The very word ‘blog’ makes me shudder and grit my teeth and so I cannot see revamping everything over to that sort of format. Maybe I just need to find a way to make this work a little differently. I don’t know. I’m not going to stop writing. I just need to figure out how to get brain to release everything in a more timely manner.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m tired and cranky, and sick of it being so damn hot out. And maybe it’s because I have a stupid Neil Diamond song in my head and it will Not Go Away and it is driving me ever so slightly nuts because while Neil Diamond music is amusing for elevators or background music, it is not the sort of thing one wants to find oneself humming at all hours of day and night, humming, or singing, ‘when I would call your name, Shiloh you always came’, oh for crying out loud make it stop.

A while ago my older sister noted that my two little nephews would love a puppet theater. And since my dad likes puttering around in his workshop playing with wood and tools, and since my mom had been wanting to ‘steal’ the boys for a grandparents-and-grandsons-only day, they decided that my dad would build them a theater, and then the boys would come down to help grandpa and grandma paint it. That was on Saturday.

Richard and I had a pile of errands to run and chores to do around the house on Saturday, and then there was also a birthday party he needed to go to, so I did not make it over to my parents’ house until the evening, for dinner. While we were at Costco, I saw a pile of plush hand puppets for sale for an unbelievable price and dithered a little before picking out a set of four sea creature puppets to bring them, for their new theater, so I brought that over to the house with me when I came.

The theater is fairly large – a three panel contraption where the two side panels act as the supports, with the middle panel having a cut-out at the top where the puppets could go. It was rather obvious that the boys had done most of the painting, because there was a lot of abstract blue and green and brown, meant to be trees and trunk and sky, and I had to be told that the black smudges were birds and the red speckled things were lady bugs and, and, and. It amuses me because with both the boys there are times when they will just begin to talk and then they continue to talk and talk and talk and sometimes you have to stuff their mouths with food to get them to stop. The younger one still talks mostly in incomprehensible babble, but the older one is quite clear (he’s in first grade, after all) and he has a lot to say.

We ate dinner and the boys chattered. We’d discovered earlier that they are *very* into knock-knock jokes, and can happily go through far more of those than any adult can possibly stomach, all in one sitting. They were very happy to point out where and how they had ‘helped’ with dinner. And after dinner we got them to put on a puppet show; or rather, first the oldest and grandpa put on a puppet show with the batch of puppets they’d brought with them. I think it was supposed to be Sleeping Beauty, but it was a little abbreviated and there was a dragon in there who occasionally showed up, and perhaps what was far more amusing than the actual puppets themselves was that there was a lot of whispering behind the scenes where my dad and my nephew were hashing out just what the heck was supposed to happen next. Then they pulled out the sea creature puppets – the two boys did, at this point, since we adults decided we wanted to watch while they performed, and my older nephew started singing ‘There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea’. Except that he kept forgetting the order in which all the things happen in this song – which is very long and repetitive to begin with, but which is made even more long and repetitive when the singer keeps starting over from the beginning, again, and again, and again. Oh, to be as oblivious as seven. It was hysterical to watch, although I pity my older sister and her husband, since it is likely they will have to endure far more verses of that particular song than we did once the puppet theater and the boys returned home.

Mom and Dad took the boys to church with them yesterday, but I was the pianist that morning so could not go along to see how they did. But I hear they had fun there too, and only asked a few humorous questions during the children’s time, and there were no more recitations of The Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, at least not while they were still with my grandparents.

This afternoon I went back to Costco and bought the other four sets of plush hand puppets they had on sale. It’s early yet, but these will keep perfectly fine until Christmas. An aunt is all about being an enabler, after all, and I am nothing if not determined to be a very good aunt.

A month or two ago I received an email from the sister of someone I used to know back in high school. The director for the high school band was finishing up his 25th year there as a band director, and so some of the old band members were throwing a little reunion party, and she was trying to track down any old band members she could think of. I’m registered with the various school reunion sites (mainly as a way to hopefully track down some still-missing old friends) so that’s how she found me, years ago, for an earlier reunion party more than ten years ago, and so I wasn’t too hard to find again.

I forwarded it to the few band members I knew and still had contact with – mainly my best friend from high school, and my older sister. The old friend’s in Utah these days, her hands rather full with taking care of three very active young kids, but my older sister lives close enough that going to this thing might be feasible. She thought it sounded like fun and we made very tentative plans, but then I never heard anything more from her about it and somehow assumed that meant she didn’t want to go (it would be a very long drive for her). And as I’m not good in social situations where I don’t know anyone, and I wasn’t sure who all would be there or if there would even be anyone there I knew, I didn’t really want to go by myself.

But the Friday of the party my older sister called me on my cell phone to ask how we should proceed. Which meant that we were going after all, and luckily she was caught in traffic on the way down so I could go home first and we carpooled up to Roseville together to try to find the house where the party was being held. They told us to just go in since it was likely no one would hear the door bell, but we knocked, and as we opened the door, the very first face I saw, I recognized right away. He waved us toward the rest of the house and as we turned a corner another familiar face, and then another one, and there, over there, more and more. We’re all of us older and wider, some with a little more grey; some with a little (or a lot) less hair, but the faces underneath everything that nearly 20 years of age brings, they were still the same.

And oh, it was a wonderful night. People I hadn’t seen or heard from since we graduated nearly twenty years ago came up to me and we hugged as if it hadn’t been any time at all. The band director was there, with a lot less hair, but still that same Miami Dolphins hat and the same grin, and his wife was there, just as bouncy and bubbly as ever, and their daughter, thirteen years old and how could it have possibly been that long since we had seen them last? People had brought pictures, so we milled between rooms and paused by the table where they were all laid out, trying to dredge names for the faces of people we hadn’t seen in so very, very long. Remember her? She changed her name and she works as a photographer down in Southern California now. Remember him? He works in computers and has four kids. And him? He’s a band director at a nearby high school. A band director! How can he be that old? How can any of us be that old? Somehow someone had a copy of a video tape of some of our parade and field show performances from 1984, and we all crowded into one overheated room and watched it together, groaning with laughter, trying to put names to all the blurry faces, amazed at how small we were back then, how young.

It was a strange little nearly-a-family reunion that evening. I was in his third year of teaching and my older sister was in his second, and he’d come to our school fresh out of college, full of energy and enthusiasm and still with a lot to learn and a lot of growing up to do. He turned that little high school band from a lackluster group of nothing into a band over 100 strong by the time I graduated. We competed against the bigger, better schools and won awards. We played non-traditional music on the field like Dance Bachanale and Carmina Berana. He kept us all dedicated, willing to come to school and hour earlier than anyone else for marching practice in the fall, and then jazz band practice in the winter. He kept us after school for woodwind ensemble rehearsals, and asked us to give up part of our summers for band camp; and to live in buses and sleep on hard, noisy high school gymnasium floors to travel for band tour, sometimes even out of the country. During those first few years we were all still so close in age to him that I think sometimes it made it hard for some to separate students and teachers from friends, but we were so young and he was so gung-ho and he got us to learn and to march and to play. And through it all we became a family – a bunch of odd little outsiders, some of us, who came to the band because it was at least something we could do, but where we made our friends and forged connections that sometimes have lasted decades after the last bell of classes ended, and all of it, all because of what he and his wife brought when they came to that school, full of hopes and dreams and high aspirations that none of us ever questioned could be done.

We stayed far too late; by the time my older sister dropped me off it was nearly 11 and she had still another ninety minutes to drive home, but it was worth it. There was a sign up sheet for names and addresses and contact information. There were hugs and pictures and suggestions to do this again sometime, and maybe sooner than thirteen years and my older sister and I drove home, still playing the remember game. Remember when we went to there? Remember that girl, who was going out with that guy? Remember when?

Earlier this week the Roomba arrived. I dragged the huge box inside and tore it open immediately, to check it out. It�s a lot bigger than I�d imagined � for some reason I had it in my head it was going to be this cute dinner plate sized contraption. It�s still cute, but much larger than a dinner plate.

The cats were a little startled the first time we started it up. It�s a little on the noisy side, but that�s to be expected from any vacuum cleaner, robotic or not. The fact that it moves around all by itself seemed to be a bit disconcerting to the cats at first, but after the initial moment of skittery panic, they reached a general consensus that it wasn�t really going to try to eat them, and settled back down again to do their best to nap and ignore it. In fact, Sebastian is making such a concerted effort to demonstrate how much he does not care about it that he will sprawl on the floor even when it is puttering around in the same room, and will only get up and move when it is actively approaching him and has come close enough that he has no choice. The only exception to the rule of nonchalant cats is Rosie, who has apparently decided that the Roomba is quite fascinating. When it runs, she occasionally must follow it around and watch it, whiskers fully forward and an expression of avid curiosity on her face, and when it is dormant in its docking station, she sometimes comes dashing downstairs and slides to a halt directly in front of it, then sits there, expectantly, as if waiting for it to do something. We have not felt the need to start it up just to entertain the cat, however, even though the thought has crossed my mind once or twice, just to see what she would do

Richard�s been working from home most of this week, so he�s been able to play with it more than I have so far. I get occasional email updates about what the Roomba is up to throughout the day � things like the fact that yes, its cliff sensors really do work (and it is in no danger of driving merrily off the edge and falling down the stairs when we run it on the second floor), and what happens when it tries to vacuum up one of the cats� toys. We still have the cleaning elves coming in every two weeks to beat the house into submission, but this will certainly come in handy in between cleanings.

We�ve got no carpets at all in the house save for a few small area rugs, so it does a pretty good job of sucking up all the random dust bunnies and cat hair drifts. We�ve discovered that it does not mix well with the smaller cat toys, so before we run it, we do a quick floor check to pick up anything small enough to confuse it. I find it more than a little amusing that when it backs itself out of its docking station to start cleaning, it makes little backing up beeps, much like a large van pulling out of a driveway. I�m not sure what it�s supposed to be warning to get out of its way (and quite frankly I don�t think I want to know), but it makes me giggle every time I hear it. I also find quite amusing the way the little �charging� light slowly flashes when it�s in its docking station, almost as if it has attached itself to the nipple of a bottle filled with electricity and is slowly sucking down nourishment to fill its empty batteries.

So the general consensus, in this house at least, is that the Roomba is quite possibly one of the coolest gadgets we have ever purchased, especially for a house with six cats, no carpets, and two people who really cannot stand to vacuum.

This week I feel as if I just keep going and going and there hasn’t been any time to breathe. Or, for that matter, sleep. There was the extremely long meeting on Tuesday night, and the tool tutorial on Wednesday night. Friday night was craft night, so even if it was another late night out, at least it was something that was a lot of fun, and that was even above and beyond the fact that the woman who hosts craft night had another batch of foster kittens to play with. We all alternated between working on our various projects (I managed to nearly finish the first of my socks for the secret pal sock exchange) and poking at kittens, because when one has kittens climbing on one’s lap and trying to eat one’s craft, it’s hard to ignore them. And with kittens is is always easier to just pretend that you were taking a break in your work to pet something fuzzy and see if you can get it to settle down and purr, then to try to continue with tiny teeth and claws and bottle brush tails getting all in the way.

I tried to sleep in on Saturday, but there really was no hope for it. The heat has been unbearable and shows no sign of abating any time soon, which means sleeping with the windows open, like we prefer doing in the summer, is out. And I cannot seem to get any sort of decent, restful sleep when the air conditioning is running, so I usually just give up and get up early and spend my days bleary-eyed and yawning as a result.

This weekend is Lambtown, which means there are people from all over the country flocking to our little rural town. This is a fact which continually amazes me, because the festival itself seems so very small and insignificant. But one must not underestimate the allure of sheep, I suppose.

Someone I knew back from when I worked for the Big Fish and was on assignment up in Roseville emailed me to say she was going to be coming down, so we arranged to try to meet for lunch. So we eyed the time and tossed on some clothes and sneakers and decided we might as well walk over to the fairgrounds because finding parking was going to be a nightmare, and oh, was it muggy and hot. There was just no escape from it. We wandered around the grounds and signed petition letters against the stupid racetrack. We headed into the indoor markets, but if they had any sort of cooling systems going, they were remarkably ineffective against the heat. It was hard to work up any enthusiasm for purchasing anything, even though there was one building dedicated entirely to fleece and yarn and all things fiber related. After the TKGA show in Oakland earlier this month, however, I have put a personal moratorium on buying any more yarn unless it is directly related to a specific project, so I was able to resist the allure of pretty, pretty fiber. Also, the mere thought of having anything to do with wool when one is sweating and dying slowly from heat was likely the more powerful deterrent.

There was a lot of traffic coming into town, so my friend ended up being over an hour delayed. And by that time we didn’t have much time left to do more than find a booth that did not have a huge line, stake out a spot on the ground in the shade, listlessly eat our lamb gyros and inhale bottles of water, and then trudge wearily home to collapse.

Richard’s little sister’s birthday was yesterday so there was really no time to recuperate from being out in the heat. So instead we wrapped up his niece’s present (which we’ve had sitting on the counter for weeks now) to bring with us, and we drank copious amounts of water and tried to cool off, and then got into the car and turned the air conditioner to full blast and drove down to Campbell for the fun. I brought along my knitting and managed to sneak in a few rows while we waited for the Almost Twin and Richard’s niece to arrive, and then we all went out for Chinese food for her celebratory birthday dinner. Afterward there was the ritual opening of presents and the ritual throwing of the ball in a vain attempt to keep the still-mostly-puppy busy, and we ate cake and ice cream and drank coffee and Richard and I tried very hard to stay awake because we were so very tired, and then finally we came home.

Today there has been the usual assortment of things that must be done, like going to church and practicing the song I’m going to play while two of my friends sing next week, and rummaging around until I found the disk with the latest church newsletter that I now need to upload to the church website. At some point today I am hoping there will a nap, because if I do not get any sleep between now and Monday I will surely be dozing off at work, and for some reason, they really seem to frown on that.

I wrote, back in February, about attending a Ladies Night Out at a local hardware store where, among other things, we learned how to take apart, and put together a toilet. Last week I got a call from them, since I’d put my name on a list to be contacted. They were holding another one and was I interested in attending? Definitely. This time I heard about it enough in advance to let my mom know, so the two of us drove down together last night, meeting my knitting mom and one of her daughters there as well.

There was just about as large a crowd as last time, and it appeared they used the same caterer. Plus, when we had filled our plates and found our seats, it turned out they had some of the same demonstrations as last time as well. But that was actually okay. The guy who taught the session on how to put up crown molding touched on door and window casings this time, something I’d missed back in February, and that was actually pretty informative. Then he walked us all through how to cut and measure and bevel and level molding strips, all with a sense of humor and a grin.

They had two other sessions after the one on crown molding – one on compound miter saws, and one on fence building. While the compound miter saw certainly looked very cool, my mom and I both agreed that we didn’t really need to sit through an hour on something we’re not likely to ever use, so instead we headed off to where they’d built the beginnings of a mock fence, complete with huge wooden posts embedded in heavy buckets (since it was indoors). Then a guy who resembled Bob Newhart, both in physical appearance and in mannerisms and voice, talked about building fences, while a younger man quietly and efficiently began attaching joists and boards to the fence skeleton behind him. They talked about the pluses and minuses of using wider versus narrower fence boards. They talked about how to set the supporting posts, and how many cross beams you would need in our area (we need more, because of the wind). They showed us some really cool tips on how to keep the fence boards level, and went over the pros and cons of painting versus staining. They answered questions and the Bob Newhart look-alike made quiet, respectful little jokes and by the end I think we would have been hard pressed to not be ready to go out there and build our own fence.

One of our friends had to leave early, so she left me her raffle ticket, which then promptly won a really nice cordless drill. So I picked it up for her and passed it on to her mom, and I’ll admit there was a little part of me that was hoping maybe she would already have one (she’s got quite the selection of power tools), but alas, she did not. Several people asked me why I didn’t just keep it for myself, but you know, it was her ticket, not mine, and it just wouldn’t have felt right. Besides, I ended up winning a tool apron and a t-shirt later, and my mom got a hat and a t-shirt and a saw blade (which we figure my dad would be thrilled to have), and last time I won a very nice cutting board, so it all worked out nicely. The grand prize was a compound miter saw and the woman who won it was just flabbergasted about the whole thing. I think that is the coolest part about these events, however. The smaller door prizes are usually shirts and hats with vendor names on it, but there are also useful things like drills and sawsalls and hefty power tools and all with the expectation that we will definitely find a use for them because sharp objects that run on electricity and can do serious damage to even the sturdiest of walls are really cool toys to give to grown women.