Saturday Afternoons

There is nothing better than a lazy Saturday after a looong week. This week we remodeled at work, meaning that everyone was busier than normal and more stressed than normal. Normally on a Friday night after a week like that I probably would've gone to bed early with a good book, but instead I went to church and spent five hours shepherding dozens of shrieking/laughing/crazy(!) children. It was fun, but EXHAUSTING. Completely exhausting.

Then I came home to find my husband (finally!) and had a nice lazy sleeping-in sort of morning with him. I made sausage and cheesy scrambled eggs for breakfast, and then he ran errands while I finished the lesson for church tomorrow morning and balanced the budget, my two small bits of productivity. Now, however, I have successfully wasted at least an hour online. Next on my agenda is playing some more Scrabulous, and then making some oven-roasted kielbasa, potatoes and onions for dinner, yummy! My biggest dilemma is what to make for the picnic tomorrow. I'm torn between my favorite dark chocolate and white chocolate chip cookies, or peanutbutter kiss cookies. Since I will probably single-handedly devour any and all dark chocolate and white chocolate chip cookies tomorrow night, I think I'll make the peanutbutter kiss cookies, since those leftovers might actually last a few days around here.

My nerdy self is also debating bringing in the Ian Rankin audio book I've been listening to in the car, and putting a disc in. The downside to listening to audio books in the car is definitely the fact that I don't drive much on the weekends, which is frustrating when I'm listening to a particularly good book. I'm not sure yet if I'd call this a particularly good book, it seems like a pretty standard aging-maverick-cop-and-cute-sidekick-cop-investigate-series-of-bizarre-murders type book, but it has the added bonus of a narrator with a fabulous Scottish burr. (Brogue? No Irish brogue, Scottish burr. I think.) Anyway, after just a few minutes of listening I have to fight down an intense urge to try to imitate the narrator in my own pathetic attempt at sounding Scottish.

Plus there are occasionally words that really don't sound like English at all until I repeat them a couple of times in my head, and then realize that yup, the whole audio book is in English. It makes me think of a few years ago when I was staying at a particularly dreadful hotel in Paris, and there were hordes, literally hordes, of small children wreaking havoc upon the elevators/stairs/lobby/halls/anywhere they possibly could. For about two days we had been griping about the children in the hotel, trying to decide where they were from. Then one day, to my astonishment, when I was trapped in an elevator with 11 or 12 boys, who appeared to range in age from about 8-10, and who were attempting to climb the walls of the elevator while pushing on the little service box in the top, Mission Impossible style, it suddenly dawned on me that I had understood what one little kid just said. Sure enough, they were Scottish, but it had taken me two days to realize that they were actually speaking English! Once I had ascertained that we spoke the same language I informed them that if they didn't get down off the walls of the elevator NOW I was going to find a security card. They retaliated by pushing literally every button, meaning that the elevator made a depressingly slow stop at each floor, but hey, at least we were all speaking the same language.

(And on a total sidenote, I turned on PBS a few minutes ago for background noise since I decided I wasn't quite nerdy enough for audio books indoors, and as I was typing the above paragraph the narrator started talking in a ridiculous burr about the sights of Glasgow. Way to go Scottish synchronicity!)