This weekend seemed short. Saturday, I spent in the cafeteria area of Lawrence Freestate High School. I am the assistant debate coach, which is a glorified title for the person who drives the other vehicle for the junior varsity debaters. I am currently learning how debate works, so I mainly offer direction on confidence, appearance and public speaking. At this point, as junior varsity debaters, they are at the stage where they need practice in public speaking more than the fine tuning of winning the debate based upon their respective arguments. I sat and wrote several pages in my journal, a brand new one I received as a gift from a past birthday or Christmas, which I've put into use because I finally filled up the previous one, which I received in similar circumstances. I also wrote about 6-8 pages in my creative writing notebook to finish a short story I'd been writing. These Saturdays I've spent in various Kansas high school cafeterias has had some redeeming value for me besides the extra pay I receive and what I learn about debate and public speaking, and that is that it's given me big chunks of time to write. While the students are in their respective classrooms debating, there really is not much for us, as coaches, to do at that point. Since it's my first year, I also don't know many of the other coaches, so the temptation to chit-chat and kill time has been eliminated. I do not take along my laptop for that reason exactly. If I had it available I'd no doubt spend the entire day watching people fall down on Youtube.
I felt good completing the short story, all 17 pages of it, but i wasn't really pleased with it. For one thing, the characters were just entirely based upon me and my family. I didn't created new characters. Something bad happens in the story and since I've used my family as the characters (only changing their names really) it's disconcerting to read it and visualize my own kids. It was a first draft, so I am not too worried about that part of it. Recently I've overcome some kind of barrier I'd previously held which prevented me from completing a story. I used to write good beginnings and middles, but never finish a story. I overcame that, as I said, and have had great satisfaction writing until I've said all that needed said about a story.
It was raining almost all day in Lawrence on Saturday. The boys stayed inside with Mare. They'd checked out The Iron Giant from the library so they watched it on Saturday. They loved it.
Sunday I did the chores I have relegated to that day: clean the bathroom, take out the trash, make breakfast, clean up the kitchen. After that we got all dressed up and drove to the spot where Mare and I exchanged wedding vows at the Clinton Lake museum for a photo shoot. We took several photos (if 110 is "several") and got some good ones out of that batch. It was cold and bright out and a good day for picture taking. It ended kind of badly when we finally ended the shoot and allowed the boys to run and play at a nearby playground near sundown, when it was starting to really get crisp out. Jack went down the curly cue slide, right into the standing water on the bottom. He drenched all of his pants on the backside, right off the bat nearly. It was too cold for him to play in wet clothes so we had to walk back a long uphill with Jack moaning about the temperature and Leo following along crying that we had to leave so quickly without really getting started playing. Henry did well out in the cold. Mare had him bundled up like a snug a bug.
Mare has our tree up and stockings. Thanks to my aunt Becky who created the stocking for Henry (for all five of us!) it looks great! She has some lights up around our street facing windows which give our house a warm, cozy, inviting feel to it. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
Well, it's another Monday down in the books. Just like this horse: "I'm dun!"
