September 16, 2002

Claire's birthday party

Posted by Scott at 12:04 PM

Claire had her birthday party on Saturday afternoon. Besides Claire and Abby there were six other little girls around Claire's age. You can imagine the giggles, yelling, etc. Later that evening we let Claire pick a place to go out for dinner. She picked Charmins on Amherst Street. We had to have some of our dinners boxed to go and leave around half way into the dinner because of the boys' behavior. We apologized to Claire and explained it was not her fault. Later as we approached bedtime Abby got a bit difficult because she really needed a nap. By the time the kids were all down Michelle and I were about at our wits end.

Despite the trying day, we tried to look on the bright side. Claire behaved well all day. The weather cooperated. The boys were sleeping throughout the party. One of the nicest things about the party was that when the Godins came, they brought back our snowblower — all prep'ed and ready for the next winter. There had been some sediment building up in the bottom of the fuel tank and in the carburator which was keeping the snowblower from starting. I wish I could have been around when Chris Godin cleaned it out just to see how it's done. He recommended that I don't run the snowblower out of fuel at the end of a season. Rather use the fuel kill switch on the fuel line and just starve the engine for gas. Now I know...
Sunday was much better. Because I had to read at 10:30 Mass, Michelle and I did split shifts. Michelle took just the girls to 8AM Mass and I brought the boys over around 9AM for breakfast downstairs after the 8 o'clock Mass. After they ate the kids enjoyed running around playing tag in the church basement. I helped Michelle load up the van to go home but I hung around for the 10:30 Mass. Later when I got home Michelle and the boys were napping and the girls were watching My Dog Skip. Once the movie ended I did our first CCD lesson with Claire. She said she liked doing the lesson one on one. It reminded her of the homeschooling days.
Because we needed some swing music for our dance class, I ticked off the RIAA and downloaded Limewire, a gnutella peer to peer file sharing client. I downloaded several big band era swing style songs and burned a CD. One of the songs I downloaded was Zoot Suit Riot, which was played at Chris' wedding last month. At the time it was played TJ and I could only think of the Weird Al parody: Grapefruit Diet. So just for fun I downloaded Grapefruit Diet as well. The lyrics are a hillarious!
Late last weekend I tried to get the new Bilikfamily.com template to pass official W3 validation as syntactically correct XHTML 1.0 but could not work around a minor bug at Livejournal. I posted a request for assistance and got an answer that effectively says, “sorry, we're not there yet. Someday in the future but it's not a high priority.” Oh well. I backed off to to just HTML 4.0 and with some minor adjustments to the template the validation passed. I expect in a another day or so to switch to the new template.

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