BilikFamily.com

Morning - Today we lived with the fringe rain of tropical storm Danny. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad it wasn't a hurricane pounding the east coast. But after having such nice weather during my work week, it was a bit annoying to have steady rain when I finally had a full day off. It also meant the pool would not open today when it otherwise would have been the last day the town pool would be open. Glad I squeezed in one last visit last weekend!

I started the morning with a trip to Golds Gym to catch the morning Step & abs class. Because it is mild outside, the A/C doesn't have to run much in the gym and especially the studio. It was pretty steamy during the class since the A/C wasn't drying out the humid air from the rains outside. I can tell because even though I'm not hitting my aerobic capacity, I'm sweating a lot and just want to be done with class.

Shortly after I got home we started to decide what would be our big outing for the afternoon. We had hoped that "Ponyo" would be showing someplace close, especially at Chunkys in Nashua. I guess it's not in the usual Disney distribution saturation channel. We decided we would go for lunch and a round of candlepin bowling.

Lunch - So we packed up the kids, plus Claire's friend Shauna, and head to Nathaniels in Nashua. We all love the chicken and rice avgolemono Greek soup that they serve on Saturdays. When we arrived we got "our" usual booth (a large curved one meant for big families), got our drinks and placed our orders. As the cups of soups started coming out, we set them down around each setting. Michelle and I each offered to help any child who needed help, especially with opening their oyster cracker packages. I think I helped Timothy and asked Daniel if he needed help. He said, "nope."

About a minute later as I'm eating my soup I see Daniel burst open his package of crackers (the plastic wrap had been giving him trouble) and he sent his soup flying onto his arm. Of course being hot soup he shrieked a bit. We immediately tried to settle him down as I wiped it off as fast as I could and soon placed his glass of ice water next to the spot to help cool him down. Our server helped clean up everything else and brought him a fresh cup of soup.

About five minutes later our main courses arrived. I had praised Daniel for how quickly he let this go by. It's easy for Daniel to obsess about such things for a long time. As we were shuffling things around, I picked up his soup to make some room for his lunch plate. This time I was at fault. The sides of the cup were a bit slippery/slimy from soup that had spilt over the edges. As I picked it up, again it spilt. This time it didn't hit any skin, but more spilt on his clothes. I felt so incredibly bad. Twice in ten minutes. I immediately hustled him out to the entrance area to dry his tears, tell him it was my fault, and help clean him up, and praise him for keeping his emotions in check.

Needless to say, when we got back, he just wanted to eat his lunch and didn't care about more soup. I can understand that. But at this point he wasn't in the mood to go bowling. I encouraged him to come along and try because he might feel better once he got there. We paid the bill and I tipped our server well for enduring two cleanups. She has served us before and always shows great patience and understanding.

Bowling - I forgot to mention, Nathaniels just happened to have coupons for free bowling at the alley we were going to. It helped offset Michelle's feelings about spending so much at Nathaniels. Effectively we only had to pay for shoe rentals at Leda Lanes. Daniel got over his moping. In fact he and Timothy tied for first place. (granted they had bumpers up whereas the girls played without them) Doing so well went a long way towards making him feel better. On the drive home we stopped at Wendys to buy each of the children a junior sized Frosty. We then stopped at A & E Roastery to get two coffees for Michelle and me.

Coraline - When we got home I queued up Coraline for the kids to watch. While they watched that, I tried to nap. I didn't succeed in dozing off, but at least I felt a little more energy after the rest. While resting I listened to several chapters of "Introduction to the Devout Life" by St. Francis de Sales. I read it around the time we first moved to NH, but thought it might be useful to listen to it again.

Programming - Once dinner time came there really wasn't that much for us to do. I worked on the archiving script to give it a new feature. Before today it captured my Facebook status updates and my Flickr camera phone pictures. I wanted to add the ability to capture and present links posted to Facebook. I'm 99% the way there. The only problem I have is with the encoding of "special characters". I won't go into details. So now if there's some article of interest (usually related to news & current events), I can share it in the "Short Updates". I hope you don't find it too annoying.