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David's first soccer game of the season was on Monday night; they played Scotia, David's old club, losing 5-4. David is not happy with the team (very few kids tried out this time, so the general skill of the team members is quite low) or the coach and is probably going to withdraw until the summer. He will continue to go to a soccer skills session on Saturday mornings.
Unfortunately Emily and Katy have been under the weather. Emily felt ill on Thursday evening and missed school on Friday; then Katy felt ill last night and spent most of today in bed. Emily was on her feet again after a day, so hopefully Katy will be back to normal tomorrow.
Yesterday Ann and I went to the DuMaurier Theatre (the smaller stage at the Neptune Theatre) to see Three in the Back, Two in the Head, a play about a naïve scientist developing a missile shield who gets in over his head and is killed by the CIA. It raises interesting questions about the balance of morality and expediency and the competing claims of security for the world, one's country and one's family. We had a pleasant meal beforehand with Jocelyn and Puxley at Dharma Sushi, a Japanese restaurant right across the street from the theatre.
As today was the first Sunday in Advent, we went to the annual Advent Pot-luck Dinner in the basement of the church. Everyone is required to sing for their supper: a Christmas Carol, sung in a group, not alone thank goodness. James and I had to sing Away in a Manger.
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Yesterday was the last day of Emily and James' gymnastics lessons. As usual, all Mums and Dads were invited to watch the kids demonstrate their prowess at jumping and vaulting and balancing. Emily and James gave Ann and myself a good show on the floor, vault, uneven bars, balance beam and trampoline.
Sometime after Christmas our friends Kevin, Linda, Mark and Jane will be moving to Australia for a couple of years. Kevin is going on an exchange similar to the one we did in France. Ann figured that this was a good excuse to invite everyone we know that has a connection with Australia for Sunday lunch. That included Ingrid, Mike and Alex, who have been there twice on Sabbaticals, and Mark, Shirley, Kathleen and Maragret, who returned from an exchange a couple of years ago. Along with Ingrid's Mum, who is visiting, that made 18 for lunch. Yesterday Ann bought a large beef roast and piles and piles of vegetables, and we rearranged all the furniture in the house to make a table large enough to accomodate us all. As usual, it was my job to cook it all up, though appetizers and dessert were provided by others. Everyone arrived around one o'clock and we spent most of the afternoon eating, talking about Australia, and generally having a jolly time. We now have mounds of leftovers to get us through the week and Ann is still cleaning up the kitchen at 10:30 PM.
The weather has been cold enough this week that we still have snow on the ground from the storm last weekend. Nova Scotia Power has been taking a lot of flak for handling the power outages badly. The prevailing opinion is that they should have learned some lessons from the hurricane and blizzard last year and that, if they couldn't prevent the outages, they should at least have been more forthcoming with predictions of when power would be returned. We were lucky to get off completely unscathed, though some people were without power for a week.
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I mentioned last week that Emily was a wood elf for Hallowe'en but that I had no pictures, as I was in Washington. However, Emily returned to elvishness after school this week, so I took the opportunity to take a photo; here it is.
As you may have heard on the news, we had our first major storm of the winter last night. We had about 10 centimetres of snow, but the amount was quite variable, even within Dartmouth. Further down the south shore they had closer to 50 centimetres. The snow was very wet and heavy and its weight brought down four transmission towers in Dartmouth, causing parts of the city to lose power. Apparently the power crews spent all day trying to keep up; as they restored power in one area, a tree limb would fall and take it out somewhere else. Luckily, we have been spared completely (touch wood), but there is more forecast for tonight.
We did have another busy weekend planned, but in the end it has been comparatively sedate. Last night Ann and I were to go to Mahone Bay for the birthday party of my fellow Dave Brother, Puxley; but it was cancelled. Today Katy was to play in a concert, but it was also cancelled. As was the birthday party of one of Emily's friends and the play date for James with one of his school buddies. However, this morning everyone but me did go off to church as usual where Katy and David played flute and trumpet in an instrumental number and James also had choir practice. After church Katy and David played Dungeons and Dragons with the rest of the Youth Group. James and Emily also had their swimming lessons later in the afternoon. The kids are now all hoping that we get enough snow tonight that school will be cancelled tomorrow.
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Ann and I had discussed about a month ago when we would have the snow tires put on the van. We decided to do it when it was in the shop for regular maintenance a couple of weeks ago. Except that, when the time for the maintenance arrived, we both forgot, as we found out yesterday. We'll have them put on next week.
On Remembrance Day we all walked down to the centotaph for the ceremony at 11 o'clock. James marched in the parade with his Beaver colony. It was cool and overcast this year, not the beautiful day we had last year, nor the rain we had the years before that. After the ceremony the kids each had friends come back to our house. For a while the whole place was crawling with people from 7 to 17. Ann cooked a pizza to feed them all. Most of them cleared out by the end of the afternoon, but some of Katy's friends stayed for dinner as well.
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I missed last week's Web page because I was in Washington DC on a business trip. Six of us from the lab flew down on Sunday morning to discuss possible collaborative research with the British and the Americans. We stayed in Tyson's Corner, just outside the beltway, but quite convenient to Dulles Airport and the US hydrodynamics lab in Carderock. On Monday afternoon we had a bit of free time, so several of us went downtown to do a little sightseeing. I took quite a few pictures including the one at the left.
We were there during the election on Tuesday, though the scientists we were dealing with seemed a little disengaged from the political process. Not so the rest of the population who were lining the streets and overpasses carrying placards in support of both Bush and Kerry. On Wednesday morning, the day after, one of the British scientists arrived with a tie decorated with the figure from Munch's The Scream. I thought it was an appropriate, if not entirely tactful, political comment.
On the way home again on Wednesday I made a classic blunder. To get through security I had to remove my laptop from my briefcase, take off my coat and jacket and remove my shoes, as well as take off my watch and remove all keys, pens, and change from my pockets. I still made the alarm go off, so I had to return and take off my belt and remove my wallet as well. I finally got through and then had to reassemble myself. Since I had my shoes off, I decided that I might as well change into the comfier ones that I had in my suitcase. By the time I had everything all back together my companions were nowhere to be seen, so I assumed that they had already gone ahead. At Dulles, security is in a different building from the gates and one has to take a shuttle bus to get from one to the other. While I was on the bus it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't remember putting my belt back on. Sure enough, my belt was not on. Then, PANIC!, my wallet is with my belt. As soon as the bus arrived at the gates I jumped on another one to return to security. My wallet was nowhere to be seen, but one of the security guards took me in tow and finally found it, along with my belt, in a back room where it had been put for safekeeping. I took the bus to the gates, once again, to find my companions wondering where on earth I had got to. Luckily we had a couple of hours to spare at the airport so I was in no danger of missing the flight.
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Since I left on Sunday morning I missed Hallowe'en, though Emily, James and I carved pumpkins on Saturday evening. I also helped James make a bat costume during the week before. He wore that to the party at Beavers on Wednesday night and again to the party at his school on Friday. However, by Sunday trick-or-treating, he had turned into a wizard. Emily began as a hippie (school party), but on Sunday she and Katy spent all afternoon turning her into a woodland elf (not to be confused with any of the other major types of elf). Apparently the result was very good, though I didn't see it myself.
The Dartmouth High soccer team made it as far as the provincial finals this year. On Friday David missed most of the day at school to go to a game in Wolfville, then on Saturday morning I drove him and one of the other players back up to Wolfville for the final. Unfortunately they lost 1-0 so they got the silver medal. I would like to report that this excellent result was due, in part, to David's hard work and excellent playing but, in fact, he has spent almost the whole season sitting on the bench. For example, neither he nor the other boy that we gave a ride to played at all on Friday or Saturday. I have been upset about this for most of the season, not because I think that David is such a good player that he should be playing more, but because I think that anyone who makes the team should expect to play at least a little bit in each game; if the coaches don't think a player is good enough to play in a game, he shouldn't be on the team. For the privilege of sitting on the bench David has been missing music practices and other school classes and I have been driving all over Halifax and beyond to pick him up from the games. I have made my displeasure known to the school, but whether it will do any good for next year remains to be seen.
Last night we went to Neptune to see The Syringa Tree, a play about growing up in South Africa during apartheid. It had a one woman cast playing about 20 different characters. Though I liked the play as a whole, I found that the principal character, a young girl, became quite irritating after a while. The actor also didn't seem to appreciate the large difference between a girl of six and a girl of nine; she played them identically. We went out for a pleasant meal beforehand at the Halifax Alehouse along with the usual gang.
October 2004 Archive
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