Another Couple of Weeks in Review

• Yesterday I registered for the last two graduate classes I'll ever have to take. After next semester, it's just exams, dissertating, and the job search (which, combined, will still take several years, but at least I won't have to take any more classes!).
• Laura made blueberry breakfast sausages for dinner. Not good. It'll be a while before any of us can eat blueberries or sausage again.
• Miles and Griff signed up for baseball and Caleigh signed up for softball. Between rainstorms, we've been throwing the ball around. Griff has quite an arm, but he has a hard time catching. I won't let him cry when the ball hits him in the face, so he just rubs his forehead and says that baseball is boring and he doesn't want to play anymore.
• Laura's been re-staining our kitchen table and chairs, so for the last week we've been using a giant card table with two patio chairs, a weight bench, a rocking chair, and a broken pink chair with no back. The kids love it and one of them (I can't remember who, one of the shorter ones) asked if we could keep it like that until we move.
• Miles has a girl from school who calls him everyday. They talk for a half hour or so, and Miles keeps asking, "So why did you call? Did you want to set up a play date or something?" Today she told Miles she likes him as more than a friend, but Miles told her he's not cool with that, so she said, "Okay, we'll just be friends." We're proud of Miles for holding his ground. But now Laura frets every time she calls. "I'm not ready for this," she says. "Should we be putting limits to how long he can talk on the phone? Should he be talking to girls?"
• I took one of my old suits in to get tailored. The seamstress, a rotund lady with rosy cheeks and a thick Norwegian accent, looked frazzled as she pinned up the seat of my pants. "This will have to do," she said. "You're no Versace model, but it'll look fine on you." Then she chuckled, looked around to make sure no one was listening, and said, "The secret is that those Versace models don't look that good in suits either. It's a little something called Photoshop." I took it as a compliment. A good back-handed Norwegian compliment.
• I removed a sliver from Griffin's finger. There was a tiny drop of blood, so he asked if he could put a band-aid on it. He insisted on doing it himself, and after five minutes of fumbling around, he finally got the band-aid on. "People say that band-aids make it feel better," he said. "But I think it feels exactly the same." A couple minutes later he looked at his hand and said, "Ah, man...I put it on the wrong finger."