Nationals Change

This evening as I was finishing putting away Christmas stuff and cleaning up, Kris informed me of an email she received from one of the cheer parents about Nationals next month.  It seems that this year, the Preliminary round is taking place on Friday rather than Saturday.  The official schedule has not yet been posted/published, but apparently, in our division, the girls could perform anytime Friday between 9:00 AM and 8:00 PM.  This is particularly troubling this year because when the team tried to get accommodations at the Disney “budget” resorts, they were told they were all booked up.  Apparently, the coach worked out something with UCA to get into the Resorts Friday, but that leaves them someplace else on Thursday which would mean pretty much moving everything Friday in addition to competing.  It also means that they will most likely spend much of their time on Thursday practicing.  And with them not staying on the Disney grounds it is going to be very difficult to get to and from the practice fields.  It is turning out to be a very difficult trip/competition this year, and I am already resigning myself to not expecting too much.  If they do end up performing well and advancing, I will be pleasantly surprised.

It would have also been helpful to know about the schedule changes ahead of time, such as when they qualified, so that flights and other travel arrangements could have been made right away.  In the past, the schedule was Saturday and Sunday, so some parents scheduled their flights on Friday.  This year, if they are flying Friday, they had better hope for a later performance time, or they will need to change their flights.  Luckily we have always gone down on Thursday and had always used Friday as a “free day” before the competition for going to the Disney Parks.  This year, we aren’t planning on going to the Parks, so it worked out OK for us, but I am still not a fan of the schedule change.

Christmas Is Over

As with everything this year, it seems like we are running late with getting the Christmas decorations down.  Actually, I was happy with it since I feel like Christmas things should stay up until the Epiphany, but in the past it was just more convenient to take it down New Year’s Day.  But this year due to schedules and other things that were going on (like the plumbing fiasco) we made it all the way to the end of the Christmas season.

I had taken some things down a couple of days earlier (like the girls’ assortment of nutcrackers), but the bulk of the decorations came down today.  Kris emptied all of her snowman decorations and I spent the day taking ornaments off the tree and boxing them back up, taking the tree down, and since it was relatively warm, I got the lights off the bushes outside. 

In fact, the lights needed to come down for a week, because for some reason they hadn’t been working since about the 27^th or 28^th.  I assumed that there was a short in one of the wires, or the stake receptacles.  However, as I was taking the lights off the bushes, I was double checking by plugging them into the outlet in the garage, and they all worked.  I even plugged the stake receptacles in, and plugged the lights into them individually, but they all worked.  After exhausting all my options, I tried my digital stake timer.  The display worked, the manual on/off button worked, and the timer even worked.  However, when the timer was plugged in and I plugged the strings of lights directly into the outlets instead of the extension cords, they wouldn’t work.  So obviously something was jacked up with the timer.  I do have a couple of others, but this one was probably about 8-10 years old, so maybe it was just time to replace it anyway? 

The ornaments took forever.  It is always my least favorite part of the Christmas season.  I began the ornament removal process at around 9:00 AM, and I finished with everything at about 7:30.  This included removing ornaments and reboxing/rewrapping them all, and separating them into bins by ownership (Sarah’s, Ali’s, Family/Kris & Mine).  I also had to figure out how to box up all the new decorations we got his year, which required a trip to Home Depot for a few new bins.  And then labelling and restacking everything in an orderly manner.  The tree and lights also had to be disassembled and stored.  The lights were OK, but the bag that the tree is in is cumbersome and I don’t have a very good place to store it.  I think that eventually I will need to get down in the basement and completely clean house.  Hopefully that happens before next Christmas.

Starry Night

Today we drove up the Two Rivers to visit with Kris’s birth mother and her husband.  I don’t know if I ever explained that Kris is adopted and years ago (about 19 years ago now) we found her birth mother.  But it is a long story and I won’t go into it.  But after a nice day of visiting with them, it was time to head home.  As we were driving, I happened to look out the window and mention that it was a very starry night.  I forget how many stars there are living in the city and having the light pollution drown out most of them.  I never used to think that we lived in a large town, but we do get all the light pollution from Milwaukee.  It really reminded me of growing up in the Valley.  We didn’t live in the boondocks, but we could at least see the big dipper, North Star and other constellations.  That just doesn’t happen in Menomonee Falls.  I think we need to make a point of getting out of town more often (probably more in the summertime than winter) and just enjoy the night sky.