Meghan has started 10th grade, which is taking over our lives. She is still homeschooling through the charter school we've been with, but has added classes at Monterey Peninsula College. She is still swimming on the swim team, although a bit reluctantly. She's never been much for competing, she mostly joined because her friends did. But, the exercise is good for her and I promised to not harass her about how much sugar she eats if she swims at least three times a week.
Of course, everything is in Monterey, 30 minutes away. She has seminary at Heather's in Marina (about halfway to Monterey) from 6 to 7 am. Then she's at the college from 9am to noon, Monday thru Thursday. She swims from 4 to 5:30 pm three days a week, at a pool about ten minutes from the church. So we go to the Marina library (or somewhere) after MPC to do the rest of her schoolwork before swim practice. On Wednesday she goes directly from the pool to the church for Mutual. Oh, and piano lessons are Wednesday mornings from 8 to 8:30 am. Crazy. Heather and Lysa both have kids going to either MPC or in the swim team. So we've tried to work it out so that no one has to spend their day driving. But trying to figure it out is like a complicated math problem: If you have nine kids in three schools, on two different swim teams, two sedans and a van, how do you get everyone where they need to go and still have someone home to get the preschooler on and off the bus. Throw in assorted doctor and therapists appointments for special needs kids, and you really see the problem. But, we're managing.
Sam is still working at the temporary job. He finished the board that they hired him for in about a week, but they contracted him for six weeks, so they gave him a few more projects. He's finishing up the biggest one this week, and he hasn't heard if they have more to do. In the meantime, we're still kind of hoping to hear from Cisco about the job he interviewed for. He's also been getting calls from a guy he used to work for that we call Slimy Dave. He's not exactly trustworthy, so we've been kind of putting him off. We're praying we don't have to resort to working for him. Today I have to decide if I'm going to pony up the $1300 a month to continue our health care coverage, or just give it up and hope we all stay healthy. We've always paid it before, but Sam was getting a lot of contract work at the time.
The Stake Christmas started practices a couple of weeks ago. The director picked some challenging music, so I've been putting in more piano bench time than usual. The Elderhostel choir that I play for every year starts next week. That's a crazy schedule on it's own and how I'm gonna integrate it into the school schedule is a mystery so far. I suspect the sisterwives will help pick up the slack, because they are awesome and I don't know what I'd do without them. The extra cash will be nice, especially if Sam is unemployed again next week.
A couple of weekends ago, we took a quicky weekend trip to Carson City to get apples. Really, we went to see the Halls, the apples were a bonus. It was short, but it was nice to see them, as always. We got our game of butthead in, ate awesome meatball sandwiches and sweet and sour Hawaiian haystacks, saw the Reno temple, had a lovely drive home on Hwy 4 through the Sierras and came home with enough apples to make twelve pints of strawberry applesauce and two pints of apple butter. Yum. Just because I don't believe in posts without pics, here is one that Sam took on the drive home.
OK, two. I feel like this tree most of the time these days.
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