So I missed some great discussions on Friday on Xanga (Kimberly’s book list was great…thought Madeleine L’Engle is NOT a Scientologist like Tom Cruise, nor is the Christian Scientist the same thing as Scientology…but that’s another discussion!).  Unfortunately, I was booked solid for the entire day.  There were 4 sessions during the day; the first one started at 8:30 and the last one ended at 5.  I started toward home at about 20 after 5.  In each session a number of people read papers they had written and then there was 30 minutes for discussion about the topics each person had addressed.  My first paper was a rationale for the benefits of using popular culture in the writing classroom, and then most of my questions in the Q&A time were about how I do that.  My other presentation was a workshop about the importance of critical thinking and how we might get ourselves and our students to do more of it!  There weren’t very many people at my second presentation (a number of people left early and skipped the last session), but it went well anyway.  And the best part of all was that it was DONE!

So I tried to spend the rest of the weekend relaxing a bit and unwinding.  I was still crazy busy, but I think I’m starting to let all the stress go.  Friday night, we had meatloaf and vegged out for a while, before I took a bath to relax and then read a book in bed until I was too tired to keep my eyes open.  Saturday morning was actually pretty low-key.  I decided to clean my house because people were coming on Sunday, so I did some of that.  Eric & I also loaded up the recyclables we’d been accumulating for weeks and dropped them off.  I stopped at the grocery quickly on our way home.  Then we had a wedding to go to at 1:30 (the poor groom fainted!) but skipped the reception. We watched the first half of the OSU game before heading to Cedarville for Erik’s birthday party which took the rest of the night.  It was actually a good time and not too overwhelming, although we are a very LOUD group!

On Sunday, Eric’s brother, Alan, and his two cousins, Mark & Michelle, came out to visit our church and have dinner with us.  So we slept in and went to the second service…how nice!   I put a chicken in to roast while we were at church, so of course, Pastor ran long.  But the bird was falling off the bones and was very good!  Our company stayed until about 3, so then I had the rest of the afternoon to just relax and unwind.  I did clean up the kitchen so that was done, and we went to small group about 7:00.  Our group was pretty small last night, but it was one of the most refreshing and enjoyable times ever…lots of beneficial sharing.  God is so awesome!