Monday

Worrisome news about Amy and Marinda and the current California wildfire. They were awakened by helicopters early yesterday morning, like, 2am, and discovered embers in their front yard. A while after that they were told to evacuate. They're safe, thank God, and the last they heard, their house was ok.

Jamie and I had a great evening Saturday night. We made marinara over angelhair, there was a bottle of wine (that I didn't get to drink because of migraine meds, but whatever!) and we rented movies (She's Having a Baby and Baby Mama). We ended up only watching the first one and I have to report it has held up well and it's still funny 20+ years later.

One thing about my husband that you probably didn't know--he's a seriously good cook. Yesterday he made more of his awesome belgian waffles, some really good chocolate chip banana bread for the bake sale and some OMG-Awesome fried chicken.

The girls all three had fun at their sleepovers and are back at school today but very not happy that Jamie gets the day off (Columbus Day) while they don't. This was declared Very Unfair. I'm really happy Jamie gets a day to himself, though. Yay!

We stayed up *really* late on Saturday night and then I hit the ground running at 6am on Sunday morning and spent about three hours before church working on Social Justice Committee stuff. I have to tell you, I'm pretty pleased with how the Social Justice Committee is shaping up. It's been in a bit of a shambles for a while but I've done a ton of work it's all coming together nicely. At church yesterday we had a *great* bakesale to benefit CROP Walk for Hunger. I asked the 5th-8th grade RE students to provide the baked goods, we set up a pretty cool "booth" complete with huge multi-colored banner and I decided to go with a "free will offering" instead of marking each thing because I figured we would make more $$$ that way and we totally did! We made over $300.00. We're focusing on Poverty at the moment and we're planning a film night with the youth selling concessions to raise money for their annual Habitat for Humanity trip. We just did a workshop at a district-wide youth convention where we showed a segment of the Morgan Spurlock film about living on minimum wage, 30 Days, (which is kind of, um, not controversial, but some think it's a wee bit unrealistic, but it served well here) and followed that with a discussion, a letter writing activity and the youth participated in an exercise designed to illustrate the role of privilege in our society. We're also educating on fair trade chocolate since Halloween is coming up and we're about to start working on ethical eating.

I should get two of my "big" medical test results back today or tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

Love--

Susanne