What a weekend!
This past Saturday was, in a word, nuts! Our 4th annual Christmas Extravaganza came to pass, and once again our basement was filled with people in search of crafts, baking, candy, and the occasional bowl of VC's Famous Chili, among other things! We had a couple in the congregation say, "Hey, we sell holiday woodcrafts!" VC sez, 'Okay, c'mon out!' What she didn't realize was that these woodcrafts were huge!! Beautiful, absolutely, but they needed three of our shorter tables all to themselves, plus a chunk of walking area... and they went like NUTS!! The wife was telling me that they had sold out of everything that had sold out at the last craft show they had worked, which showed them which ones were the truly popular ones, plus a bunch of others! And since a portion of all sales went to our mission project for the day, everything sold meant a little more in the pot. On Sunday, we always have the post-extravaganza sale to the church people who don't come out on Saturday, and an utterly gorgeous nativity scene was put forward by the woodworkers - $120 value which, if sold, goes straight to the project. Our choir actually pooled their money to purchase it for the church, so everyone was happy there!
The Kat was on the candy table again, with the sign that I had made for her last year up again - I've apparently been voluntold that I am building at least three more signs for next year, which I really don't mind (they're neither expensive nor particularly difficult to make). She doesn't know exactly how much money her table made, but she thinks it was up from last year. The chili was awesome, as always, we took in over $130 in admission (plus a bunch of food items) that go straight to the town's Food Bank.
In the end, all told, we brought in over $2100 - our goal this year was $1800, up from $1600 last year! We have some expenses to cover, but that's still an AWESOME amount of money! We are using it to help build "shallow" wells in Malawi, which are constructed by the people who live there and only facilitated by the mission staff who are working with them. Each well will give a cleaner, more convenient water source to approximately 300 people - so we just impacted on the lives of 1200 people! We help because we can - God moves us to do what we can to reach out and help in the world, and even if we can't go, we can still send part of ourselves out there!
*****
The boys and I were able to help out for a little while, but then we had to get over to our dojo for a seminar led by Grand Master Kensei Taba, the founder of our particular style of karate. He has been over in Canada from Okinawa for the past week, and I spent much of Saturday in a zenkutsu-dachi, a forward stance, bending a knee that doesn't want to bend so much anymore, with this little 75-year-old Japanese man poking my hip and saying, "Down, down, down!" Then I would be standing, much easier (so I thought) in a shizentai-dachi, a walking stance, with all of us being told that we were too long, too narrow, too wide, or whatever. I tried throwing the best punches I could throw with a barrel-chested 8th-degree black belt, Sensei Vern Tilley, leaning in on my right side - if my elbow brushed his chest on the way in or out, I was 'chicken-winging' my punch too much and not getting all the power I might be into the punch itself. Let me tell you, my arm got him a LOT... but less so by the end of the drill, I think...
It was a good seminar, but with a lot of concentration on the basics - it's common sense that if your basics are bad then anything built on the basics will be bad, but this was almost all basics. We focused on three kata in two days, and that they were the three 'simplest' kata made sense because we had a lot of lower-level belts on the floor. But we also had a fair number of higher belts on the floor as well, and to see them get told, "No, you're punching wrong; no, you're blocking wrong; no, your feet are wrong," the same as was happening to me made me wonder what the heck I'm doing with anything other than a white belt around my waist! I'm proud of my purple belt, yes, but there are times like this when I see just how cheaply I got it at a karate-by-checklist school.
Of course, on Monday morning, my joints all ached, with that ache of overwork, overstress and just general pain. Still, I asked for it, didn't I?
*****
Going to war with an 11-year-old is not fun.
#1Son is of an age that can be very hard - he wants to be right about everything, and cannot stand it when he is wrong. This led to a three-day war recently that finally ended with a good, long, late discussion about humility, blessing and trying to act in ways that would please God. I hate conflict, hate it, but the resolution of it is amazing for the soul. This is not, to paraphrase Paul, to say that I think there should be more conflict in the world so that we can experience a greater measure of the bliss of reconciliation, but I can't deny how good it feels to come to the end of a fight!
*****
Now, about that last part...
On Sunday evening, after a hard day of 'finishing up', our family flopped down in our family room for supper in front of the TV - we hadn't spent a lot of time there for the past four days, and we just wanted to spend some time together doing as little as possible. Supper was relatively simple, and some of the leftover desserts/treats were put out on a tray upstairs to be brought down later.
Partway through the movie (The Muppets' Christmas Carol) I started hearing an odd clatter from upstairs, like many toenails hitting the floor at once, every few minutes. Suddenly, there was a clatter, and #1Son went up to investigate. Suddenly, there was an agonized wail of loss from him - all of the desserts were gone! Someone had left their chair pushed partway back at the table, right near the treat tray, and though he'd never done it in nine and a half years, our dog had leapt up to the table and helped himself... to the fudge, the chocolates, the nut clusters and even the ollie bollein! Luckily, the truffles had been in a bag in the fridge, but all of the rest (which we hadn't actually paid for but which had been given to us as leftovers) was gone!
We quickly banished the dog to the outside for an hour, just in case the chocolate should choose to vacate his system abruptly from either exit. It didn't, much to our surprise. On Tuesday, #1Son came in from the yard - he had been trying to do some work to earn some money, and was getting a dollar for each stuffed-full bag of leaves he raked up, plus a fifty-cent bonus if he "cleared the landmines" in the back yard. He was holding his doggie bag at arm's length, but smilingly offered me some "post-processed peanuts" - I smiled back and ordered the bag out of the house with a firm, "No, thanks!" Apparently, all that chocolate didn't hurt the dog, as (except for the peanuts) the pile had appeared relatively normal.
Oh, well... there's always next year's sale!