Today had a few focuses.

One was laundry. The dryer has offered its final rebellion a couple of days ago. The drum or whatever they call it no longer spins round. I actually skipped the hyperventilative feel-sorry for me step, meh, it's not as fun as it used to be, I guess. I just got my three batches of laundry done, asked the other kids if they wanted to do theirs (the four oldest do their own laundry); had one who did; then later in the afternoon Beautimous and I ran over to the dryers at the laundry mat. I'll be folding and putting away all next week, but it is nice to know that that is done and will not be on my mind during another week of school.

Second was homework. I usually rewrite a homework list each Friday after school with all my homework tasks numbered in priority so I know what I'm doing for the next week, which I had made homework list yesterday. But I knew I was already behind since the beginning of school on my reading and I had missed two assignments and was about to miss a third, so I made myself get that third one done. These aren't huge assignments, more for the purpose of getting a participatory grade. But still not a habit I want to get into. So in any case, one of the readings I am in the middle of is regarding pre-colonial China. Haven't ever read Chinese history before, so it's fun to get new information. The one page paper I wrote today was about Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather. This is for my physical anthropology (read: human evolution) class. Apparently Erasmus was already someone who accepted concepts like a common ancestor for species. So I thought it was curious that at least popularly we view Charles at coming up with these types of elements, and that is apparently not really the case, although I'm sure he developed them to an unprecedented degree.

Third focus was doing the preparation I needed to for the ward choir. This consisted of mainly making many phone calls to ask people to participate in a youth choir and a children's choir, which rehearsals start tomorrow. I did type out some announcements, schedules, whatnot. It's stuff I have to keep up on constantly, communicating is a big part of the calling. There is no one in our ward called as the choir accompaniast (btw, that is a word I cannot spell; never have, never will), so I am asking people to play the piano for individual numbers. There are quite a few people in the ward who play, and are (thankfully) willing, but it still requires a phone call or two on my part.

Fourth. Beautimous turned 16 in December, and I promised her something spectacular for that milestone. Well, with one thing and another, finally this evening for her birthday party I took her and her best friends minus one who couldn't make it to Inkheart at the theatre. It opened yesterday. The five girls were kind enough to include me in the fun, Beautimous even said, "Sit by me, Mom." What more could I ask for? During the trailers, I'm afraid we were quite loud, oooing and aaaing and making really teenager-y remarks at cute guys and whatnot. I was afraid we might get thrown out by the other movie-goers. Never fear. Once the main feature started, silence descended on our row of double X chromosomes -- we're serious about our Brendan Fraser. (Leading actor in Inkheart.) Anyway, it was a good movie. Also Paul Bettany in it. And then Beautimous drove us home (learning permit).

Let's see . . . anything else important about today . . . I usually write down things I need to get done on pieces of paper and then pick them out of a hat and see what comes up and then do it. Literally, I do this. Without the hat, usually just a pile of papers. I've been using this "method" for a long time for a couple of reasons, only one of which is that I usually have -- again literally -- a hundred things that need or ought to get done in a given 24 hour period, and only the power and time to do, say, 15 to 50. So instead of wasting time angsting over 100 equally important things to do, I just pick them out of a hat, and whatever comes up is what gets done, and it's usually a pretty good mix I can be satisfied with. Point being that today between all of the above that I have just chronicled, I only had time to pick out about four things. Interestingly, about three of those were scripture study. So I had these lovely little moments in the middle of everything else where I sat down and read some of Elder Eyring's conference address about unity and some of the chapter in the Joseph Smith Teachings book where they go over Joseph's letters to his family. Both tear jerkers. I hadn't done hardly any gospel studying since school started, some but nothing like before, so I'm having difficulty getting the rythm of scripture study added to this new schedule. So it was especially nice for today.