Weekend Warriors

There are a lot of great things about being a stay-at-home wife, and things have been going pretty smoothly around here, so I'm not complaining. But there is one drawback--all the days run together and weekends aren't that big a deal. Because Al works during the week, many of our weekends are spent doing yard work, cleaning cars, fixing things around the house, and if he's the one doing the work outside, I'm usually doing something like laundry or cleaning or knitting while inside. And that's just not much different than what I do during the week.

But this weekend, no work, only fun.

Saturday I went to the ladies' spring luncheon at our church. We learned how to arrange flowers, which I've never been very good at. By the end of our lesson, each of the groups had made a lovely arrangement.

The man who was our teacher was a retired chemistry teacher. For his retirement, he's been growing irises and entering flower arranging competitions. He was really very helpful because he put flower arranging in very concrete, almost mathematical terms. First choose a line (like a tall iris or a cattail) and put that in the center. Then choose your focal flower (peonies today), something bright and big, and put those (for example, two in the front) on either side of the line, forming a triangle. Then add all the fillers around to cover up the foam you've been sticking the flowers in and to balance the other flowers. Oh, and don't forget the long, skinny blades of grass--they look very cool in the arrangement. It helped me to think of analytically--my creative mind tends to lean towards the technical sometimes, so this was a nice way to use both sides of my brain.

But here's the funny thing. At one point he turned around to us and said, "I hope these colors look good together. I'm color blind and it's hard for me to tell." What? A color-blind iris grower and flower arranger? Purple looks blue to him. That's just too wild. No wonder he uses the overall shape to dictate the arrangement.

Anyway, we had a nice lunch of salads and dessert (everyone brought one or the other), and I won one of the flower arrangements. I rarely win door prizes.

The best thing, though, was that while I was at the luncheon, Al went to the open house at the BMW motorcycle shop, so I didn't have to go! They are very nice people, but they like to talk about their near-death experiences on the bikes. It's not something I want to hear as I'm watching Al suit-up to test ride an R-1200. So, it was nice to have an excuse to miss it without hurting his feelings.

We went out to dinner Saturday night to the new brewery in town--Lazlo's. The beer was great, the food was awesome, and we talked all through dinner. This is a pretty momentous thing because Al is really quite, even with me, and we've had many a conversation-less dinner.

Sunday was just as busy and a very fun day. The weather was gorgeous--not a cloud in the sky and mid 60s. We put the top down on the Miata and headed out.

First we went to Mahoney State Park for an Art Show and Rib Fest. Now, these aren't as polar opposites as you would think. Most of the paintings and photographs were wildlife art. So, somehow looking at paintings of pheasants, wolves, and bears fit right in with the cowboy-themed rib dinner outside.

The art show was in the lodge:



And we rode the trolly around the park before heading out.



But we didn't eat here because our next stop was the Czech Folk Festival, and we both were salivating for kolaches.

Who knew there was such a large Czech population in Omaha, NE?!? The place was packed!

There was band



And polka dancing





And there were booths of games for the kids and products from the Czech Republic for sale (mostly Christmas ornaments and crystal).

But *sniff* all the kolaches were gone *sniff*. And we were so looking forward to those. I was going to use up all my extra calories for the day on one of those *sniff*.

Oh well, it was fun anyway. But we didn't stay much longer once we realized there were no more baked goods. Instead we went to Paradise Bakery and split a chicken sandwich and a chocolate chip cookie. It wasn't the same but it was damn good.

So, banner day for Kell. It actually felt like a weekend.