Had a great Fourth.

I stayed awake for [most of] my meetings. I did doze off in Gospel Doctrine, but I made sure to tell the teacher afterward that I had enjoyed class, and that my drowsiness was not an editorial comment.

Came home and had a bit of solitude and a bite of dinner before heading back to the chapel. I got there just as everybody else was finishing dinner, and I had no trouble staying awake during Bishop’s talk at the fireside.

Drove to the parking lot near my house and was just getting comfy when my phone went off: Secondborn is the new 1st counselor in the RS presidency in her ward! The new RS president has been serving in the stake RS presidency, [and I suspect she has been a RS president before]. Secondborn will learn so much in this calling, and she will bring much to it, and she will learn to love the sisters in her ward more deeply than she can now imagine.

So I watched the fireworks at the Colonial first, while Secondborn talked to me, and then the ones at Trinity Park started, and the ones at Colonial finished in a blaze of glory, and we had several more minutes before the ones at Trinity Park were done. I have no idea why fireworks should move me to tears, but they do.

My friend M’s socks are done. I can start swatching for sweaters for Faith and Chutzpah. I pulled out a remnant of darkish green laceweight wool that I think will do very nicely for Chutzpah. I will have to look at my laceweight and see what would look good on Faith, my little unicorn-human hybrid.

I need to email Middlest and ask her if I gave her the last of the aqua silk/wool laceweight, or if it’s buried in my stash somewhere. I am trying to be really good and knit only from my stash. As Ringo sang, “It don’t come easy, you know it don’t come easy...”

I slept in until about 7:00 this morning and am about ready to grab the gym bag and go play at the health club for awhile. I wonder if people will be sleeping in this morning, or if it’s going to be a madhouse?

A few weeks ago I went twice in one day (I was trying to resist the call of some ridiculously fattening food, and it worked.) The pool, and more particularly the hot tub, were filled with twenty-somethings, and they were all TALKING LIKE THIS.

At 4:30am, the pool has a sprinkling of people my age, and we nod to one another, and we murmur respectfully to one another, and we focus on the task at hand.

I made the decision, years ago, not to be crabby in the morning. I am not a lark by nature; I am a night owl who has functioned as a lark for nearly three decades (since Firstborn started kindergarten).

When the girls started hitting seminary age, I learned that I needed to get up an hour before everybody else, have my devotional and finish waking up, before I had to start dealing with groggy teenagers.

I caught a bit of a break when it was just LittleBit and me, because I only had to open her door and say, “Good morning, Beautiful!”, and her eyes would fly open, and she would smile at me and chirp, “Good morning, Mommy!” (even when she was 18). And then she would get up and get herself ready.

I cherish those memories, now that she is going through her rebellious period. Which I think is going to last awhile. I keep her name on the prayer roll pretty much constantly, and it just occurred to me that this might have been like (3rd) Nephi felt: do I pray for famine, or do I let the natural consequences of war bring her around?

I just send up a prayer, every so often, that she will have experiences where she feels God's love and where she is drawn back to Him, but mostly I pray for her safety. As I pray for her sisters and their families.

I think when I get home from the health club, that I am going to spend some time reorganizing the kitchen and my food storage. I have one last cheapie bookshelf out in the living room, that is more rhomboid every day. I think I will take it apart and add four shelves to the stack by the fridge (#10 cans are the spacers), so I will have room to stack my pots and pans.

This kitchen was designed for quick refueling, back when a good cook had three pots and a frying pan and a rolling pan. It does not inspire a cookfest, and I haven’t truly felt like cooking in months, and there is minimal storage.

I have my good dishes (bought on sale at Target, a dozen for $10) and all the cool stuff I bought to augment them (chargers, handblown goblets from Pier One, earthenware from Garden Ridge), plus the everyday dishes, plus remnants of other sets that I’ve collected over the years (the things that Fourthborn didn’t accidentally[?] break when it was her turn to do dishes; she’s a lovely human being now, but when she was a teenager, she raised passive-aggression to an art form!) and Corningware bowls for microwaving and and and...

Five kids + actual or eventual spouses + me + eventual eternal companion = service for 12 at a minimum. And, two apartments ago, when I had 22 kitchen cabinets[!] and six drawers, plus a linen closet in the hall and a well-designed dining room, I liked to have small dinner parties once a month.

I have done that *once* since I moved in here. We had three sitting on the couch, one in the rocker, one in a wooden folding chair, and me in my rolling chair, all clustered around the coffee table, because there is literally no room to open up my gate-leg table.

But I do love living here, because I am gradually going through my stuff, discovering what I no longer need, and giving it to people who truly need or want it. Last year before Halloween, I took a couple of bags of decorations to Relief Society and plunked them on the chairs where we’re supposed to sit at the beginning of the meeting and told the sisters to have at it, after class. Everything found a home. I think I’m about ready to do that with my candlestick collection.

Well, my computer says it’s pushing 9:00, and I need to get moving. The light through the “eyebrow” window at the top of my front door is glorious. I think I will pop open a carton of yogurt and then hit the road.