My update rate sucks. Sorry. Last time I wrote, we were in the midst of our mini-vacation, and now school has already been going on over the past week, and we leave this afternoon for a wedding out in Minneapolis. Soccer got mostly rained out (or if not rained out, the fields were simply too wet to play on), which while inconvenient in one sense meant that we could make more TaeKwonDo than we had expected: definitely a good thing.

Our trip out to Galena was really quite nice, though necessarily short. The kids seemed to have a pretty good time, at least. I’ll have photographs up eventually.

Mom heard from The Elder and Unknown recently, with some photos even, which was nice. She sounds like she’s doing okay, though going through a period of indecision about college, no-college, moving out of the house, getting a car, and all that good stuff. I remember all that quite well myself, even though it was “so long ago”. I think she’ll survive, one way or the other.

I have a ton of games to referee this season—not as many as some of the younger guys who can be more available for games than me, of course, but more than usual. #1 Son is working higher-level games than before, now, too, and is excited about it. Unfortunately one of our wet-field cancellations was an upper-division game for him. I’m not certain if he was upset about not getting the experience the game would have provided or not getting the money. A healthy dosage of both, I would imagine.

#1 Son started school on Monday and #1 Daughter on Wednesday. Both are doing well. I’ll be helping out once a week in #1 Daughter’s class again, but not this week. They’re on a new five-day rotation schedule which is applied literally (it skips the holidays, in other words), so the days that #1 Daughter’s teacher wants me to help float practically from week to week. So, we’ll see what kind of help I can manage to be. #1 Son is already fitting in well at such a bigger school. Of course, it’s still too early to tell, but his attitude is certainly up. At least no one’s given him crap about being “the new guy” yet, and he’s a got a few friends scattered around the school from soccer, summer camps, and TaeKwonDo, so that helps.

The kittens are growing quickly and are a ton of fun. The older cats are even getting along with them a little bit. Sometimes. I’ve been too busy to take too many photos, although #1 Daughter and I did take a few the other day. I’ll try to get those up online as well. I keep wishing the big cats would play with the little ones, but they still seem to prefer acting like their territory has been invaded. They mostly ignore the kittens, and tend to simply turn away and stalk off when confronted, as opposed to the hissing and other posturing that was being done before. I suppose that’s an improvement, anyway. Because Jupiter especially is apparently too stupid not to take a swipe at either Pluto’s or Ginka’s tail as they walk by.

So there you go. Another boringly domestic update. More later.