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Not much happened yesterday. It got relatively warm, so we turned our ceiling fans on. It didn't quite get warm enough to turn on the air conditioning, but it was a near thing. It rained starting some time around 5:00 (the folks at the football game must have gotten soaked). We ended up making pizza for dinner. Normally, Scott would do it on the grill (and probably burn it), but with the rain, he decided that the oven was a better bet.

Organization for Girl Scout troops at Cordelia's school is in progress. It's not at all clear what will happen with the Cadettes, the girls Cordelia's age. There are two of them returning from last year and an unknown number of others from among the new girls at the school. If it stays two girls, it makes sense to fold them in with the Juniors. If there are six or seven, I'm not sure that the Junior troop can accommodate them. There are about fifteen Juniors already, girls who were in third and fourth grades last year. Adding two more isn't a big deal, even if those two will need special consideration (the activities recommended for Cadettes aren't the same as those recommended for Juniors, and none of the badge work carries over. The Juniors actually have a better selection of badges from what I understand).

I did, in early August, ask the e-mail list for incoming sixth graders if anybody was willing to run a Cadette troop. I got no response, not even from families saying that they couldn't run a troop but would want their daughters involved. Unfortunately, I can't run a troop. The stress and anxiety would come close to killing me. I had a hard enough time with what I did last year (which wasn't much beyond attending all the meetings).

If there isn't a place for Cadettes at Cordelia's school, I don't think Cordelia will do Girl Scouts. I'm waiting to register her until that's clear one way or the other. She doesn't want to join a troop anywhere else (I found a great one across town where she'd even know two girls, and there's one at the middle school she would have gone to). I want Cordelia to be a Girl Scout. I think it's good for her to have a social activity like that.

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I just got a call from the coach of Cordelia's volleyball team. They'll be practicing at Cordelia's school on Wednesdays. That will work out pretty well. I'll have to leave Scott's FATE game (or Babylon 5 game, depending on which he's running) for ten to fifteen minutes in order to pick Cordelia up from practice, but that shouldn't be too big a disruption. I was afraid volleyball would practice on Thursdays, forcing us to choose between volleyball practice and soccer practice. As it is, there are two days when we'll probably have both a soccer game and a volleyball game. I've told Cordelia that volleyball will take precedence if there's a conflict because she likes volleyball better, but I'm hoping we'll get away with no conflicts. We won't get the game schedule for a week or so.

The coach this year is different than last year. Last year's coach is helping out with the team. The mother who's coaching is the mother of one of Cordelia's friends who went to the big middle school. So, for that matter, is the assistant coach. Cordelia will be playing mostly with kids she knows. That'll be helpful if Scott has to work any game day. There'll be plenty of people coming from this side of town to give us a ride.

I do need to e-mail the coach. She asked if there were any Saturdays when Cordelia couldn't play, and I said I couldn't think of any. I forgot about UCon, and I need to let the coach know about that. There are eight girls on the team, and only four girls are on the court at any given time, so there should be enough girls that one person absent shouldn't be a big deal.

Book Logging

( Giants Beware! )

( Iron West )

( Korgi, Book 1: Sprouting Wings )

( The Last Airbender, Prequel: Zuko's Story )

( The Losers volumes 1 & 2 )

( Meadows, Daisy. Azafran, el hada amarilla )

( Owly: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer )

( Princeless, Book 2: Get Over Yourself )

( Riera, Michael. Uncommon Sense for Parents with Teenagers )

Read but not finished:

( James, P.D. Death Comes to Pemberley )

( Kuhl, Herbert. Should We Burn Babar? )

( Riley, James. Half Upon a Time )

( Thorpe, Helen. Soldier Girls: the Battles of Three Women at Home and at War )

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Yuletide nominations open in just a few days, and I'm trying to decide what to nominate. The two things I'm definitely nominating, Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman and Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson, are both long. Fetch! is four seasons long, and Alcatraz is four books long. I sort of think my third fandom should be something short, just in case I go to the pinch hitters. Drujienna's Harp is just one book, but it's about $25 to purchase it. Planet Ladder is a seven volume manga series, definitely not short. The there are two books in the Morrow series, and they're kind of hard to come by.

Something somebody said made me think about five minute fandoms. I wracked my brains, trying to think of songs or poems that interest me. I managed to come up with two songs from the 80s that might spark some fic ideas. The videos for both songs are on YouTube, but they're nowhere near as cool as I remembered them being. I guess thirty years makes a big difference in how I look at such things. The songs are "Don't Pay the Ferryman" by Chris de Bourgh and "Twilight Zone" by Golden Earring. I suppose I could also request Kipling's "Helen All Alone" again.

It's just that I don't feel strongly about my third nomination (and thus my third request). The things I've come up with are all things that could produce interesting stories, but none of them are likely to produce stories that I desperately want to read.

I care more about what I write for Yuletide than about what I request, but it would be nice to be asking for things I really want. I need to go through my bookshelves and DVD shelves and see if that sparks any must-have ideas as opposed to I-suppose-that's-possible ideas.

(no subject)

Poking around my bookshelves has given me several ideas for Yuletide, but none of them are short. I'm leaning toward the Wild Hunt series by Jocelin Foxe. It's a two book series published around 2000. It was obviously set up to be a long running series, so I assume the first two books didn't sell well. I'm not sure I want to specify characters for that one. They've got a large cast, and none of them appeal to me more than the others.

Other things that occurred to me were something by Lloyd Biggle, James White's Sector General books, The Silver Crown by Robert C. O'Brien, Kelly McCullough's Ravirn series, Changer by Jane Lindskold, and the Night Calls series by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel.

Anybody know any of these canons and have an opinion?