Last week I took my whole family, and a friend, to the sign language church I've been visiting with my 5 year old son. I've been enjoying taking him there because I can watch all the speakers sign, and no one complains about how loud my son is, because they're all deaf. Well this time my son picked up a crayon and drew some lines on the back of my husband's shirt, tramatizing a nice little boy behind us, with a chochlear implant in his head. So I guess my son can't get away with ALL his behaviors, there.

We stayed for a few minutes, after the service, for donuts and juice in their basement. It's a nice, old, urban, small, Catholic church. My husband says you can tell by the decorations, that it was originally an Italian Catholic church. The priest stopped by and visited us. He asked us if any of us or our kids were deaf and if we lived in the neighborhood, but when the answer to both was "no", he left pretty quickly. Later my husband said, look, the priest is old, most of the congregation at our service were all old, and even the building is old. They're a dying church, desparate for new members.

Last night my husband told me that his sister had called him during the day. She's putting together a printed program guide for her wedding, in a month, and she asked him about me. She asked him, would I prefer to give the communion wafers to the preist, "presenting the gifts;" or would I prefer speaking to the congregation, to tell the congregation what they should pray for, "reading the intentions". He told her I'd "read the intentions."
I had to call her late last night, to leave her a voice mail and tell her , excuse me, I'm an athiest, I shouldn't be doing any of those things. I still wonder what made him say that. I wonder how well all my in-laws will take hearing I left someone a voice mail to say I'm an athiest. They've probably already figured it out, but I've never really said it out loud to any of them before. I hope they haven't printed those programs yet.

Ok our lights at home started flickering, every time we ran the washing machine, and every time the new refrigerator would run. So last week, early in the week, we had an electrician come out and do a free estimate. He showed us that our fuse box was put together by an amature, and that even though the little metal door on part of it said 100 amps, and the house was sold to us as such, clearly we only had 60 amps. It would cost $1,600 to replace the fuse box and make the house 100 amps.

My husband and I debated if and when we should get that work . Then Friday night half our lights and outlets died! And Saturday morning we discovered that that included the starter to our gas furnace. We had no heat! And our daughter's 11th birthday party was scheduled for that evening! 12 children were coming, and 6 were going to sleep over. She didn't want to postpone this party.

When all the lights in the house went out, I heard my 5-year-old son scream from the basement. The outlet downstairs, that we have out portable tv , and Gamecube set up on, was one of the outlets that died. He was screaming because his video game didn't work. That afternoon, I moved the tv-stand, tv, and Gamecube to an outlet in the kitchen that still worked. Strangely the outlet that our TV, VCR, and DVD player is plugged in to, also still worked. So the kids weren't much affected by the outage.

My husband called a furnace company. I couldn't stop him. I said that was like that old urban legend about the guy who calls tech support because his computer is dead, but says he can't read the serial number on it because all the lights are out due to the blackout in his building. But he called the furnace guy and paid him $60 just to tell us the furnace isnt' working because your electricity is out, oh,by the way, look at all this mold in your furnace, you really should buy a new one for over $3,000 .

I called all the parents and told them the house was warm enough for now , but that the furnace was out. I'm so glad that even the parents of the children who were sleeping over just agreed to dress their children warmly and brought them anyway! And the house never did get that cold, with all those little kids running around in it!

Sunday night it finally got really cold. My husband and I dragged our 'big-mommy-bed' queen size mattress in to the living room, put on the space heater, plugged in to a working outlet, and we all 4 slept together on the mattress, so my husband could watch football.

Yesterday, my husband stayed home from work. The electricians came at 7:00 and didn't leave until 6:30 at night! The re-wired everything, and found that the line going from the utility pole in to our house was fraying, from rubbing against a tree branch. The power company, NSP, came out and cut the tree down, and strung a new line from the utility pole from our house. The electricians didn't leave our house until 6:30 at night They really fixed our fuse box so that it's no longer a mess of tangled wires and round, screw-in fuses. It's an orderly box of switches, each swith labeled so we'll know what, in the house, it controls. And the electricians also made sure that major appliances don't share circuits with each other, as they did before.

We had light and heat last night. It felt good. I'm trying not to think about what's inside the furnace right now.

I'm at my desk at work on a Saturday again.

I have a busy aftenroon ahead of me . In about an hour, at 1 pm when I get off work, I pick up my friend Trish & we're going to Brookdale Mall for Deaf Aware Fair. Another coworker of ours, deaf, invited us to go with her...now she had to back out for some reason, so now we're actually going without her. I just think it'll be cool to see the sign entertainers the flier says will be there, and I'm looking for some sign language videos that I don't want to buy on the internet, so I'm hoping a vendor will be selling them.

Then I take Trish home and drive to my husband's ex-coworker, Mai's , house for her Hmong baby naming party. I just know they tie a little string around the baby's wrist, and they have a bunch of Hmong food. I'll be late, but I'll meet my husband and kids there.

I got about 6 phone calls in the whole 4 hours I've been here so far, and it took me about 20 minutes to go downstairs and change all the backup tapes and run all the End of Day functions we gotta type in, when we work on a Saturday.

My 5 year old son lost his second tooth this week!
And my 10 year old daughter spent most of last week Monday through Thursday afternoon, at a school camping trip. It was the longest I've ever been away from her, that I couldn't even call her on the phone. She's spent a week at her grandma's in Green Bay 3 times, but even then, I could call her. I was glad when she came back, she said she had had a great time, and even that she wished she could go back!

My sister sent me an IM yesterday, that my brother and his wife, in Idaho Falls, are going to have a baby. Strangely I had just recently spoken to my mom on the phone, and she didn't mention it.

Tuesday Oct 5, my husband and I got a sitter for our son, and we went to the St Paul Xcel Energy Center to see REM and Bruce Springstein. Im not a big Bruce fan, but I just loved seeing REM. Michael Stipe is such a dream boy and all their music is good. We actually had to leave part way through Springstein's set, because we had to take the baby sitter home.

Someone on Marco's message board pointed out that John Kerry looks just like the Fred Astair puppet on The Year Without a Santa Claus. Now I can't stop thinking that every time I see him. Before that I always thought he looked just like Guy Smiley the muppet.

Our friend Derek brought us another Kerry-Edwards lawn sign, we've put this one up, much farther from the curb than our old one, and it's remained un-stolen and un-vandalized for 4 straight days now!