Today was the first day in a long time that I just got to sleep in and do nothing.

Last Monday I got that car-carving kit from the Boy Scouts and starting sawing up his block of wood, trying to shape a car out of it.

Tuesday afternoon, I took my daughter to guitar lessons, came home, made dinner. Then that night I taught my last English as a Second Language class for a while. I had to quit because I just can't fit it in to my schedule any more. Luckily the school district found a replacement for me, who can start next week.

Wednesday night my husband filed down my son's Pinwood Derby car, and helped him paint it light blue, with paint left over from when we painted our kitchen blue last year, and I searched everywhere for someplace that sells rolls of butcher paper, until I found it at Office Max. I also tried to find someplace where I could weigh our son's car, that afternoon, to verify it was less than the maximum 5 ounces as regulated by the Pinewood Derby. I found out the New Brighton post office was shut down! The building is vacated! I was going to use their scale! So I took his little toy car to the Cub Food grocery store, and weighed it on their produce scale in the fruit department. It was 4 1/2 ounces, so that was good.

Thursday my husband took our son to Boy Scouts to their pre-pre-weigh in meeting, where they practiced racing their cars along a race track. His car was well under the weight limitation, so my husband and son came home and glued two Sacagawea gold coins to the top, to weigh it down more. We call it the "money car" now.

And I led my daughter's Girl Scout meeting because last week their leader said she coulndn't make it and I agreed to take it over. Since my daughter was officially the leader-daughter of the evening, I allowed her to decide what the meeting should be about, and of course she only likes art and agreed to an art project. I I brought 50 feet of butcher paper, construction paper, scissors, markers and glue, and asked people to bring magazines. Our project was to trace around each other on the butcher paper, and make black construction paper silouhettes to cut out and place on a colorful construction paper background. The magazines are for cutting up and instead of drawing your features on your life size portrait, you can paste pictures of things that are interesting or important to you.

I was afraid that we wouldn't be able to fill 90 minutes with just those projects, or that the 12 year old girls in the troop would think it was too junvenile, but instead it went great! Except for the part where the leader came to my house the day before and gave me the troop equipment such as the flags for the opening flag ceremony, and some extra art supplies and magazines, and I left her box at home on my bedroom floor!

Friday we ate out, yum, it felt good to sit down. But we had to eat quickly because we had to take my son's car to a church gymnasium for the final weigh in. It passed inspection perfectly, but they still advised us to add even more weight to it , because cars closer to the 5 ounce limit win more, against the lighter weighted cars. I was relieved when my own 7 year old son put his own foot down and declared it finished and said he didn't want to add more to it. After the official weigh in, they lock the cars in a safe over night, like top secret government documents. It was just ridiculous how many of those cars were so intricate with little cockpits carved in to them, with so much detail. No 7 year old carved that , it was all done by the dads, all of it.

Saturday morning, I had Norwegian language class at Mindekirken, still fun!

When I got home, we took my daughter to her friend's house in Little Canada. They invited her to spend the night, and we explained that the only way we could get her there was to bring her in the early afternoon, and luckily they agreed. We dropped her off. We finally grocery shopped, because we really needed it. Then my husband took my son to the actual Pinewood Derby where he got to race his car against other cars. I had about an hour to put all the groceries away, clean the house for my husband's evening house guest, make a fruit salad, and burn 7 CD's of Evig Poesi, so the other Norwegian language students coming to the party could hear this Norwegian rap group I've been enjoying. Thank hevens for my work laptop, I was able to load the songs over the t1 at work, very quickly, last week, in the morning, from the band's web site, and from their myspace web site, then bring my work laptop home and use its CD burner to make homemade CDs of the 7 songs I was able to load. They put those songs on the net themselves, I'm not violating anyone's copywrite.

Then I drove to a party , held by our Norwegian language teacher, very near downtown Mpls. I was a little late, becuase I left a little late, trying to get everything done, and then getting lost in the maze of one-way streets in that neighborhood. But I got to give out the home made CD's , somone put theirs on the stereo and everyone agreed with me, they liked the band! And my fruit salad seemed to go over ok.

I came home later to find that my husband's expected dinner guest never showed up! Well at least the idea of it had motivated my to clean up the kitchen a little.

This morning I slept in , and this afternoon I scanned some photos for people who I had agreed to scan photos for a long time ago, and watched the backlog of VH1 I Love Toys that I've been recording. And I just spent a fat chunk of lazy time with my son, doing nothing, so that's been fun. My daughter is still not home from her friend's house.

I got NOTHING but my regular day job, and my daughter's Tuesday afternoon guitar class, until next Saturday, so I'm going to try to really enjoy the next few week nights and try to do as little as possible!