Waco Trip

Off to Waco at Friday noon (well a little later but noon was the plan). We took the cute little trailer my dad built for my parents to sleep in. An unexciting journey, I slept and read... and had a vanilla frosty. I realize my parents are randomly just as indecisive as moi - kinda good to know, kinda not. We dump the trailer and head back into town to meet A3 for dinner. We met Amy at the bank and got to chat with her co-workers and help pack up some of the Relay for Life paraphenalia. Italian at Mama Baris for dinner. Except for the kid - chicken strips and fries - children's menus are just criminal these days, nothing but unhealthy fried foods (rant on. stop.). Back to the house, kid to bed, time to help Amy color the posters she's making for decorating the tent. I thought about trying to do a color scheme but couldn't decide and so it all ended up random. Plus, because we had waterproof markers, they smeared all over the place and we decided to distract the eye from it with the clever use of dots of all colors like confetti all over the poster. Yay! To bed, to bed, and because my parents brought the trailer I got to forego the couch and sleep in the actual guest room.
Morning up, pizza for breakfast :) and the Little Mermaid (came out Tuesday, my sister is highly attuned to Disney releases and don't think she doesn't have as many Disney DVDs as she can find). Josh, Aaron's brother, came just in time for lunch. Kid to naptime, everyone else to chat and diddle away the day. 4 PM Amy begs me to come help set up, so I do. We do the easy-up tent, the other sleeping tent, pom-poms, posters, signs, tables, folding chairs, etc. We also sorted shirts and small gifts into smaller bags with names for the people at Amy's bank. Btw, it was a SNL themed event, the credit union was the Spartans, and I enjoyed the set-up and time before the event started much more than after it started.
After all our tasks were done, I quickly got bored... and hungry... and then cold... plus annoyed. For a while hunger trumped all, but it went hand in hand with annoyed. The event started and the first lap was the Survivors' Lap. It was kinda cool to see all the people who had defeated cancer walk by, but I'm not one to stand and cheer for 30 minutes...
Kids at the event outnumbered adults 3 to 1. Dislike immediately settled upon me. I'm surprised I made it 2 days as a teacher. Individual children.. mm okay, small groups of children... mm maybe, roving gangs of youth.... no. Watching children brings me no idealistic visions of a brighter tomorrow; instead I wonder at the humanity of living. I compare Bush to a child - ego-centric, selfish, lacking complexity, lacking subtlety, bleh - though for the sake of fairness on my list I do rank children above that nasty man. It made me realise something about why I enjoyed New York so very much - there are tons of people, just not all that many kids. I appreciate that it's Waco, it's a sinless place to bring your kids for a big party. It just wasn't the place for my jaded child-grumpy little self.
People started arriving - Aaron and Josh, with Andrew and my food (finally!), Mum and Dad with goldfish :) , more walkers. The time came to light the luminaries and for the speech of the night. The stadium lights went out and the candlelight was pretty nice, but when the "speech" started off with horrifically sentimental music, I decided to duck into the tent with Andrew and the portable DVD player rather than subject myself to 30 minutes of torture. I was already grumpy enough, thank you.
Shortly after all that ended, my Mum, Aaron and Josh decided it was time to go. I could either stay or go home at 4:30 so I went home, deicded I would attempt to get on a regular sleeping schedule and leave others to the inevitable fun of the big party. To bed, to bed. I actually fell asleep in the car for a short while because it was so nice and warm inside and surprising cold outside (50's - cold for Texas at least).
Breafast tacos in the morning, plus the box of free donuts my father couldn't resist the night before. We amused ourselves until we had to leave (shortly after 12) so we could get to the Byers' anniversary party back in Wimberley.
My apologies for a pretty boring post.