Endings

The Girl Scout end-of-year din­ner and awards cer­e­mo­ny was tonight.

We man­aged to get the enor­mous pot of pas­ta there (an hour away with­out traf­fic and it was rush hour) there with­out it get­ting clumpy and gross. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the per­son bring­ing the Alfre­do sauce did­n’t show. There was enough of the toma­to-based sauce (with or with­out meat) to go around. I hate toma­to-based sauces but cer­tain­ly would­n’t have said so.

About a quar­ter of the troop did­n’t show up at all after all of them said they would be there. The peo­ple who were sup­posed to bring drinks came in emp­ty-hand­ed, know­ing they were sup­posed to bring them, and sim­ply said “Oh, we for­got.” Had it been us, Sam or I would have high-tailed it to the near­est store and bought drinks at what­ev­er price was demand­ed, but no, not these people.

I was floored, how­ev­er, when the woman com­plained that there was noth­ing but tap water and sodas she did­n’t like (that oth­er peo­ple brought “just in case”) to drink. Brass ones!

I’d sug­gest­ed that we should have two fam­i­lies assigned to each cat­e­go­ry of stuff in case some­body did­n’t come or for­got, and the alpha leader has agreed that it will be done that way in the future. Actu­al­ly, I think it would have been far more rea­son­able to have a cook­out or some­thing, but she does­n’t like those.

The A/C was­n’t work­ing in the church, either.

But—the girls were pret­ty good. The bridg­ing cer­e­mo­ny was nice. Katie moved up to Cadettes, one Brown­ie moved up to Juniors, and one Daisy moved up to Brown­ies. Our oth­er Daisy isn’t com­ing back next year, so it looks like we’ll just have Brown­ies to Cadettes with maybe a Senior.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, our Girl Scout coun­cil changed its sched­ule. As of last week, their web­site said that the Badge & Sash store would be closed NEXT WEEK for inven­to­ry, but open 9–5 every day this week. In fact, as of yes­ter­day morn­ing, it still said that.

But when we went to get Katie’s Cadette uni­form today, they were closed. In fact, they decid­ed to close the entire coun­cil office for the entire week for some sort of train­ing ses­sions that were sched­uled at the very last minute. And alpha leader, who had checked their web­site yes­ter­day morn­ing, went there today to get the girls’ awards—and could­n’t. So the girls got pieces of paper about the awards they’d earned, and we’ll have to buy them in two weeks when the store is sup­pos­ed­ly open again and then get them to the girls. (Had she let me know in time, Sam or I would have fig­ured out some kind of cer­tifi­cates to print up for the girls, at least, but she did­n’t think about it.)

I was informed by the par­ents of one girl (the ones who did­n’t bring the drinks, in fact) that I’m the only per­son their daugh­ter lis­tens to. Huh? I see her week­ly for 90 min­utes. That’s it. I mean, I’m glad she likes me and all, but—well, I did­n’t think she lis­tened to any­one, to be hon­est. But okay, I’ll take it. They want­ed me to tell her that it’s unhealthy to car­ry her new kit­ten (first pet ever) around con­stant­ly like a beanie baby. So I did since it’s true. She’s an extreme­ly intel­li­gent child, so I explained how the kit­ten needs to run around and use her body and how the devel­op­ment of her body and mind are tied togeth­er. Maybe she listened.

And we had to take one of our cats, Alan­na (the one we adopt­ed last fall) to the shel­ter today.

A while back, she just stopped using the lit­ter box inter­mit­tent­ly. She isn’t incontinent—no, she goes to the bath­room and does her busi­ness NEXT to the lit­ter box. Or if she sees us clean­ing out the cov­ered box, she would come in and do her busi­ness in the lid. We’ve tried dif­fer­ent kinds of lit­ter and box­es with no joy. There are two box­es and Shel­ley (senior cat) does not use the one down­stairs at all, but Alan­na did the same thing in both bath­rooms. It was intermittent—would hap­pen at least once most days, some­times more. It’s just too unsan­i­tary. There’s absolute­ly noth­ing wrong with the cat phys­i­cal­ly. It’s just some weird emotional/psychological thing. At first, we thought that maybe it would clear up short­ly, but it just got worse. And it’s just too foul and unhealthy to live with. We were afraid to walk into any bath­room with­out check­ing for “sur­pris­es.” There’s been a LOT of mop­ping around here lately!

This is NOT an area where it’s safe for cats to live out­doors (if any­where is—I just don’t nor­mal­ly have out­door pets, peri­od). Even if it were safe, it would be against the coun­ty’s leash laws. So she went to a shel­ter, and we’re hop­ing some­one will adopt her. Maybe she’ll be hap­pi­er in a home with­out oth­er ani­mals, or some­thing. But we’re all pret­ty unhap­py that she had to go 🙁