Peg Kerr's Journal

Delia's graduation party was this past Saturday, and we counted it as a pleasing success--even if the tent canopy we had borrowed again from minnehaha K. & B. (just as we did for Fiona's party) was not up to the challenge of Saturday's wind and thunderstorm. We got it up Friday night but were forced to take it down about an hour and a half before the party started when the poles started coming apart. Fortunately, it wasn't damaged and what's more, no guests were under it at the time.

So we moved the party indoors and all squeezed in somehow, squeezing one of the four tables we had borrowed from my church onto the porch, but we had great fun neverthless. Thanks to all who braved the weather to join us! Many thanks especially to my Mom, Rob's brother and sister-in-law who provided the chocolate fountain, my sister Betsy, who wasn't able to be there but still contributed supplies, my church, which let us borrow tables and chairs, and especially Rob, my sister Cindy and her friend Kris Chizek, who together braved the wind and the rain to take down the canopy during a thunderstorm. Phew!

I was too busy to take many pictures--including one of the guest of honor! I hope some of the other shutterbugs managed better than I did. I was a bit caught up in logistics.

Remember this post, when I talked about how our church presents each high school graduate with a hand-knotted fleece blanket in their school colors? A friend from my church sent me a picture from the ceremony:



I am both proud (and a little sad) that this day has arrived. She has worked SO HARD to get through high school, and for a long time, it was a tough, tough slog, but she did it! And now my last little fledgling is about to leave the nest.

Will try to post more pictures later.

Helena (Delia) and Hermia:



Oberon:



Puck makes mischief:



And as a result, Helena is not happy:





( Other pictures from the show )

Fiona leaves for college in a couple weeks (well, technically, she trundles down the street to a location about fifteen minutes away and moves in with her new sheets and towels, the old microwave, and the clothes that are presently scattered all over the floor of her bedroom). She's not ready--she has to finish her summer paper for the Youth Theological Seminar, and get her transcript extracted from the Minneapolis school district and sent to the college (belated due to summer online gym) and finalize her loan and decide what to do about her banking and buy clothes and and and

and I'm not ready.

I can hardly believe that we've reached this point. Everyone warned me, and it's true. Those eighteen years passed by in a blink.

Delia's switching schools this year, too. She was unhappy at her former school and we had a number of wrangles with the school administration and so now she'll be attending a charter school in St. Paul, which runs on a collaborative basis, using project-based learning. I desperately hope this will be a better answer for her.

We can't take a vacation this year, but the girls and I are going to take a long weekend this weekend, driving up to Washington Island in Wisconsin (Door County), where my extended family has property. We'll be staying with one of my aunts, who summers up there. The girls have gone the last couple of years with my sister Betsy and my parents, but this is the first time I'll be going long. Poor Rob is left at home to hold down the fort.

Lordy, lordy, I need the break.

I'm having terrific troubles with my computer, which has been fritzing out and crashing repeatedly (which has been driving me up a wall), and I've been excessively distracted with all the end of the year stuff and Other Stuff Elinor Dashwood Does Not Mention. I'm afraid I have been very spotty about responding and may have missed some things. Leave me a comment here if you need to yell to get my attention for something. I do not usually feel like such a ditz, but somehow I am this week (Exhibit A: my last entry).

Someone commented on my last post (in reference to the last line where I repeated Fiona's remark that she was glad the thieves jumped her, and not the young woman she had just passed carrying a baby:

You know, her concern for the mother and her baby, doesn't this make her a "official" warrior? (Or a knight, or a samurai, or a saint?)

Fiona has been flailing and flailing to come up with a paper topic for her Extended Essay, which is a twenty page researched paper that she has to do a first draft on this summer. It's one of the requirements for the International Baccalaureate degree.

I had a discussion with her this week about it, trying to help her come up with something that was at the intersection of her passionate interests (karate, fantasy, and characters like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mulan, Xena, and some from Firefly) I suggested she should do a paper on The Woman Warrior. She'll have to narrow the topic, but I suggested perhaps taking at look at books like Maxine Hong Kingston's book The Woman Warrior, or Kij Johnson's Fudoki.

She liked the idea and got preliminary approval from her thesis advisor on this just a couple of days ago.

If you have any suggestions for a paper on The Woman Warrior, either books to suggest or thoughts on refining the topic, send 'em our way.

Edited to add: She'll be at Convergence this weekend. If you see her, feel free to say hello.

It's confirmed...Delia got into her high school choice, the same school that Fiona's attending!

(Now we just have to figure out how to pay for the city bus pass to get them there and back when they take the school bus away next year.)

Fiona has been studying Dante's Inferno in English. She really really LOVES Dante's Inferno. The students in the IB program have to do an oral presentation on it, 10% of which goes to their grade in IB Honors English.

Fiona, deciding to get creative, approached her teacher with a rather novel suggestion.

Yes. Her oral presentation on Dante's Inferno is going to be...get this...a karate form, which she's choreographed by herself and will be performing today.

She will be depicting, in her form, the various torments of the damned in each of the circles of hell and the ways that the demons punish them. She'll perform it and then go through it again, explaining to the three teachers assessing her why she used the particular karate technique for each level. 'Gluttony' is all about deep stances, low to the earth. For 'Lust,' the circle where the damned are blown by unending winds, she'll circle the bo with helicopter movements. For 'Heretics,' where the damned are tormented by fire, she'll pretend to strike a spark with her steel kamas, and then use the kama motions to suggest rising flames. Etc.

I'm sure her teachers will have never seen anything like it before.

One little bobble: it occurred to her, belatedly, that, um...she'd be bringing weapons to school. She told her teacher that she wanted to do a karate form, but she didn't mention that weapons were involved. She emailed her teacher yesterday but didn't get a reply back. So she's decided to use a meter stick instead of the bo. She's bringing the kamas, but I wrote a note for her, explaining that we had tried to contact her teacher but hadn't gotten a response, that Fiona is a black belt who is trained to handle the kamas, and that the kamas are not sharp. She'll bring the kamas immediately to her English teacher to hold for the day, only taking them to do the routine, and then will give them back to her and retrieve them at the end of the day. And if there were any questions, they can call me.

So I don't know. I may either hear tonight a report that her form was a complete triumph, that she awed the judges with her originality. Or I might hear today from the school to come pick up my daughter because she's been suspended for three days.

I'm crossing my fingers.

Her karate instructor was delighted with the idea when Fiona explained it to him, and he suggested that she might try refining it and then presenting it as a tournament form for competition.

Cross-posted to karate_do and girlfighters

Rob got called back for a two month temporary assignment with the U.S. Census. Of course, the last time they told him they were giving him a two-month full time job, it turned out to be a one month part time job.

I'm trying to be grateful. See how grateful I am? Really. Oh I'm so verrrrrry grateful.

Screw that.

( A teeny rant )

No matter how much chocolate I eat, it doesn't help.

Enter your child's school's name here to see how toxic the surrounding air is.

Ew. Not good. Delia's school is in the 28th percentile (34,948 of 127,809 schools have worse air) and Fiona's school is in the 17th percentile (21,160 of 127,809 schools have worse air.)