Well, it’s always something around here, and the latest news is that someone has been leaving a pile of meat on the town common once a week for the last 6 weeks. Why? We may never know. But I’d rather be hearing about abandoned meat on the news than the news of a stabbing at the high school. What ever happened to a good old-fashioned pummeling? Nikki and Jessie came home one day last week talking about how a kid had been stabbed in the butt by another kid during a fight over a girl. I could hear the helicopter…the high school is about 2 miles away. I can’t remember at what age you start to respect life and think about your own mortality, but I guess it’s after high school. Here are all of the details about the stabbing…more on the meat below.
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x466663672/Stabbing-reported-at-Framingham-High

After receiving (several times) the widely-circulated email list of store closings which included – to my horror – J. Jill, the only place I buy my clothes, I worried that I might have to start wearing a hefty bag or a loincloth depending on the weather. Friday night I was at the mall (yes, I’ve completely lost my senses) and I stopped at J.Jill (with Adlani and Aliya – further proof of my insanity) to see what I should buy with my birthday gift card before it lost all of its value. One of the salesladies struck up a conversation with Aliya and Adlani to keep them from playing in the water feature, and mentioned that she worked as a substitute teacher in addition to working at J.Jill part time. I said that it was too bad she wouldn’t be able to work at J.Jill any more because of the store closing. She adamantly denied that the store would be closing. She said that they were being sold by Talbots and had a letter from the president of J.Jill that discussed the rumours being spread on the internet. I am so thrilled! I could get away with the hefty bag for the next few months, but eventually I’d have to break out the loincloth and that would just add a whole new spin to the annual Easter egg hunt.
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Since I’m always the one taking the pictures, I never end up with any pictures of myself…we all hate those anyway, right? Aliya’s school asked for a picture of us to use in brochure about the school, so I “did” the front half of my hair, put on make-up, clean clothes, and Ben took this picture of us. I think it came out pretty nice. I’m not sure how we became the poster family from Barbieri but just this week someone recognized me from the video the school made last year. I guess I’m a local access channel celeb.

I have one more tough week before things get back to “normal”. This week our national convention is in Boston so I have a fully-packed schedule of classes, trade show, dinners, seminars, parties, etc. I’m teaching a class on Friday for about 100 architects so that has been weighing heavily and taking up every spare moment, leaving me no time to post any news on the blog. Expect a flood of posts next week.
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Aliya chose Samba for her birthday dinner and it was delicious as always. A few days later we took Aliya and 8 friends to see High School Musical 3 after lunch at Uno’s. Aliya had requested donations for Heifer International instead of gifts, and she received enough money to buy a water buffalo (not a moose!). She has a lot of questions about how the water buffalo gets to Africa or wherever its new home will be, what they feed it, etc., so I told her to write them down and we’ll send the list of questions with the check. Hopefully she’ll get a response from Heifer International – that would be cool.

http://www.heifer.org/site/c.edJRKQNiFiG/b.2663611/

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In our annual quest to get as much wear as possible out of the Halloween costumes, we wore them to Baby Billy’s birthday party, the YMCA Halloween party, Pam & Ted’s spooky soiree (Brutus and Popeye only), preschool & day care, and trick-or-treating with the Fahys and Lewenbergs. Adlani missed out on the T-or-T’ing because he was sent home for unecessary roughness, and Norah stole the show by blowing kisses at each house. We got lucky with the weather and it was a great night to beg for chocolate.

Here’s an assortment of pics (Email me if you’d like copies of the spooky soiree photos that are inappropriate for a family blog.).

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