I went for a walk with a three ladies the other day, two of whom are in Girl Scouts. One is a leader for a Brownie group and the other is my service unit manager. A couple of delightful things happened during that time. Other than the exercise that always makes a body feel better, the SUM brought out a copy of the NEW Girl's Guide to Girl Scouting for Juniors for me to peruse and explore. The good news is that the books are arriving...the bad news is that the corporate powers significantly underestimated how many books they needed to print and have available. Apparently, they estimated that only 7% of girls buy books each year, so they decided to only run that many (or perhaps I mis-heard and they ran a few more, but it wasn't a full run). They didn't take into consideration that many of the books have been handed down from one sister to another or that leaders had a collection to use for all the girls so that they didn't have to buy any (especially for low-income areas). Since these books haven't changed much in quite a few years, and there is virtually no writing to be done in them, there was no reason to buy new ones every year. They didn't take into consideration that everyone would need to start from scratch. Not surprisingly, they sold out within hours and it'll be several weeks before they have enough to meet the demand. Also, while looking through the book, I discovered that the GSUSA has decided to maintain the "Make Your Own" badge. We'll be doing a lot of those, starting with a needlework badge...since there are no fiber arts for the girls until they reach Seniors...which is 8th & 9th grades. In addition, Renee loaned me a copy of her 1972 edition of the Junior Girl Scout Handbook, which I have photocopied in its entirety and will be pulling ideas from to create our own badges. It's amazing how much information was in those earlier books about traditions and history that is no longer in the handbooks. I don't know what I'm going to do with this, but I want to make sure that each of my Girl Scouts get copies of this in some form or other. I'm sure it's copywrited and totally illegal, though. Sure, a few bits of it is really outdated, but most of it is still relavent and important to every girl today--even the modern feminists in a computerized world need to learn the lessons of the past. After our walk, we went blueberry picking at a local farm just down the hill from me--the last berries of the season. I found this little guy on a leaf in one of the bushes. Isn't he CUTE? I carefully set him back at the base of a bush after I took a couple pictures. I got about $6 worth of berries, which filled one gallon ice cream bucket--that's a pretty awesome price! Kelly was a pretty happy guy to find out I was picking berries; those things just don't stay around our house for very long. I think he ate 1/3 of the bucket in the next 24 hours, but the kids do their share, too. I also think I paid about 10 cents for the spiders that rode along...I kicked out the two big ones. You can't be an arachnophobe to pick berries. Seriously. Cammie's soccer team had a game on Saturday and they did pretty well. I think they lost by one goal, but it was still well done! Ben's team had a game on Sunday and two of the kids were not there--one due to sickness and one was on vacation with his family--which meant that all the kids had to play with no substitutions. Ben paid attention and participated for about half the game, and the other half he was watching his shadow or running in circles. Even so, the three other boys held their own and they lost by just a couple goals. We had a quilting retreat last weekend. Sharon & her daughter, and Michele came down and spent the weekend. Miss O and Cammie played and played...we hardly saw them except at meal times. I was able to get a quilt top finished for charity, another quilt top is nearly finished for charity (the one at left, which is about 45" square but still needs two seams to be sewn and a border), and a third quilt that just needs a bit more quilting was worked on as well. I also made an underdress for Miss O for an All-Saints costume. Michele and Sharon both got several small projects finished, too--a skirt, pillowcase, two table runners, and more. While we were quilting, the doorbell rang and the Fed Ex guy handed me a box. Inside was this little beauty! Kelly finally took pity on me and replaced my computer with a new Dell (he was also probably tired of listening to me cuss at the old one). He wasn't expecting it to show up for another week, so it was a surprise for both of us...but mostly for me! It's going to be great to be able to use a computer that doesn't continually overheat, shut down, and move slow as that snail up above. K