Busy, busy

My goodness, it's been a busy week. Almost too busy to post on the blog. Almost. But -- then I jinxed myself last week when I said my computer was fixed, and it turned out it wasn't, and now I've had a busy week AND no laptop and thus not much time to post to the blog.

As I said last time, Catherine and I went to the Father-Daughter dance at her school on Friday night. This is the fourth one we've been to, and she looks forward to it every year. Mostly for the snacks that they lay out, the corsage I get her, and the opportunity to buy me anew tie to match her dress, but also so she can spend time with me. I assume.

We laso go out to dinner together before the dance, and my favorite memory from all of these dances was from the first one, when she was four. She chose Applebees as our dinner location. When we arrived, there were four waitresses at the hostess' station, and all of them when on about how beautiful she looked; an older couple nearby said the same thing; and then the hostess made over her too before taking us to our table. When our waitress came to the table, she asked us what we'd like to drink, and then left to get them in a rush. Catherine leaned over to me and whispered, "Dad -- she didn't tell me how beautiful I look." It's tough to be a princess.

Catherine and I actually dance quite well together. Lots of spinning, the occasional dipping, and a dynamite two-person robot dance. Very Shields and Yarnell, if your memory goes back that far.

Anyway, we had a great time.

We got home and went straight to bed, because we had to leave at 5:30am Saturday to bring Peter down to Washington, DC to a Youth Leadership Conference that he was invited to. This is his first extended time away from home, and he has been looking forward to it for a while.

The conference takes advantage of its DC location, bringing the kids (who are all 12 or 13 years old, from all over the country) to various spots in and around the city to talk about leadership qualities like courage, determination, and problem-solving while thinking and learning about real-life examples. Peter's interested in history and politics, so this was a good thing for him to experience.

Frankly, I didn't expect to hear from him at all for a week, but he's been good about texting us a couple of times a day. So we get things like "Harpers Ferry is awesome! John Brown looks like he was insane!" and "Here's a pic of the Canadian Enbassy! Woot!"

So he's having a good time, as far as we can tell. (We know that "woot!" means that something is good.) I think if he was going to feel uncomfortable about being away, it's probably not an issue because he has family so close. He's got the "special phone number" just in case there's an emergency -- he knows the Secret Service will pop up from out of nowhere to take care of any problems.

He'll be back on Saturday.

And I'll get back to cancer-related posts very soon. Some exciting research going on.