My "halloween" celebration

It's probably the most I'm going to do aside from handing out candy Thursday night.

We did a cookout/fishing outing for the youth group kids. There weren't enough adults free to plan/decorate/buy for/clean up after a party at the church, so we figured a cookout would work better.

Even though it was cold and damp, we had eight or ten kids and their parents - which is as many as we ever have. Even though it had rained heavily the day before, a couple of the men got a good bonfire going. The adults mostly hung out while the kids fished. (Most of the fish caught were tiny perch or bluegills and were thrown back. Towards the end of the fishing, one of the boys got a couple of nice-sized crappies which he kept and cleaned to take home and cook the next day (the kids are out of public school today; teacher-inservice).

They had hotdogs to cook over the fire. (Sigh. I used to like hotdogs cooked over an open fire). But I was "good" and had my little low-sodium cheese sticks and crackers instead. I did, however, buy an extra bag of apples when I was at the grocery and brought them to share. (I guess I am now the adult who brings the "healthful" food. But really - I grew up being taught that you eat at least a fruit or a vegetable with every meal. And I like apples well enough that I don't primarily think of them as "healthful" - they are good picnic food because they're portable, and they are refreshing after sticky or salty things).

So, instead of cooking a hotdog, I decided to try spearing an apple and roasting it over the fire. I remember having read about that as a kid in "Prince Caspian" - towards the beginning, when the Pevensies wound up back at the ruins of Cair Paravel, and the only food was apples from the ancient apple orchard. As I remember, CS Lewis was not so positive about roasted apples (that they were too hot to eat at first, but then weren't very good once they cooled), but I found it rather good. I didn't get it heated all through - the skin charred and blistered before the whole apple was cooked - but I was able to slip the hot skin off and eat the apple, most of it was kind of like a baked apple (the innermost part was still uncooked, but as raw is how you usually eat apples....)

One of the kids tried it after seeing me do it but his apple fell off into the fire.

They also had marshmallows for S'mores, which I did take part in. (Marshmallows are really much more edible once they are heated up and have a tiny bit of caramelization on the sugar on the outside).

***

In a slightly better mood today. I was afraid I was getting a cold over the weekend but that may have been allergies. Also, I was concerned about my piano teacher - she cancelled on Tuesday and rescheduled for Thursday, and then never showed up. I went so far as to stalk her facebook page (I knew she had one) just to see if she'd posted to see if she was okay.

Turns out, from the e-mail I got this morning, she was really sick. She had e-mailed me but either misspelled my name or our stupid campus server ate it. (It seems to eat somewhere around 1/20 of the e-mails that come in). So now I know that nothing terrible happened. (I had even woken in the middle of the night one night with the horrible thought that "Maybe I'm so terrible and making so little progress she wants to drop me, and she's trying to come up with a tactful way of doing it.")

***

I guess....I don't know. I mean, I DO believe in an afterlife but I am fearful of pain or difficulty in getting there, or that passing through is going to be scary. Or that it might be different from what I expect. I guess I fear pain and debilitation more (given my previous comments about preferring a heart attack to something lingering). Also, I have a bigger fear that I will be left here alone, that I will wind up with no close family (though with my niece, if we wind up being close, there's less of a chance of that now) and few friends my own age. I guess I have to rethink my relationship to people; the one I "do" best and understand best is as a daughter or daughter-like sort of relationship.Many of my friends are older than I am, in some cases by more than 20 years.  I think that's because many of my peers failed so hard (I'm going to put that on them and not on me for once) at being decent to me when I was growing up, that I wound up (and still wind up) with few friends close to me in age. (Also, most women my age right now are in the thick of child-rearing, and they don't share my experience, and I've found that the people I tried to befriend just weren't into having a friend who didn't have kids, for various reasons).

I still think planning my own funeral is not something I'm ready to contemplate, however. (Confession: I don't have a will. I probably should, I know it will be a big mess if something happens to me and I DON'T, but it's mainly the figuring out all my assets and where I want them to go that gets to me. And there are a lot of things I don't understand - I was going to put my niece down as a beneficiary on something but my father told me that was a bad idea (putting her down rather than one or both of her parents) until she was of age....so I probably need to actually talk to an attorney rather than trying to do the online or holograph type route. I mean, with the material stuff, I kind of know - the piano should go to someone in the family, or, if no one in the family wants it, I would like my university's music department to have it (they can use it). My books, I think I'd leave some of the nicer children's-type books (at this point) to my niece, maybe suggest the rest be sold and the proceeds go to the university library. The yarn....well, what I'd most like to do would be to have my knitting friends get it, I guess....But the financial assets I have, I'm not sure what I want done with them. I want to be sure, in as much as it's in my power to, to be sure no one in my near family is impoverished if I can prevent it (I will probably still be around - I hope - when my niece makes college age, but I could see helping her to attend college - unless things change much at that point I will probably be more materially comfortable and have greater freedom to spend money that way than her parents do, just because of how our lives have worked out). Other than that, I don't know. Give it all to Heifer Project? Or Mercy Corps? Give it to my church, provided the church I currently belong to is still in existence then? It's a lot of big decisions.)