Saturday and so on

I'm catching up on my newspaper reading this morning. The iPod is cranked.

No church for us this morning. Kates hasn't been feeling well this weekend. ... Which means I'm doing the laundry. I've done some of the house cleaning. I've taken care of all the meals. I've done the dishes and cleaned the kitchen twice.

Phoebe was upstairs "teaching her class." That's her new thing. Yesterday, she told me she wanted to have class in her bedroom, so I lined up all of her stuffed animals in front of her. She proceeded to pull books from her book shelf and read to them. This morning her class had "sharing time," her preschool class's version of show-and-tell. ... Now in the last few moments, she's come down by me, and she's whirling around to the music on the ipod.

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A contrast from some of the last several weekends, this one has been a good, relaxing, productive, refreshing and quiet one.

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Yesteday, we slept until almost 9 a.m. Oh, so good.

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Phoebe was supposed to be at a dance rehearsal at 10:30 a.m. yesterday. But she erupted in a mega tantrum at about 10:05, and didn't calm down until about 10:45. There was no dance class for Phoebe yesterday.

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We decided earlier in the week to skip out on the 'Cats football game. It marked the first time since my first game in 1997 that I missed a 'Cats home football game -- regular season or post season -- for a reason other than living two states away. ... The game was a fairly meaningless one in the grand scheme of our season. I listened to it on the radio as I worked around the house, and the 'Cats won 65-20.

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Last night was the first night of The 'Ville's annual Halloween overload -- the annual trick-or-treat night at the lake and campground on the outskirts of town. Seriously, kids in this town could find a trick-or-treating event every other night past Halloween if they looked hard enough.

This is the first year we can say Phoebe is truly grasping the concept; she asked repeatedly from the time she awoke yesterday if it was time to go trick-or-treating. This year, Phoebe wanted to be a dancer. She put on her leotard and tutu -- at noon. Then Kates dolled up Phoebe with a little makeup, and Pheebs and I joined a co-worker's family to head to the lake.

It was the only trick-or-treating event in which we participated last year, and it is a unique one. For campers, they say it's one of the campground's most popular weekend. Some of the campers go all out with elaborate decorations and mini haunted houses set up in dining flies.

Phoebe took it all in stride and was hardly daunted by any of it. She cruised from camp site to camp site, intent on filling her bucket ... I'd say she did pretty good -- except for the fact that she kept bypassing the 3 Musketeers, M&Ms, Reese's and Whoppers for the more acidic stuff like the suckers, taffy and Starburst. Mommy and Daddy want the chocolate, Pheebs! 

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So the Texas Rangers won the American League Championship last night.

And that makes the World Series half as interesting as it would have been had I been granted my ultimate matchup. Now it's Brewers all the way or bust.

It was fun while it lasted, Tigers.

Some good reads from the last few days of the postseason ... 
a Stoic Tigers Can Only Watch the Scene
a Late, Sudden, Unsurprising, the Emergence of Nelson Cruz ... To think what might have been had the Brewers kept him.
a Verlander cements elite status with postseason game for the ages
a Brewers’ Hairston Haunts La Russa, His Father’s Favorite Manager
a Fielder and Weeks: Friends for Ages, Brewers for Now