Coach Cahill will be so proud when I tell him.  I played soccer yesterday for the first time in SIX YEARS.  And yes, I was terrible at it, but the point is, I PLAYED.  And apparently, I'm a tough girl.  News to me, but I'll take the compliment!

And oh, man, am I feeling it now.  Gemma and I tripped over each other and I twisted my ankle, Michael kicked my shin (on accident, I'm sure, since he's thoroughly a gentleman when I'm not trying to steal the ball from him), Tommy tripped me and knocked the wind out of me (eleven year olds are so hard not to trip over!) and then Joey stepped on my glasses (oops).

So until I get new glasses, I'm trying the contact thing again, because, you know, maybe moving away from the Number One Most Allergenic City In The US will make me stop being allergic to contacts, too.  I can always hope, at least.  Maybe it was some allergy in the air that was irritating my eyes, and the contacts made it worse.  Or maybe I can just learn to live with dry eyes.  I might even be totally frivolous and go buy a bunch of different kinds of eye drops, to see if one of them works.  I would be so in favor of having corrective lenses, peripheral vision, comfortable eyes, and eyelashes that are visible when I put mascara on them instead of hiding behind lenses, all at  the same time.

In other news, The Barn is soon to be The Studio, which means everything in the barn is now Somewhere Else.  Like, in stacks on the front porch, in the well house, by the wood pile, in the furniture shed, in the tool shed, and in the carport.  Hope we don't have to find any of it between now and when it's all done and renovated!

The kittens are 4 weeks old, and while I don't have pictures of them, I can announce their names with great joy.  (NB: sometimes you have to wait a reeeeeeally long time before you name animals, because when their eyes aren't open yet and all they look like is squishy, it's hard to tell what their personalities are like.)  They come in pairs, because two sets of pairs look almost exactly alike, and the remaining two are lumped together by virtue of being the oddballs: Essie (named after her mother, Esmerelda, because she looks just like her) and Gandalf (the Grey), Louis and Jemima (black and white and very sassy), and Thing One and Thing Two (Thing Two has a funny looking white spot on his nose) (you can't name kittens without some sort of Dr Seuss reference, hello!).  Maybe in the next few days I'll have pictures.