This will be long

First, don't hold your breath waiting for pix of the glass blowing. My shots were not close enough. And Marty is in the middle of doing taxes. Downloading pix for me is way down on the list.

Today I worked at school. I worked with two little boys and one little girl. We are learning pennies, nickles, and dimes. Money is a hard concept. They know how to count out pennies, but then they have to trade the pennies for nickles and then trade the nickles into dimes. And that stupid dime is smaller than everything, so they don't think it is worth as much. Yes, size does count to a first grader. I remember my older sister talking me out of my dimes for nickles by telling me since the nickles were bigger so I would have more. This was Saint Maryann who never did anything wrong. Well, she never got caught, I always got caught.

Back to school today. We counted pennies, then turned them into nickles. Then we counted by 5's and they were fine. I then put out 6 nickles and said how many dimes? 60, 1, 30, no clue. I had them match 2 nickles to every dime, no problem. Then again, 6 nickles, how many dimes? Bless their hearts, they either get it right off, or they don't. I asked the little girl how she had so many correct on the worksheet since she didn't understand what we were doing. " I copied them." An honest cheat. Gotta love them. I think they were beginning to get a glimmer of what we were talking about.

And this afternoon, weddings. I brought a long book today because I have been doing so few weddings. I have been finishing my books and have had nothing to do. Today I read for 30 minutes and then all hell broke loose. United Nations day at the marriage factory. We had Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Kahzastan (this may be misspelled, but spell check can't fix it ) Morocco, Ethiopia, Ghana, The Philippines, and some from Wisconsin and California. I did 8 weddings in a couple of hours. The Chinese decided they wanted a translator. The Russian groom translated for his bride from Kahzastan. She understood some English, just more comfortable in Russian. Everyone else had pretty good English.

The jewelery and some outfits today were exceptional. Big honking diamonds. One bride received a ring set with a stone at least 2 carats, and it had baguettes on each side. It was truly lovely. And trust me, I told them how gorgeous that ring was. Others made do with simple 1 carat stones. The couple from Ghana were in lovely outfits. He wore white slacks, shirt, and a large white shawl. She had on a 2 piece to the floor dress. It had beautiful embroidery work on the skirt. A lovely couple to look at.

Today was fun over all, in spite of the clerk from hell. We have one who doesn't pay attention to details. Under country she wrote Africa, and didn't see why it had to be changed. Then on the new license I found another error. And she told me she was going on break. This is while the couple has been sitting 20 minutes waiting on her to correct things. I got all huffy and grand lady and told her to fix it before break and to bring it upstairs. I then had to apologize to the waiting couple and I took in another couple to marry. It finally worked out and the couple were really nice about the wait. This clerk drives me crazy. She just doesn't care if things are correct and gives attitude when asked to correct the license. Rules don't seem to apply to her. But I think her comeuppance is coming. Others have had it with her and are keeping track of her errors.

I warned you, long. But it was a busy good day.