a series of disproportionate events

This morning I'm back from a wonderful, and slightly wacky, weekend in Louisville, where we got the chance to visit our good friends, the Boevings. If you work with me on the title, you'll see that while nothing that happened was really unfortunate, things didn't exactly go 100 % as planned. Thus, disproportionate. Maybe not the best word, but definitely the most catchy.

Let's begin with my in-car entertainment. I had planned to use the 6 hour car ride from Memphis to Louisville to begin knitting a baby blanket for my new second cousin, Townes, who will be arriving in December. I've got mad blanket knitting skills, but my talent ends there. I can stitch row after row until I've got a square, but if you want something with a shape other than a rectangle, you've come to the wrong person.

I began knitting as soon as the tires hit the pavement, hoping to make big-time headway. Well, headway I made, but not in the direction I was hoping. I'm not sure how, but I soon discovered that the "blanket" I was working on was more like a full size bed spread. What's worse, after my first ball of yarn was up, my work in progress was only 3 1/2 inches long. What does that mean? About 100 balls of yarn were in my future if I continued on the path I set out on. So the blanket morphed into a scarf, and a rather long one at that. Just over 7 feet, if you want to know. It's lovely, if I do say so, but boy is it long. So much for the mad skills.

Next in the series of weekend adventures was a disproportionately hard hit to the head taken by little Aubrey Boeving shortly after we arrived. Adrienne was running around with the Boeving sisters, when suddenly Aubrey tripped and ended up falling headlong onto the corner of a chest with nothing to break her fall. The cut was deep and required stitches, so Nathan, Adrienne, Savannah, and I spent a quiet evening in the house while Aaron and Laurin took poor Aubrey up to the emergency room for three stitches. She was a champ the rest of the weekend, sporting her band-aid proudly.

On Saturday followed a disproportionately cold day for the fall festival taking place right next to where the Boevings live. Three very cold, but cutely costumed, kiddos tried their best to enjoy a frigid festival before we packed it up and opted for warmer in-door play. And just hours after that, I followed up our disproportionately cold morning with a disproportionately long run alone. Laurin, still recovering from laryngitis, couldn't go with me, making the 7.4 miles I did my longest solo run to date. The trees were gorgeous and the day had warmed up, making for ideal conditions for the run, but still, I missed her company!

Wrapping up the wacky weekend of a disproportionate nature was our drive home Sunday afternoon. The three hours to Nashville flew by like the wind, leaving us marvelling at what an easy drive we were experiencing. We even anticipated getting home ahead of schedule and cutting 30 minutes off of the 6 hour trip. But that was not to be. Two very long, very unexplained traffic jams had us pulling in at 7:45, nearly 8 hours after leaving the Boeving's house. Adrienne proved to be car-rider extraordinaire, but still, two periods of standstill traffic, each lasting longer than 45 minutes, in the distance between Memphis and Nashville? It's just plain disproportionate.

And so our series of disproportionate events came to a close. Or so we thought. Fast asleep after our weekend adventure, we didn't expect the little surprise our alarm system gave us around 4:00 am. I woke up to a rapid beeping sound, which we soon discovered was our alarm system panel on the fritz. Nathan thought it was shorting out, and this seemed to be confirmed when it completely lost power a few minutes later, appearing to be totally dead with no lit buttons. Oh, if only. No that little alarm panel was not dead or shorted out. Instead, over the next two hours the panel would activate, deactivate, make a series of beeping sounds, and power off. And then it would do it again. I still have no idea what's going on, and I'm a little afraid to open my doors since I'm not ever sure whether it has set itself or not. A little unnerving for sure.

But appropriate, don't you think? It completed our weekend very nicely. Now all I need is a nap to catch up from our wildly wacky series of disproportionate events.