Sarah and I were supposed to go to the 100 day party, a Korean tradition, for a friend of ours today. Sarah didn’t feel too well and I was tired from having gone out last night until 2:00 AM. A Korean friend of mine explained the tradition to me and mentioned that the one year party is a major event. Her son’s one year party had over 200 people attend with 300 people invited and the party was during a blizzard. She mentioned that in Korea if you have a son it is the only real chance for the mother to throw a large party on their behalf. A daughter’s wedding is arranged and organized by the bride’s family so the one year party is a big event similar to a wedding. That got me to thinking about traditions like Bar Mitzvahs, traditionally male until the invention of the Bat Mitzvah, and I realize that parents have a need to throw big parties for their children where family members and friends can all get together for a fun time. So cultures have created events like weddings for girls and bar mitzvahs or one year celebrations for boys as a reason to hold these big events.

Last night was fun. We went out to see Lisa and Dave play with Sweet Wednesday. Plenty of folks were there including Falkoff, DK, Hattie, Stephanie, and Robert. Falkoff brought his brother Nick, sister Katie, and his friend who is living in the Falkoff house while doing contract work with Nick. At one point in the evening some folks were talking girl talk and someone mentioned a story about being on a beach at a resort town and a man walking up to her, saying “you can slap me for this later” and then kissing her passionately. The Sweet Wednesday band sounded excellent.

The crew got excited to go dancing so we took a ride to Central and watched the soul band close out the night at the Cantab Lounge. When I got home Sarah was in bed with Madeline sleeping. I walked Madeline into her crib and carefully laid her down. At first she stirred a bit but when I got into bed she had quieted. But Sarah and I got up to walk to the kitchen to grab some drinks. Madeline woke-up and started crying. We figured we’d let her calm down for a few minutes but the cries kept getting louder. Finally I went in to check on her and found her standing up grasping the top bar of her crib with both hands and crying. She must have decided to climb to a standing position to get a better view of us and then once standing was unsure of how to get down from the position. It was unexpected to see her standing as I have never seen her pull herself into a standing position on her own.

Today we considered going to get a cat at the Angell shelter but on investigation we learned that the shelter is closed on Sundays and Mondays. Personally I would think these would be ideal cat adoption days since people don't have to work on Sunday and getting the cat during the week allows them to do that last bit of travelling or driving around to places before beginning a commitment to care for a needy kitten or acclimate an older cat. But maybe it is intentional for them to make the hours tricky. If people can't commit important time to adopt the cat then they probably won't be committed to the process. But maybe Tuesday or Thursday will work. For now I just did some patching with steel wool and joint compound to fill a hole after going to Home Depot to grab a new blue toilet seat (the other one was cracked) along with other implements of mouse protection. Unfortunately the mice got lucky because the round metal piece designed to cover the radiator pipe disappeared somewhere before we got home.