In Bosnia, You Get a Free Cat

Well, you get the free cat if you set out food and the cat likes you enough to keep coming around an let you pet it.This is one of the stories Gaz has related to me from one of her school friends, whose family is from Bosnia and who sometimes gets to visit. I love it, not only because it's a cool story, but because she's thinking about places that aren't here, learning that things are different and not-so-different in these distant places. I hope she gets to see all the wonders of the world, preferably on her own dime, but I would gladly use her as my excuse to do some globetrotting if I could.

Gaz has almost finished three weeks of school now, and today was open house day. I got to meet her teacher, who not only seems very nice, she's a Loyola alum. That just makes me like her more, since I have yet to meet a reprehensible Rambler. And Gaz is, in Mrs. H's own words, an angel in class. A very messy angel, though--I saw in her desk, and couldn't help but clean it out a bit. I did leave the lollipop wrapper in there, but put all the pencils and crayons in their proper place, and I located the long lost eraser. But the important things are that she's doing very well (100% on her first spelling test), she's focused in school, and she's tolerating the after-school time with the neighbors reasonably well.

It's Marathon Kids time again, and she's crazy excited about that too. She's talked one of her friends into coming with us to the kick-off. I'm not sure how well this friend will do with running a whole mile, which is what Gaz tries very hard to do, and might even succeed this year, with her longer legs and increasing stamina. I got her to run with me for a half a mile one Saturday before she got distracted by a playground

School for me is very intense and makes blogging and photo uploading even more sporadic. It's been a good Gaz day, so I wanted to get this down before I fall alseep. Which will be very soon.

Gaming!

From G's FB status:

Cristina George Rizen
Gaz's first Star Wars RPG game was a rousing success!

• Mark Mitchell: She got bored during the description parts, and a lot of the plan-making and such, but she did really well with the action scenes and the one segment where we asked her to role-play. We fed her some lines, but she did the performance and came up with her own expressions and reactions. It was awesome. Well, within the realm of gamer "awesome."
• Cristina George Rizen: And since it edged into bedtime, we started losing her earlier than she might otherwise have been okay for.
• Bill Sanderson: Hey, maybe Fletcher can play over Skype. He's been bugging me again recently to play again.