Rewind!

Wow!  In the final days before the Earth Day Event, life was a little too chaotic to update the blog.  Therefore, some backtracking is in order.

One exciting and stressful thing is that Joselle began running test batches of natural dye for egg coloring.  She selected red cabbage for blue eggs, turmeric for yellow eggs, and beets for pink eggs.  Given that the the event would occur in a field without the benefit of a stove, we needed the dyes to set quickly at "room" temperature.  We also needed large quantities of liquid so that we could accommodate all of the children expected at the event.

The turmeric produced lovely yellow eggs quickly, but made the whole house stink.  The red cabbage produced wonderful blue eggs, but the dyes took forever to set.  And the beets produced splotchy brownish eggs after hours.  I found the beets disappointing since the pink did not match my memory of my experience with my Memama.  I thought Memama just used straight beet juice perhaps with some vinegar, but Joselle found an elaborate recipe involving cooking many cans of beets mixed with grape juice and vinegar.  After two vats that did not take (and buying nearly every can of beets in our grocery store), Joselle found that plain beet juice with a small amount of vinegar did the trick.  No elaborate concoctions were required.  The dilemma became the time for the blue to set.  Do we send the liquid home with the kids?  If so, in what?  A disposable cup?  That certainly is not an environmentally-friendly Earth Day message!

The next piece of news is that, at long last, I got a commitment from Mary, our plumber's office manager.  She had been enthusiastic about the event from the beginning.  Since she obviously could not convince one of the guys to come, she decided to come herself.  However, she took it a step further and got permission to bring a low flow toilet and tankless water heater with her.  How cool is that?

I had collected all of the door prizes, borrowed the tables from the Peaceful Dragon, picked up the t-shirts (which looked even more awesome than I expected), labeled boxes for recyclables, made event signage from card board boxes I got at work, borrowed a rental tent from work, and distributed surveys.  Now all that remained was to watch the weather and wait...