Whose job was it to bring the milk?

So I went to a women's retreat on Friday.

It wasn't so much a retreat, really, since it was just an event that lasted from 6-10 PM and then we all went home. But that's what it was called.

Anyway! I'm generally opposed to women's events at church, because they tend to range from "a bit tedious" to "mind-crushingly dull", with strong hits of "girly", "frilly" and "emotionally taxing". I don't know why women's events have to be this way, and it is for this reason that I make every effort available to me to make sure my own women's event does not dissolve into cheap psychotherapy with lashings of tears and the decimation of several hundred boxes of Kleenex.

But this one wasn't one of those. For starters, we had four different speakers. Each of them was a woman who goes to South Plains (in other words, someone we already know). Not a one of them is known for her cheesy-ness, dullness, or crying fits. They were all excellent speakers, who made their points very well and then left the rest of us to talk about it. It was really, really good.

Of course, no evening with me would be complete without me really annoying as many people as possible; this time, I managed to do it anonymously. I made the suggestion several weeks ago that we do something about mixing everyone up, so that we didn't all end up sitting with the same people we sit with every time we have an event (you know, like Sunday morning worship service). The organisers took this suggestion to heart, and colour-coded the tables and nametags. This caused several women (grown women, mind you) to cause quite a stir when they arrived to discover they would be expected to sit a whole ten feet from their best friends for an entire four hours. Somehow, the woman in charge managed to convince them all to act their ages and make nice with people they already know anyway. (It is a bit disconcerting how many grown-up teenagers we have kicking around.) At the end, she (the woman in charge) explained that it was at the request of "some of the younger women" that we were all jumbled up in this way, but she didn't give away that it was me, so my secret identity is safe for now.

No boxes of Kleenex were harmed in the staging of this retreat. But I did have a cup of tea that wasn't very good.