The long weekend began with a long dinner on Friday: The Leesville Road High School Band Banquet.

The Band Banquet is a potluck buffet dinner that celebrates all of the students in the band, with a particular focus on the students who will be graduating in a few weeks time.

After an opening skit by the juniors, then eating begins, with the seniors getting their food first, and the juniors next in line.

This is necessary, in part, because the next part of the program gives each senior the opportunity to say a few (or many) words, and they are occasionally interrupted by the juniors who have the task handing out a series of “most likely” to awards to each of the seniors — awards are pointedly relevant to the senior in question — such as “most likely to lose an embarrassing bet to his mom.”

When all of the seniors have had a chance to speak, and all of the awards have been made, there is a slide show of the seniors, followed by an announcement of all the band officers for the next year. Then the banquet is over except for the juniors who do the remaining clean up.

Each year I come prepared. Some years I am better prepared than others.

Last year, I worked on what would become this Project Linus blanket:

This year, I brought one of the six-petal flower shawls, and added a fourteenth row:

With the banquet and all of obligations it entailed behind me, I decided that I needed to spend some of the available time getting organized, and to that end, after I had done the many household chores that beckoned, I worked to clear off my the dining room table that now serves as headquarters of my crochet operations, and in the process, I unearthed the hexagons I had begun work on for my 2014 World Cup soccer ball.

I found the four vertical stripe hexagons meant to represent the countries of Cote d’Ivoire, France, Belgium, and Nigeria:

I found the two horizontal stripe hexagons representing Netherlands and Germany:

and I got this group photo which also included hexagons meant to represent Brazil and Japan:

And while I did not find them right away (causing some consternation and worry), I did finally dig up these two pentagons:

With all of the pieces I had completed so far now in front of me, the next step was to decide what to do next, and I settled on making this pentagon which is meant to represent Uruguay:

Working with a palette based on the colors of the flags of nations is a bit outside my comfort zone. There is no purple, only a very occasional bit of orange, no pink, and far more white than I would typically choose, but as I complete more of the hexagon and pentagons, I am beginning to enjoy them more, and while my 2014 World Cup soccer ball will be very different from my 2010 World Cup soccer ball, I am hoping that it is just as joyful and interesting.