In which I have had plenty of sleep

I didn't work last night, so I went to bed early, and turned my phone off! I woke up early this morning when Rich got up, and hurried downstairs to harvest my crops from last night, because I was a little worried about the aloe vera I planted. I was afraid I wouldn't get it in time and it was going to wilt!

Fortunately, the aloe vera was just fine, the tomatoes were beautiful, and I could relax. Whew! Farming is a lot of work!

I haven't been doing anything worth writing about, unless you like to read the same thing every day: Went with RA to get a soda, stopped at the store, read a book, knitted something. So fascinating.

I have a bunch of half-done knitting projects and nothing else to talk about. I'll try to get out and have an adventure later, but RA is going out of town, so I don't see any real prospects ahead.

Oh, one more thing - this is making me so happy today. (Click on the word 'this' for the link) I don't care about watching Glee, although I do love Kurt, but this number is so much fun.

Hi Ho Hi Ho, it's off to work we go!

I came to work at 7 instead of at 11, because Lana called in sick. She has MS, so we are never sure when she calls in sick if it is MS-related, or if she has a cold, or if one of her many children has broken itself again.

Barb was here when I got here, and she wasn't happy about that! Oh well, she's having surgery (again!) in a few weeks, so she will be recovering at home for a while and it will be a nice little vacation for her. Wont' it?

So I stopped at McDonalds on the way to work and brought in some hot french fries for Barb and I, to improve our attitudes. It would have worked beautifully, too, but by the time I got to work, I was having a giant fit of road rage because I was driving behind someone's sweet old grandpa, who was going about 10 miles an hour! I think it must have been one of the old guys Sando overheard in McDonalds last week, complaining about how dangerous airbags are, and planning to disable theirs. They won't be needing them, they don't drive any faster than they could walk with their walkers anyway!

I really need a do-over on the parking job I did, too, but all the spaces where I normally park (Princess Parking!) were full! I had to exit the close parking lot and go around the block to the (slightly) less close lot and I'm parked all wonky, but I didn't even care.

I haven't worked the early evening hours at work for a long time, and I forgot just how many calls there are, and just how many cheap phones with bad sound quality there are in the world. I'm sorry people, when you are using your terrible-sounding phone and also slurring your words together? You're going to need to repeat yourself, so don't give me a bunch of crap about it.

It's okay, I'm getting my zen back now. I'm taking a deep breath, I'm going to ...

Rachel's here! She just showed up at my office door, bearing tacos! She said she dropped Ash off at his first night of work and kept the car to take him a burger later, and she came over to see what was going on at the hospital tonight!

So we were eating our tacos, and I showed Rachel my list of things to do before Thanksgiving - because we're having company for Thanksgiving dinner - and she immediately started mocking it!

Guest Entry from Rachel

What’s really going to happen with Mom’s to-do list this month

This is Mom’s to-do list:

• 1. Paint upstairs bathroom
  
• 2. Buy folding chairs (that match!)
  
• 3. Find a couch
  
• 4. Get cat's bathroom ceiling fixed
  
• 5. Scrape and repaint dining room wall
  
• 6. Clean fridge

So she asked me if I thought she would get it done before Thanksgiving. After a moments consideration, I said she’d probably find a couch and maybe buy some folding chairs. Here’s my predictions for what will happen with the rest of the list.

She will go upstairs to paint the bathroom. She may even get the cans of paint up to the bathroom. At that point she will look around the bathroom and start getting overwhelmed and crazy and say she doesn’t know where to start. She will immediately turn around and go back downstairs and get on the computer, possibly to look up on the internet where to start painting a bathroom, but while she is down there she will need to check her Facebook.

While she is on Facebook she will either A) talk about how great she is for painting the bathroom or B) talk about how crazy and overwhelmed she is because she doesn’t know where to start with the bathroom. Auntie Di will leave some sympathetic/inspiring comments. Then, Mom will call RA and they will go get a hamburger and when Thanksgiving comes the paint cans will be tucked away neatly behind the toilet, unopened.

As for the dining room wall. By Thanksgiving, the hole in the wall over the piano where the paint is chipping off will be a little bigger because in an attempt to accomplish something on her list, Mom will start picking at it. She’ll pick away with her fingers till she can’t get anymore off and then she"ll get on Facebook and talk about all the work she’s done and that she’s exhausted now.

The fridge might get cleaned, but that will probably involve some fighting and finally Dad will clean it out one Saturday just so Mom stops talking about it.

Agricultural angst

This farming thing is more work than I expected. I am running two farms in Farmville, because I used Kim's Facebook account to start a second farm when the crops on my farm weren't growing fast enough for my entertainment, and now it's almost too much for me.

I have my crop schedule down now, so that I plant short-growing crops in the morning before I go to sleep, and then I harvest those, and check on my animals, when I wake up in the afternoon. I plant a second crop after I harvest the first one, another short-term crop, and I harvest that before my evening nap, and then I have to decide if I want to plant one more short-growing crop, which means I have to harvest it again before work, or would it be better to plant a longer growing crop so that I don't have to worry about it until morning?

Last night I was doing my evening harvest, and I started with my farm, which I then replanted in rice, because it grows overnight, so I don't have to harvest it until I get home in the morning, and then I signed onto Kim's account so I could harvest her crop of blueberries, and plant rice on her farm, too.

Something kept slowing down the loading time on Kim's account, and I tried reloading the farm, but I couldn't get it to load. I noticed a chat window was open at the bottom of the screen, and it looked like she had been chatting with a friend on Facebook earlier in the evening. I knew she was gone to her night class on Wednesday, so I closed her chat window and tried to open up her farm again.

It still wasn't loading, and then a second chat window opened, and the first one was back up, so I thought that Facebook must be having some problems, and I clicked the chat windows closed and tried again to access the farm, and when I couldn't get it into it again, I had an idea of what the problem might be...

I texted Kim and asked her if she was on Facebook, and she said yes! I've heard of this, but I never suspected Kim of being one of those kids who takes their laptop to class and checks their Facebook page during class! I was too tired to care, so I told her to harvest her blueberry crop while she was online, and I went to bed.

When I got up to go to work, I checked Kim's farm, because I wasn't sure if she would have replanted her farm after harvesting, and I wanted to get something planted to harvest in the morning. I was pretty surprised to see that she hadn't touched those blueberries!

So I harvested the blueberries, and planted rice, although I probably should have put in pumpkins, because that rice crop won't be ready until later, and if I had planted pumpkins, they would have been ready to harvest in the morning.

Then I messaged Kim and let her know that I was shocked, shocked! that she hadn't harvested the crop, because hello? Those berries only stay good for 4 hours and I got them just in time! And guess what? Kim didn't really care. Can you believe it?

You know who cares about their farm? Diana! She called me at work last night, and she was feeling frustrated and upset, as anyone would at the prospect of losing their harvest, because she couldn't get into Farmville to take care of her farm! What is up with that? She tried refreshing the screen a few times, but she never was able to get it loaded, poor thing. I wish I could have done something to help her, but I can't access Facebook from work, so there was nothing I could do. It's so sad.

Our microwave died.

When I woke up today, the microwave oven was gone from the kitchen, and Rich's daily frozen lunch meal was sitting in the fridge. It was obvious that the microwave had died mid-cycle.

So I went to lunch with RA, and then we shopped at W@lmart for some things she wanted, and looked at the microwaves there. She thought we could probably get a better price at Men@ards, so we went there and we actually did buy one, but I don't think it was necessarily a better deal.

While we were checking out at Men@ards, I noticed the cashier in the next aisle had big flesh-colored spacers in his ears, and I poked RA to look at him, too, so we could share the horror. Then I recognized the kid wearing them - it was someone I used to think was the cutest kid in the neighborhood! Too bad he grew up into a hot mess. If I had been in his line, I would have pretended I wanted a picture to send to Kim, because she knew him slightly in high school, but I was just too far away to get a good camera shot with my cell phone. Darn!

Billy No-mates is working here tonight, setting up the blahblahblah system. I wish I'd known he'd be here, we could have planned ahead and got pizza!

And now it's quiet.

I got up today after about 5 hours sleep, and never got any more. Oh well, I'll catch up tomorrow. Or maybe Monday.

Kim was sitting on the couch in her pajamas, Rich was in the chair watching TV with the cats, and I had to go right to the den to start harvesting crops in Farmville. It's relaxing, really.

I found a letter from Wendy in my email inbox, letting me know that the increases I was working on the Mondo pulli aren't right, so I'm going to rip back on that and start again. (If you don't like to rip, you don't like to knit.) I don't know how I messed up the increases this time, I had them right the first time, but I had to start over with a larger needle to get the gauge, and now I've got them wrong. No problem.

So Kim went off to take a shower, and Rich went away to work on RA's computer, and I just fiddled around on Farmville, and uh, yeah, that's all I did.

Sando came over, having previously planned to go to late lunch with Kim, and they waited for Rachel to call about the apple orchard. Rachel worked last night too, and was just getting up, so they finally went to lunch, while they waited for her to call them back.

An hour later they called to ask for directions to the orchard. Kim and Sando had met up with Rachel and Ash at their place, and they were on their way, but having trouble actually finding the orchard. I know how that is, because how many times have I ridden around out in the country with RA, trying to find that place? I totally know where it is now, and I told them, but they didn't trust me, and wanted me to get the street address for them so they could put it into the Garmin.

While they were gone, I cleaned up the living room, because there was enough cat hair on the rug to make another cat. Another hour or so went by and then Kim and Sando returned, bearing apples, cider, and donuts from the orchard.

Rachel and I had tickets for a dance recital tonight, given in honor of Rachel's former dance teacher, by some of her former students who found out that their teacher has cancer. The show was to benefit the American Cancer Society, and of course we wanted to go.

Most of the dancing was modern, not ballet, and it was a very fun and interesting program. Some of the peformances were better than others, and because it was modern dance, some of it was inexplicably weird. There was a guest dancer from Chicago, a young black man, who was a wonderful dancer, and everybody loved his performance. That number was one of the best in the show.

The low point of the show was a number called Untitled, and Rachel and I amused ourselves afterward by thinking of titles for it. The music wasn't exactly music, it was the sounds of machinary not functioning properly. Broken Alarm Clock was one possible title, and also, Who Let the Cogs Out? Really, it was killing me, and Rachel said she wanted to jump up and start screaming! We both remained calm, but I think it was making me autistic.

The very last number was a dance over two stools, and the dancer was a long, lean beautiful girl, who was a pleasure to watch. She writhed over and around and under those chairs in constant motion, and kept it up through two Patsy Cline songs, and I just wanted her to sit down! It was making me unbelievable edgy, especially since I hadn't fully recovered nerve function after Untitled. I started giggling from nervousness, and Rachel was wondering what was wrong with me, but I shook my head and held it together until it was all over. Whew!

The dancers called their teacher up to the stage at the end and everyone stood and applauded her, and then they asked all of her former students who were in the audience to stand also, and Rachel stood up with the others, even though she is feeling clumsy and chubby (hello? pregnant!) and I was crying, but lots of other people were, too. It was very sweet.

And we laughed all the way to the car, because damn! Sometimes things are just funny.

Back at my house, Sando and Kim had been joined by Catsy, and they had been watching TV and computing, but they were moving into the dining room to play Munchkin, leaving the TV going so they wouldn't miss any of Spongebob!

I had an hour until it was time to leave for work, so I went up and just lay on the bed in the dark and dozed, but I could hear a constant murmur of laughter from the kids downstairs, and anyway, I was too wired up from the show to really nap.

So here I am, back at work. I'm going to just knit on a sock and read a book and calm down now.

In which Kim arrived home tired, and with roadbutt.

So Kim was coming home for the weekend, and first she got a late start because she had to stay and let her roommate's family into the apartment while her roommate was in class, and then she took a wrong turn because she was driving home without turning on the Garmin, just to see if she could do it, and her mind wandered, so obviously she can't drive home without it. She drove about an hour in the wrong direction, which resulted in tears and much cursing, which was frankly hilarious. Kim used the F word at least four times, and I was laughing pretty hard, until she sucked me into her black hole of misery and I started crying with her, because I know how it is to be lost and hungry and feel like you'll never get home! (Damn you, Wisconsin!)

So Kim is home sitting on the couch playing Guild Wars and watching ghost shows on TV, and I am at work. She's going to stay until Monday evening, having arranged for a friend to take notes in her Monday class. She just needs to be home, eat chicken soup, and relax. If relaxing means going to see Zombieland with Sando and then staying up late playing video games and eating pizza.

RA was having a breakdown today and took to her bed like an aging starlet, so I went shopping by myself. Just a run to the grocery store to get the stuff for chicken noodle soup, and some breakfast link sausages, because that is what I always buy when Kim comes home.

So in the last couple of days, I've watched two movies while knitting on the manly cabled scarf and waiting for my crops to grow in Farmville. Some of Kim's friends were making references to the movie Go, which I'd heard of but never seen, so I watched it on Netflix, and loved it! It's a dark comedy, and stars one of my favorite actors that nobody has heard of, Timothy Olyphant. Today I watched a quiet little movie with Parker Posey, called Broken English. It was one of those movies that Scott calls "They Came to Talk", and I really liked it, but you know I love those movies where people just sit around, wearing pretty clothes and talking about things. (There were no car chases or fistfights.)

And tonight I'm at work, where it is quiet and I have a book to read - Mystery at Longbourn - and the Mondo pullover to start over again. I've got a cold pop, and there is a distinct shortage of cat hair on the carpet of the office, which is not a bad thing at all.

Bitter, party of one, your table is ready.

So I am ripping out the Mondo Cable pulli, because I'm not happy with the gauge I'm getting with this yarn. Also, the directions are needlessly complicated, and I think I'll be happier working on something else for a while. I've got so much yarn, but most of it is regular worsted weight, and I have trouble knitting it to 18/24 gauge. Maybe I'll try it tomorrow on a bigger needle.

I have a couple of knitting projects that RA asked me to make for her to give as Christmas gifts, but there is no hurry for those. I'm working on the cable scarf, which is really fun to do, but I left it at home and I just have a sock to knit tonight at work. The yarn is Opal in the Hedwig colorway, and it's beautiful and soothing.

While I knit my sock, I will be reading The Magicians, by Lev Grossman. I really like this book, it's Harry Potter for grownups. I like the story, I like the characters, who are all rather unhappy people, around college age, and I'm just enjoying it.

RA and I went to the library today and I got a pile of books, although I couldn't find any of the books on my list. Then we drove out into the country to the apple orchard, but it was closed today. Must remember, the orchard is closed on Mon, Tues, and Wed. We are talking about going to the orchard in DeKalb on Saturday when Kim is home, but that might not happen.

She'll be here for just two days, and there won't be time to do everything. It might be a better idea for me to just go back to the small orchard on Friday and buy some donuts and cider to feed her, and not try to make time for her to go the orchard. There is a corn maze by the orchard in Dekalb, and I suggested that she and Sando could go, maybe with Divad, and she was slightly interested, but probably they will go to the movies to see Zombieland, and then just play video games all night afterward.

Farming and Knitting

I went to the store with RA, who has been sick with a cold all weekend and she said she felt better and needed to get out of the house and get a pop! So we got a pop, and drove around drinking it, and then we stopped at the store for milk and bread and some meat that was on sale. Now I am all fixed with meat, so I can make meals the rest of the week.

I bought stew meat for stew, because when it gets cold I like to make stew, so I'll make that in the crockpot tomorrow. I got a package of chicken breasts, because I can always do something with those, and a package of pork chops, just for the heck of it.

What I'm knitting today:

I made a list of all the projects that I need to finish, and also listed projects that I want to start, and it's a pretty long list. Maybe I need to spend less time farming on Facebook? Nah. I have plenty of time for knitting while my crops grow.

Last week I started a Knit-A-Long with Wendy when she mentioned that she was going to knit the Mondo Cable Pulli from Chicknits. This weekend, after Wendy re-read the directions and wrote up the stitch counts for us to refer to, and we could both see that the raglan increase line from shoulder to neck wasn't going to be long enough, Wendy cleverly re-wrote the increase part of the directions, and we will be starting over. You know my motto: if you don't like to rip, you don't like to knit!

I was originally going to knit this sweater for Kim, but since Kim has approximately a hundred handknit sweaters, I think I'll make this one in a smaller size for Carolyn.

Yesterday I saw a great baby hat on someone's knitblog, so I downloaded that pattern last night, and I'm pretty excited about making it for Scott's kids. Whooo! Baby knitting! It goes so fast!

Also, I am finally sewing the knitted triangle-point trim around the edge of the blanket for Rachel's baby! Only one more of these blankets to finish after this one, and then I will probably never make another one, at least until the memory of sewing on trim fades!

I have a horse! And a cow!

I love my new Halloween design! Diana picked it for me and surprised me with it! Isn't it great? The cemetary is like the cool one at the other end of my street, and there is a cat, too! Links don't show up in a different color, though, so you will need to mouse over the writing to find links. There are three in this post.

Still playing Farmville. In fact, it's pretty much all I did yesterday afternoon. No, that's not true, there was some knitting, a little reading, and some Buffy-watching, but that was all just to kill time until my plants grew so I could harvest them on my farm!

Last night I was so antsy to grow more stuff, that I signed onto Kim's Facebook account during a time when I knew she was in a class, and I started playing Farmville on her account, too. I started farming, and invited some of her friends who had farms to be her neighbors in Farmville. (Wow, a lot of college kids are playing Farmville!)

I felt a little embarrassed to be using Kim's account to get a second farm to work, especially when I confessed to Kim what I had done, and she mocked me for it, but later when I told Diana how pathetically obsessed I had become, she told me that she understands perfectly, because she plays two accounts on Yoville, her own, and her friend Naomi's! Whew!

This morning when I woke up, as I was heading to my computer so I could sign on and go to my farm to reap my giant pumpkin harvest, I told Rich that I talked to Diana and how it made me feel better when she said she played her friend's account on Yoville - it validated my life! Rich said he didn't think that just because Diana did it, that it made it less crazy (or something like that), but I think he is very wrong. Diana and I have long felt that our behavior is the yardstick by which all human behavior should be measured!

So. While I was farming yesterday, I knitted. I bought some beautiful chocolate-brown wool at the fabric store - Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool - and I started a cabled scarf from a pattern I saw on the internet a few years ago. It's called Sharfik Scarf and you can see it here. I'm going to make mine without the fringe. It's so much fun to work on that I knitted about 10 inches of it by bedtime.

The other knitting project I have right now is the Mondo Cable Pulli from Chicknits. I'm making it with some tweedy plum wool in a discontinued line called Ballybrae. When the company stopped making Ballybrae, I bought quite a bit of it, and it still comes up for sale on eBay, so it's possible to get more.

My friend Wendy announced that she is making the same sweater, and when she mentioned it, I looked over at the pattern for it, that has been sitting on my desk for about a month, and decided to knit it along with her! It turns out that she is very clever and has been doing some work to clarify the directions, so I'm glad I jumped on that bandwagon with her.

I've been watching the episodes of Buffy on Hulu because Diana is watching them, and she likes the show, so I decided to give it a try. Rich used to love it and watch it all the time when it was in reruns on TV (and our dog was named for it), and it was on like three times a day - he watched it in the morning before work, and at lunchtime after he walked the dog, and it seems like it was on again later, too. I didn't like the way the vampires looked, I thought they were ridiculous, because in my head, vampires are glamorous and attractive. I read Interview with the Vampire about 50 times when it first came out, and I always wonder why more people don't use it as a reference when they create vampire characters (cough, Stephanie Meyers, cough).

Anyway, I watched a couple of episodes yesterday, and yes, it is funny and the dialogue is snappy (when it's not sappy), so I will probably watch a little more of it. While I wait for my strawberry fields to ripen.

In which I become a farmer.

So this afternoon I was sitting at my desk with my face in the computer, like I always am in the afternoon, but at least today I had managed to put in a load of wash and had some dinner in the oven, so I didn't feel like a complete slacker.

I was chatting to Kim on IM and playing some Three Towers Solitaire on Facebook and then for some reason I started thinking about Billy No-mates. I wondered what he was up to, and how he was liking his new job, and if he was on Facebook, or if he thought he was too cool for it. I did a search for him, and found several people with the same name, but there he was, with a picture, and I thought about friending him, but then, well... I don't know. It's been a long time since I blew him off, and I haven't missed him, except in the way you miss a big painful headache when it's gone, like you notice it's not there, but you don't really wish it was back.

It occured to me too, that he might be mad because I did kind of break up with him, when he made me mad one night after months of him getting on my nerves on an almost daily basis. So I asked Kim if I should try to friend him on FB and she said what the heck, I should just do it. I told her it would be pretty degrading if he clicked ignore - I mean, really, ignored by Billy No-mates? How humiliating! But she said I should go ahead, because who cares, it's just the internet!

So I hesitated, but then I thought what the heck, it's just the internet, and I sent him a friend request, and about a minute later he replied, which didn't surprise me, because one of the things that made us friends was that when no one else was around, we were both always online.

Then, before I even had a chance to write on his wall, he sent me a note, asking me to be his neighbor in Farmville. Ugh, I have blown off so many of those little Farmville requests, because I tried Yoville and got tired of it, but I thought that just to be nice I would take a look at Farmville, and you know what? It's kind of fun. It reminds me of Animal Crossing, and more than that, it's like Harvest Moon, a game that I used to watch Kim play for hours!

Which is why when I got up from my nap before work, I was a little pressed for time, but I had to check on my farm and harvest my strawberry crop, because Billy No-mates had warned me that they will wilt and die if you don't pick your crops in time. So yay! I saved my strawberry crop and planted some longer-lasting soybeans and wheat.

In other news, I finished knitting a dark blue cabled sweater vest for Kim this weekend. It fit beautifully and she wore it all day on Saturday. I had started a rust-colored vest, too, but last night I was working on it at work, and I had an epiphany! Kim does not need two sweater vests! I ripped it out, and today I put that yarn back in the yarn room until I can decide what I want to do with it.

So for right now, I don't have any big projects on the needles. I have a sock in my purse, in the Hedwig colorway of Opal Harry Potter colors, and it's beautiful. I started a pair of wool socks for RA, who is buying them for her son, and also wants me to knit some felted slippers for her sister, so I need to find the pattern for those.

I still have some projects that need finishing, like buttons to sew on baby sweaters and edging to sew on blankets, but I need something new and fun to work on. Hmm. Maybe something for Carolyn...

In which there is cooking, knitting and mockage. Also Euchre.

We're having a good visit with Kim this weekend. She was stressed last week, and Rachel told her to come home to allow us to pamper her. She got here Friday night, later than she had expected due to an unplanned lunch with a friend after her Friday class.

When Kim got home, it was right about time for my evening nap, so she sat on my bed with her laptop, reading emails and whatnot, and I tried to sleep, but I was pretty excited to have her home, so the sleep never happened. We got up and went downstairs to sit with Rich, who was watching a TV show about haunted houses, and then Sando showed up with a video game he wanted Kim to play, and by the time that was all set up, it was time for me to go to work. I didn't get to see the video game, but Kim assured me it was as much fun as Sando said it would be.

By the time I got home from work this morning, I had been awake for 24 hours, and I was pretty tired! I dropped into bed and went right to sleep! When I woke up, Rich was gone to the church to listen to conference, and Kim was just waking up, too.

I promised Kim earlier this week that when she came home we would go to the apple orchard, so we got dressed and took a long drive into the country and ... wait for it... found the apple orchard! It's the first time I've driven there by myself, but RA and I have spent hours driving around looking for it! Last year we finally got good directions, so now we are able to drive directly to the orchard, instead of taking a tour of the cornfields first.

We bought apples, salsa, cider donuts, two kinds of cider, and some chocolate-covered cashew brittle. Oh, and a caramel apple for Rachel, who asked us to bring her one. There were two kinds of salsa, pineapple and hot peach, which sounds wierd, but I'd had the hot peach salsa before and knew it was good, and the orchard lady told me the pineapple salsa was good, too, so I had to try it.

Oh, and we stopped on the way home to get a few things at the grocery store, including flea medication for the cats! You apply the liquid to the back of their necks, and then, if you are mean like we are, you mock the cats for the rest of the night for having manky-looking neck fur.

Kim sat down on the couch with her computer on her lap and started watching a Mythbusters marathon, and I went to the kitchen to make 40 clove garlic chicken. When that was in the oven I pulled out my knitting and watched TV while I finished the sweater vest for Kim.

Rich and Ash went to church for the priesthood session of conference tonight, and Rachel came over to eat chicken and her caramel apple, and she was kind enough to play euchre with me, too!

I did manage to get in a short nap before work, but I'm still tired. When Kim goes back to school tomorrow, I'm going to bed, to catch up from the weekend.

The travel report.

I've been back from SLC for a few days, but I haven't felt like updating my journal. At first I was tired, then I was just uninspired. I think there was too much blood in my caffeine system.

I didn't work last night, which means I have had enough sleep, and I've had two cans of Diet Pepsi this morning, so I think I can manage to pull something together for your entertainment.

When Diana was nagging encouraging me to write something (anything!), she said to write about the best thing I saw and the best thing we ate while we were out of town, so we'll start there.

The best thing I ate while we were at Scott and Carolyn's was the Spam they fried to go with eggs for breakfast the first morning! I know, I am not usually (ever) a fan of Spam, but they fried it in thin slices and it was great! It was like crispy bacon! I tried frying some myself the next day, and mine was more like bacon chips, but I'm sure I will get better with practice - which is why I bought two cans of Spam when I went shopping yesterday.

Also, Saturday night we had dinner at a Thai restaurant called Sawadee, and it was wonderful. They had the best Pad Thai I've ever eaten, and a wonderful desert that was kind of like tapioca pudding. The people watching was amusing there, too.

The best thing I saw while we were there was the night that Rich, Soren and Scott all sat in the living room watching a Star Trek DVD and eating chips. They were bonding like men, and Soren was happy to sit on the couch next to Rich, eating chips out of the bag. It was so cute!

There are rules about TV watching for Soren, and one of them is that he can only have the TV on as long as he is sitting on the couch, watching it. If he gets up to do something else, they pause his show, and if he wants to continue it, he has to sit back down on the couch.

That rule is so the TV doesn't just become background noise for his life, but it was a problem when Rich was watching another Star Trek episode on DVD, and every time Soren wandered away, Carolyn paused the show. The third time it was paused, Rich whimpered pathetically, "Soren, come back, I'm trying to watch this show!"

We had a really nice visit; the babies are so nice, and the weather was beautiful. We didn't go out much, because we were there to visit our grandchildren, so we were happy to stay in the house and enjoy watching Soren play with his legos while we rocked Carl and tried to get him to sleep. (All the company was too much for him!)

It was a good trip with Rich, too. The last two times I went out to SLC I was with one of the girls, but this time it was just Rich and I and it was fun.