It has been a very lovely weekend. We’ve been up in Seattle, visiting my sister and her family.

We got to see my sister in her chef’s outfit at her new job.

My sister and my niece

We got to meet my niece’s hamster, Sherbet, and the new chickens (whose names I cannot remember, because eight chickens is a lot of names to remember), and the latest acquisition – a baby Flemish Giant bunny named, quite appropriately, Mungo.

(excuse graininess of photo; this was taken via cell phone)

We went to a local street fair and my niece won herself a very cute little frog, whom she promptly named George. We ate cheese fondue. I got to help my sister make a birthday cake for a friend’s little boy, and it was the very first time I have ever played with fondant and hey, that is actually a lot of fun. Also she let me use her icing sprayer thing for some of the cake, and that was fun too, although she is far better at doing that kind of thing than I am (no big surprise, since she actually went to school for that). We stayed up late and talked about all kinds of things, and did a lot of laughing.

These visits are always too short. It was so hard to get on that plane and fly away from my niece and my sister and brother-in-law. I love our house and our neighborhood and our jobs and our friends and our life in Sacramento, I know that they feel exactly the same way about where they are too, but oh how I wish there was some way to magically create a fold in space so these visits weren’t so few and far between.