The guesthouse we are staying in is undergoing renovations, so it’s been kind of interesting to come and go and have to maneuver around ladders and people painting or wielding power tools. Apparently they just opened up rooms again on Friday, so we have the luxury of staying in freshly renovated rooms. It’s a nice room, although we’ve already discovered one thing these hotels lack which is so common in hotels in the US – there isn’t a clock to be found in the room at all. Luckily Richard’s aunt sent me my birthday present early, which arrived just before we left, and turned out to be a wonderful little travel clock, complete with alarm, and ability to program for multiple time zones.

Since the guesthouse is undergoing renovations, breakfast was served at a local cafe just around the corner. Three meals in and I’ve already discovered just how big meals here can be (and yet everyone seems to be in great shape – I suspect it’s all the walking!). They brought us a plate piled with toast, then coffee and juice and there was cereal if we wanted it, and we also had the option of getting (along with all of that) a typical fry – eggs, sausages, potatoes, and ham.

Our first stop today was to the tourist office; or rather, that was intended to be the first stop, but we got there before it opened. And while we were standing there deciding what to do, another woman approached and we got to talking with her. Turns out she’s from New Hampshire and was touring Ireland on her own and having a wonderful time. When we mentioned the possibility of tracking down an internet cafe she was immediately interested, so the three of us made our way over to the only one in town. Luckily it is located right across the street from a coffee shop, so we could get some much-needed caffeine while we waited for the guy to arrive to open the computer store where internet access was to be found. And luckily they had plenty of computers for use, all with high speed access, so all three of us could perch on a stool and plow through accumulated email, as well as drop a few quick notes to family just to let them know we made it to Ireland in one piece.

The main touristy thing we’ve done today was to visit Castle Trim. We’ve purchased Heritage cards, which give us access to a whole slew of places around the country, including the castle, which is the one where they filmed the movie Braveheart. Was rather fun as the guide pointed out the various spots from the movie, including where Mel Gibson was killed. Apparently a lot of locals from Trim were used as extras in the cast, and the man who played the executioner was a local schoolteacher.

The castle has been preserved as a ruin, so in many places you could see where floors or roofs used to be. From the top the view across Trim was lovely, and I’m sure it would be even more breathtaking if it was a bit clearer. We’ve found it kind of amusing that all the locals keep apologizing for the weather – we’re just glad to get out of the unseasonable heat in California, and it’s been just barely sprinkling all day, which hasn’t bothered us at all.

We ate lunch in the cafe at the tourist office, where we met three more Americans, who chatted with us about their trip, noted that the Heritage cards are definitely worth the money, and made us feel slightly better about getting so lost yesterday on the way to Trim, since they noted they’d spent a good part of the day trying without success to reach the Hill of Tara.

This afternoon we’ve been mainly just wandering around Trim. We slipped into the St. Patrick’s Cathedral and snapped a few quick shots of the interior – including the huge pipe organ in the back balcony, and the amazing artwork on the walls of the altar. In the course of our wanderings we also found another church (I think it’s also called St. Patrick’s) which has a bell tower, and every hour, if you listen carefully, the bells chime the time. This particular church was surrounded by a tiny little cemetery, with some gravestones so old the words had all but worn away. I also got a kick out of finding a little wool shop that is possibly the tiniest little shop ever. There were cubbies on two of the walls full of skeins of wool, but most of them were hidden behind clothing, or piles of boxes stacked haphazardly on the floor. They sold knit and crocheted items there and I was tempted to find out how much a knit sweater would cost, but couldn’t actually get to any of them to check for prices. We also saw a rather bored looking calico cat camped out in front of the wool shop, and later on, found two very friendly little cats lurking around a house. They did their best to show how aloof they were until I called to them and held out a hand, and suddenly we had two very best friends who were all about weaving around our legs and getting some pets.

The sun rises quite early and also sets quite late in Ireland this time of year, so it’s a bit odd (to us) to still have nearly complete daylight even at 9 at night. We finally tracked down that restaurant we’d been looking for last night, and went there tonight for dinner. We had some fresh cream of broccoli and cauliflower soup, served, of course, with bread, and skipped the main entrees so we would have room for dessert. Meals here so far have all been huge. Richard had something with chocolate and orange ganache and I had apple tart, which they served with a scoop of ice cream into which someone bizarrely added raisins. So I was trying to very discreetly pick the raisins out of my ice cream the entire time.

After dinner we decided to take advantage of the fact that it was still so light out and go for a walk. There were paved paths along the Boyne River, which runs right through town and right past the castle, and on the castle side of the river there were signs posted here and there talking about the restoration of the moat (they’ve allowed it to become a little wetland area). We got a kick out of finding a whole population of tiny black Irish slugs making their way across the path from the river to the marshy moat area.

On the other side of the river we noticed that there were some trails cut through the fields up the hill, and as we’d been eating dinner we’d noticed people coming and going on them, so we decided to do a little bit of exploring. Turns out it was a good idea, since we circled around and found the Yellow Steeple, which is a tower that is all that remains of what was once (I think) a monastery. It’s surrounded by a fence, but the gate was open and apparently it’s a spot for the local teens to go hang out and smoke, since there was a group there, still in their school uniforms, as we wandered around and did the tourist thing with the gaping and the oohing and aahing and the taking of pictures.

We’ve mapped out where to go for the next few days – we’re planning three nights in Kilkenny so we can take in the surrounding two counties. We’re also still hoping to track down a new copy of that lost guidebook (sigh). We found a wonderful little book shop up the road from the guesthouse, which did not carry it, but the man behind the counter was extremely nice and rung up a few places to see if they might carry it too (no luck). So now the hope is to order a new one from Amazon.uk, and have it delivered to the place we’ll be staying in Kilkenny – keep your fingers crossed that this all works out.

Pictures from our stay here in Trim are all here.

It doesn’t seem so very long since my dad picked us up and drove us to the airport, til the time when we arrived in Dublin. It’s just a few parts of the trip that seemed to stretch on forever, but getting here made it all worthwhile.

The plane from San Francisco to Heathrow was packed, but I’d managed to at least get us aisle seats even if we were stuck back in coach, so it wasn’t as bad at all as I’d expected it to be. We ended up chatting with a couple from Folsom in the waiting area in San Franciso – she has just started knitting and was commenting on the pair of socks I was working on, and he collects books, mainly science fiction and fantasy, so all four of us had lots to chat about. They ended up sitting a few rows ahead of us so we each had friendly faces to wave to through the course of the trip.

Heathrow airport is kind of a nightmare. We landed in one terminal and then joined a line that stretched through hallways, up and down stairs, and around corners nearly indefinitely while waiting to board a shuttle bus to take us to the next terminal. While in line we chatted with two other Americans (funny how we always find each other, isn’t it) and determined that the line was much like Disneyland – you think you see the end, but then you turn the corner and you’ve another half hour or more of shuffling slowly forward and feeling as if you are going nowhere.

The shuttle bus wasn’t the end of it by a long shot. Next we waited in a huge line to get through security at the second terminal, and then another line (much shorter this time) to get through the passport check, and then more miles and miles (or at least it seemed that way) of windowless metal hallways until we finally reached the tiny little offshoot terminal for flights to the UK and Ireland. We had about three hours of layover in Heathrow and it turned out to be just barely enough time, since they called for boarding for our flight to Dublin about 30 seconds after we finally tracked down the gate. I feel sorry for anyone who had less time to make it than we did – chances were high they were going to miss their flight.

We landed in Dublin airport which was much easier to navigate than Heathrow (pretty much anywhere would be easier to navigate than Heathrow) and tracked down our baggage and then the rental car counter. They pointed us to the lot, we found our car (with a little help) and then the fun began. First there was the excitement of trying to figure out how to put the thing into reverse, and then Richard had the fun of driving on the left side of the road while both of us tried desperately to figure out the street signs. I am not entirely sure how many times we ended up circling through roundabouts and going the wrong way on the same freeway, but we did manage to miss the road we wanted too many times to count, and also go through a tollbooth before we’d had a chance to track down an ATM. Luckily the lady at the booth was extremely nice and understanding of the poor stupid lost tourists, so she pointed us in the right direction and let us through without paying. Off we went to get lost some more, finally ending up in a little town called Kilcock, where we decided we’d had enough. We stopped, got lunch, and tracked down an ATM in case we hit any more of those unexpected toolbooths, took deep breaths, and finally found the road to Trim.

Trim is a lovely little town, what we’ve seen of it so far. It’s quiet and small and perfect for our first few days here. We checked into Brogan’s Guesthouse (check-in happens in the bar) and crashed for a few hours, then wandered off down the roads to try to find someplace for dinner. We never did track down the restaurant we were looking for – recommended by our handy guidebook – but we found a cute little diner where we had a large and delicious dinner. Unfortunately, on the way to the restaurant we lost our handy little guidebook (Rick Steve’s Ireland 2006), which is extremely inconvenient, since that’s the one we were using primarily as our guide. Urk. So we’re hoping we can track down another at some point, or else rely on the kindness of strangers and the prevalence of Tourist Information offices around the country to make do.

But despite this little setback, and the fact that we’re still suffering a bit from jetlag and the lack of sleep on the trip over, I’m so glad we’re here and I am looking forward to the next three weeks. I have even tracked down a wool shop, and obviously we found an internet cafe, so life is, as they say here, grand.

There has been such a change since we first brought Checkers home. Instead of hiding all the time, she pretty much now pops her head out of wherever she’s been lurking the instant I walk into the room. She has a lot of opinions and is more than happy to share them with us, but luckily she’s got a much quieter voice than Sebastian so it’s actually pretty cute.

She is, amusingly, still living in the library and the linen closet, but at this point we have very little to do with it. Despite the fact that we’ve had the door open pretty much all the time now for weeks, she has decided that the library is her territory and she should not actually be required to leave it. In fact, she will come right to the edge of the room and stand in the doorway and holler for one of us to come in and play with her, and no amount of coaxing will get her to place even one dainty little toe over the threshold unless it is on her very exacting terms. I suspect it does not help that we usually give in and go to her rather than the other way around. We keep discussing whether or not to remove her litter box and make her use the main ones (we’ve caught her in the regular boxes once or twice so she does know where they are), but unfortunately there are still some unresolved issues. Or rather, there is exactly one unresolved issue, who goes by the name of Rosemary. Rosie has taken to going in and sitting right by wherever Checkers is lurking, lying in wait for her to poke her head out so that then they can have a yelling match. We’re trying to do the usual things – removing Rosie and distracting her with toys elsewhere, trying to give Rosie extra attention, and occaisonally even shutting the library door so Checkers can have some peace, but so far, we seem to have reached a stalemate in the integration process where Rosie is concerned and I am not quite sure what to do about it.

But aside from the problem of Rosie being a little snot, things are going well. Checkers is very sweet and playful and opinionated enough that I am not missing Allegra as much anymore, which was one of the primary reasons we wanted a tortie in the first place. She has her own little quirks and I suspect that we will continue to learn more of them over time. And like any good self-respecting cat, she has us well trained, as you can see in this little video Richard took of us playing the feline version of Fetch. Notice, if you will, which participant is ‘tossing’ the toy and which one is ‘bringing’ it back.

April has so far shaped up to be an expensive month. First there were the taxes, which we actually got done the last weekend in March, but which did not get paid until the last possible minute. In a way it was kind of amusing because this is the first year in a very long time that both Richard and I have worked only one job each, and we did not have anything complicated, like buying or refinancing a house, or purchasing a car that required recording a credit based on instruction so complicated (and yet so vague at the same time) that it took five of us to figure out where the hell to record the damn thing on the taxes, or any other sort of complicated thing that would keep us from doing our taxes ourselves. We’ve been so used to going to H&R Block to get them done that it didn’t even occur to me until we were nearly done with the whole thing that we could have just bought the silly software and done it ourselves this year and saved ourselves a bit of money. Not, mind you, that this would have saved us the whopping $2000 we owed the Feds (you may all commence with the cringing right along with me), but it might have been quicker. I will note that since we got our taxes done we have both upped our contributions to our respective 401k’s at work and both of us made sure that we’ve got the maximum amount of tax being withdrawn from our paychecks, and we are both crossing our fingers that next year the tax bill won’t be quite so painful.

Next, one of my tires bit the dust as I was toodling along on the freeway heading to work. Luckily Richard was working from home during the original tire blow-out, so he could drive out, and we could swap out cars. By the time he arrived I’d managed to get the tire off and was just starting to fight with trying to put the new tire on. We discovered that my car comes with a nifty little wheel lock – one of the wheel bolts is specially shaped and requires a special little wrench extension to get it off. I am so glad this happened during daylight, or there would have been a *lot* more swearing during the process than there was. Anyway, when Richard took my car in to have them repair the dead tire, we found out that actually all four tires had barely any tread left and were in urgent need of being replaced. I guess all those road trips to and from Ashland and Seattle must have taken their toll. Cost for the new tires – several hundred dollars. Ding! And finally, when Richard took his car in for its regular 3000 mile check-up, we discovered that he needed work done on the brakes. Add in a few hundred more bucks to the mix. Ding!

I am hoping that after all of this, our financial karma will decide to let us take a little break. May’s going to be expensive enough, what with that three week trip to Ireland.

I woke up yesterday morning feeling kind of icky, because yes, the sinuses were doing their thing again. I woudl have much rather taken meds and gone back to bed, but I had to be at church at 8:30 for the recorder group because we’re doing all the music for the Good Friday service and there were a lot of songs to go through. I did mostly okay through that, and thought that maybe, if I could just hold out until the meds kicked in, that I would be fine. But then we went to choir rehearsal and the director had us warm up by singing a song only on “ooh” and that was pretty much my downfall. Singing ‘ooh’ when your sinuses are seriously imploding from the pressure is not good. Basically the sound vibrates through the sinuses and all that lovely little nausea that accompanies a big nasty sinus pressure attack like this just comes boiling to the surface.

So I went home and crawled back into bed and sent my apologies to the choir director via Richard and was once again very glad that at least the other tenor is a strong enough singer to cover for me. And I pretty much stayed in bed (except for a brief foray into the bathroom because I HATE YOU TOO, SINUSES) for the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon.

I finally staggered out of bed for good at about 4, because the sinuses do not just like to try to kill me slowly, they also like to make me waste whole days of potential productivity focusing instead on how very much I hate them. Richard picked up some sushi for dinner from the little restaurant downtown and we watched Dr. Strangelove. I was under the apparently very mistaken impression that this was a comedy. I was also woefully unaware that it was a Stanley Kubrick film, since having seriously disliked every Kubrick film I have ever seen in the past I might not have been so gungho to watch this. Let’s just say that it did not change my opinion of Kubrick films.

Anyway. The rest of the weekend wasn’t nearly as bad. Friday night was craft night, and it was a very small group, but that was actually kind of nice because sometimes when it’s a crowd it’s almost impossible to hear the person next to you. The hostess is dogsitting for some friends who are out of town, and the dog has a large fleece bed that is his security blanket; he would carry it around in his mouth everywhere he went and then flump down on it, with the largest, saddest eyes he could muster, staring at the front door. Poor spoiled doggy misses his family.

Saturday I did a bunch of knitting and tackled some laundry and poked at the cats, while Richard went off to his writing group, and then we headed off to run some errands, mainly tracking down and purchasing a recumbant bicycle for me. I know I need to exercise but I also know that if I hate it I will find any excuse not to do it, and the recumbant bike seems like the best option because it leaves my hands free, which means I can distract myself while exercising by reading or doing logic puzzles, or even better, by knitting. You knew I would find a way to work that in there, didn’t you. We brought it home and put it together with surprisingly minimal feline assistance, and it will live in the bedroom.

The integration of the cats continues slowly, by the way. I’m no longer being woken up by screaming fits every night, and while Checkers will fuss at any other cat that comes near her and a few of the other cats will growl in retaliation, that seems to be about it. We are finding it very amusing that Rosie has apparently launched a campaign of her own, because yesterday while we were putting the bike together she trotted into the bedroom and rather proudly deposited the catnip toy we’d given to Checkers onto the floor. And this morning she woke me up with rather thunderous skittering after what turned out to be Checkers’ favorite red sparkly ball. So I suspect she has decided that if she cannot convince us to make the usurper go away, she will just steal all of her toys away. I am thwarting her in her efforts by returning all the captured booty back to the library, but I am hoping that maybe if she has to keep going in there to steal things, she and Checkers will eventually get to the point where they can just get over their snippy bad selves and learn to get along.

Yesterday it occurred, rather belatedly, to me that today was Saint Patrick’s Day and then it occurred to me that I have not ever actually cooked corned beef and then I suddenly started craving corned beef with cabbage and potatos, and so I started searching online for recipes, since I figured this is the sort of thing one can do in a crockpot. And then I suggested to Richard that we should see if anyone was interested in coming over for dinner, even though it was last minute.

Last night was choir practice, and we knew that if we were going to get it set up for this morning we would have to go get all the ingredients after choir, since there wasn’t much time before choir to do anything but eat dinner and find our music. So we headed over to the store and I am not sure why it did not occur to either of us that waiting until the last minute to get corned beef for a holiday where everyone and their grandmother eats corned beef (even though yes, I am quite aware of the fact that corned beef is not, in fact, a traditional Irish meal at all). But when we wandered through the meat section of the store, we couldn’t find it anywhere (we didn’t really know quite what we were looking for, to be honest), but we did find a big empty chiller with a sign that said ‘corned beef’, and a shrinkwrap package of potatoes, carrots, onions, and cabbage, cleverly labeled ‘Irish Vegetables’, already pre-cut into the appropriately sized chunks.

Luckily I tracked down a random employee, who noted that there was more corned beef over in the vegetable section, by the cabbage, because naturally the produce department is right where any sane person would go looking for big hunks of dead cow, but he was right, it was there. However, what was not there was cabbage – they’d been completely wiped out (see above reference to ‘leaving the shopping to the last minute’). So even though we had mocked the package of ‘Irish Vegetables’ moments before, we had no choice but to grab it, since it appeared to be our only source of cabbage for the evening.

This morning we stuffed all the ingredients into the crockpot except the cabbage, and set it on high and let it do its thing while we were at work, so that by the time we got home the house smelled divine. I found a recipe for Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake online, which sounded really good, so I made that (with a few modifications, due to the lack of any pureed dates to be found in our area, as well as the problem of not having a pan larger than my springform pan for the steaming process). My parents brought over some green Irish Soda Bread (as an aside, my dad makes great pizza, and when we were kids he used to occasionally put food coloring in the crust, and while a green crust is not too scary to look at just try to imagine eating a crust that someone tried, not quite successfully, to dye purple, because it looks wrong on too many levels to count), so we were all set.

The corned beef and root vegetables were delicious. The cake, although a bit on the fussy side, was wonderful – not too sweet, even with the homemade caramel sauce cooked into it. I suspect Richard and I will be eating it for breakfast for the next day or two. We’d ended up buying two packages of the corned beef because we weren’t sure how much we’d need (although it wouldn’t have all fit into the crockpot anyway), so we thinking that we’ll cook up the second batch on Sunday, since there isn’t much left over from this evening.

I forget, sometimes, how fun it is to slam together a dinner at the last minute and have people over. I think that sometimes we get so busy doing other things, and it doesn’t help that our friends have been slowly scattering further and further away, and they’ve got their own lives and making dinner plans at the drop of a hat isn’t really very easy for most anyone any more.

For those of you who don’t know yet, hold on to your seats. Because Sacramento has hit the big time. Yes, folks, we finally have our own Ikea. Be still all of our beating hearts.

I’ve been passing it on the way to work for months now, watching as the big blue and yellow box was put together and the signs hung and the parking lots striped. I remember when they built the one near Berkeley and how everyone was just so excited because oh boy, there was going to be an Ikea within driving distance, and I vaguely recall that they had to either put in a new off-ramp, or reroute traffic off the existing off-ramps so as to avoid any Ikea-related snarls on the nearby freeways because the masses would flock. And when the Sacramento one opened at the beginning of this month there were signs on the freeway, warning that traffic might be slow as you approached the exit for Ikea, because the masses, they would be a’flocking to this one too.

I’ve seen their stuff on their website and since I am not so much a fan of the minimilst holdover-from-the 70’s style of furniture, I never bothered to go to the one in the Bay Area. It never seemed worth a special trip just to go to a furniture store. But now, we have one in Sacramento, and it is conveniently located right off the freeway, one exit before I turn to go to my office, and so tonight, on the way home from work, I was bored and pondering the lack of dinner choices and figuring that I really ought to go see what all the fuss was about, and feeling as if maybe it would be fun, just this once, to be part of the flocking masses, and I called Richard and instead of going directly home we instead met at Ikea and prepared ourselves for the Ikea experience.

It’s a very large store, for those of you who’ve never been in one, and they start you off upstairs, and they give you maps, which is good because if you were looking for anything in particular instead of just aimlessly meandering, like we were, you would very quickly go ever so slightly insane if you did not have a map to direct you where to go. They’ve got tiny little ‘rooms’ set up here and there in each section of the store, showing how to incorporate their furniture and accessories into even the tiniest of apartment spaces, and that in itself was rather clever and useful. But the furniture itself? Eh. I was not impressed.

Or rather, maybe I am about 15 years too old to be impressed by Ikea. It is inexpensive, yes, and the sort of furniture one would expect to find in a college student’s apartment, and if I was just starting out and desperately in need of some stuff that matched and didn’t come from a relative’s hand-me-downs or a garage sale, I could see the appeal. But I am not a college student and I am still not a fan of minimilist 70’s style furniture, and so it just didn’t do much for me.

We ate dinner there, because one doesn’t get the chance to eat Swedish meatballs in a furniture store every day, and we found some plain glass drinking glasses down in the kitchen supplies section of the store, which I’ve been looking for for a while now. But then we went home and that was it, and I suspect that unless we suddenly find ourselves in the need for some cheap, boring bookshelves, we will not be going back any time soon.

I woke up early thismorning because the cats thought they really ought to have their breakfast RIGHT NOW. And when I got up, because I was still sort of half asleep and fully intending to crawl back into bed when I was done appeasing the starving hordes, I decided that even though my sinuses never get better on their own without benefit of the miracles of modern chemistry, that the best way to make the intense and painful pressure in my sinuses go away was to just ignore them and go back to sleep and hope it would disappear on its own.

Ha ha ha. By the time I finally crawled out of bed, several hours later, to either take some decongestants or else stab something sharp through my cheekbones to relieve the pressure, I was dizzy, naseous, and feeling like crap. So I took a pill (becuse luckily we still had some) and I crawled back into bed and willed the pill to stay in my stomach and not leave the same way it had entered, like my stomach really thought it should do, and curled up and waited for the medication to kick in. Because the bestest part about sinuses and the meds we all love is that they can take HOURS to work.

So most of the day today was pretty much shot, since getting out of bed wasn’t exactly an option when I was feeling woozy and queasy and getting the distinct impression that my sinuses had now decided the best way to kill me is to make my head implode. But I cannot really complain too much because bad things come in threes, and in my family, I got the better end of the bargain. Because yesterday, instead of going with me to craft night, my mom stayed home to try to put the house back together because they were burgled yesterday afternoon. And the jerks who broke in not only smashed a window and spread glass as far around the house as they could, they also went through and methodically dumped every single drawer and cabinet all over the floor. Bizarrely, it appears that the only things they actually took were some Sacajawea dollar coins from my dad’s dresser and both my parents’ digital cameras. For a brief moment there we thought they’d also taken my grandma’s pearls, which was actually worse than the digital cameras because those can be replaced but heirlooms cannot, but the pearls turned up amid a pile of debris later that night.

And when my dad called to tell me that they’d found the pearls, he told me about the third bad thing for my family, which was that my older sister was in a traffic accident Friday morning and totalled the car. Luckily the boys weren’t in the car with her and aside from some nasty bruises, both drivers are fine. But still, it has not been a good few days for my family, and my little attack of the killer sinuses kind of pales in comparison. Not that that made it any less fun at the time.

After I upgraded to the newest version of MoveableType a month or two ago (thanks to the talents of my very patient husband) I noticed that I was getting quite a bit of comment spam. A LOT of comment spam, actually. And the new version doesn’t synch with the Blacklist plug-in I’d had for the old version, so even though with the new version I’ve set all comments to require approval before they’re posted, it was still a lot of comments to wade through, trying to pick out the real ones from all the riff raff.

And then it occurred to me that I haven’t shut off comments on older entries in quite a while, and in fact, all those comments were coming on only older entries, so I went through a very tedious process of shutting off comments on every single entry for the past six months (which is how long it’s been since I did this last), and have come to the realization that I am just going to have to do this once a month, and that only a month’s worth of entries can ever be active for comments from now on.

It is worth noting that I have not received a single piece of comment spam since I did this.

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The other night I was standing at the kitchen sink, rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. We’ve got a garden window right over the kitchen sink, which looks out over a patch of the back yard we’ve not really touched – mainly it’s served as a place to stack random bricks and stones left over from our previous landscaping endeavors, and it’s also where the trash cans live. So I wasn’t exactly expecting to see anything moving out there, which is why it startled me enough that I apparently gave a little yell.

Somewhere out there, some kid is really upset that their mylar birthday balloon escaped. It had obviously been floating around a while, since it was hovering just at window height. It only hovered there a few seconds before it spiraled out of sight. I have no idea where it eventually ended up – it’s been awfully windy lately, so by the time either of us could have stuffed our feet into shoes and gone to fetch it, it was long gone.

I think I’m just glad that it wasn’t one of those bright yellow smiley face balloons. It was bad enough I was confronted with a shiny birthday cake; it would have been worse to have suddenly seen a face peering in.

This past weekend Richard and I decided to be proactive on dinner food, since we were eying the calendar and realizing that one or both of us has something planned every single night this week. So Sunday afternoon we did a massive grocery shopping spree and then spent about two hours in the kitchen this afternoon cooking.

I started with a Garden Vegetable lasagna from the latest issue of Cooking Light, which looked delicious in the magazine and ended up tasting even better than expected (we actually ended up having that for dinner Sunday and Monday nights). The only downside is that it took a lot of time and counter space and dishes to prepare, but then this is not an uncommon side effect of many of the recipes in Cooking Light, so I suppose I will not hold it against them.

While I was working on that, Richard put together Chicken with Vegetables and Rice, for which we used brown rice instead of the white rice the recipe usually calls for because we are all about the brown rice in this house. Then, since I was *still* working on the time-suck that was the lasagna, he made a Mexican Bean and Rice Casserole, which is one of those disgustingly easy recipes that mostly involves opening a lot of cans and stirring things together into a big bowl and then pouring it all into a pan to bake. And finally, because at this point I’d finished the lasagna that made time stand still, I started making Bumpy Meatballs. These are something that emerged in my family years and years ago. I am sure it’s a recipe we likely picked up through Girl Scouts, because it is the sort of comfort food that is perfect for kids. Basically you just make meatballs with rice and then you smother them with a mixture of cream of cheddar soup and milk and then you toss it into the oven to bake and the rice soaks up the liquid and they turn out marvelous. Because we’re pretty much back on the Weight Watchers Points plan, we used the faux ground beef instead of meat, but the recipe is such that you would likely never even notice the substitution because when it comes to Bumpy Meatballs, cheese sauce trumps all.

In the course of making this last dish, I discovered that Richard is the Meatball Master. I have never managed to make pretty meatballs, no matter how many times I try, because the gunk sticks to my hands and they always end up sort of lopsided and misshapen and tend to fall apart. But give Richard a bowl of mangled (faux) meat goo and he will produce perfectly round meatballs without any apparent effort at all. I know who will be in charge of forming meatballs in our house from now on (hint, it isn’t going to be me)!.

The end result of all this furious cooking was that we now have home cooked meals available to last us for the next few weeks. Richard performed a feat of physics in rearranging the contents of the freezer so that they somehow fit inside, and so far this week we’ve been pretty good about snagging two random boxes each day to thaw in the fridge for dinner that night.