This morning I got up at the usual time, and headed off to meet my mom at Curves – except that somehow she had gotten it into her head that we were flying out yesterday evening, so had made other plans. I suppose, since I was sitting in the parking lot right in front of Curves, I could have gone in and worked out anyway, but the will power just wasn’t strong enough. So instead I swung by a coffee shop and picked up coffee and pastries for breakfast, and returned home to share them with Richard before he left for work.

After this past week’s hectic schedule it was almost sheer relief to have nothing more pressing to do than putter aimlessly around the house. I sorted and put away a few stacks of miscellaneous mail that had been piling on the kitchen counters over the past few days. I emptied and reloaded the dishwasher. I did a few loads of laundry, and tidied the breakfast nook table, and packed my little weekend bag. I even went outside and picked all the peaches that were ripe and had yet to be attacked by the birds. I had to leave two on the tree that hadn’t yet reached prime ripeness, but did manage to rescue four peaches from the birds. They’ve torn more than that to bits, however, and I am telling myself that in a few years we will be glad of a little help from the birds to take care of the sheer volume of fruit this tree is so desperate to produce. But still, it’s a little disappointing, since for a brief moment there I thought we might possibly get enough peaches off our tree to make a pie. How fun it would have been to have been able to serve a white peach pie on July 4th when all our family is here. Ah well.

Because we’ve been working at the church every night this week I haven’t gotten in much, if any knitting time at all since Sunday, and so one of the things I was very much looking forward to doing today was getting some knitting done. I am bringing the lace shawl with me on the plane, since it’s on bamboo needles, and the yarn is so light and thin that it easily rolls into a tiny little bag and fits into my purse. So instead of focusing on the shawl, I decided to focus all my extra time on the afghan I’m making for Richard – thicker yarn means faster knitting, which was just what I needed this morning.

My older sister has called to say she is on her way now, which means it’s time to take care of all the last minute details, like zipping off to the bank to get some cash for the trip, dropping off some library books, and giving all the cats one final scritch or pet before I leave them behind for two whole days. I’d pondered going in to work for half the day today and having my sister pick me up at the office, but after this past week, I’m glad I decided to take the day off instead. Just a little peaceful, quiet downtime to prepare myself for what promises to be a very busy, very fun weekend.

The last four days have been more than a little exhausting. Our church is a little old one from the 1800’s, without a lot of money, so when there’s maintenance work to be done, the members gather together to do it themselves. There’s the benefit of getting to learn new skills (for example, when they were building the new front steps and porch, a lot of us got to learn how to lay bricks), but it does mean the occasional block of time dedicated to hard work. This past week was a blitz week, in that we have had projects going on every night from 5-9pm. If I wasn’t the chair of the Board of Trustees I might have found all manner of excuses to not go every single night, but unfortunately, with position comes responsibility, and all that. So my days this week have been spent getting up, going to work, coming home just long enough to change into grubby clothes, and head over to the church to do things like paint and repair and clean and so forth.

We did a little bit of preview work Sunday afternoon, lugging all the heavy furniture and chairs off the chancel (in preparation for painting) and somehow managing to drag the (extremely heavy and awkward) organ away from the wall far enough so we could get scaffolding behind it. There was also the fun drama of trying to pick a paint color – for months now, several women in the church have been pondering whether to go with something a little different, but when it finally came time to make a decision, after all that dithering somehow we ended up choosing the same color it’s always been. The one modification is that this time the paint will *not* be flat finish, which means when the walls get their inevitable scuffs and marks, this time around we might actually be able to clean them off without having to paint the whole darn thing to cover them over.

Monday and Tuesday night several of us spent working on painting the chancel (and I successfully avoiding having to climb up on the extremely tall and wobbly scaffolding to do it). Wednesday night we removed all the plastic sheeting and tape and somehow did it without removing any of the new paint (a feat which I have never managed to accomplish when painting at home, of course). And tonight a group of us headed upstairs with buckets and sponges and cleaning supplies and scrubbed down the walls and baseboards and doors of the entire upstairs. While we were painting and scrubbing, other people were busily cleaning downstairs rooms, inventorying the kitchen, replacing burnt-out fluorescent bulbs all over the church, washing every single toy from all the Sunday School rooms (and there are a *lot* of toys), and one entire group focused, all week, solely on removing the old water damaged sink and cabinetry in the tiny little parsonage next door and putting in brand new flooring, cabinets, counters, and sink.

Richard had a meeting on Monday, but came to join in the ‘fun’ for the rest of the week. He and another of the basses from the choir headed up to the roof with huge brushes and buckets of sealer and cleaned the flat part of the roof, then covered it with two coats of sealing paint (the reasons for this were made fairly obvious by the line of wastebaskets that had been set up underneath the leaks in the ceiling in some of the rooms below). They came down each night covered in splotches of white sealant, but there was a lot of laughing and joking and talk of pigeons with digestive problems, so I think somewhere in all the work they also managed to have a little bit of fun.

There’s more work still scheduled for tomorrow night, but I will not be involved (Gosh. Gee. Darn). I’ve assured everyone that I will be thinking about them all when I’m off to Las Vegas with my sisters (somehow none of them believed me, I think). I suppose I should feel a little guilty for skipping out on the last day, but I just cannot muster up even a smidge of regret. Four evenings of nothing but coming home to work, work, work, is more than enough for me.

When Richard’s laptop was stolen, and he got a brand new one to replace it (thanks to the wonderful thing that is insurance), we pondered swapping out my old one for something a wee bit shinier as well. But mine seemed like it was still holding up fairly well, and since I really have no need for anything more advance than what I had – a Sony Vaio we purchased about 3 years ago (back when we were both working for Benthic Creatures), it didn’t seem worth spending the money.

Then the warranty renewal came up for my laptop. and we discussed the fact that it is 3 years old and has had to be sent in for the same repair several times now – and Richard’s (prior to being stolen, that is) had to go in even more often for the same thing. After a period of time the cooling fan seems to break, and the laptop begins to shut down intermittently, and without any warning whatsoever. And naturally, once we made the decision to let the warranty expire instead of renewing it one more time, the fan in my laptop started acting up almost immediately. I’ve been trying to avoid problems by putting it into hibernate whenever possible, figuring I’d try to hold out maybe til the end of the year before thinking about finding a replacement. It’s not so crucial for Richard, since he’s got his desktop computer to use, but for me, my little laptop is the only computer I’ve got. So after it shut down on me in the middle of working on something far too many times to count this week, I finally gave up.

This afternoon we headed off to Fry’s, and bought me a pretty new laptop. It was actually a pretty painless procedure, and I think I found exactly what I was looking for. I don’t play graphic-intense games, I don’t really listen to much music or watch DVD’s on my laptop, and I have no need for massive amounts of storage. All I really wanted was a 17 inch screen, enough speed to make things run smoothly, and the ability to burn the occasional CD, without having to pay for any extra features I would never use. When we told the sales guy, he didn’t even blink an eye. He just led us to the end of the aisle, and pointed to the Fujitsu Lifebook. Heck, this thing will even read the memory stick from my Clie. Yay!

In Fry’s, when you go to pay for things, you have to snake your way through several aisles of shelves of impulse buys. It always amuses me to see what they’ve got for sale on these shelves, since interspersed between the assorted candies and snacks are usually a fairly large selection of personal hygiene products (just what everyone would go to a computer and electronic mega store to buy), and of course the few random toys and accessories to make any nerds think twice about passing by empty handed.

We’ve succumbed to the Fry’s impulse buy aisle twice now. The first time was a year or two ago when we could not pass up on teeny portable USB drives that had such a great rebate they only ended up $10 each. This time, Richard spied extra long outlet strips, and after a little bit of discussion, we were sold

See, one of the problems with our computer room is that when we were building the house, this was not actually supposed to *be* the office. The room that is now the library was originally supposed to be the office, so that room has tons of extra electrical outlets. The room that is now the office, however, was just going to be the guest bedroom, so it’s got only the normal number of outlets, all of them situated in the most inconvenient spots possible. When the contractors built in our main computer desk (which sits in the center of the room with file drawers on either side, so that each of us has a workstation in the center, as well as one directly behind each of us against the side walls, they left space to access the main electrical outlets, but getting to them requires crawling underneath the desks and going through interesting contortions to reach through a narrow opening between the desks to reach the outlet. The sheer volume of electronic gadgets we’ve had set up on the main desk has resulted over the years in a veritable web-like tangle of cords and surge protectors, all cleverly woven through ancient plastic milk crates to try to protect them from the prying teeth of a certain orange kitty cat. We’ve talked about having someone come in and rewire the room, or at least lay down a strip of outlets across the top of the desk. Turns out all we needed was a four-foot long strip with a dozen available outlets to make it all work out.

It took a bit of doing, including climbing around underneath the desks to untangle the mess. Turns out we had a small pile of adaptors and cords that were plugged into various surge protectors, but apparently nothing else – the consequence of four and a half years of gradual upgrades and equipment replacement.

And since we were going to be rearranging and reorganizing the mess of electronic gadgets anyway, we swung by a hardware store on the way home and picked up a set of nesting wire mesh shelves. While most of the mess of cords had been living in milk crates underneath the desk, another tangled pile had its own stack of milk crates on top of the desk, housing all the little pieces of equipment that allow us to have our happy little wireless network in our house. These new shelves give each of the little routers and hubs lots more space, and hopefully a slightly more dust free environment to hang out. This can only be a good thing when it comes to electronics, I’m sure of it.

I’m slowly transferring everything over from the old laptop to the new one, and marveling at how crisp and clear everything is on this new machine. We’re not giving up on the old one completely, by the way – once I get everything I need off it, we’re going to give it a brain wipe, and then – since voiding the warranty is not so much a concern anymore, we’re going to try to crack it open and give it a good cleaning and see if that might fix the fan problem. If it works, Richard gets yet another Linux box (because in the world of open source geekery one can never have too many Linux boxes); if it doesn’t, well, I know where there’s a place where we can recycle our old electronics, and my old, dead laptop will just have to join the pile of obsolete equipment that’s been waiting in our garage for longer than I care to think about, for that some day in the distant future when we finally get around to getting rid of it.

The end of May marks the beginning of birthday season in Richard’s and my combined family. First up is Richard’s oldest sister, who is exactly five days older than me, and then comes my birthday. June is positively littered with birthdays and such – my dad, Richard’s dad, Father’s Day (for both of them), my oldest nephew, and Richard’s aunt. Close on the heels of June comes July, with birthdays for half a dozen more members of Richard’s family. So planning for birthday (or other) celebrations starts to get a little interesting, as we all try to figure out the best way to fit everything in.

Last weekend we did a combination celebration for my dad and my oldest nephew’s birthday (he turned 7! How did he get to be this old?), as well as Father’s Day. My older sister made a birthday cake for the two of them to share (my nephew got his own cake at his own party with several other little boys today). There were lots of presents to unwrap, what with all three reasons for presents. My mom made chicken parmesan and my dad uses any excuse to use their nifty bread machine. They’d found these marvelous air rocket toys earlier in the week – the rockets were squishy foam and you shot them into the air by pulling back the tube and forcing them off the launcher with a blast of air. We took those outside to the front lawn and the entire family had a wonderful time launching those goofy little rockets into the air. We quickly discovered that the youngest nephew was perfectly willing to dash off to collect the rockets, over and over, since, being much younger and closer to the ground, he didn’t mind bending over to pick them up.

The oldest nephew got roller blades for his birthday, and had to go try them out immediately. Watching him, with his helmet and his elbow and knee pads, had me remembering my sisters and I and our first roller skates, which were noisy metal contraptions you put on over your shoes, and then tightened with a metal key. The whole concept of helmets and padding never came up back then; we’d just strap on our skates and hit the sidewalk. I’m sure the neighbors got a little tired of the sound of those things scraping along the concrete, but that’s what all the kids had, so it was no big deal. Then came the boot skates (and amusingly I believe I still own a pair of boot skates – not only that, but I think it’s likely they actually might still fit). Roller blades really didn’t hit it big until we were in college. A friend and I rented some for the day and spent the afternoon careening around corners and grasping wildly for stop signs and telephone poles because we could never figure out how to make the darn things stop. Now I doubt any of my nephew’s classmates have ever even heard of roller skates – especially not clanky metal ones that had to be adjusted with a skate key. It makes me feel a little nostalgic. Okay, and also more than just a little old.

This weekend we headed down to Richard’s parents’ house for his dad’s birthday/Father’s Day thing. His dad is heavily into the Scottish guilds and is a member (and on the council or something) of one particular clan – even owns, and wears, kilts. So he was off at the Scottish Games in Campbell when we arrived, and we headed off to meet him there.

The Scottish Games in Campbell, much like the ones here in our home town, are a tad on the small side. Really, if you want to see a big one, you have to hit the ones in Pleasanton, where they end the day with hundreds upon hundreds of bagpipers all converging into one massive army making something vaguely like music heard through the buzzing of a million industrious bees. But still, it’s fun to wander around, see all the clan tables and tents, and ponder if there’s anything cool to buy. I’d dressed according to weather.com, which swore it was going to be cool, with chances of rain, so I was naturally dying of heat shortly after we got there. Luckily we found a table of suitable t-shirts, so I demonstrated skills learned during long ago coed bus trips for high school and junior high band competitions, and changed from sweatshirt to t-shirt right there in the middle of everything, all without flashing any hint of skin. Later we wandered into the indoor areas and listened to a little group consisting of hammer dulcimer, drum, various sizes of flutes, and a singer who was actually pretty good.

So now the latest installments of the summer birthday celebration are done and, with a few exceptions, we’ve got all the gifts for the July birthdays purchased, wrapped, and mailed or delivered early, just in case we can’t make it down at the appointed time. And we can breathe a little sigh of relief and forget all about birthdays, except for the random one here or there, until November, when the winter birthday season starts up and we get to do this all over again.

Years ago, Starbucks used to sell a cinnamon chip scone. It was one of my very favorite breakfast treats – to go to Starbucks in the morning on the way to work and purchase a double tall, nonfat, no-foam latte and a cinnamon chip scone.

But then, back in 2002, for some reason known only to whoever it was in charge of pastry ordering for the corporate offices, Starbucks stopped carrying my scone. Oh, they tried to replace it with an apple cinnamon concoction, memorable only because the apple pieces were rubbery and not at all pleasant to chew. Eventually that disappeared from the menu entirely, since apparently I was not the only one who didn’t see it as a decent replacement.

Starbucks in other areas of the country still carry cinnamon chip scones, but they are made by a different bakery, and they do not taste the same. I have looked in every bakery we have entered since then, but alas, nowhere have I ever found a suitable replacement. I even searched high and low for a recipe for the scones, but since the recipe surely had to involve cinnamon chips, and since cinnamon chips weren’t something I had ever seen before, I figured that was a lost cause.

Then, a few months ago, while searching for toffee chips in the baking aisle at the grocery store, I spied something new. Hershey now makes cinnamon chips! I snatched a bag, emailed my sister (the budding pastry chef) for some likely scone recipes, and then sat back and pondered all the possibilities.

Last week I finally made cinnamon chip scones. But they were a little disappointing. For one thing, Hershey’s cinnamon chips are not very cinnamony. And for another, for being little chips of disappointing flavor, they were unreasonably high in calories – Richard calculated out that there were 38 Points in the entire bag of chips, and the recipe called for the full bag. Ouch. The scones themselves were tasty, but they just weren’t worth all the caloric overload. And overall, the experiment was a bit of a disappointment. Richard brought the remainder of the scones to work (where one of his coworkers dubbed me the scone queen, or something like that), because they *were* good…but they just weren’t what I was hoping they would be.

I have been mulling over the issue for the past week or so, pondering ways in which I could try again, this time with something with a bit more cinnamony kick (and a lot less guilt), and then I remembered the cinnamon ornaments I had made, years and years ago. It was all due to an article I found in some random magazine that listed a bunch of lovely holiday crafts one could do with children. As I recall, this same article also had a recipe for peppermint ribbon candy that it claimed was so easy even kids could do it. We will not discuss the disaster that ensued when college-aged women attempted to make ribbon candy.

The cinnamon ornaments, however, were a different story. You mixed up huge quantities of cinnamon with a little applesauce, then rolled it out and cut it into shapes. Let them dry, drill holes in one end, and poof, you had lovely holiday-shaped ornaments that exuded a pleasant cinnamon scent. Or rather, you *would* have had lovely holiday shaped ornaments if they were made by someone who was a wee bit more artistic; my stars turned out a little lumpy and misshapen. But they did smell nice, and I strung them on some red ribbon and they were hung near the door for a few years. Eventually they disappeared, however, and I’m not sure what happened to them. But remembering those ornaments, it occurred to me that the dough could surely be made a bit thinner, and then one could take a large mallet or hammer to them once dried, and smash them into teeny nearly calorie-free bits, which could then be used as, perhaps, a suitable substitute for Hershey’s disappointing barely cinnamon flavored things.

A quick internet search revealed that the cinnamon ornament has been listed in far too many children’s craft sites to count, but basically, the general recipe is that you mix one part powdered cinnamon with one part unsweetened applesauce, stir it into a dough, and have happy shaping fun. So yesterday, since I had the time, I decided to give my theory a shot. I mixed cinnamon and applesauce together (it’s a messy endeavor because cinnamon, in large quantities, tends to poof over the sides of the bowl no matter how carefully you try to stir), then spread it out as thin as I could onto some parchment paper on a big baking sheet. I preheat the oven to a low temperature, popped the pan in, and then turned the oven off, since all I wanted to do was dry them quickly. That was yesterday evening.

This morning I removed the (mostly) dry cinnamon stuff from the oven, and broke it into little chunks. Then I dragged out the recipe and did a few more substitutions, like swapping half the white flour for whole wheat flour (because we are all about the fiber, yes we are).

The good news is that with my homemade cinnamon applesauce ‘chips’ and the whole wheat flour, I literally cut the total number of Points in the recipe by half. The bad news is that the scones still need work. And I’m not so sure that my rather primitive cinnamon chip recipe is necessarily the best. But at least these taste pretty good with a little apple butter, and the whole experience has been kind of fun. And the house still smells rather strongly of cinnamon, but in a nice, comforting sort of way.

The first story occurred as I was at the grocery store, leaving it actually, and heading for my car. There was a little old man working his way around a car, and he was hanging onto the side. I slowed down, since it looked like maybe he needed some help, and he saw me and gave a strained smile.

“It’s no fun being handicapped,” he said with a sigh, and I stopped.

“Can I help you with something?”

He looked embarrassed. “I need to go to the bathroom. My wife is in the store, but…I can’t wait. I really need to go.”

I thought about various options. “Would it help if I brought over a cart and you could lean on it?” I asked, thinking that maybe he just needed some help walking. But he shook his head, and it occurred to me that maybe there was more to the procedure, especially when he mentioned that he really needed his wife again.

So I asked if he’d like me to have her paged, and he looked so very relieved. He told me her name and I marched right back to the store and cornered the first employee I found – a young man restocking the carts. It took a few attempts to explain what I wanted him to do, but once it finally sunk in, he nodded and immediately went inside, hopefully to page the man’s wife so he could get some relief.

I thought about waiting, but I wasn’t sure what else I could do. So I told the man that she’d been paged, and wished him a nice day, and continued on to my car.

As I was pulling out of the parking lot I saw the young employee heading back across the parking lot toward the old man. I wondered if he’d been able to page the wife, or if she would have even heard her name over the usual ambient noise of a grocery store during the after-work rush. I wondered if maybe the employee would be able to offer more help to him than I could. I wondered if it all worked out okay.

The second story happened earlier. As I was headed off to a local coffee shop this morning to get some coffee, I noticed a woman with a funnel, carefully pouring something through one of the holes in a manhole cover – not into the sewer, but into the smaller covers that show up periodically in the middle of residential streets. I didn’t think much of it, until I came home a little later and found her doing the same thing to an entirely different utility hold cover a bit further down the street.

It was late morning and now that I had coffee I was feeling more polite and willing to be friendly, so I stopped beside her, rolled down my window, smiled, and said “Okay, I’m curious. What are you doing?”

It was like I’d put a nickel in a slot. She started rambling about how pouring water down these holes filled up a particular pipe, and when it was full, something was triggered. At first I thought maybe there was something to what she was saying, but then the story got more convoluted – something about how what was triggered was old bills that would then have to be paid, although I wasn’t entirely sure if it was the city that had to pay the bills or somebody else. She talked about how her whole family used to do this to every single one of these conduits on the entire city, and in all the surrounding cities, and then somehow Michael Jackson entered the rambling, and there was something about how when she paid her bills to the utility company she would print the letter G backwards and that would also trigger whatever it was that she claimed pouring water into the conduits triggers. Then she started leaning on the window sill and gesturing and I realized that not only did I have no clue what she was talking about, it was pretty obvious that this woman was likely not playing with a full deck, and maybe I should try to quietly drive away and leave her to her pouring her water down the conduit covers in peace.

Luckily at this point a truck was coming up behind me, so I motioned behind me, noted that I really needed to move my car out of the way, wished her a nice day, and drove away. When I left her she was staring back down at the conduit cover, clutching her jug of water. I have no idea how long she was there, or if she just kept moving down the
street, pouring water into all the conduits in the hopes of triggering whatever it was that she was so sure would happen. I though about calling the police but it was just water – nothing that wouldn’t’ go down those conduits in the rainy season anyway – and if that’s what kept her happy and occupied, well, why not. But still. Some stories have endings you want to know, and some stories maybe you were better off never asking about in the first place.

In my next life I want to be one of those people who can sleep late on weekends. This has nothing to do with the fact that I have cats who have developed such a fine sense of hearing that the sound of my eyes opening can make them come running. Nor does this have anything to do with the fact that as I have gotten older (sheesh, when did mid 30’s become ‘older’!), my bladder’s capacity to last through the night has seriously diminished. No, this has everything to do with the fact that my brain is so wired to wake up at somewhere around 6 am (because that is when we wake up on work days) that even on days when we can sleep late, it simply cannot handle any change in the routine. Oh, I might sneak in an extra half hour here or there, but none of this sleeping in til the luxurious hour of, say, 8 or 9. Sigh.

On the other hand, being wide awake at o-dark thirty on a weekend morning means lots more knitting time before we have to go anywhere or do anything. So that’s what I did this morning, when my internal clock decided that sleeping past 6:30 am just was not an option. I got up, fed the cats, and then went downstairs and did a full pattern repeat on the lace shawl.

Which leads me into noting that, oh, by the way, I have decided that I must now learn how to knit lace. I’ve mastered cables (did that early on with my very first knitting project, in fact – you long term readers may recall the adorable cable sweater I made for my nephew – the one that ended up not being able to fit over his head, sigh), I’ve mastered two-color slipstitching, and most recently I’ve mastered socks. Next up was either Fair Isle (those patterned bands of color you often see on sweaters, for the non-knitters among you. Think Scandanavian type designs, if that helps), which, while I fully intend to learn it one of these days, is not high on the priority list, intarsia (again, not high on the priority list), or lace. So even though I do not wear shawls, nor know anyone who wears shawls or ever *would* wear a shawl, especially a shawl made from yarn about the thickness of dental floss, I am making a lace shawl. It’s this one, in case you’re wondering (because I am sure you all were dying to know), and after the first few rows of dropping stitches and swearing (knitting is, after all, a ladylike art, so you know swearing has to be involved at *some* point), it all clicked. But it’s the kind of thing where I still need a quiet room and very little distraction. So if I had to be up that early this morning at least it wasn’t all for naught.

We’ve had a mostly quiet day. We went to church, mainly out of habit, and I sat in the back and made funny faces at a little four-month old baby with the most marvelous fuzzy patch of hair on her head that stood straight up and made her look perpetually astonished, and pretty much paid absolutely no attention to the sermon as a result. Afterwards, because I happen to be the chair of the Board of Trustees and therefore somewhat responsible for general building maintenance, I was handed a clipboard and a list of random maintenance and renovation tasks for the church and I and the two guys who know about construction and all that goes with it wandered through various rooms and even wandered outside for a brief moment, to discuss which items from the never-ending list we wanted to try to accomplish during the all church work week at the end of the month. Or rather, I made a few suggestions and then they would go off on tangents discussing how best to reroute electrical cables or something or other, and then I would interject ‘so about the painting’ to bring them back around, and somehow we got it all planned. Sort of. Or at the very least, we narrowed the list down to a more manageable number.

Afterwards, I sat in the sanctuary and worked on the lace shawl – which mainly entailed knitting one row and then quietly swearing as I undid the entire thing, timing it all so perfectly that I only had a few more stitches to unravel by the time Richard was done with his meeting. We pondered various lunch options, but then decided that the mature, adult thing to do would be to go to Costco and consume sustenance in the form of samples, and also see if there was anything there we could not live without. The theme of the samples today seemed to be all meat, all the time, but at least the trip was fruitful in that we scored a four-foot long folding table for me. I’ve been wanting a folding table to use as craft space for a while, and now that I’ve got the knitting machine (it finally arrived this week!), which requires a flat surface with square edges (and unfortunately both the dining room and breakfast nook tables have rounded edges), the need was a little more urgent. So now I have a lovely sturdy table, with perfectly square edges, which will fold up and store nicely into the closet with all my yarn and other crafting type paraphernalia (although if I keep this up we may have to revisit that random idea we once had about looking into expanding out over the garage – ha ha).

Richard went off to demo Linux to people at the Co-op in Davis and I stayed home and worked on the shawl a little more (this time without any swearing at all – yay!), and then he came home and made dinner because after he got those books yesterday he’s been quite motivated to try out some of the new recipes. Tonight was chicken with a spice rub with just a little kick to it, and corn on the cob that he put directly over the coals until it was just perfect, and it was delicious. I am so very glad that he likes grilling, and doesn’t mind being outside in the heat, standing over burning coals, dealing with the smoke and the occasional yellow jacket or other buzzy sort of critter, while I stay inside in blissful air conditioned comfort.

The last two days I have been very inspired to actually cook. The past few weeks have been marked with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for making something at home more complicated than a box of Kraft Mac and Cheese, or going out to eat, but yesterday, for some reason, it finally clicked.

Last night I made salmon cakes, by smashing up several salmon patties (purchased from Trader Joe’s so at least I can rest assured they were environmentally friendly chunks of dead fish) with some bread crumbs, onion flakes, egg, and seasoning. Then I spritzed a pan with nonstick spray, cooked them until the salmon looked like it was done, and served them with green beans and a side of brown rice. They turned out quite delicious, for something thrown together at the last moment. I tossed the recipe, such as it is, onto What’s for Dinner, because they turned out pretty well. Likely I will have to make them again in the near future to work out some tweaks to the recipe, but there you are. My very own recipe for salmon cakes. I am sure that it is extremely similar to everyone else in the world’s recipe for salmon cakes, but I couldn’t be bothered to go find out.

Riding on the success of last night’s dinner, this morning I decided that it had been far too long since I last made (or attempted to make) Paprika Chicken, and it was time to remedy that situation. I found this recipe years ago and have made it numerous times since, usually to rave reviews. But it is also the recipe I seem to be most capable of ruining. There was the one fateful evening I accidentally grabbed the wrong orange box from the cupboard and put in a tablespoon of baking soda instead of cornstarch (in case you were curious, baking soda and tomato sauce make an exciting, nasty smelling, bubbly combination which neither of us was brave enough to taste). And the last time I tried to make Paprika Chicken, I think I must have put in a tablespoon of cayenne pepper and 1/8 teaspoon of paprika, instead of the other way around, making the dish a wee bit nuclear, and also quite inedible.

This time, however, it turned out marvelously. I suspect we’ll be eating the leftovers for dinner tomorrow night.

Earlier this week Richard replaced the garbage disposal. We’d been kind of building up to this; we bought it on Sunday, thinking we’d have time to do it, and then we thought maybe we’d have time on Monday (but when we came back from the zoo we were too tired), so it had to wait for a week night.

I volunteered to help, but he didn’t need any assistance. So I figured the best way I could be useful was to go into another room and listen for any yelling, which might indicate injury (to either Richard or the disposal). There was no yelling, however; turns out he managed to install it with a minimum of swearing or problems – a much smoother foray into plumbing related house maintenance than when we replaced the faucet in the rental house, years ago.

It was good we managed to get the disposal replaced, since we had a full house this evening, which meant it was definitely needed. My parents and my older sister and her family came over for my belated birthday celebration. We’d purchased a huge slab of salmon at a weak moment earlier in the week, which turned out to have been a good idea, since Richard ended up cutting it into smaller and more manageable chunks and tossing it on the grill with some fresh asparagus and green beans and just enough teriyaki sauce. My mom and my older sister and I stayed inside the nice cool house with the little boys while all the men went outside to congregate around the grill. It’s one of those odd gender things I will never understand – why it is that men feel the need to go stand outside, in the heat, beside a big metal can full of burning things which is emitting clouds of smoke and occasionally a spark.

The boys found Richard’s K’nex set and the Legos we bought specifically to entertain small people when they visit, and spent a majority of their time having noisy fun with either those, or with Richard’s old cast iron train cars. These things are solid metal, extremely sturdy, and pretty much impervious to anything that small child could do. I am happy to report that wood laminate stands up quite well to two determined children and three extremely heavy iron train cars (each about a foot long) being rolled as fast as little boys can push them around and around and around the floor. They were a lot of fun to watch.

This year the general theme of my birthday presents has been all about enabling the knitting addiction. Richard’s aunt sent me a pattern book for knit rugs. Richard got me some marvelous knit pattern software, and a knitting machine (which might possibly be lost in limbo, considering how long it’s taking for the thing to be shipped). My parents got me needle organizers – one for circulars and one for double pointeds – which means, of course, that now I must wander around the house and figure out where I’ve managed to stash my slowly growing needle collection so I can now have them all in one convenient spot, next time I’m frantically searching for that pair of size 4 circulars I could swear I had. I also got a DVD of Monsters, Inc. from my older sister, which is one of our favorite funny movies.

There was ice cream cake from Ben & Jerry’s, and more talking and more careening around the floor of heavy train cars, which also meant there was a lot of laughing. The boys got their baths upstairs in our big garden window tub (where I am thinking we are eventually going to have to break down and put up some shelves because there are only so many devil ducks that any one bathtub can hold). Then everyone hugged their goodbyes and my older sister and brother-in-law took their freshly scrubbed and not-at-all-tired-just-ask-them little boys home, and we are now relaxing and I am pondering whether or not to tackle the dishes or leave them til later, and also whether there was any ice cream cake left, and thus ends another birthday period in our house.

Since we both had today off from work – it being Memorial Day and all – I decided I wanted to go to the San Francisco Zoo. The fact that today is my birthday just meant that it was going to be a birthday trip, but I’d have wanted to go even if it wasn’t.

We’ve managed to get to the zoo once a year now for the past few years, and it’s always a lot of fun. We’ve learned that the best way to go to the zoo, especially on a holiday when it’s more likely to be crowded, is to get there when they open, so that by the time it gets crowded, we’ve seen everything we wanted to see, and we’re ready to go home.

We went to see the lemurs first, because Richard and I are all about the lemurs. They were in fine form, lots of barking and meandering and – like anything vaguely feline in form and behavior – lots of lounging around , either singly or in groups. Then we got distracted by an extraordinary amount of noise coming from the rest of the primates. Turns out the howler monkeys and the simians had a LOT to say, and they felt the need to say it at the top of their voices.

Then it was on to the Africa exhibit, which was brand new when we went to see it last year. We saw a herd of giraffes, ostriches, and a pair of , who seemed to need to stay right next to each other no matter where they went.

As we were nearing the end of the meandering path through the African Savannah, we spotted a door to something else – a door neither Richard nor I recall being there before (so either we missed it last year, or it’s been added on since last time we were there). Inside a large netted area were a handful of additional critters, including some of the world’s ugliest scavenger birds, some extremely fat squatty birds that resembled either pheasants or chickens, and which were covered with a Escher-esc pattern of tiny black and white checks. And lurking in the back corner was one of the cutest things at the zoo – a dik-dik! It’s the tiniest little thing. I looked it up online and the info says they usually don’t get to more than about 8 pounds. It’s got a snout that’s longer than the usual deer-type critters, and the nose tends to twitch and wiggle as if maybe, somewhere back in its ancestry, some dik-dik had a passing fling with an anteater. Another distant ancestor had a thing for rabbits, if the hind end is anything to go by.

We spent a little bit of time watching the gorillas, since the large silverback was wandering around looking bored, and the younger (I think female) kept zipping here and there. It looked like one of the zookeepers was inside the building, so the little gorilla kept hanging out by the door, but she would hang out by sitting on top of a huge rubber ball and rocking back and forth. Then she decided she’d had enough of that, and it was time to go sit in one of the food bowls. All the while the older female did her best to move through half a dozen sprawl positions on a flat rock which was probably a lovely, sun-warmed spot to nap.

This time we finally got to see the bald eagle; most of the time it’s been so hidden behind the trees on its little island that we cannot see it. Apparently something happened to the penguins because there were a lot fewer than in years past – although we did get to see just how fast a penguin can swim, because as we stood there, one of them decided that it needed to do some speed laps Right Now, and took off, zipping madly around the pool, and occasionally leaping out of the water, dolphin style. It was amazing to watch, especially because all the other penguins seemed determined to ignore the speedy one completely.

It was a wonderful day. We saw a very lazy polar bear (don’t you just want to go poke those toes? Sleepy polar bears always look so friendly and harmless – until of course you remember that to polar bears, we humans are actually prey). I had to snap a picture of the snoozing zebra because I love the ‘zipper line’ stripe along the tummy. By the time we made it over to the prairie dogs and the meerkats, it was getting warm out, and most of them were staying inside their burrows. But one little prairie dog came over to the glass wall and rather abruptly starting leaping about and turning from side to side…it almost looked as if he was dancing with his reflection. Richard got a terrific shot of the ‘two’ of them that looks as if they are trying to hold hands.

We stayed longer than we have in the past, and by the time we headed out to the car, we were exhausted. Since it had been a bit chilly in the morning, we started the day wearing jackets, but then those came off, and it didn’t occur to either Richard or I that we might have wanted to put on sun block. So we’re both sporting sunburns on our arms and faces.

There’d been some discussion about trying to have all my family come over this evening for a birthday dinner. But my older sister and her family had plans for a cul-de-sac block party barbeque, and by the time we got home, we were so tired that I was glad we didn’t have to somehow come up with enough energy to entertain guests. So instead we stopped for dinner on the way home, and then came home and lolled on the couches in the living room and watched my new copy of Noises Off and I think a long soak in a hot tub might be in order later, to try to soothe all our tired aches and pains. But even though we’re both worn out, it’s been a fun birthday. Any day that includes a trip to the San Francisco Zoo is a marvelous day.