The last time I called the pharmacy to get a refill on my happy pills (aka birth control) they called me back to note that I had no more refills. A quick call to the doctor garnered me a two-month reprieve, but there was also a stern reminder that it was time to make my yearly appointment if I wanted them to give me any more. So this afternoon I left work early and headed off to my doctor for the yearly poking and prodding and all the fun that goes along with it.

I’ve been dealing with these nasty sinus infections now for the better part of three years or so, and I am getting awfully tired of having them come on every time I come down with a cold. Plus I seem to get sick more often these days, despite the exercise and healthier diet. So this doctor’s visit I finally decided that I had enough, and brought up the subject of allergy shots. We talked about my symptoms, and he agreed that – especially since my known allergies (to most things small and fuzzy) have been getting progressively worse over the past few years as well – seeing an allergist would be a good idea for me. So he’ll set that up and once the insurance company has agreed that it will be covered they’ll call me to schedule an appointment. I must admit that I’m actually looking forward to it. At long last I’ll finally know exactly what I’m allergic to – and maybe I can finally *do* something about it beyond taking random allergy meds and having to deal with the occasional and unexpected breakout in hives and swelling of throat when I am exposed. Plus, anything that might get rid of these damn sinus infections is a good thing.

It turns out that since my health is otherwise pretty stable I only have to get the worst of the poking and prodding every other year. So aside from peering into my nose and throat, the appointment was mostly us sitting there and chatting about all my questions. But then he brought something up which took me by surprise. He noted that now that I am 35, it’s time for me to start thinking about scheduling my first mammogram.

I will admit that my first response was to gape at him. And then I picked my jaw up off the floor and gave a weak little laugh. I know that it’s something I have to ‘look forward’ to, but really, I didn’t think it was something I’d have to worry about for at least another five years or more. I thought that sort of thing didn’t come up in conversations with doctors until you were in your 40’s. Yeesh.

I think my shock amused him, and he noted that it wasn’t necessary for me to get it right away. But I have a feeling I’m going to be getting more and more pressure over the next few years until I *do* schedule it, so I suppose I might as well suck it up and get it over with sooner rather than later. But still, it was kind of a nasty wake-up call. I have never lied about my age – nor do I understand the woman who feel it necessary to do so – but sometimes it sneaks up on me just how ‘old’ I am. At 35 I can no longer say I am in my early 30’s – and by my next birthday ‘late 30’s’ will become a reality. It won’t be that much longer until suddenly I am facing 40 squarely in the eye and middle age as well. And really, that doesn’t bother me as much as I suppose it might. But really, mammograms. Why do I have to be suddenly old enough for *that*?

After Saturday’s adventures we all slept pretty hard last night. I made potato cheese soup for dinner (there really was a good reason I brought my blender with me) and we snacked on Oreos and Cheeto’s, and squashed a few more crunchy ants, and then we all curled up on various couches and chairs in the living room and did some crafting work. But we were all pretty exhausted and not much in the mood to do anything that required any amount of energy, so eventually we just gave up and went to bed.

We got up this morning and ate donuts for breakfast because every Sisters’ Only weekend must have donuts. Then we cleaned up the cabin and gathered up all our things and wandered around the cabin to pick out about half a dozen huge and perfect pine cones for my little sister to take home with her. My older sister balanced her camera as well as she could on the hood of her car and then we three posed in front of the cabin. And then, alas, it was time to go. We piled back into the car and drove back down those windy, bumpy mountain roads, back to those boring stretches of 99 and I-5. There was a brief detour into Galt to make use of bathrooms at a McDonalds (bathrooms blessedly free of jumbo-sized ants or spiders) and to get soft serve ice cream cones. We dutifully finished off the remnants of our weekend – a few leftover donuts and Oreos and the last sorry dregs from the bag of Cheetos. My older sister and I dropped my little sister back at the airport with hugs and goodbyes. And then she took me home, with only a brief detour to drop off the key to the cabin to her mother-in-law and have a short chat about all the fun we’d had.

I’m pretty exhausted at this point, so I shall end this entry with pictures from our trip, in no particular order. In case it wasn’t obvious, we had a marvelous time.

This is my little sister. I included this picture because, despite the fact that she is sticking her tongue out at me, it is actually a really good picture. Isn’t she gorgeous?

This is a view from the top of the descent, where we started the rappel. It doesn’t look so bad, does it. What you cannot see is that there is a ledge down there where you get to stop and catch your breath. That ledge tricks you into thinking it won’t be all that bad. It’s only after that ledge that things get really scary.

This picture came out really grainy because it’s the only way I could lighten it enough so you could see. If you peer really closely you’ll see my older sister at the top (just follow those ropes up). That’s the point where you come down over the rock face and start descending into open space. See how very high up that is? It feels even higher when you are the one clinging to that rope and doing your best to talk yourself into continuing on down.

She’s getting closer now. It’s about here that we could hear her – she was doing Lamaze breathing. I am sure that my little sister and I were probably sounding just as panicked when we were at this point too. This is also about the point when the guides told me I had to stop and wait for my little sister to get out of the way.

And here she is, almost to the bottom.

Some pretty cave formations. I took this picture as we were climbing back up the very steep spiral staircase to get out of the cave.

The three of us afterwards, posing with the instructor. We are all grinning like fools because it is over and it was amazing, and most of all, we did not die.

Since the cabin is located in the mountains, there were, of course, bugs. And they grow bugs a tad bit bigger up there in the mountains than they do down in the flat, dry farmland of home. We squashed quite a few of what my older sister referred to as ‘crunchy ants’ – huge black ants that would skitter across the floor – and I was, unfortunately, the first to take a shower on Saturday morning, so was lucky enough to get to deal with two huge black spiders who’d been lurking in the shower curtain until I was silly enough to try to turn on the water. It’s a novel experience trying to wash and rinse one’s hair while keeping an eagle eye on the shower curtain, the window, and the ceiling all at the same time, and doing one’s best not to touch either curtain or wall, in case of further spider incursions.

The original plan for Saturday was to go back to Murphys and wander around the very cute little downtown area. First there was the Fun with Spiders, and then my little sister concocted ‘damn fine omelets’ for us for breakfast (her term for them) that really were quite delicious. Then there was more lounging around reading or making cards or, in my case, starting and restarting that stupid afghan until I finally settled on a design that seemed to work for the yarn I had. And then finally we got ourselves organized and headed off to Murphys to do some exploring.

It’s a cute little town with the main street lined with shops of all sorts. There was the little bath and beauty shop where my little sister succumbed to the lure of bath bombs shaped like cute little animals. There was the toyshop where my sisters marveled about being able to wander around and just *look* without small people insisting on wanting to touch and play and buy. There was the art shop we wandered in to, full of beautifully detailed pictures of frogs cleverly hidden within all manner of flowers. Eventually we decided we were hungry, so we had lunch at the old Murphys Hotel, and since it was such a lovely day we ate outside in the courtyard, under towering trees. There was a wedding scheduled for later in the day and we amused ourselves by watching what was quite possibly the mother of the bride dither endlessly about the placement of the chairs, since she and another person kept arranging and rearranging them to within centimeter specifications, time and time again.

I’m not sure where we actually picked up the fliers – just that they were available in a lot of the little shops. There are a number of caves around that area and my older sister mentioned how she’d been interested in checking them out, to see if they might be something she could take her kids to later. We picked up a few of the fliers, and in flipping through them I happened to notice that one of them offers the chance to rappel down into the cavern itself, and even though I am the one with the most advanced fear of heights, apparently that part of my brain was fast asleep when I suggested that we go do that, and right away.

So we got ice cream sundaes at an overcrowded and under-air conditioned little sweet shop and then we set off for the cavern, eventually finding it through no help at all from the lack of well-placed signage. The price made us blanch a little, but then my older sister pointed out that we would probably never have this kind of opportunity again, and suddenly there we were, stepping up to the counter to fork over money and then crowding around a tiny little opening in the rocks while a little video played above us, noting all the things we needed to remember, and all the ways that screwing up could lead to ‘an out of control situation’. Or in other words, since this little venture included rappelling 165 feet down, with more than half of it on ropes only, with no rocks to cling to, the little video told us all the ways we could screw up and possibly die. It did not help that as the group for the regular tour was filing past us, a little girl who could not have been much more than 7 or 8 called out some words of encouragement – “I’ll see you at the bottom if you don’t die.” We cracked up immediately, of course, but still, thanks a lot, kid!

They fitted us for climbing gear – straps that we had to shimmy into and hard hats and j-racks that threaded through thick ropes. My little sister went down first because I think either she had less fear than the rest of us, or she was just feeling particularly brave. Then I went down, stepping past the railing and inching my way down the rocks, muttering what would become my mantra for the next undeterminable period of time: “You can do this. You can do this. You can do this.” Not, mind you, that it helped, but somehow I needed to tell myself *something* to make it all better.

There were a few terrifying moments in the descent, which you can sort of see here – it’s the only link I could find that shows a cross-section of the cavern (although the animation shows the walking tour, not the version we took). The first part was the easiest (ha ha – I use that term lightly) since it’s a fairly narrow hole (the top entrance in the middle, if you clicked that link) and you had to use your feet to kind of ‘walk’ down the rocks. There was a ledge and then you had to shimmy down into a crevice that didn’t look as if any of us could possibly fit, and for a brief moment there I was sure I was going to get myself stuck in there, one leg jammed into a crack in the rocks, and they would have to send someone down to pull me out, but then I was through, and the rocks were huge and slippery in front of me and I could feel the open air behind me and I knew I was coming into the main cavern and oh, I was so incredibly scared. There is this moment when you come over the ridge of rocks and I lost control a little bit, swinging off to the side and banging into the rock face with my knee, but my little sister was just below me, hollering up words of encouragement and so somehow I made it past that.

And then came the very worst, and very best part of all. See, eventually the cavern opened up, and there were no more rocks to cling to, and the rope just descended into completely empty space. I was smart enough to know that if I looked down I would freeze up and never get myself to move any further (because did I mention that I am a teensy bit terrified of heights?), but I did make myself look out as I spun slowly in that huge, dim expanse of cave. It was amazing. Stalactites and stalagmites were all around me in beautiful combinations, and I had the best vantage point in the entire place. It was almost enough to make me not concentrate on the fact that I could still fall and kill myself, until the guides down below told me I had to stop where I was because I’d come down faster than they expected (plus my little sister had gotten caught up on those rocks above and came down slower) and they needed to get her off the ropes before they could bring me in.

It was at this point that I realized that unless I clung to the ropes with all my strength, I just kept on slipping downwards. They’d told us how to adjust the bars of the j-rack to modify the speed of our descent but that only really worked when we were going down at a slight angle, slipping and sliding over the rocks above. In the open space no amount of adjusting the j-rack would slow me down any further unless I hung on tight – not exactly the most fun thing to realize when one is dangling there with nothing between one and the bottom of a cave but some metal bits and a rope. I hung there, clutching that rope for all I was worth, and made myself look out every now and then and tried to distract myself with the beauty of the cavern all around me, until finally they said that magical word – “go”, and I could let go with my death grip and slide slowly downwards until I could see people at the bottom and I knew that it was almost over and I wasn’t going to fall to my death after all and wasn’t life grand.

The guide pulled me in from the final part of the descent (into a small pit) and unhooked me from the rope and I took off my hat and my gloves and it wasn’t until I tried to actually walk that I realized how scared I’d actually been. But my older sister was coming down next and so somehow I extricated my camera from my pocket and I told my arms and legs to stop shaking and I took a few pictures as she came slowly down the rope, just so we could prove how far down that rappel really was.

It was an amazing feeling, once it was finally over and we were on solid ground – even if it was solid ground at the bottom of a very big and very deep cavern with only one way out – up a spiral staircase to the top. I think it may have been pure adrenaline that got the three of us up that very long staircase. The stairs were steep and narrow and there were parts where we had to inch past rock outcroppings, and at one point the guide down below turned out the lights to impress upon his regular tour group how very dark it can get when you are hundreds of feet below the surface. At one point we looked out and saw another woman coming down the rope, and we all recognized the look of sheer terror and determination on her face. So we called out encouragement and we told her she was doing fine and later one when we saw her in the gift shop she told us that she had been really, really glad to know we were there and we had made it and that meant she would make it too.

My sisters and I are all glad that we did it, but I am not sure any of us feel the need to do it again any time soon. We wandered around the gift shop afterwards and bought t-shirts that proclaimed we’d rappelled into the cave, and took a picture with the very nice man who’d shown us how to get into our gear and had sent us down the ropes in the first place. There had been talk about going to some of the other caves in the area as well but after that experience we were all a little caved out. Plus we were drenched in sweat from being so scared coming down and I wasn’t the only one who’d collected a small assortment of rock-induced scratches and bruises. So instead we drove back to the cabin and we called our respective husbands and told them what we’d done. Richard’s reaction was “You are so lucky!”

Both brothers-in-law’s reactions (and our parents’), however, were a rather surprised “You did what?” So in a way that impromptu excursion into the cave sealed the deal. We all sat around later in the cabin, after showers (sans spiders this time, since I made very sure to *not* be the first one into the water – ha!) and decided that obviously this, and the karaoke last year, meant that we would have to add a tradition to our annual Sisters’ Only events – to do something completely outrageous that we might never ordinarily do. We also decided that there was no need to try to top ourselves each year, or else we’d eventually find ourselves having to jump out of planes with parachutes strapped on our backs and while my fear of heights did not manage to make me back out of lowering myself into a cave on a little rope, I am not sure that even grim determination is enough to make me fling myself out of a plane into open space.

Richard was probably thrilled to death that this weekend was the second annual Sisters’ Only weekend – not because I was going to be gone for a few days, but because my being gone meant that he got to take the Prius out instead. I packed everything this morning before work – far more stuff than it might seem I would need for two nights away, but I was also responsible for bringing a blender (to make soup) and there was the bag of peaches for the pie, and I also had to bring some knitting along, so it was a respectable pile of stuff we dragged from the car to my office when he dropped me off.

I only worked half the day, but it seemed to drag – probably because I was so antsy for my sisters to arrive. My younger sister flew down from Seattle and my older sister picked her up at the airport, and then the two of them continued on to Sacramento to pick me up. I waved goodbye to all my coworkers, we loaded all my bags into the car, and we were off.

It’s a very long drive from Sacramento to Bear Valley, especially since a lot of that is down 99 and I-5, neither of which are particularly lovely stretches of freeway. Eventually we turned off onto a little two-lane highway that weaved and bumped its way into the hills and mountains and a host of obscure little towns that blended into each other over the course of the next few hours. But eventually we finally made it to Murphys, where we stopped to procure ice cream (to go with the peach pie I was going to make) as well as cones for the three of us. We needed, after all, to get the weekend off to a good start. And then it was back into the car for another 30 or 45 minutes of driving those bumpy, windy mountain roads I love so very not much, until we reached the cabin.

My older sister’s in-laws bought this cabin with a group of their friends perhaps 20 or 30 years ago. It is very small, but very cute. Downstairs there is a tiny kitchen and a living room with a wood-burning stove, which I can see would be marvelous when it is cold and snowy outside. Up a flight of stairs so steep we took them very carefully each time, there are two bedrooms and three beds, and enough floor space that there could probably be a few more people piled in for a larger gaterhing. It’s nestled into the trees on the slope of a hill. In the winter this area would be covered in snow and we would have had to climb through drifts to reach the door, but this being summer, we could drive right up to the very front of it and go right in.

We spent the rest of the evening being delightfully lazy. I started and restarted work on the second knitted afghan probably three or four times that night while my little sister worked on hand-made cards and my older sister did counted cross-stitch. Eventually we had French bread pizzas and salad, and I made a really good attempt at making pie from those lovely white peaches. Unfortunately the (store-bought) crust never cooked on the bottom, no matter how long we left it in the oven, so we ended up eating the peach filling and the top crust, and topping it with vanilla ice cream, which could not disguise the fact that the bottom crust was still mostly dough. Considering I’ve used this same crust umpteen times at home (because I am a lazy cook when it comes to pie crust and have never had success making it myself) I have a feeling the oven (which I suspect is quite possibly the same age as the cabin) was to blame. But at least the peaches were delicious and cinnamony sweet when cooked, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Because the Fourth was on Sunday, we had Monday off. Naturally, considering our recent acquisition, we decided that we needed to find something to do that required driving.

The day started, of course, with the required sleeping in and lounging around, but eventually we decided we should go to the zoo. We did talk about going to the San Francisco zoo, since we’d had so much fun the last time, but by the time we finally settled on a destination it was getting too late to make the trek down to San Francisco and back, so instead we decided to head for the one in Sacramento.

Of course we didn’t’ bother checking the weather before we left, else I think we might have ended up just staying home and inside where it was nice and cool. Today was just incredibly hot – and there wasn’t even much of a breeze to help take the edge off. We got a little lost on the way to the zoo since I’d been expecting to see signs from the freeway (there *used* to be signs), so by the time we got there it was later in the afternoon. Just walking around for a few minutes I was wilting in the heat, and it was obvious the animals were all feeling just about as hot and lethargic as us humans. Plus, even though they’re obviously in the process of building larger and nicer habitats for lots of the animals, I could not help but keep comparing the small size of some of the cages to the nice big areas they had in the San Francisco zoo.

Yesterday after work we drove the Prius back to the dealer to leave it there for the day, since we decided to splurge and get the special fabric and paint treatment for stain and scratch resistance. It felt weird to drop off that pretty new car and drive off without it after we’ve had it for less than a week, but they only needed it for the day. And that gave me the push to have Richard drop me off at Raley Field on the way to work so I could bike the rest of the way to my office – something I haven’t done for far too long. One or the other of us has been sick, or we’ve been busy, or more often I’ve just found too many excuses to not ride, so it was probably for the best that we were forced to work with only one car for the day.

On the way home from dropping the car off yesterday we swung by my knitting-enabling friend’s house, since it turned out she not only had a white peach tree overloaded with fruit she was desperate to get rid of, she also had a new batch of tiny little foster kittens that needed some attention. And who am I to refuse a chance to see fuzzy baby kittens, after all?

Seeing her white peach tree gave me a little bit of a start, since it was so covered in fruit that in some cases we couldn’t even see the leaves beneath all the peaches. She handed me a bag and I went outside with her to fill it, not even making a dent in the sheer volume of peaches (and her tree is only a few years older than ours – this is what we have to look forward to in the not so distant future!) but Richard remained inside, having succumbed to the charms of the very tiniest of the foster babies. When we came back in he had the cutest little tabby girl all curled up right under his chin, and did not seem at all bothered by the fact that she was studiously trying to either chew on his beard or bat at his nose with one soft and tiny little paw. One of the other new fosters – a little buff girl – bounced randomly around the room and declared herself Queen of the Chair, defying any of the other kittens to even think about trying to take that perch away from her. There is nothing quite so adorably cute as watching tiny little kittens puff themselves out into full indignation, doing their very best to look intimidating and failing utterly.

We ended up foisting half the peaches off on Richard’s parents, who came by to pick up his little sister’s laptop, which he’s spent the better part of the last few evenings working on, reinstalling the operating system and cleaning off all the spy-ware and ad-ware that’s accumulated over the years. The remaining peaches will go with me this weekend. It is summer, after all, and what better reason for pie than summer, and a sack full of peaches picked fresh from the tree.

It has been weird to have the Fourth of July celebration on a weekend. It has felt, in fact, as if the day snuck up on us. Usually I feel much more prepared, but this time around it was as if suddenly it was July and wow, we hadn’t made any plans at all.

We did what has now become the customary celebration for the Fourth, ever since we got this house. We gathered all the local family together (Richard’s parents and little sister, my parents, my older sister and her family, and her mother-in-law) and they all came to our house for dinner and dessert and then to watch the fireworks from our back porch.

This means, of course, that the bulk of the morning and early afternoon were spent at home getting ready. Richard roasted Cornish game hens on the barbeque and we found a recipe for grilled vegetables (green beans, asparagus and mushrooms) in a light seasoning of rosemary and thyme. I spent a few hours coring and slicing apples into paper-thin chips, then sprinkled them with cinnamon sugar and baked them until they were almost crispy. I don’t make the apple chips very often because they’re so time consuming, but sometimes they’re worth it.

The last few times we’ve had family over for dinner cooked on the barbeque, we’ve had the timing off and dinner ends up being served later than planned. This time we made extra sure to have everything in place so dinner would be ready right when we said it would. Naturally, this meant that everyone else showed up late – traffic, naps for little kids, and so on. In fact, we ended up eating almost in shifts. Richard’s parents showed up first, and my older sister called to say they’d be a lot later, so we started in on the chicken and the veggies and then my sister and her family came in just as we were finishing our food, so we all sat around the table and chatted with them while they ate theirs.

Because the oldest nephew has learned to read, I made sure to go through our collection of kids’ books before they arrived and pulled out a small stack of books I thought might be in his ability level. After dinner the two boys excused themselves like they usually do to go play, but when we went to check on them later, only the three-year-old was actually playing. The six-year-old had planted himself on the couch in the living room and was lost in a book – and that’s just about where he stayed the rest of the evening. Luckily my family and Richard’s were more than used to having kids lost in books (Richard and I were both reading from an early age as well) so we all just moved around him and chatted above his head and only finally dragged him back into reality once it was time for the kids to get into their pajamas in preparation for the fireworks.

As usual the city put on a spectacular display. We all sat on the back porch, or in lawn chairs lined up on the path around the grass in the back yard, and oohed and aahed and laughed and applauded some of the more amazing explosions. And then it was all over, like it inevitably must be, and my sister took her two very sleepy kids out to their car and we waved them goodbye, then my parents (sending them home with the remains of the apple pie from dessert), and Richard’s family as well, leaving only Richard and I and seven very annoyed and slightly skittish cats in a suddenly quiet house.

Actually, there was one amusing incident during the fireworks show. In preparation I ran around the house and shut all the windows before the fireworks even started, to minimize the level of noise on the cats since I know it tends to scare them. Most of the cats immediately skittered upstairs and hid nervously under the bed until long after the fireworks had finished and everyone had gone home. The one exception to this, however, was Tangerine. At one point someone looked toward the glass door and started laughing, and the rest of us turned to see her standing there. With the noise of the fireworks we couldn’t actually hear her, of course, but we could see her mouth moving, since she apparently had a lot to say. We weren’t sure if she was just miffed because we were all outside and she couldn’t come join us, or she’d been sent down by the rest of the cats to tell us all off for the scary noises, but whatever the reason it was pretty funny to see.

We left work and got to the dealer yesterday around 3, and did not leave that place until after 6. Luckily there wasn’t too much traffic (probably because everyone had already left for the holiday weekend the day before – something my boss and I discovered on our way back from the San Francisco office Thursday afternoon), so we managed to get back home with enough time to pick up my parents and get dinner before continuing on to Davis for the play. There was a brief moment of consternation as we realized we had no clue how to actually *start* the Prius once it was stopped – this model comes with the Smart Start system, which means that as long as the key is within a few feet, the doors will lock or unlock, and the car can start without having to actually touch key to car at all. But starting it does required the combination of pressing a button and putting one’s foot on the brake – something they neglected to tell us at the dealer – so we had to frantically look it up in the manual and figure it out ourselves.

(As an aside, I should note that we have, quite possibly, looked at the manual for this car more than any other car either of us has owned in the past few days. We looked up how to fiddle with the 6-disc in-dash CD player. We looked up the size of the gas tank. We looked up how, exactly, it notifies the driver when the tank is empty. We have taken turns driving it, and while one drives, the other is pressing buttons or pouring through the manual, trying to figure out all the gizmos and gadgets)

Richard and I have been more than a little disappointed in this season’s quality for the musical theater company in Davis, and so we were both dreading this last play just a little – after all, we walked out at intermission in Music Man, and we did not even try to reschedule when it turned out that we were going to miss Gypsy (my parents told me later we were lucky we missed it). But neither of us had ever see Damn Yankees before, so we figured at the very least, it would be vaguely amusing, even if it was horrible, and after all there would be the traditional ordering of pie afterwards. And to our surprise, it turned out to be perhaps the best play of the season. The man who played the Devil was wickedly funny, and the woman who played Lola managed to be both a little bit sultry and a little bit wholesome at the same time. The guy they got to play the younger version of Joe was perfect for the role – ruggedly handsome and a little awkward in his own skin (as would be expected, considering his character’s recent transformation). In all, it was funny and sweet and ended the season on a higher note than I’d have thought possible. I’m actually looking forward to next season now, now that there was this reminder of what this little company is capable of doing.

Today there had been grand plans of moving bookshelves from downstairs to upstairs (in preparation for converting the guest room into a library), but with the acquisition of the new car, we ended up doing a lot of driving instead. We headed back down to the dealer because they’d forgotten to give us the extra key and we’d forgotten to bring along the title for the Maxima, and then we swung by Trader Joe’s since we were in the area and stocked up on enough of our favorite cheese blintzes to stuff the freezer, and then we swung by the grocery store to get everything we’ll need for tomorrow and now we are home, relaxing with what is left of the day, and each of us pondering where we could possibly drive our shiny new car next.

It was the weekend after Thanksgiving when, on a whim, we started calling around. “Do you have one?” we asked, and after far too many phone calls, we finally found someone who did. Out of all the possibilities in the surrounding three counties only one could be found.

“Can we see it?” we asked, and they said sure, come right down, but you can only look because it’s already been promised to someone else. So we zipped right over as quickly as we could through post-Thanksgiving traffic and we looked. And we oohed and we aahed and we wished we could do more than look but that would have to wait until later, and then we went inside and they handed up papers and we signed our names and they told us “We’ll call you.”

Then we went home to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

I began to wonder if they had forgotten about us. I began to wonder if our names somehow slipped off the list. I called around to other places. I started hearing stories about other people who were given their opportunities within weeks. I was starting to think maybe it was never going to happen.

This afternoon, during lunch, there was a call.

“I have one for you,” he said. “I know it arrived. I just need to find it, somewhere out there. I’ll call you back.”

And he made me wait some more, but this time it wasn’t months, only about half an hour.

“When can you come?” he said, and I fired off emails to Richard, and then gave up and called him. “Can you leave work?” I asked him, and my boss laughed at me and told me to go get it because it was obvious I wasn’t going to get anything else productive done that day.

We met at home and I emptied out the old Maxima. We stopped along the way to have it cleaned from top to bottom. We made it to Fairfield and filled out paperwork – oh, so very much paperwork, and we sat for hours while they twiddled away at financing and extended warranties and we eyed the clock and wondered whether or not we might actually make it back to Davis in time for the play, and then finally, finally, everything was done and they handed me the key and we walked outside and it was ours.

It is the prettiest blue possible. It looks like a stretched out Volkswagen Bug. It sounds as if it is unwinding when it stops. It is so very lovely, inside and out. And I am so very, very happy that we finally have it, even if it did take us seven months.

Our Prius, at last. So worth the wait.

In our continuing quest to be healthy, Richard and I have started an active campaign to broaden our base of healthy and delicious low-Point meals. To this end Richard dragged out some of our cookbooks and we’ve been pouring over all the possibilities during the last week or so. So far he’s made stuffed peppers, which were marvelous, and a jambalaya with shrimp and chicken and ham that was extremely filling, while I’ve stuck to old stand-by’s, like the incredibly dense apple cinnamon sweet potato muffins that we both love. Tonight, however, I decided to give one of the new recipes a try – Broccoli in Garlic Sauce. We had no broccoli, however, but a recent trip to the local farmer’s market had netted a huge bag of fresh green beans so I figured those would be an adequate substitute. And in order to make this a main dish, I decided to toss in some tofu.

I have never cooked with tofu before tonight. I’ve eaten it when other people have cooked it for me, and usually I like it. It’s one of the blandest foods in existence, so really just tends to be a slightly squishy conveyor of whatever flavoring is contained in the rest of the dish. However, I found lots of useful suggestions for just what to do with tofu on TUS so I decided that I’d give a few of them a try.

I cut the tofu (as well as anyone can cut something with the consistency of soft jello) into randomly sized bits and gave them a quick flour coating, and then pan-fried them using non-stick spray. Then I just stirred them in with the green beans as I added the sauce, and let them mix in with everything else.

The end result was delicious enough that we’ve both decided it’s a keeper. The tofu turned out just chewy and flavorful enough to be interesting, and the whole dish was wonderfully good. I’ve got another full package of tofu in the fridge. I’m pondering how this would work with a mix of vegetables as well – perhaps I might toss in some broccoli after all, or even half an onion. I’ve got another full package of tofu in the fridge, and I’m not sure how long tofu will keep. We’ve got nothing at all planned for dinner on Saturday night yet. So I think this recipe – or something like it – will show up on the menu again, and soon.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.