Yesterday was the first half of the Father’s Day festivities, when we drove down for Richard’s dad’s combined birthday/Father’s Day celebration. There was a delicious asparagus and mushroom frittata, followed by chocolate pound cake. There was much talking and laughing and opening of presents. And there was a cute new kitten to play with, since Richard’s little sister finally got the cat she’s been pining after for years. Roxie is a lanky little lynx point siamese mix with plenty of spunk (which she’ll need to hold her own in a house with two fluffy little dogs). We dutifully provided implements of amusement (for both humans and kitten) by bringing with us a laser pointer and a crinkly catnip toy.

Today was Father’s Day for my half of the family. It started with church, before which there was a hastily assembled choir rehearsal because even though our summer season has started and technically the choir was officially done until fall, some unexpected visitors to the church had the choir director leaving frantic phone calls to as many of us as he could reach. Then after church the weather was so beautiful that Richard and I decided we needed to go for a bike ride. We filled our Camelbaks with water, hopped on our bikes, and made it most of the way to Davis before it occurred to either one of us that we had neglected to put on sunscreen.

Yes, “ouch” would be the operative word here. How my face avoided frying I’ll never know, but my arms and my legs could rival a lobster and Richard didn’t fare much better. We very gingerly showered and changed and headed up to Napa for dinner, where I presented my dad with an appropriately humorous card, and then we all feasted on meat grilled on my brother-in-law’s Father’s Day present- a new gas grill. He noted with wry amusement that my sister gave him the choice of the grill or a flat screen monitor. I sympathized with such a difficult decision, as he is just as much of a computer nerd as Richard and I are.

And now we are home, where I am poking experimentally at my sunburn and hoping that if I drink enough water and slather on enough lotion in the next few days, it will not start to peel.

As we wander through the house it is customary to announce to each other, occasionally, what particular cats are doing. Hence our house often rings with a chorus of “Honey, Allegra is being wonky again,” or “Honey, Azzie is being cute at me,” or if they are cleaning themselves, then the announcement is more like “Tangerine is cleaning her toes,” with the appropriate response always being “Well, one must have clean toes.”

I tell you this in explanation as to why it was that I told Richard that Rosemary was cleaning her butt this morning. This was only because she was perched on the rug in front of the fireplace upstairs, assuming the perfect cello position as she did her business and it was kind of cute. How the conversation jumped from there to what was next I’m not exactly sure, but I do know that Richard made some comment that everyone should have a clean butt and I retaliated with the fact that not everything *has* a butt to clean, because having a butt implies that you have a digestive tract, and for the rest of the day, especially as we drove down and back to his parents’ house for his dad’s combination birthday/Father’s Day party, we had animated and laughing arguments over whether certain creatures have butts. Earthworms, we agreed, had butts, as do octopi and most fish, but plants don’t (even though Richard kept singing about how all God’s children had butts and thus all God’s children could fart), and then we got hopelessly stuck on whether jellyfish have butts because neither of us is exactly clear on jellyfish anatomy.

It is little things like this that indicate just how smart it was for us to get married. After all, who else in the world would have been willing – nay, eager – to participate in a discussion on whether or not jellyfish can fart? Yes indeedy, we’re soul mates. What can I say?

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Jennifer’s Helpful Hint #72:

When you are driving to work and you pick up the coffee cup that you just bought at the local bakery and which they filled a little too close to the top, and your car hits a bump and you dribble coffee onto your cream-colored slacks, and when you then dash to the bathroom to try to wipe it up as soon as you get to work, here is a little something to keep in mind. Avoid the paper towels. Trust me on this – even the most sturdy of paper towels will shred into trillions of tiny little pieces that adhere themselves to the fibers of your garment, such that even if you do manage to sop up enough coffee so that it does not stain, it will be obvious you did *something* because the coffee will now be replaced with an irregularly shaped splotch of paper towel tidbits that will flake off slowly over the course of the day.

Instead, grab a toilet seat cover. They may be flimsy and not necessarily as absorbent as a paper towel, but they don’t shred and stick to your clothes, and they still manage to hold enough water to clean away the stain.

Richard is taking a class this summer on books for children. Naturally this means he has to read lots of children’s books, and write reviews and come up with educational activities, and so on. He can keep the reviews and activities, however, as long as he hands the children’s’ books over when he’s done with them. Because sometimes there’s nothing like grabbing a book you know you can read in less than a minute that also comes with really cute pictures.

We have learned one very important fact from this class so far. There are a lot of crappy children’s books out there. The pictures might be nice, but the story goes nowhere or the plot makes no sense or the book cannot decide exactly what it wants to be. It’s a little disconcerting to know this, considering just how many children’s books there are out there. But then I suppose this is a good thing to learn if one is going to be a librarian (like Richard), or even if one is simply pondering buying books for ones nieces and nephews (like me). After all, why should children be left out of all the fun of trying to sort through the mounds of junk to find the random gem of good writing?

We’ve got a pretty decent collection of children’s books already, between the two of us. Anyone else remember reading the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books, or all the stories by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, like Egypt Game, and The Headless Cupid? In fact lately I’ve been trying to find some of my favorites from when I was younger. I finally own the entire Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, which was probably one of my favorite sets of books when I was a kid, and was also most likely one of the reasons I dove headfirst into science fiction and fantasy somewhere around the end of elementary school, and never really left.

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As time progresses my job is starting to divide into two separate categories. There is the computer side of things, which has evolved from just two puny databases into what will eventually be a fairly large and complex database that is keeping me busy wrestling with data relationships the more I learn about how they’ve stored their information in the past. And then there is the research side of things – which involves actual research (of the journalistic variety), composing all the research into comprehensible documents and reviews, and collecting and analyzing data.

It’s the last bit – the data analysis – that has been keeping me busy the past two days (after spending the rest of the week heads down in database code). All along my boss has made vague mumblings about how we need to get some better software for creating graphs and charts because Excel just doesn’t cut it. So yesterday he started poking around and today we actually bought something.

Here’s the cool thing about being the research department. Some days my job gets to consist of huddling in front of my computer with my boss, poking around a new piece of software and going “ooh! Wonder what this does? Ooh – pretty!” for hours on end. Granted shortly after that it became me huddled in front of my computer poring through FAQ’s and online manuals trying to figure out just how the heck to *make* some of those pretty little things we were looking at, but it was still rather fun. Of course I have a feeling I may live to occasionally regret these words, since now that we’ve got a much more powerful program to play with, the expectations for what we can produce will increase. But for now I’ll just focus on the fact that I know how to make spider charts and box-and-whisker graphs and surface charts with or without ribbons in lots of pretty colors. Whee!

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The DVD arrived on Wednesday but because of my dad’s birthday dinner, we didn’t get a chance to open the package until Thursday. We had to wait 24 hours before we actually got to start watching season 4 of Buffy! I’m not exactly sure how we survived.

I have heard mixed reviews about this season – mainly that while it has a few shining moments (“Hush” being one of them, since it is arguably one of the best episodes of Buffy ever produced, along with “The Body” and “Once More With Feeling”), that overall, it ranks fairly low on the list for best season ever. I’m not too concerned, however. Once we’re done with this set we’ve only got one more season to catch up on before we finally have seen the entire storyline.

It is June. I know it is June because tomorrow is my father’s birthday and my father’s birthday is always in June. Plus this weekend is Father’s Day, which I know is also in June, and my nephew’s birthday is next week, and my father-in-law’s birthday this weekend as well so yes, it most definitely is June.

Of course the instant I walk outside I have a tendency to get confused again because outside it doesn’t look like June or feel like June at all. In this part of California, June is supposed to be hot. Temperatures should be in the 90’s or higher, and the only way it might feel cooler is if there is a breeze. June is supposed to remind us, yet again, that the worst of the summer weather is yet to come.

But instead the weather is beautiful. In the afternoons the temperatures hover in the mid-80’s while at night we open the windows upstairs and then huddle underneath heavy blankets and comforters in bed and pretend it is still winter because it gets so chilly. In the day I look at my window in the office and listen to the birds and watch the river flowing by and it isn’t even warm enough that I am tempted by the thought of diving into all that water because I know it is too cold to be refreshing.

I know that these perfectly lovely and unseasonable cool days cannot possibly last much longer, but oh, I can cross all my fingers and toes and wish with all my might that they will stay as long as they possibly can. It’s June and it’s beautiful outside and I am reminding myself over and over to remember how lovely it was this month because the summer heat will descend on us eventually and then all these lovely, windy days will be gone.

After yesterday’s ride, I would have loved to spend today lounging around in bed with nothing at all to do. But today was the last time the choir sings before we go into summer schedule at church, and today the recorder group (now tentatively dubbed Driftwood) was to perform, and so there was nothing to do but lay in bed as long as the cats would let us and then get up and go to church.

Surprisingly I am nowhere near as sore as I expected. Compared to long rides last year, this time I can still zip up and down the stairs with almost no twinges in my muscles. It’s actually a nice feeling to know I can pound out 32 miles and still be (mostly) functional.

The rest of the day has been nice, if not necessarily the ‘lounge around with nothing planned’ sort of day I’d envisioned. After lunch Richard and I headed off to the mall to go a bit of shopping. He needed jeans and I – well, lets just say that I have come to the realization that even the best of underwear has a shelf life, and after the underwire suddenly attacked me in a second bra, I knew that time had been reached.

Years ago my friend and I descended on Victoria’s Secret and spent several hundred dollars on underwear. I know this might seem a bit insane to a lot of people, but there really is a difference between good quality and the cheap things you can get at the bargain stores. I may have resigned myself to the fact that it is next to impossible to find a bra *without* an underwire, but I refuse to have to wear ugly underwear. So when I emerged from that shopping trip, it was with a bag crammed with silky bras and panties, in matching colors, and it was a marvelously girly sort of thing to do.

Today I descended on Victoria’s Secret again, but this time it was with my husband instead of a female friend. And I got to giggle madly about the act of men in lingerie stores.

Men in lingerie stores, for the most part, all seem to have the same hunted look on their faces. You can see it in their eyes – they know they cannot stare at the lingerie, and they certainly cannot stare at other women who might be shopping, and so they tend to hover anxiously near their wives or girlfriends, eyes darting from here to there, trying desperately to unfocus their gaze so as not to appear as if they are noticing anything in the store at all. From the point of view of a woman, I can find this all grandly amusing. I do realize that perhaps it isn’t quite so amusing from the point of view of the man.

We did a little bit more shopping after that, and then we called a friend and met her at Mimi’s Café because when there is a Mimi’s near where I am, I have no choice but to succumb to the lure of their buttermilk spice muffins. During dinner we did a lot of talking and laughing and ate crème brule cheesecake for dessert and actually managed to have conversations about things other than Benthic Creatures or the Company to be Nicknamed Later (even though those topics did occasionally creep in). After dinner we had to take advantage of the fact that we were within walking distance of a Barnes and Nobles, which aside from being chock full of books, also has a coffee shop on site. So we wandered around the books and managed to escape that side of the store with only a few purchases each. I talked our friend into buying Good Omens because every time I read it, it always makes me laugh out loud, and she talked me into getting Outlander because isn’t some cheesy romance, and Richard got something by Bill Bryson because he really likes Bill Bryson, and then we dragged each other kicking and screaming away from the books before we spent all our money, and instead got coffee and chai tea lattes and mochas and sat around a tiny little table and talked and laughed for another hour or two until there was yawning and realization that the evening eventually had to end.

This morning Richard and I got up, donned our spandex shorts and bright red t-shirts, filled the Camelbaks with water, loaded bikes and all associated paraphernalia into the car, and set off for Sacramento to take part in our second Ride Against Hunger.

The mantra of the day – at least for every one of the participants who had taken part last year – was “at least it’s not as bad as last year”. Because last year, as my long-term readers may recall, the ride was hallmarked by 30-mile per hour winds, and what should have been a lovely ride was actually not so fun. Last year we spent most of the ride alternately blessing (when it was behind us) and cursing (when we rode into it) the wind.

As if to make up for last year, this morning the weather could not have been more perfect for a ride. It was just chilly enough when we started to encourage everyone to get riding so we would warm up, and what wind there was was only a slight breeze – just enough to cool off a sweaty cyclist at a rest stop, but not enough to act as a deterrent during the ride.

Perhaps last year’s wind scared them off, but it was a bit disappointing to see significantly fewer participants this year. Still, it was an enthusiastic crowd of us who pushed off from the starting line at 9am, and meandered through the streets of Sacramento until we climbed an overpass and took to the river road. And without the wind to keep us preoccupied, we could actually pay attention to the sights we were passing – adorable houses, and then out into vast fields of farmland and flowers.

Richard and I initially signed up for the shorter ride (16 miles) since we haven’t had much time (or motivation) to go riding in the past few months. But when we hit the first rest stop, we were feeling so good we decided to go the full distance. Especially since there was no wind!

I recognized Bev the moment I saw her, mainly because she tends to post pictures of herself on her journal. But I think I would have recognized her even without the pictures since she was the only one wandering around with a camera glued to her face (grin). We chatted a bit, and then all eventually got back on our bikes and got back to the all-important business of pedaling.

It wasn’t until the way back that the lack of cycling practice really started to hit Richard and me. It was more than a teeny bit obvious to both of us when we actually had to stop and walk our bikes up a short (but admittedly rather steep) hill. And I wasn’t sure if I’d actually make it over the overpass coming back into town without having to stop because by the time we only had about 8 miles left, my legs were burning and all the nerves in my butt had long since given up and gone into hiding, waiting only until I shifted on my seat to remind me how sore I was. We got a little lost on the way back, since they hadn’t clearly marked the route (lucky for us I had grabbed a ride map at the starting point!), and from there it was just steady pedaling, one foot after another, head down, with only one goal – to reach the end.

The wind finally did kick in today, but not until we had already returned home. We both did crash for an hour or two for a short nap, but to my surprise, I am not nearly as sore as I expected to be. All that working out at Curves has, if nothing else, at least paid off in better cycling performance.

We made it back to the starting point in one piece, but Bev wasn’t nearly as lucky. Her karma apparently decided she was overdue for her first big cycling accident – ouch!.

It’s been a calm and quiet week at work. With one of the estimators now gone, there are only four of us there fulltime, and the two college interns only come for a few hours on the days they are there. Add to this the fact that the noisiest of the lawyers downstairs is moving out and it’s made things almost peaceful.

The lawyers downstairs, by the way, are some of the loudest people I have ever not met. They yell – to each other, on the phone, even in normal conversation. They are always arguing. I suppose this is a lawyerly thing to do – the constant need to bicker – but it would be so much nicer if they would at least try to do it in a more civil volume. It has reached the point where one of the principles at our office broke down and complained to the landlord. We don’t think they have any idea how loud they are, but surely pesky little things like client confidentiality might just be a concern when your upstairs office neighbors can hear nearly every word of every conversation you shout to your coworkers each day.

But anyway, back to the peaceful and calm week it’s been. I’ve mainly been rummaging through file trees and tracking down project information to store in one of the databases I created. It’s not as easy a task as it might sound, but at least it’s kept me busy up til yesterday, when I drove down to our company’s office in San Francisco and managed to inadvertently jump head first into lots more work. Actually I’m a little excited about it – it means more database tweaking; new tables, rearranging indexes. All the little things that make a nerd girl happy. Plus there’s the added bonus that I managed to find the office in San Francisco without having to backtrack or circle around the maze of one-way streets or otherwise get lost. Not bad when compared to my usual (infrequent) treks into the city.

Luckily the new additions to the database are not requiring a whole lot of complex thought because today my brain has felt as if it slowly leaked out of my ears last night. My boss was home sick a few days this week with a nasty cold and it seems to have jumped ship and come to land in my sinuses, bringing with it a stuffed-up nose, sneezes, and taking away significant chunks of my ability to manage rational thought.

This afternoon I got into the car to go to Curves. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I glanced briefly to my left, and amazed even myself with the sheer girlyness of my shriek. I think only the fact that there were no cars coming saved me from the inevitable accident as I swerved all over the road in response to the sight of the hugest wolf spider I’d ever seen sitting on my window. It took a few heart-pounding moments to determine that the spider was on the *outside* of the window, and not inside the car. And then I spent the rest of the ride eying the spider nervously as it scuttled all over the window.

The logical part of my brain knows that wolf spiders are perfectly harmless. But the fact that they are large and hairy, much like tarantulas, and that they have a tendency to rear up and shake their front legs in a menacing manner when cornered overruled all logic. I had pretty much resigned myself to getting out on the passenger side of the car in order to avoid any way for the spider to get into the car once I opened the door, when suddenly the trip was too much for it and it blew away, tumbling through the air out of sight.

Once it was gone and no longer could scare the pants off me, I felt a little guilty for the fact that it was probably now road kill. But that didn’t make up for those moments of sheer panic when I saw it face to face

Today I am still sore but it is a good kind of sore – the kind of muscle ache you get when you’ve done something really hard, and each time you twist around you are reminded of why it is there. My lower back has the worst of it, but it is no longer the kind of soreness that makes me obsess about how I bend over because I am afraid I am going to throw out my back. Anyone who has ever thrown out their back knows exactly what I am talking about because after you have done it once (and I have done it now three times in my life) you start feeling a little paranoid. The rest of the ache is in my arms and the backs of my thighs, which tells me that at least I was doing a lot of the ‘proper’ lifting technique. I have a feeling that when I get to Curves tomorrow during lunchtime to do my workout I may be feeling those sore muscles a lot more than I am now, but I think I can handle it. Of course I have also just taken some ibuprofen and am anxiously waiting for it to kick in so I can stand up and sit down without feeling like I am a feeble old woman, so it’s possible I don’t know what I am talking about.

There are about 72 large stones and probably the same number of smaller stones left over (although possibly a few more since we didn’t alternate them exactly one to one when building the wall). We knew there would be leftovers when we placed the order, since we had to buy them by the pallet, but hadn’t been sure of the exact number. I am pondering all sorts of possibilities for using these leftover stones but I have a feeling they will probably just sit in wobbly piles off to one side of the yard until we are forced to move them, or until inspiration strikes, or until someone we know decides that they could use a few. Last night when Richard’s parents and little sister where here for dinner, I noted that they would make lovely stocking stuffers for Richard’s family’s Christmas tradition but I got the impression that somehow they would not be all that appreciated. It has also occurred to me that perhaps we could take the drive-by toading to new levels for all our friends and loved ones, leaving small but nicely arranged piles of alternating large and small stones on their front lawns. Perhaps if we paint goofy faces on them first it could start a new craze in decorative lawn art. Or perhaps I should just leave them alone and wait until after the backyard is finished and we start ripping up the front yard (because this is apparently a sickness and it just keeps getting worse!) and find a use for them then.

We were sore enough this morning waking up that if we hadn’t already promised to be there, we would have happily skipped church. But we went to choir practice and sang through the song we’ll be doing for the baccalaureate on Tuesday, and then Richard went home to poke around on his computer while I stayed behind for recorder group practice.

It is an interesting sound, listening to a room full of recorders, especially when most of the players are still working out the basic stuff. At one point it was noted that we sounded not unlike a calliope – one rather out of tune. To our credit by the end of the practice session we had at least managed to tune the calliope, but I’m not sure we will be progressing beyond that rather unique sound for a few more months. Still, not everyone can claim to be part of their very own makeshift carnival instrument on a bimonthly basis.

Now that the wall is built, Richard is happily taking computers apart across the desk from me. In fact I probably don’t want to know exactly why he is doing this. And I really ought to get off the computer myself and tackle the stack of presents downstairs so that we can find the breakfast nook table. I now have – among many other things (including the coolest clock ever for a cat lady!) – a nice stack of lovely new books and if I get a little bit more cleaning done around this house then I will feel a bit less guilty when I commence reading.

First of all, I think it is important to note that there were exactly 556 stones sitting on those three pallets in our driveway.

Secondly, it is also important to note that half of them weighed about 22 pounds each, and the other half weighed 12 pounds each. This is according to the little brochure we got from which we ordered the aforementioned stones. Earlier in the morning I did ponder bringing one each of the large and small inside to weigh them, but by this afternoon I didn’t want to lug any stones any further than absolutely necessary. Perhaps tomorrow. Or perhaps I’ll just take the brochure weights on faith because really, all that matters is that they were heavy! You can do the calculations if you’d like, but that’s an awful lot of pounds of stones we lugged around today between the two of us.

We got up this morning and decided that the first thing to do was to move the stones from the driveway to the backyard. We took our handy little dolly which turns into a hand truck and loaded it up with stones, and then dragged those to the backyard and unloaded them, and did that a few more times before we decided that we could stop for breakfast. Then we went back outside to lug more stones from front to back. At this point our wonderful neighbor poked his head out of the garage, eyed the stones, returned to his garage, and after a series of loud whirring and thumping noises, emerged with an extremely heavy-duty hand truck which he brought over for us to use.

I think if I hadn’t been so sweaty and dusty by that point I might have kissed him, because with both hand trucks, we were able to move those stones a lot faster than we’d anticipated. While Richard loaded his truck with the smaller stones, I stacked the big ones and toted them to the backyard where I deposited them in wobbly little piles.

Then it was off to the hardware store to procure twine and gypsum powder and gloves. The gloves were a definite must, since by this point my poor hands were starting to get more than a bit shredded and I’d already managed to drop one stone across two fingers, offering up the requisite blood sacrifice to our project (heh).

We used a combination of gypsum, twine, and tent stakes to mark out our circle, and then commenced to laying the stones. And amazingly it went one heck of a lot faster than either of us had expected! We did three layers and by then it started to actually look like the picture of the walls in that brochure I mentioned earlier so we took a break for lunch (leftover fajitas from last night and they were just as incredible today as they were yesterday!) and then went back outside and did the final three layers so quickly we were actually done by about 2 in the afternoon!

Then of course we came inside and took extremely long showers to scrub off the grime and dust that had accumulated in layers of several inches thick (okay, I exaggerate, but not by much) all over us (the dust got everywhere. It was in my *bra*, people. Euww!), and then we promptly fell onto the bed and crashed for about two hours so that we could at least pretend to be vaguely human when Richard’s family arrived to bring me birthday presents and take us out for a birthday dinner.

I am stiff and my lower back is just sore enough that I am treating it with extreme respect and being very careful about bending because the last thing I want to do is throw it out. We haven’t even begun to figure out how much dirt it will take to fill the bed. And except for a few random ideas (there will be something larger in the middle, and I want a few things that will ‘spill’ over the sides as they grow, and all the herbs which are not doing so well in my kitchen window are going to go out there and then there is the little matter of my desire to eventually plant an obscene amount of bulbs) we are still a bit unclear as to what we’re actually going to *plant* in it once the dirt is in place. Plus there is still the little matter of laying the flagstone path around the bed itself, which will also involve us planting stuff between the stones and thus, unlike the wall, require actually digging. But right now I am just so disgustingly proud of what we managed to accomplish today that all the rest doesn’t matter one bit.