Happy Birthday!!!
Mood:  celebratory
Amazing how two exceptionally cool & inspirational people I like have the same birthday today! Maybe there's something to that astrology crap after all?

Happy Birthday Laura! Always remember, someone has to be unafraid to lead the freak parade!

Oh yeah, and Happy Birthday to my favorite actor, the one and only Dink! Here's a pint of Guinness to both of you!

Mood:  lazy
Not much happening around here these days. The weather has taken a turn for the worse, getting cold, damp and dreary. Also, Kevin's gone to Boston for some IT training, so I get to batch it all week. Start collecting bail money now. ;)

Friday was the 24 hr. Walk for a Cure event in the park behind our house, so the dogs were hysterically barking most of the time and I didn't get much sleep, staying up all night watching movies, reading books and playing KOL.

Saturday, Diane and I went out to breakfast with Laura, and took a little walk/stroll/perambulation down the Crook Farm trail. None of us had been on it before, it's quite pretty. (Except for the part where you go past the water treatment plant... there's a nice spot of yang in your yin!) I gave Laura a little silver Liberty Bell charm (to commemorate our trip to Philly) for her birthday. Then I basically spent the day watching movies, reading, playing KOL and napping. I enjoy the solitude, but I miss Kevin.

Goooooaaaaallllll!
Mood:  cheeky
Saturday, I went to Casey's soccer match. Cold and muddy weather, and stupid me wore my nice pink slip-on Chucks. They are completely caked. I'll have to hope they wash up okay. But Casey's team won in a decisive victory, yahoo!

Afterwards, I got to accompany Kathleen & the boys to Walmart. That was an experience in and of itself. I know she reads this, so let me just say "No, I will not go grocery shopping with you!" :)

Then we all ate pizza, did art projects and watched movies, and Kathleen made donuts for dessert. Yummers!

Uncanny!
Mood:  a-ok
Topic: Deep Thoughts
Friday night, Kevin and I took Cole to Olean to see X-Men 3 for a very fun (and geeky!) time. He's such a hilarious kid. I hope he took away the message of the movie - simply put, that it's okay to be different even if other people don't think so. I've been a geek my whole life, but it's only been in the past few years that I've come to see the value in it. Hopefully, Cole can feel confident in himself and be spared the self-doubt I went through.

Enough philosophical pondering over a cheesy summer blockbuster! Speaking of which, apparently you can't have one without Sir Ian McKellan and/or Ben Stiller. Oh, and don't forget to play "Carmina Burana" in the trailer! Never fails...

You never see them in the same place at the same time...
Mood:  quizzical
Topic: Deep Thoughts
Are Thomas Dolby and Alton Brown the same person?

Nature red in tooth and claw
Mood:  sad
This morning, as I was attending to my morning toilette, I heard Shui (our Shar-Pei) barking like crazy and Kevin shouting at Jack (our Shiba Inu), followed by Jack snarling like I’ve never heard him before.

Turns out a rabbit had found its way into our backyard unbeknownst to Kevin, and when he let the dogs out this morning, Jack immediately ran it down and killed it. At least it died quickly, but Kevin was hugely upset. He got incredibly mad at Jack last year when Jack killed a nest of bunnies. Both of us are incredible softies when it comes to animals, but I tried to tell Kevin that he couldn’t blame Jack for following his programming.

Shiba Inus are one of the world’s oldest known dog breeds, and they’ve been bred for thousands of years to hunt small game – Jack was just doing exactly what his genes told him to do. So I wrested the poor dead bunny from him, and congratulated him on his skill. He trotted around like he was king of the world. From a Taoist perspective, nothing happened that should not have happened. But it still didn’t make me feel any better about the whole thing.

Rub me the right way
Mood:  lazy
Tonight, I had an hour-long massage from Larry at Lisa’s Hairport. Ummmm….. he used hot stones all down my back and legs. Damn, that felt awesome! He’s a very very good massotherapist, I recommend him highly. One caveat: he talks a lot more than I would prefer, but he is good enough that you can forgive him for it. He likes to tell you the muscle groups he’s working on, and the type of techniques he’s using. That’s fine, but just shut up and let me drift off please. That's what I'm paying you for.

Spam, Egg, Sausage, and Spam
Mood:  happy
Kevin and I went to Laura’s house this evening for dinner with her and Diane. It was a very good meal and a very good time – and I was pleasantly surprised that Kevin agreed to go so readily. He really seems to like both Laura and Diane, so apparently he felt comfortable enough to go to her home.

(I’m still trying to figure out after all this time if Kevin is just anti-social, anxious or agoraphobic – or all of the above. It’s generally a struggle to get him to go do something at someone else’s place.)

At any rate, Laura made shrimp kabobs, grilled asparagus, fettucini alfredo and garlic bread, and Diane brought cream puffs. Dee-lish!

The running gag all week had been that Laura was going to make us “Hawaiian” kabobs with cut-up hot dogs and canned pineapple on skewers. She said that if she felt like she really liked us, she’d use fresh pineapple instead. Of course, to be truly authentic, she’d have to use Spam.

Backslap, booby trap, cover it up with bubble wrap...
Mood:  quizzical
Why is popping bubble wrap so addictive? Today my boss got a painting for his office, and it was cocooned in layers of bubble wrap. The really good kind, with the BIG bubbles. You should have seen us, hovering like vultures over a fresh kill, just waiting for him to finish unwrapping it so we could divvy it up and ration it out. :::pop!:::

Hot, Hot, Hot!
Mood:  on fire
Remember last week when I said they had predicted snow? Monday it got up to 95 degrees, which is obscenely hot around here. (Summer temps tend to be around 85 as a maximum.)

Kevin and I were able to get the vegetable garden transplanted at last, and I put in brick edging around the front beds. Had a reunion of sorts with the Philly 4 – Clare hosted a Memorial Day party and Diane and Laura were there too. I made stuffed grape leaves and tzatzki, which went over well (once I explained what they were and what was in them.) Kevin wasn’t feeling so great so he went home to lie down in the AC for a while. I think he got dehydrated from working in the garden in the sun. I hung around for a while but then the heat started to get to me too, so I went home to nap in the cool as well.

That evening, we went to Bob and Kathleen's for their MD party. She had done a slow cooked pork shoulder on the grill and it was outstanding. Hung out with the kids and Bob's family. Good friends, good food… you can’t ask for better than that!