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Everything's temporary. I mow the lawn, it grows back. I wash dishes, they get dirty again. Don't get me started on the cat litter.

Sarah and I went out to Target so she could show me bikes, and she pleaded for a single-speed model that was marked $65. She offered to put in $20 of her own money. I countered that I'd get it if she put in $35, and she agreed. Then we got a new helmet to replace the other new helmet that dropped off the earth, and once again, she's happy to leap on the bike and go off in search of playmates and adventures.

She brought Julia back to the house, and we all jumped on the trampoline for a while. When it was almost time for Julia to go home, her dad showed up to collect her, and before I could see them off, her mom showed up to get both of them.

Cathy had Friday off from work, so we officially wrapped up last Christmas by putting the grill together that I'd bought for her. She unboxed most of the pieces and helped with the one piece of heavy lifting, and after that I made Sarah happy by letting her help with the fiddly bits. Then I hauled out the outdoor table and umbrella, finding Sarah's next-to-newest helmet in the process. It hadn't dropped off the earth -- just behind the freezer. I set it all up, tested the gas lines for leaks (using soapy water and watching for bubbles), and just after 9:00 pm, all systems were go. Cathy made a cheeseburger for Sarah and hot dogs for everybody. I don't know about the burger, but the hot dogs I had were super, on buns toasted over the grill.

Just before I finished, I ran in and got a little bottle of Coke for us to share, because THIS is AMERICA, buddy!

This morning, I looked out the basement window at the patio. It's all still there, as is an equal volume of cardboard packing material in the sun room. Progress.
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Six months ago, Sarah and Cathy gave me a cat (Frances) for my birthday. Frances was said to be six months old. Logically, then, she'll be a year old on the 15th. Sarah decided to celebrate her birthday today, and she went shopping with Cathy and brought back a scratching rug and hidey tunnel for the kitty. They also got a tiny cake and more cat treats.

We had the party somewhere around noon, with Sonali and Isham from down the street. They gave Frances cat treats and her presents while we ate pieces of cake. We sang that song. It's also Ishan's birthday, though his party is tomorrow, and my sister's birthday (hipy papy bthuth thuthdy, gixhaix!).

It's also a day of celebration for the town, which has a wing-ding in the library parking lot, on the bank of the canal. Sarah was reluctant to go, but as soon as we got there she started running into school friends, so we hung around with their parents.

We even ran into Sonali and Ishan.

Since it was a midway, we ate some stuff. I had a cup of gumbo and a tray of fried alligator from a vendor and topped it off, a while later, with a nutella crepe (including strawberries, banana slices, whipped cream, and vanilla ice cream) from Simply Crepes for dessert.

I also encountered the local historical society folks. I'll probably join the group. It'll be another way to meet people older than myself.
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After some days of hopeless worry, I joined Cathy and Sarah in lugging bags to the airport, and then we all flew to Colorado. We were all together on the first leg, Rochester to Chicago. Then we were on two flights, with nothing much to be done about it. Small error; shouldn't recur. I hit the deck, got my large bag and a rental car (a Prius, at no extra charge) and got back in time to reacquire my family. Also to attend to other needs, one of which was food.

The drive up on I-470 and I-25 was calm and scenic, though I had the impression someone in the back seat was bored. Fortunately, she slept until we were almost to our hotel. Then we checked in with my sister Martha, had a tasty supper at Vern's, and turned in for the night.

All in all, a good trip. Sarah was frequently bored, but seems to have managed to enjoy aspects of the trip. She particularly doted on her cousin Liberty (Bonnie was suffering from a sore throat, so much of our interactions with her involved not tiring her out, and not breathing too much in her immediate vicinity). In many ways, we were on separate vacations, as I had friends to visit and also spent some time in family activities like music and work.

Music? Oh, yes. I got to play trios by Telemann and Pez with my sister and a family friend. Martha played violin, Jan played recorder, and I accompanied on Jan's nice harpsichord. I also got to jam with elements of the old gang two times, and guested on Excursions, Randy's radio show over KRFC (simulcast on the web every Saturday night from 9 to 11 Mountain Time) twice. I also got to play my old upright piano, which is at Martha's house. After mine, it felt in tune.

Work? Well, yeah. It's not like I've been working here all that much. She had a near-indigestible mass of Bible verses to proof, so we worked side by side for a few hours and got it taken care of in about three sessions. I pretty much paid for my part of the trip with that, plus the car. I also brought back another job that I will return to after some food.

Regrets? Always. I never got in touch with pal Jim, and I really wanted to see pal Steve one more time. Weather kept precipitating just enough to rule out a keenly anticipated trip to Signature Rock.

Joys? Packing. I didn't bring way too much stuff. What I brought got used. I was requested to pack up old artwork and strips to show to Randy's friend Mike (who writes comics), so we had a pleasant hour or two at Mike's kitchen table passing photocopies around. Even when I had everything together, including the man-sized suitcase, I could carry/wheel it all by myself and still open doors.

We came home separately -- Cathy and Sarah on the 1st, then I came back on the 7th. Seats were narrow, but I dug in with a crossword puzzle and iPod and the time went by. I'm thinking of marketing a bungee strap to keep one's legs more or less parallel on a flight, though the sprawlers who really need them probably don't suspect a thing. All was in order at home (though the lawn insisted on continuing to grow in our absence). The cat was fine; the basil was dryish but still alive.

I just came in from mowing the front half of the back yard, which means everything back to the hill has been trimmed since my return. The fan is still blowing on me at maximum, but it's now possible to think of a time when I could even turn it off. In the breeze it makes, a small America flag wags from side to side, and taped a bit lower at my eye level is a piece of paper from my desk pad decorated with the words "Dear mom and dad you are good parents to me. Love Sarah."

I saw my friends. I visited family. I made music and got some work. My daughter writes me notes. At times like this, it's too bad I don't ever seem to fill out the "mood" line below. Music either, but I was listening to Debussy.
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Sarah's going to be home all next week. She insists she has nine days off from school, though I prefer to think of it as five. At any rate, we'll be together for nine. The pool at the Y should be open again by then, and she'll probably be in a mood to go back. She's been going to the Adventure Center there several times a week, which is good, as she gets to run wild for a while. I now sit in the lobby and do crossword puzzles, but have excavated and washed my jogging pants, thinking I might take her suggestion and exercise instead.

I exercised yesterday, at about this time. Went for a walk around the neighborhood, roughly a mile's worth. Dogs called "Hey! Hey!" after me, and once in a while, a car went by. I miss sidewalks. After lunch I went to the music store by the canal and bought an inexpensive piano tuner (Korg CA-30). In the afternoon, I spent some time on the middle octaves of the piano in the living room, with some success. I played through the Durand Valse that I have recently boiled down from five pages (with some awkward page turns) to three pages (with one easy turn) by notating when to play what. It comes down to Intro, A1, A2, B, A2, B, A2, C1, C2, D1, D2, C3, A2, B, A3, Coda (the different numbers mean that the last measure differs -- in the case of D, it's a repeat that does four measures for D1, and eight measures for D2). Printing it was harder, because the HP gives me more than I ask for, in the form of ghostly repeats of stuff from higher up on the page.

(Anybody know how to make it quit that? It's a Color Laserjet 2605dn. If I run a cleaning page before each page I print, the copy is clean until the last two or three inches, but there's always some ghosting at the bottom of the page when I print in black. One web page said you have to dismantle the machine and clean a mirror inside. Please don't make me do that. Sliding the cleaning slider back and forth is good exercise.)

We'll probably be going to Colorado at the end of May/beginning of June. First time in five years. It kind of grinds on me that I don't get out there more often. I'm getting old, and five years is too long to go without seeing my friends.

Sarah's roller skating has improved wonderfully in just two monthly sessions at the Y. The first time, she couldn't stay on her wheels for a half minute, but she persisted. The second time, she started off about the same, but by the end of the evening, she was good for a few minutes at a time. When they started dancing, she joined right in, doing the gestures for YMCA and the Chicken Dance and the Hokey Pokey (for our UK readers, that's a version of the Hokey Cokey, which somebody apparently got paid money for). I am so proud of that kid sometimes. We looked for a roller rink here, but the one in Macedon is closed because a pipe burst and warped the floor, and the one beyond Clifton Springs takes 45 minutes to drive to. Sonali's mom says there's one in Henrietta, and I plan to go out and look for it, because Sarah and I have rollerskate fever.

I keep meaning to put some of the 1979 photos I've been scanning where the "Lost Fort Collins" web site can get them. I think I'll put them on flickr and send them a link. (Some time goes by. Lunch is eaten. Photos are uploaded.)

( I think I'll show some slides. )

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This was my week last week. I was waiting for a job that seemed pretty likely to be coming in (still waiting, but hope springs eternal). I was watching the days go by, leading up to colonoscopy on the 26th.

So last Tuesday, my gut sprang a leak. Well, actually it was just diarrhea, but of a rather virulent and unremitting sort. Barfed a couple of times, too, but that was a mere distraction. Wednesday, still at it. I complained to Cathy that it was just like doing the prep kit early. So she suggested I call the med center where I was having the procedure and tell them I was ready early. Thursday, I was still spending most of the day lying down, though I felt well enough to venture out for some Immodium.

I kept referring back to the literature they sent me about the prep, because every couple of days, there was something else I couldn't take or eat. Cumulative jollity. On Friday I felt well enough to go out for lunch with Sarah, who was home from school all day because of teacher's conferences or something. We went to Simply Crepes, and I had another Reuben. No time for dessert, but she had ice cream that night.

On Saturday, she went to her Chinese class, attending about half of it. She's pretty tired of those classes and will probably make a clean getaway from them before too much longer. I was feeling more or less normal by Sunday, so we went bowling. I rolled a double in the first game (without hitting the bumpers), but that was as good as it got. By the end of the second game, I was getting bitter. We left without the customary round of Dance Dance Revolution; I was that dejected. We grabbed Subway sandwiches (they've stopped doing wraps, alas) and took them home to share with Cathy.

Sunday night was the big event for me: the long-postponed lecture by Art Spiegelman (or art spiegelman), which had originally been scheduled back in October or thereabouts. The venue was moved to RIT, so I Googled the location to be sure I could find it.

I would like to curse Google Maps for about five minutes now. They moved RIT to a location in downtown Rochester, many miles from the actual campus, and gave me a convoluted path to use in getting there. Once I found out (by frantically phoning Cathy) that all I'd needed to do was go out Jefferson, I couldn't even get back on 490 until I crept -- more accurately, I drove behind a car that crept -- through a series of detours and blocked-off on-ramps. I opted to take South Street down to Jefferson, and that worked fairly well, apart from the traffic lights and slow speed limits. RIT itself had obligingly posted signs that led me to a parking lot, after which a locator map showed me about where the auditorium would be. The likeliest-looking door, however, was some sort of religious center, so I apologetically hailed a student who confessed that he didn't remember where the auditorium was. I found it anyway, by going in the direction he'd come from.

I was only five or ten minutes late. He gave a terrific talk -- witty and understated, and full of love for the comic medium. After it was over, I stood in line for about an hour to get his autograph on MAUS and MAUS II. The time passed agreeably as I chatted away with the college guys in line ahead of me. It was the social high point of my week, if not my month. One guy in line runs a book store. I should have asked him which one, but things like that don't occur to me until much later. The reason for the delay turned out to be that Spiegelman was not just signing, but sketching as well, so now my books have spiegelmice in them. My copy of MAUS already had my name on the signature page, because when we got it (as soon as it came out), I had no idea I'd one day be getting it signed. He obligingly drew a thought balloon around my handwriting and had it coming out of the Maus's head.

During the seconds when he was efficiently inscribing my books, I was able to ask him how his brother's name had been pronounced. "Ri-shoe," he said, more or less. "I actually changed the spelling in the book so it would be pronounceable. In Polish, it's something completely different." I also told him how pleased I'd been to see Old Man Muffaroo in a crowd scene of old comic strip characters in one of his drawings.

It was good and dark by then, and I hurried out to my car and drove on home. Sarah was asleep in the downstairs comfy chair, as is her habit these days. I carried her up to bed and kissed her goodnight.
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From this vantage point at the end of the week, I'd say there were some high points.

Nicer weather came. Snow melted. On Thursday I went out and kicked the snow piles down and scattered the white stuff around, and by the end of the day Friday, the last of the large plowed-up snow was pretty much gone. I also got a stick and putted the dog waste out of the yard. A thoughtful dog owner had left it in the gutter out front, and a helpful snow plow had deposited it (along with a certain quantity of snow) in our yard, where it was revealed by the melting.

Earlier in the week, I purchased a length of rope (two, actually -- one is for a jump rope for me) at Home Depot and took it out to the tree in front along with a ladder. I tied it around the large vertical branch that has been sitting loose up there for the last four months or so, got a good distance away, and pulled. I was able to make it swing back and forth, but it had a hold on something up there. I tried changing the angle, tying the rope to it in different places, and combinations of the two. Finally I extended the ladder to its fullest and took it to the other side of the tree, clutched the trunk with one arm and reached as high as I could to reach the parts of the branch that were hooked over another branch. After I broke those off, I went back down and pulled the rope again, this time wrapping it around another piece of broken off branch, and I got the whole mess down. Later on I'll clean it up again. This, incidentally, is where I got the putter for the first paragraph.

Between the warm weather and the rain, just about all the old snow was gone from the front, and most all from the back. Today it snowed again, but that melted off as well, leaving only a couple of snow clods where the biggest of the plowed piles was.

I've been scanning old negatives, mostly from November 1979. That's when I walked all over Fort Collins, taking black and white photos of stuff I liked, most of which seems to be gone now (but not all). A lot of these photos had never even been printed, as I was mostly getting contact sheets back then to save money. I'll be sharing some of these with Lost Fort Collins, a web site that seems to have been made just for me. Or at least it might as well have. The Northern Hotel??? Wow! I lived there!

I've also been converting some of my LPs to mp3 format for iPod listening. One difficulty with this has been that I use the PC for that, so I can employ SoundForge for the recording and cleaning up, but the PC has its problems. It wants only to shut itself down. Since the day I took the case off, things were better, and I came within about a week of having my first Mozy backup completed, but this week I hit another wall, unable to find a save point in Norton GoBack that would let it come up. [Tedious detail ahead.] With experimentation, I found that I could interrupt the startup with the space bar as if I was going to GoBack, then cancel out of that and have the option of picking much farther save points than GB was giving me. January 2 has become my standard fallback, and with its judicious use, I've been booting successfully with only the occasional lost day when it decides to update Windows while I'm asleep. I'm somewhere between 6 days, 5 hours and 1 week 1 day from finishing the first Mozy backup.

Also I have to keep a close watch on the power supply fan, which doesn't always start up with the computer. I've found that I can start it up by poking it just so with the skinny straw from the compressed air I use to keep it dusted (thanks, Shelly!). When the whole thing is backed up to my satisfaction, we might see about getting it fixed. I think I'd rather keep this one working than buy a new one. I like its audio-visual features. I can turn video output into files, and I can use SoundForge with it.

I haven't been swimming at all this week, because I banged up my right knee last week (my left knee, which I hurt slipping on ice in the driveway, was just about finished with the pain cycle) trying to show Sarah something interesting at the YMCA Adventure Center. So I've been taking her to Adventure Center to play instead of swimming with her. We had a very active time of it this evening. I chased her around, then we threw soft blocks to each other for a while, and finally played on the slide until closing time. She went right to sleep tonight.

I keep trying to find time to play the piano more, and have done so here and there. Last week we went to Borders because I had a 40% off coupon for one item. I bought the one-volume BONE collection, as I have been thinking for many years I should read that. 40% off is what it took. The only copy they had was flawed, so they worked it out that I'd buy it and it would come to me from another branch. It came in the mail a couple of days ago, and I've been enmeshed in it. I'm around page 900 now, and will finish tonight or tomorrow. I'm just as glad I could go through it all in one shot, as each chapter is a quick read. Gotta go. Bone calls me.
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It was warm enough today that Sarah wanted to go out and ride bikes, so we did. A couple of houses from Mikey's, there was a big truck with a trailer, and on the trailer was what looked for all the world like a rough, muddy concrete sofa. As we were getting set to leave later on, I had been regretting that I didn't have my camera, but then I remembered my phone camera. I got it out, and before I could, the truck started up and drove off. I didn't get a decent shot of it. I'm guessing it was a chunk of concrete that used to be a front porch. Lots of work going on at that house.

Yesterday was hundreds day for Sarah, and she was home feeling sick. I was a parent volunteer, so I took her project in (Great Wall of China festooned with genuine Chinese sunflower seeds). They were making beanie-type stuffed critters with 100 lima beans in each. As I helped kids, I was also counting out beans and making a basic beanie for Sarah so when she came in today, she wouldn't be the only kid in class who didn't have one. I took the extra step of stitching off the extremities, with beans inside, so they'd always have some substance to them. She says she has decorated it with a cape and a black karate belt. As you might guess, she's fine today.

I have the turntable hooked up again, and have started ripping some of my LPs. I've scanned in some negatives, too. Using all those peripherals. Rip, scan, print... Mr. Techno Guy!

So. Tonight I was getting ready to turn in, and the cat was, as is typical, sprawled across my path. I looked down and saw that she had a mouse between her paws. It was still moving its legs a little. I emptied some soybeans out of a bowl and put it over the mouse, then carefully slid a piece of card stock under that, followed by a thin board. I assured Frances that she was a good cat and took the captive to the front porch. I lifted the bowl, and the mouse looked a bit startled. It was probably even more startled when I flipped it out into the yard. It landed with a slight squeak. Well, I thought, now I've heard a mouse go 'squeak.'

Cathy said there's a hole by the base of the fireplace. Oh, yes, that's a hole, all right. Silly mice don't know what a mouse hole is supposed to look like, but it was enough for them to get in through, anyway. I looked in the garage for something to block it with, missing my bricks and cinder blocks (which I reluctantly surrendered when we last moved, after having had them for decades). I selected a likely 1x4 and nailed it over the large part of the hole. I went back for a 1x2 and nailed it over the rest, cursing each time a nail bent. There are two bent nails, but I straightened them out and they bent again, so there were more than two curses.

I returned to the bedroom to get back to trying to prepare for bed. There was a strange little object on the floor, which I suspected might be some sort of hairball. After I poked it with my finger, I realized it was an ex-mouse, intact at the ends and harvested much like an ear of corn in the middle. (My apologies to my friends with pet rodents for this gruesome image.) Informing Cathy that our cat was twice as good as we thought, I carefully picked it up with a paper towel and put it in a proper sort of place. Then I washed my hands and gave Frances some extra kibble and told her some more what a great cat she is.

Are there more furry little surprises in our future? Time will tell. Time will tell.
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Sarah Williams, your future ruler, turned 7 last night at midnight, local time. More on this breaking story as details become available.
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I forgot to mention that the pants cost $60, and the shoeshine kit cost $10. Knowing that, can you guess, to the penny, how much the Friday gig paid?

Anyway, earlier in the week, I was practicing, and the phone rang. It was Sarah's principal. "I have Sarah in my office now. Her teacher sent her to me." One of my eyebrows was trying to escape over the top of my head as he went on. "Because she's doing such a great job. She works really hard on her homework and her work in class, so the teacher sent her to me for a commendation." I said I didn't know where she got that, because we always told her to slack off. "I'll bet," he said, chuckling.

I told Cathy about it, and she said that was great. "Especially since she didn't finish one of her reading books, and when I wrote it on the form, she tried to erase it." "So she's also a great eraser!" I said. By and large, she really is a good homework doer. She looks forward to math, which she says is her favorite subject. I didn't tell her about calculus.

We still go bowl on Sundays. Next Sunday is her bowling birthday party, with ten guests (including little brothers). She went to Wegman's with Cathy and picked out a soccer ice cream cake for the occasion. We go to the Y several times a week now; she's into it again. We waited long enough before going today that there wasn't time for the Adventure Center, so we just swam. Had the pool to ourselves, except for one woman who was swimming laps some of the time. We did some diving, seeing if we could retrieve little bits of jetsam off the pool bottom in the deep end. I got my fingers on a rubber band in the 12-foot end, but before I could grasp it, the surface was calling to my fat cells. After that, it must have moved a little onto a dark stripe, and I couldn't see it any more. I swam three or four laps as well.

I'll keep working my way through the easy-listening songbook that I got for a quarter at a Virginia Beach Friends of the Library sale some time back. Maybe I'll get the hang of music that was written after I drifted away from paying attention to pop. It seems to me that if I just pick up the groove of the chord patterns, I should be able to sit down and make the stuff up by the yard.

(Well, I didn't say I wasn't going to talk about me.)

Oh, and last week we went to a different bowling alley, because Clover Lanes was full up. It turns out the one in Henrietta has a Dance Dance Revolution machine. So on our way from bowling to lunch, I stopped off and did a dollar's worth. For the first time, I went to the medium setting instead of the gah gah goo goo setting. It wasn't much harder, except that it introduced steps where I had to put both feet down at the same time.

Speaking of the shoeshine kit, Sarah is fascinated by it and wants to be able to polish some shoes of her own with it. Unfortunately, her Spider-Man boots are vinyl, and the next pair of shoes she tried was suede. I looked around and saw some camera accessories my sister had sent me recently -- Mom's little Kodak Bantam 828 camera, that I used in 8th grade, when I took Photography, and a light meter. Both had leather cases, and both were dusty and much bedraggled. I polished them both up a bit, and they look thirty years younger. Just a little more worn than when I was using the camera to take clumsily composed black and white pics and developing them at school and printing on a Vivitar enlarger.



This would be the first picture I took and developed myself. I had a sort of light bulb moment and decided I could capture the view from our living room window for all eternity. Darned if it didn't work out pretty much like I had hoped. I posted an excessive commentary on it at the flickr page, though it barely scratches the surface of memories that stark landscape brings up. It's at a pretty small size, though, and I think I'll get out the negative and re-scan the thing soon.
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Sarah and I have been doing stuff together. The routine has been that Cathy takes her to Chinese school on Saturday morning, and then they eat lunch. Cathy's doing better, but the week before this one, she wasn't up to the Saturday morning part, so I took Sarah to her class. The day before that was payday Friday, and Cathy wasn't able to go out for dinner, so Sarah and I went out to Sakura for sushi and yakisoba. Since it was a weekend night, they had a piano player in the lounge. I didn't have a dollar bill, so I made a point of giving him a thumbs-up on my way out, so he'd at least know I thought he did a good job.

Getting back to Saturday (I seem to be unstuck in time today), I suggested to Sarah after her class that we might go to the science museum. She responded with a degree of apathy and I used my Jedi mind tricks to guilt her into going. She started enjoying herself right away, going through the climber, up the rock wall, controlling the little bathyscaphe (or whatever it is) and other stuff on the first floor. It got to be lunch time, so we ate in the museum cafeteria. I had a delightful potato and leek soup, and Sarah grudgingly munched the grilled cheese sandwich she had first asked for. I missed the part where she changed her request to a cheeseburger. Refreshed, we continued through the museum. I made a trip back to the car for my camera, which didn't work. I suspected at first it might have been too cold to work, but signs seemed to indicate that it might have been left on (which I thought was impossible). No batteries in the gift shop, so I made another trip through the rather cold day we were having back to the car for two AAs. Then we went to the top floor (traveling bug exhibit, with giant mechanical insects, flats of pinned specimens, and some live crawlies in glass cages) and worked our way on down. Sarah enjoyed the hands-on stuff and tried to hurry me up through the museum-type stuff, with artifacts and dioramas and recreations of old-timey stores and offices with mannequins.

Sunday was our usual day for bowling, but the snow was coming down, and streets weren't plowed quite enough for my taste, and I didn't want to get stuck on the street when Cathy couldn't even come for us (her car wasn't starting for some reason at that time) so we stayed in.

Then we passed a pretty normal week, with some extra shoveling and sweater wearing. For supper Friday, I took Sarah to Wendy's to see how she liked it. She liked it fine. I suggested the root beer float, and she liked that, and got a mandarin orange cup for both of us. I showed her the small bacon burger, and she got one of those. It was the first time I remember going to a Wendy's since before we had her, and I was glad to see that the Junior Deluxe Cheeseburger is still a good eat. The chili was tasty as well.

When Saturday came, Cathy was doing well enough that she went in with Sarah, and after class and a bite of food, they watched HOTEL FOR DOGS at the theater near the mall. On Sunday, Sarah and I went bowling and arranged for her birthday party on February 8. Our first game was a good one. In the third frame, we both got strikes, not even hitting the bumpers. We also picked up several spares. Sarah was rolling a bunch of good ones, right down the middle. I wasn't doing all that badly either. The second day wasn't as great, but it still wasn't awful like two weeks before when I couldn't manage a straight roll if somebody'd offered me a trip to Disneyland. (My suspicion was that playing Wii bowling was wrecking my reflexes for real bowling.) Then we went to King Buffet, where we both enjoyed some tasty stuffed clams and other delights for lunch.

That brings us up to today, which is just beginning. Sarah has already helped herself to breakfast. She announced to me (I was in the bathroom at the time) that she had mastered the whipped cream can and put some on a cup of pudding. Breakfast. I've been making her bacon for breakfast most days, at her request, and was surprised to see her vary her routine.

The house is looking better and better inside. I got a lot of boxes out of various rooms, upstairs and downstairs, cut up, flattened, and off to recycling. I made a bunch of new room in the garage, which now seems more spacious, though it will never be big enough for two cars, because the kitchen sticks into it. The family room is big enough for Sarah to really let loose when she dances, and she also wants to rassle more. She's home for the King holiday (no relation to the buffet), so all day today is Daddy and Sarah time. We're watching DVR'd "Avatar" episodes. It's a pretty good show. And Sarah's playing with the breath gauge they had Cathy using at the hospital. I brought it home because I suspected Sarah would be interested in it. I get to be right sometimes.

Cathy has ALA Midwinter this weekend, in Denver, so from Friday to Tuesday will be Daddy and Sarah time too.

edited to add: We also went swimming at the Y, for the first time in a while. Sarah seems to have had a good time, as she wants to go again soon. I'm all for it, as I need the exercise, and we're paying big bucks. She doesn't like her swimming lessons now because the teacher isn't letting her wear goggles with a nose cover. She says she's not used to it, and I tell her she should try to get used to it. (repeat sentence ad libitum)
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