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Lloyd and I went to Omaha on some small quests, and one of the stops was Fat Brain Toys, where I saw – and purchased – the Best Thing Ever!!

In preschool we have lots of ways to encourage children to explore writing, and traditionally the girls are raring to go – lots of ‘office work’ and such – but I often have a handful of boys that would rather eat a mountain of spinach than come over and draw for a little bit.

This will change all that.

It is so cool!! The ‘pen’ is a magnet that pulls each BB up through this little tube until it clicks into place. Tracing each letter produces the most satisfying click-click-click, and then to erase them, you trace back over them with your finger and they click back down. (I bought the number version, too.)

The directions for making some of the letters and numbers are a little wacky, but this is absolutely awesome! I can’t wait until tomorrow. 😀

Our good friends the Peperkorns came on Friday, and it was great to see them.

The last time they came through we were dealing with The Bat Bug Incident of Two Thousand Ten, so it was nice to have them here without the anxiety. 😀

Their life has been in a bit of – I don’t want to say upheaval – but I was just cracking up at the stories Kathryn was telling me. They have been packing up to leave for California, and the weekend before Kathryn had all her awesome children’s opera performances. No stress there. Then they loaded up the car on Monday to leave…. and the van died. Died as in ‘now we have to buy a new car’ kind of died. So, they unpacked the camping beds and slept in the house so they wouldn’t swelter in their camper…..then the house lost electricity. At this point I told Kathryn that their life would make a great t.v. show, titled something like “And then….” or “One more thing….”

(The replacement car is fabulous, by the way! It’s a Chevy Traverse and has seats that not only heated seats but cooled seats!)

She had stories such as this: On the morning of her daughter twice-rescheduled birthday party (due to illness), she made a gorgeous rainbow layer cake, put it in the fridge, and when youngest daughter opened the fridge, the cake fell on the floor. Then it was off to a little out-patient varicose vein surgery before the party. (!) Twenty shots in the legs / zap zap / home for the party. Honestly.

They are awesome people and I wish them a disaster-free journey across the country!

Do they even make station wagons anymore? It seems to me it’s the perfect family vehicle – well, perfect if you aren’t concerned about ‘safety’ for children, but back in my childhood, seatbelts were optional and we liked it that way. In fact, if memory serves, the seat belts in the back seat were always buried in the crack.

Anyway, I loved our station wagon. We would do a cross-country trek once a year to visit both sets of grandparents, and the back of the wagon was prime riding real estate. It would hold the cooler (so you could sneak snacks), and I could stretch out on a blanket or sleeping bag and either read or look upside-down at the sky.

Good thing I didn’t get carsick. or thrown from the vehicle.

The place where I grew up had beautiful surroundings. Delta is at the base of Grand Mesa, and up on Grand Mesa, aspen trees grow like weeds. Aspen trees are nice enough during the summer, but during the fall they turn all golden and beautiful and sound fantastic. I imagine it’s like hearing the ocean a little – lots of wooshing and rustling.

Anyway, sometime during the fall, while the trees were still golden and not yet brown, my parents would round their ungrateful children up, put clean clothes on them, pack them in the car and then put up with their bickering and whining for twenty minutes while we drove to the beautiful trees for a family photo.

This was pre-digital, too, when posing nicely mattered. We couldn’t take this shot twenty times and pick the best one. You smiled when it was time to smile and let your eyes dry out so you wouldn’t be blinking for the photo.

See? We look happy, but secretly we are plotting one another’s demise. Well…. maybe that was just me….. Huh. Maybe all of it – the bickering and whining – was me.

Our good friends the Peperkorns are moving to California and will be stopping by soon. Lloyd and I were trying to spiff the place up, and as he was vacuuming, there was suddenly a terrible, terrible noise.

(Question: If you were driving a vacuum and it suddenly made a terrible, terrible noise, wouldn’t you stop said vacuum immediately? Somebody didn’t, and can’t seem to explain his actions. I maintain that it is because he is so unfamiliar with using a vacuum that he thought the sound was normal. He does the same thing when a spoon is in the disposal.)

Back to the story: I screamed, “Stop!”, then we turned over the vacuum to see all the length of my phone charger cord wrapped around the beater bar. The plug-in part was far, far away from it.

Boooo.

Hmmmmm. This could be a problem. It’s not that I call people very much, but I do use the alarm clock feature (three alarms: The ‘wake up’ one, the ‘you should be out of the shower by now’ one, and the ‘you should be eating breakfast by now’ one). When I go on home visits I set the alarm so I leave in time for the next visit. I can’t lose battery power!

I thought I could just use my car charger, but I don’t drive enough to charge up the phone without wearing out the car battery. I went to buy a replacement charger at Wal-Mart, but they didn’t have the right size. They did have a cool car-charger-to-outlet gadget, though. Perfect!

Guess what? I can’t find my car charger anywhere. Have you seen it?

Not a big deal. We have a U.S. Cellular place in town and I thought I could just stop by every couple of days and switch out the battery, or just break down and buy a new charger. Until then, I’m returning calls from my Google account:

Funny true story: At my last home visit, I sat down at the table and there was my phone’s twin! I told the parents my sob story and asked if I could borrow a cup of electricity as we visited. They very kindly obliged.

So, it’s time to buy a new charger…… or a new phone. 😀

I grew up in western Colorado where the humidity is very low. Our house didn’t have central air conditioning because it really didn’t need it. If we opened our windows at night and closed them in the morning the house stayed relatively cool. Now, being the temperature-control-freak that I am, I can understand my Dad getting upset if my window was still open at noon.

We did have a large air-conditioning unit off off the dining room. Mostly it served as a place for the family cat to sit – staring through the window, waiting for us to notice she was ready to come inside – but once in a great while we got to turn it on.

That was sheer bliss! I would stand right in front the vents, holding up my shirt to catch that chilly air, ignoring the shouts of everyone else to move so the rest of the house could cool off. I was deaf with freezing-cold joy.