Nine Years, Give or Take...

Quite a crazy week, out here in suburbia... I started up at the school again, which was interesting... usually, the first week back is pretty cool, because it is just faculty and staff, so we're only cooking for about a hundred people, and can make whatever wacky things come to mind. As usual though, work is chock full of wonderful challenges (can you feel the gentle ooze of sarcasm?) and we were greeted with a kitchen minus a floor because of a mildew problem they discovered right before opening up for the year. Unfortunately, since I haven't perfected the ability to levitate, we had to quicklikearabbit roll a refrigerator into the hallway, a worktable into the storeroom, and gather up all the equipment we thought we might need and drag it out of the kitchen before they started working... and spent the whole week cooking like Anne Frank, hidden away in corners and storerooms. 'Course there weren't any Nazis, but we did get into the habit of whispering to each other, and I kept a diary that I think will still be as touching and relevant 50 years from now as it is today. One of the highlights of the week was a party that Kate and I catered on Tuesday night, it was a short notice thing for 100 people that we scraped together using one table, a grill, and a few microwaves. About 5 hours and a lot of cursing later we turned out filet mignon, citrus shrimp, eggplant parmesan, antipasto, chicken with marsala cream... and a handful of little appetizers. Good times... Oh, and on top of that it was our anniversary on Tuesday, so I left early in the morning, and didn't get home until Sara was already in bed, not exactly the most romantic moment in our nine years of marriage. Luckily, we found out on Wednesday that Tuesday wasn't actually our anniversary, Wednesday was. After a short discussion about why neither of us can ever remember whether it is the 28th or 29th (and a brief, scolding lecture from my sister who set us right on the date) we actually had nice anniversary after all...

Amidst all of the hustle and bustle around here, we've been doing a fairly decent job of keeping ourselves sane by running the kids ragged. For our long four day weekend we've been all over the map, and walked them to the point of exhaustion through the Tyler Arboretum yesterday. We saw some cool stuff - a butterfly house packed with caterpillars and butterflies; some cool trails and a meadow maze; and more frogs than you can shake a stick at... and best part of all was that everyone in the house slept like rocks afterwards.

Oh, on a totally unrelated note, Sam has started dressing himself. It's great, since we don't have to coax him into getting dressed in the morning, but he needs a bit of fashion advice. I certainly don't want to discourage him, but its hard to leave the house when he comes downstairs wearing Spiderman pants and a ruffled periwinkle tuxedo shirt. I have to admit it does add a little spice to our lives though... it's fun sitting downstairs in the morning waiting to see which one of the Village People the boy will come down looking like...