Where's the butter?

Bill and Clay are back in St. Louis for a weekend LAN party, and Linc and I have been just sort of being lazy, doing little errands and projects, visiting friends...

Been fighting off a cold. Respiratory infections while using a CPAP is a new experience for me. Finally figured out how to up the humidity; that's made a bit of difference.

Did a stock-up trip to the grocery store back in Brookside. I can't believe how spoiled I was, living close to a store that stocks shallots and toasted sesame oil and organic produce and hummus and guacamole and Scimeca hot Italian links and lots of other stuff. I even couldn't find whipping cream at the store close to us now! Sheesh.

Got the rest of Linc's puppy costume: a long-sleeved tan shirt, to go with some tan pants, paw-print gloves (thanks, Aunt Amanda!), and the puppy mask he picked out at Michael's the other day (see glue-gun frustrations, below). Still haven't figured out the tail, but it's pretty cute.

Went to tara_doula's house for dinner last night... her husband is out of town this weekend, too, and she made us fabulous tacos and margaritas. She was very tolerant of my kid trying to wreck her house, and we had a great visit.

I finally obtained glue gun sticks to refill the ancient glue gun (seriously... this thing is possibly older than I am; it was my grandmother's) so I could finish wrapping gifts for Cordell's host parents. Gift giving is a really big part of Japanese culture, and wrapping the gift is almost as important as what's inside. He wanted me to send things specific to this area, so I found popcorn on the cob, honey-toasted sunflower seeds, and a bunch of little containers of colorful candy-coated sunny seeds (think M&M style) for the kids. I used this really pretty sparkly turquoise paper, but it's coated with plastic or something... it merely laughed at my attempt to seal it down with tape. The glue gun did the trick, but it's taken me a couple of weeks to finish what should have been a ten-minute job. Argh!

I packed up all the gifts, plus some lemon-pepper seasoning (apparently you can't get that in Japan, and Cord's been jonesing for lemon-pepper pasta, and it seems that using lemons and pepper in their natural form just isn't the same) and some immunity-building tincture (poor guy's been down with a cold not once, but twice since he got there), and a few recent family photos.

Linc painted a couple of Halloween decorations, and I packed up those along with a few more photos for all the grandmas. More photos for Julia went into another package. A very tardy birthday gift for another friend into another one. Now... off to the UPS, then the puppy and I will head to Boo at the Zoo.

Tomorrow: I braid at a wedding, first one in a while. Finish the laundry, maybe sketch out some NaNoWriMo ideas, perhaps make some earrings...

Puppy action

Maybe not up to Cute Overload standards, but pretty cute nonetheless... Linc in his puppy outfit:



He enjoyed the Boo at the Zoo immensely. We rode the train and carousel twice each, and he did great in the fairly long lines (to their credit, the zoo was pretty wonderful about moving things along quickly... they had three trains running simultaneously!). He didn't really figure out the whole gathering-candy thing, and I didn't do anything to change that. He did manage to accidentally obtain a couple crunch bars and a Tootsie Pop, and seemed overjoyed to have them. He said "thanks you" to the zoo folks helping out on the rides, usually unprompted. He patiently took his turn at several activities without pushing or rushing... in fact, several kids cut in front of him and he took it in stride.

He also tried to help out a couple of overstimulated wailing kids (his efforts were rebuffed, sometimes by the parent?!, but I was glad to see him at least try... he's got a bit of compassion in him, which you don't always see in a four-year-old), and ran up to play with a bunch of other kids... not shy at all.

Yep, it looks like we've got another anti-social, maladjusted, isolated homeschooler kid on our hands.