Most writers who have received feedback on a story have probably been told, at least once if not more often, that they need to "show, don't tell."  There are lots of explanations of what that means, but when I say it, what I mean when I talk about "showing" is using enough words to help your readers feel as if they were watching the scene, and what I mean when I talk about "telling" is summarizing things that aren't all that important, so the story can get to the important stuff.  So when I say, "Show, don't tell," I am asking for more words about the important parts and fewer words about the stuff that connects the important parts. 

But there are other times when we could apply this recommendation.  How about when we're talking about being loving to one another?  We can "tell" someone that we love them all day long, but if we don't "show" our love, they may not believe us.  And if we pick the wrong way to "show" our love, that also isn't going to get the message across.  (The meaning of the message is in what is received, not in what was sent.)

So in order to really "show" others that we love them, we need to find out how they feel loved.  Some people feel loved when they receive gifts that are clearly selected with their interests and preferences in mind.  Some people feel loved when someone does something for them without being asked.  Some people feel loved when someone spends time with them, doing what they like to do.  Some people feel loved through physical contact--hugs, kisses, just a simple touch, or more.  Some people feel loved when someone takes the time to share their thoughts and feelings, even if it is "telling."  Some people feel loved when someone just says "I love you," especially if they don't do it very often.  Some people feel loved in more than one of these ways.  Everyone feels loved when it is clear that thought and consideration has gone into the showing.

Most of us have heard of "the Golden Rule," but that rule can be confused with the one that says, "do unto others what you wish they would do for you so that you'll feel loved," which can actually be kind of selfish and manipulative.  Giving someone flowers because that's what you wish they would give to you will not get you flowers, and may frustrate the other person who couldn't care less about getting flowers.

We all have our own way of feeling loved, and some call that our "love language."  What is particularly frustrating is if someone loves you, but doesn't know what your love language is.  And we can't fall back on the "if you really loved me, you'd know" argument because love doesn't make us telepathic.

So herewith is a plea not only for showing along with telling (being told you are loved can be very meaningful, but it needs showing to support it), but also for finding out how to show.  If you don't know how those you love feel loved, and you can't figure it out (either from the crazy things they do for you that you don't really care about, or from the things that they get very excited about when you accidentally do them), sit down and talk to them.  Ask them if you could do anything in the world for them, within reason, what would it be?  And think about how their answer can give you clues to their "love language."

Then go forth and show, don't just tell.  This world really does need more "love, sweet love."

I've talked about my knitting a little in a few previous posts, such as this one:

http://phaedrekathleen.livejournal.com/7015.html

Well, because my daughter, the spinner and super-knitter, entered some of her completed projects in the state fair this year, I decided to enter the shawl I show in the above blog post (if the link works).

And I won a blue ribbon!  I was so excited when I saw that.  Wow!

I mentioned that my daughter has been trying to teach me how to spin in an earlier blog post, too.  Well, the wheel I borrowed from a friend of hers wasn't cooperating with me very much.

Last month, she found a different wheel that I could actually purchase (it's officially for my Christmas present), and I've actually been spinning with it.  It's called a hitchhiker (google it to see one) and it's just tiny, but it works great for me, and I'm enjoying myself.

Next I want to try dyeing (I think that's how it's spelled) the yarn I spin.  I've heard that kool-aid (TM) makes great yarn dye.

Wow!  It's been a while.  Sorry abou that.  And here I am getting ready to post two entries.

First one is about some thought processes I've had lately.

I have what I tend to call a "butterfly brain" in that it flits from one thought to another to another and to another.  This can be quite entertaining, to me, at least, when I'm just sitting there pondering or meditating or whatever.  I'll stop and notice where my thoughts have taken me, and remember where they started out, and I'll spend time going backwards to see how this thought was triggered by that thought which was triggered by that thought.

Are your eyes glazing over yet?

Well, when this happens while I'm talking with people, it can be quite disconcerting to them, because they'll think we're discussing one subject, and suddenly I'll share a thought that is about ten thoughts down the line from that subject, and they look at me like "where did that come from?"  I've learned that it isn't all that entertaining for me to backtrack for them to show how I came to the new thought, so I usually just smile and apologize.

The reason I bring this up is because one of the things my brain really likes to do is put unrelated, or only slightly related thoughts next to each other and see what kind of ideas that generates.  This can actually be a pretty good exercise for writers, especially if they are struggling with writers block, but it can also be confusing for anyone not in on the process.

When I get a particularly interesting combination, I like to share it.  And that has its own problems.  I was explaining some thought juxtapositions I had had recently to a friend.  The friend tried to explain to me why that particular juxtaposition wouldn't work.  And I tried to show how, in spite of the friend's problems with it, there were still some interesting possibilities.

And things got a little heated for a few minutes there.

Looking back on it (something I have to do a lot when I need to figure out what went wrong in a conversation), I realized that the heat was generated because neither one of us felt the other was "getting" what we were trying to say.  I feel that I "got" what my friend was trying to say, but I don't feel that my friend "got" what I was trying to say.  It calmed down, but not very satisfactorily, for me, at least.

So I've decided that what I need to do the next time that happens is to stop the discussion before it gets too heated and point out that we are probably repeating ourselves in louder voices because each think the other is not "getting" our message.  Then, if the other person agrees that that is the problem, I intend to suggest that we each use what I believe is called "reflection" in psychology, where the listener repeats back in his or her own words what they have understood the speaker to have said.  That way the speaker can gauge whether the listener "got" what the speaker was saying.  And if both people do that, they they both have a chance to find out without feeling frustrated.

I'm writing this in my blog in hopes that by putting it down in words somewhere I will have a better chance of being able to remember to actually do it.

Even though I'm not sure this made any sense at all to anyone else who may read it.

Thanks for listening.

We have gutters now, and they look very nice.  All we are missing is support for our rooftop swamp cooler (which was removed when they removed the old shingles).  It's supposed to be replaced tomorrow, but in the meantime, we can't pump water into the swamp cooler and use it to cool down the house.  When we got back from driving to Nephi, Utah to pick up our jeep (more about this below), the temperature inside the house, according to our thermostat, was 89 degrees F.

The jeep was in Nephi because it broke down there on the way back from an adventure at Zion National Park on the 4th of July weekend.  We were able to have a mechanic there work on it, but it took them all this time to figure out what was wrong.  But they did (YAY!) and it wasn't too terribly expensive.

And we took some time to do some more adventuring (a "shakedown" drive, more or less) by driving to Maple Canyon near Moroni (where the walls of the canyon are conglomerate--looks like an old sidewalk with the smooth surface worn off--bunch of pebbles and larger rocks stuck in cement).  Lots of people were doing climbing, but we just hiked a bit.

Then we drove on a jeeping road from Wales (Utah) to Levan and then back home (stopped to give a birthday present to our grandson--he's six) and spend time with the family.

Earlier this week, we went to Cedar City for the Utah Shakespeare Festival and saw four of the six plays (THE SECRET GARDEN, HENRY V, COMEDY OF ERRORS, and AS YOU LIKE IT).  Had a great time.  I'm excited about next year when they'll do PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, MERCHANT OF VENICE, MACBETH, and MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.  Was able to donate a bunch of material (from my sewing stash) to the costuming department.  I hope they can use it.

And in the middle of the week, I was able to go to the Oquirrh Mountain Temple open house with my friend, Jodi.  We went to the open house for the Draper Temple together, and it was interesting to see this one, and how they are different and how they are the same.
 

We've been doing strange things to our house during the past few months.  It started when our sewer kept backing up (and my handy husband had to rent a rooter every few weeks to clean it out--through the clean out on our roof!--the cleanout in our yard was almost at the the street, so it was no help at all).

First, we rented a mini-excavator and dug up the yard, replacing the clean-out near the street, and then putting in a new clean-out close to the house (and discovering the "root" of all of our troubles in the process).  Had to replace the water line to the house because the excavator broke it--oh, the joys of using "heavy" equipment.

We also resloped our front yard (from relatively flat with a bit of a drop-off at the sidewalk, to gently sloping down to the sidewalk) and had 16 tons of dirt hauled off in that process.

Next handy husband started putting in new sprinkers (when you live in a mountain desert, you can't rely on the weather to keep things green--though this past June has certainly put the lie to that) before we re-sod the front yard.

Also before re-sodding, we had someone come and remove a layer of cedar shakes which had been put down over a layer of cedar shingles on our roof lo many years ago.  We did this because cedar makes home owners insurance providers very unhappy, and we didn't want to lose our insurance in this troubled economy.

So now we have lovely asphalt shingles on our roof, but no gutters (the work has been getting done between thunderstorms and "gullywashing" rainfalls) so far.  And no grass in the front yard, yet, either.

I feel truly blessed that my children do not feel entitled. There are that many fewer things I have to worry about for them because of that.

For example, when I found out that my oldest daughter had car trouble, which meant she and her kids would not be able to come play at our house on the day they usually come, I offered to drive out and get them.  My car is not as big as her minivan, so there was a chance the car seat and boosters wouldn't fit.  But they did.

And we went to our house, and then we all went to a family get-together at my in-laws.  My husband rode with our daughter and her kids in our car, and I walked (got my daily walk in that way--they only live a couple of miles away).  Her husband drove over from work and met us there.

That's when I made an offer that hadn't even occurred to our daughter, because she does not feel entitled.  I offered to switch cars with her husband, so their family could all fit in--his car isn't wide enough for the car seat and boosters.  And that's what we did.

The next day, my husband and I drove out to their house with their car, and stayed with the grandkids while they went on a ski date (we'd given our son-in-law a couple of ski tickets for his birthday a few months ago and he asked his wife to go skiing with him--she hasn't been for at least five years).

So we had two days in a row to play with our grandkids, and we were able to help our daughter and son-in-law out (he fixed the minivan with neighborhood help and with my husband's help after they got back from skiing).  And my daughter never asked, never even thought of asking.  We had to come up with the idea and offer.

Now, I just need to remember that she doesn't think of things we can do to help them, and so I need to think of them myself, or we will miss out on other opportunities like these.

You know, when I'm stressing about something that is coming up, I think of all the things I could say about it on this blog, but that I don't have time to say because I have to get things done for the whatever it is that is coming.

Then, when it's all over, I'm so glad it went as well as it did, and I just want to move on.

There have been two such things in the past two weeks.  The first one was Life, the Universe, and Everything, the BYU science fiction symposium held 19-21 February at Brigham Young University.  I had panels in the evening (7pm--who ever heard of a 7pm panel?!?!?!?--on Thursday, 5pm and 7pm on Saturday, and one at 1pm on Friday that conflicted with something else I had to do).  So I had to go down to Provo on Thursday, and then back down on Friday (after my something else) to stay overnight for Saturday.  When I got there on Friday, I realized that I was sick (urinary tract infection--I haven't had one of those since I was a teenager--that I know of).  I went to Instacare that evening, waited around at least an hour before anyone could see me, answered questions, etc, etc, etc, and got a prescription that I had to drive to another town to fill because it was so late only one place was still open.

Got to bed late, slept later than I expected, but I felt better in the morning (YAY!) and then went to the symposium and didn't leave until my panel that evening at 7pm (!?!?!?!?).  I suspect the programming chair doesn't like me.

I spent a good part of the next week getting ready for the next thing--the Association for Mormon Letters annual meeting which is a day-long series of panels and presentations with a luncheon.  It was supposed to be 7 March, but it got moved up to 28 February because of the availability of a wonderful keynote speaker.  He was worth it, but it was a scramble to get everything done in time, and things still went wrong.  (There was a misunderstanding about the luncheon, so I gave up my ticket and went elsewhere to eat--had a lovely meal, by the way--so that there would be enough lunches for all the people who showed up at the last minute.)

I'm just glad it's over, and all I have to do now is gather up the information that needs to go out onto the AML website and get it up there.

And that's all I want to say about that.

<SIGH!>

Okay, how do I do this?

I've heard that a friend has a blog here on livejournal, but I can't figure out how to find her blog.

I can remember seeing whole lists of names of people with blogs here, such as members of SFWA, but I can't find those lists now.

This person is a member of SFWA, and I was hoping to be able to just go to the list and look for her blog, but no such luck.

What am I doing wrong?  (The FAQs don't even cover this question.)

I go all this time without saying much, and then I think of several topics I'd like to talk about.  Which to do?  Or should I even do any of them?

Maybe I should even have separate posts for them.

Ah, well.  I'll do one of them now, anyway.

And, to go along with the title, I'll talk about the one that has to do with attending a luncheon.

A while ago, I went to a luncheon for a club that I had heard about.  It's the kind of club that is always trying to get new members, so it wasn't something I'd been specifically invited to join.  They have these luncheons every so often, and this was the first one I'd been able to attend.

When I arrived, I found that the people I knew were either involved in serving the buffet, or were seated around a table.  Several people greeted me, but there was no room for me at the table--the vacant chairs had stuff on them, indicating that they were already taken.  So I sat alone at the next table.

And watched as other people I knew came in and were invited to sit in the already taken seats.  By the way they were invited, I got the impression that they were not expected, that the seats had not been saved for them; rather that they just happened to be the ones the woman who had "saved" the seats wanted at her table.

I sat there, feeling hurt by this, especially since I would hope that if someone I knew were in a similar situation, and I were one of those at the table with the others, that I would have gotten up and joined the lone woman.  I almost considered getting up and leaving, and I certainly considered never coming again.

Eventually, the women I knew who had been involved in serving the buffet came and sat with me, so I wasn't alone the whole time, but it was very disheartening sitting there alone.  I really hope I remember this, so that I don't let someone sit alone like that.

So, a year ago today I was in Jerusalem.  We'd had a tour and this was a "free day" which we spent shopping, and revisiting places we wanted to spend more time in.  We started by visiting the Garden Tomb outside the Damascus Gate--an amazing place--and ended by walking along the outside of the eastern wall where the bricked-up Golden Gate overlooks the Mount of Olives.  We returned to the US on 6 January, and the whole trip was an amazing experience.

I found out when I got home that I had developed something called "deQuervain's tenosynovitis" which basically means that it hurts when I move my left arm certain ways (like anything that makes me stretch with my thumb, or certain kinds of turns or leverages).  I got a cortisone shot for it and had to wear a special wrist splint that imobilized my thumb.  It still hasn't gone away entirely, but the pain has gotten less, and I can manage, if I'm careful.

Our youngest daughter graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in marketing and a minor in French (she is fluent after having lived in France and Belgium for almost a year and a half a few years ago).

Our fourth grandchild was born the day after Mother's Day, and it was an amazing experience.  He wasn't due for a couple of weeks yet, but my daughter felt that something was wrong.  She asked me what I thought, and I told her to leave her other kids with me and go find out.  She would not be bothering the hospital people--that's what they were there for.  So she went, and found out that the baby needed to be born RIGHT NOW!  His amniotic fluid was extremely low, the cord was wrapped around his neck a couple of times, and there was even a knot in it, and she was very right to go when she did.  (The kids got to stay overnight--without any sleepwear or other preparation--so it was quite an adventure.)  But he is doing great, and is a lovely little boy.

Our youngest daughter started dating a young man with whom she'd been friends for about a year and a half, and they became engaged just before he had to leave to start law school in the Washington D.C. area.  She was able to visit him for a month in the middle of his semester because her sister moved there from Chicago this summer.  They were married on 30 December and are on their honeymoon as I type this.  It was a lovely wedding, and we had a wonderful party for them and their friends and all of the relatives.

My husband and I celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary this year, and in a couple of days we will have been married for 1/3 of a century.  It's been a great adventure, and we are looking forward to the rest of our century.

We had to put down our 16-year-old Siamese Manx kitty this summer, but a week after my birthday this fall, we adopted a five-year-old polydactyl Snowshoe Lynx-point part-Siamese named Tikki (from M.T.K. which stands for Many-Toed Kitty).  She answers to Mewtant, which is our youngest daughter's name for her, and she is a sweetheart.

So we're officially empty-nesters, but we have a kitty to make up for that.

It's been a good year, and we are looking forward to visiting the Washington D.C. area in 2009 at least once.  I'll have to see if I can get myself invited to a SF convention out there.

Best wishes to all who read this.  I hope you have a lot of exciting things planned for 2009, and that some of them actually happen.  I also hope that you enjoy the exciting things that actually do happen this coming year.

I spent most of this week trying to upgrade my daughter's laptop from a 40-gig hard drive with 500 megs of ram to a 120-gig hard drive with 2 gigs of ram. The ram upgrade was simple, but the hard-drive upgrade required file and settings transfers, and then operating system reinstalling, and other applications reinstalling. And it still wouldn't work right.

I have a driver agent account because of OSC's praise for the program in one of his Hatrack columns, so I tried running that (it checks the internet for updated drivers for your computer), and I installed the drivers it found for me.

And that worked. My daughter is very excited about how fast her laptop is now, and how she can have her browser running at the same time as her media player (so she can listen to her mpg files). She hasn't been able to do that for a while.

Today (Saturday), I went to the funeral of my cousin's wife.  I was reading the newspaper on Thanksgiving morning and turned to the obituaries to see her name and photograph.  She died on Sunday after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer a few months ago, and I hadn't heard.  She was only a year older than I am.

My mom and I drove down to Utah Valley to be there.  It was great to see my cousins and meet some of their kids.  One cousin, who'd been quite a favorite when we were kids, I hadn't seen for several years, and it was a real treat to see him.  Another cousin, whom I'd visited for a week a few years ago while my mother attended a lace convention (she makes bobbin lace) in his town, came with his wife, and it was great to see them again.  It's always great to see family, but it's hard when the thing that brings us together is a funeral.  And it was especially hard when the funeral is for someone who should not have died this young.

She looked beautiful as she lay there, but then, she always did look beautiful.

   This is a sweater I knitted with acrylic yarn many years ago for my daughter.  It actually has two unicorns on it, facing each other, and it was a real struggle for me to make because of the different colors.  I am not nearly as comfortable doing what I believe is called "color work" as I am doing fancy stitiches. 

I remember trying to do an argyle, with all the different colors that involves, and giving up after only about twenty rows because I just couldn't get it to hold together.  My daughter does such stuff quite a lot, and she's figured out how to do it so that it does stay together, but she hasn't inspired me to follow her to that particular kind of knitting experience yet.  It's probably only a matter of time.

By the way, even though this sweater is knitted in acrylic yarn, it has held up quite well over time, but that might be in part because my daughter didn't wear it very much.  <shrug>

   This sweater, which may not be very easy to see, I knitted in 2002 for my daughter.  I love Aran Isle sweaters because I enjoy doing fancy stitches, and I have a copy of Alice Starmore's Aran Knitting which has a bunch of lovely, cabled patterns.  I offered to knit one of them up for my daughter as a Christmas present, and she chose St. Brigid.  She also picked out the yarn, a lovely green wool, because she wanted something that would last longer than the acrylic yarn sweaters I had knitted with up until then.

The project terrified me because wool is much more expensive than acrylic and what if I ruined it?

My daughter didn't think so, however, and she has encouraged me to keep knitting with natural fibers (though I still have a stash of acrylic which I hope to use up for "fun" as time goes by).

The seraphim shawl from my earlier post is from a wool-silk blend, I believe.

                   

This is called a seraphim shawl, and I just finished knitting it.  My daughter spun the yarn for it, and she found the pattern, so it is a collaboration between us. 

The different colored "stripe" is yarn that has gold thread with it.  I'm not much of a shawl wearer, because they tend to slip off of my shoulders or get in my way as I'm trying to use my arms, but I think I've figured out how to wear this one so it will behave (or at least cooperate).

Thanks, Daughter, for the wonderful spinning you did for me, and for helping me block this so it looks so fine.

This week, after I'd been to my SF/F reading group and was almost home, I stopped at a stop sign facing the mountains to the east of Salt Lake City, and I saw an Unidentified FALLING Object (not flying, falling).

I've seen "falling stars" (meteors), so I know what they look like. This was not a meteor (or, at least, it was much bigger and closer). I think it might have been a meteorite (meaning it was big enough and close enough to actually land on the surface).

It was burning bright green and trailing golden sparks, and it angled down from left to right toward the mountains in front of me. It could have landed near I-80 in Parley's Canyon, or anywhere around there--I just don't know.

I expected to hear something about it the next day, but have heard nothing. (It fell too late to get on that evening's news--it was about 10 minutes to 11.)

I'm not sure who I would even call about it, but surely it might have started a fire in the mountains even if it didn't land anywhere noticeable otherwise.

It was cool, though, and I'm glad I saw it.

I had an epiphany the other day about Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."  I decided while going for a walk on a snowy day that the poem isn't about death (just as Frost always insisted), but it's about listening to the special kind of silence you can hear when it's snowy.

It's a muffled, cozy kind of silence, and I love it.  I, too, like to stop and listen to it when I'm out there in the snow.

I had a couple of panels at MountainCon today, so I went north of Salt Lake City to be on them.

MountainCon is what is known as more of a "media" convention with the main guests being actors who have appeared in science fiction and fantasy films and television shows.  The guests I actually saw were Richard Herd, who has appeared in V and Star Trek and TJ Hooker and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and several other shows, and Sara Douglas who was in Superman II among other shows.

The panels were  "Exo-anthopology 101" which was on alien life and the possibilities, and "How to write PG-13 in a NC-17 world" which is self-explanatory.  I think they went well.  The first was in the morning and the second was in the afternoon, and in the middle, I was able to go to lunch with Amy Chopine whom I have been acquainted with off and on for a while (she participated in the Hatrack River Writers Workshop for a while, and so on).  I didn't recognize her at first because when I last met her, her hair was short, but as we talked, things came back to me.  It has been a while.

Local conventions are sort of like family reunions in that you see these people only a few times a year (depending on how many local cons there are), and they're familiar but you have to be reminded of who they are.  I enjoy meeting people at cons, and I really appreciate it when someone I've met before speaks to me and reminds me of how we know each other.  It's too bad that there aren't ways to see some of them more often.

I know I did this before, but I don't remember what I did.

I have a couple of photos of my new cat, Tikki, who is a polydactyl (extra toes), snowshoe (white feet), lynxpoint (stripes) siamese.

One photo shows her face and the other shows what her front feet look like.  I hope I can get them up here.

Yeah!  It worked.  Isn't she something?

We went visiting on Tuesday night and met three of the cats that have been advertised online (ksl.com).

The first one we met was a 5-year-old female who has lived with her owner since she was a kitten. She looks like a snowshoe siamese, and she is polydactyl, so her "mittens" are extra big. She was very sweet and friendly--got onto my husband's lap (sigh!) right away.

The second cat we visited was a large almost 3-year-old male flame point siamese. His owner brought him in and put him in my arms, and he didn't want to go there. We couldn't put him down because there were three pomerainians yapping at our feet. He was a heavy shedder and he wasn't happy, so it was rather a frustrating experience.

The third cat was barely 2 years old, a male that looked like he was part red point siamese, though he didn't act or sound siamese. He was very intelligent, and we think he knew that we were coming to take him away because he didn't want to come meet us. He's only been with his current owner a few months, and she said it took him a while to accept her. My husband liked him, and I thought he was lovely (I like intelligent cats), but I knew we'd both be miserable if we couldn't bond, and I just don't want to do that to such a fine cat.

 On Wednesday night, I went to get the polydactyl snowshoe siamese and brought her home with me.   Her name is Tikki, and her owner said it came from M.T.K. which the owner's mother used to call the cat, for Many Toed Kitty.  The owner's daughter morphed that into Tikki.

Anyway, Tikki hid behind the couch in the family room. (I suspect that she's a little concerned about the cat smell from our 16-year-old--the one we had to put down. We tried to clean everything up after she died, but, of course, a cat is going to be able to smell things we can't smell.)

We visited some places with the cats in cages, and I'd planned to go to a "super adoption fair" that is this weekend, but when I woke up Wednesday morning, I realized that I would be sorry if the owner found someone else for the showshoe, so we decided that we would go get her.

I was hoping she would come sleep on the bed with me that night, but she stayed behind the couch.

Thursday morning I called the vet and made an appointment.  The owner had given me her immunization records, and apparently Tikki has not been seen by a vet for four and a half years.  Also, her birthday was Thursday (September 11, 2003), so she got to go to the vet for her birthday.  (I was able to pull her out from under the couch.)

When we got back, she went right back to behind the couch again, and she wouldn't come out, so I ran errands.  When I got back, my youngest daughter came by to meet her, so I pulled her out again, and she seemed happy to sit on my lap and get scritched around the ears and jaw.  After my daughter left, I took her in and laid down on my bed with her and stroked her fur, and scritched her ears and jaws some more.  She settled down near me after a while, and we took a little cat nap together.

That night, she jumped up onto the bed several times and cried to me to scritch her some more.  I tried to get her to sleep with me, but she just wanted scritchies.

This morning, I couldn't find her anywhere.  I started going through boxes and throwing things away, and still couldn't find her.  Then I caught a glimpse of her as she came out from under my desk (which shouldn't have had enough room for her under it) to peek at me.  I got down and talked to her, and finally she came out for scritchies.

I had to leave during the day, today, and when I got home, there was, again, no sign of her, even after I called for her for a while.  Finally, I sat down at my computer, and called once more.  She responded with a MRWM? And I asked her to come see me, and she did!  She jumped up onto my lap and even took a nap there!  I just hope she decides to sleep on the bed tonight instead of only coming to ask for more scritchies.

But we're bonding!  Yay!  I'll try to get a photo of her posted here, once I have access to a digital camera.

Today is my 33rd wedding anniversary.  And I'm getting over a bout of stomach flu.

How's that for starters?

We had a family reunion over Labor Day weekend.  Usually we go up to a ranch in Idaho for the reunion, but Grandma and Grandpa (my in-laws) have a hard time getting around up there, so it was decided that we would have it closer to home.  This is a game-playing family, so all the game playing happened late into each night, along with lots of eating and talking, and great-grandkid chasing, at Grandma and Grandpa's home.  Everyone else took care of the food, though.  We were supposed to have Sunday dinner as a barbecue at our house, but a cold front came through and brought pouring rain, so we took the food to Grandma and Grandpa's and ate where everyone else was anyway.

My grandkids had been battling stomach flu, and I'm hoping my husband and I were the only ones who caught it from them (we helped their parents a lot).

I went back to bed and shivered all Wednesday morning, but managed to fix a dessert (wore latex gloves while cooking) for my reading group that night.  I made raspberry brownies with raspberry pie filling and cool whip dolloped on top.

The next day, Thursday (yesterday), was my birthday and I felt a little better.  Was able to get ready for a service project at my church (I'm LDS for those who don't know).  There's a group of women in town who get together on the first Thursday of each month to tie quilts for service.  They call themselves "Quilters without Borders" because they belong to several different religions.  I read about them in the paper earlier this year, and have attended since then.  I volunteered my church for the September meeting, and I thought it was a nice way to spend part of my birthday.  We got lots of quilts tied, so that went well.

And today is my 33rd anniversary.  My husband started feeling sick yesterday, but he felt better this morning, so we may be able to go out to dinner to celebrate this evening.  I haven't been eating much lately, but I think my appetite is returning.

And such is life.