Ok, Ok, No More Telegraph

I thought it was fun. Maybe I wore you all out with the very long-ness of it all? But you see, when I started it, it was going to be a small post detailing how we were home and I didn't feel like typing very much because, well, moving sucks. Don't ever move. But then I got started and I couldn't stop telling you all about the stuff we'd done. And it went on from there. I've got a few things I want to say to friends of mine:

• Jess is back from Florida and is in much better spirits than I would be after a trip to the Sunshine State if said trip was spent trapsing from softball field to softball field. Then again, it was for her lovely little sister, and given the chance, I would enthusiastically trapse around any state with my little brother to see all manners of musicals. If softball was his thing, I'd probably be just as excited.
• Also Jessica has just reappeared in the US, after an extended stay in GENEVA. For serious. She had a great time and met all sorts of cool people. She and I had at least one very funny instant message session wherein she was very disturbed at her choice of debauchery, but I think I assured her enough that she had done absolutely nothing wrong.
• Another friend of ours has recently made a giant change in his life, moving from The Patch to Wyoming. Bruce and I are really happy to see him doing good. Keep your fingers crossed for him, but I'm sure he'll be fine. Better than fine. Awesome.
• We're really missing Cap. That's about all there is to it.

Lisa, Todd, Mason, Sky and I went tubing down the Wolf RED last week. Our route took us past the Noviciate, where there's a pretty big waterfall which we got out of the water to avoid. On our short trek across the land, we found a perfectly good inner tube with a not-so-perfectly good plastic tube inside of it, nestled in with a perfectly good cooler. All of that could be explained. (Eg: maybe some rich people decided they were flatlanders and were too lame to take the cooler with them, and were too dumb to detatch them and just left them on the side of the river. Or perhaps there was a random sex episode, after which they just forgot to take their perfectly good stuff before launching off.) None of this, we all agreed, explained the fact that they'd left their perfectly good beer in the cooler when they left it behind. Obviously, something terrible had happened to these people. After all, who leaves their beer behind? It was pretty scary. Even more scary were the flip-flops that floated ominiously at the bottom of the falls. Naturally, we took the whole lot with us when we left. The cooler has been dubbed, naturally, the Dead Man's Chest. Aye, matey, we made merry with the dead man's beer, too.

Then, on Friday, my cousin's little girl had her first birthday. She was very excited and very happy with the gift I knitted for her. I didn't get any pictures (Bruce stole the batteries for my camera to put in his mouse, and I haven't bought any since), but just picture Kate with grey fur and dark blue stripes on light blue britches. I was a little worried that Hannah might be alarmed by Kate's masculinity, so I gave her a pink nose and a yarn bow on top of her head. Oh, before you get confused, Hannah turned six on Friday. It was her first birthday because before now, her parents weren't of the sort that celebrated holidays. (Don't look so confused, I'm sure everyone has Jehovah's Witness relatives. Don't you?) I worried and worried that she might not like it, because it was, after all, a homemade gift, and not nearly as cool as a Bratz doll or something, but she warmed my heart but good when she loved it right away. Her mom told her it was "made from scratch" and she's done a good job of making sure Hannah is really appreciative. Wow, it was so great. She seemed to like it almost as much as the fluffy white puppy she got from someone else (she named the puppy "Princess", because she's the "Queen"). She named the knitted cat "Harley". It's not quite as feminine, but it's exponentially cooler, and I'm happy. Two minutes after they arrived I wondered where Bruce was. When I looked down to the water (we were visiting at the Lake), I saw that they were all on the dock, Hannah on one side of him and Phillip on the other. In the sunset it made quite a picture.

So, that's what we've been up to. Much wine was bedranken on Friday night, much chatting was done with Hannah. ("Now that I'm six, I'm soooo much closer to dying," she said with a huge sigh.) She informed me that I don't look anything like my mom and dad (which I knew) and also that there was no way that Robby could be my little brother. ("He's like THIS MUCH bigger than you!" was her comment.) The great news is that now we live about 10 minutes away from them, and we can visit as often as we like.

I hope everyone had a great weekend!