weekend busyness and weirdness!

it was a fabulous weekend here in the northwest. temps reaching the 70's, sun, the constant buzz of lawnmowers making their first passes of the season. this includes ours.

on friday, we acquired sophie, for a weekend visit. for those of you who don’t know, sophie is the black lab ‘puppy’ i got when i was 20. she’s lived mostly with my parents due to college, housing arrangements which didn’t allow pets, and times when she and i both lived with them. so she’s, more or less, their dog, although technically mine. so she’s here for a little visit – hair and all. (i’m a bit overly-sensitive to the little black hairs everywhere at this point and my floors have never been cleaner. she cleans up all the crumbs, and i sweep and vacuum obsessively to get up the hair before the tumbleweeds form!)

saturday was spent outdoors (of course). i’ve been working to clear the garden and have about 2/3 done right now.  so layla and i did the first planting – sugar snap peas. i also worked on tediously clearing out the strawberry patch, so that the only ‘plants’ remaining were the actual strawberry plants.  dave mowed the lawn and then we took a walk to the park with sophie and the little kids.  shane was at his buddy’s house and we could see them across the lake driving his rc boat and then getting in a canoe.  came back and i gave sophie a bath (because she’d gone in the lake, but she stunk before that anyway, so she needed one). then dave grilled some hamburgers for dinner.  YUM!

yesterday, after church, we did more outdoor stuff. shane washed the car, i finished clearing the strawberry patch and dave cleaned up some of the junk in the backyard. i pulled out the water table and cleaned that up so they could play with that.  we had a bit of a parade of neighborhood kids coming through to play.  then we had to leave to get shane to a birthday party (and pick up a present on the way – to be more prepared than that would be shocking) at 5:30.  and that’s where it gets weird.

i didn’t know the kid whose party it was. it was someone from shane’s hsn classes.  it was at a ‘jumpy place’ so i really didn’t want to have layla and/or micah with me, because they totally wouldn’t understand that they weren’t invited.  so dave dropped shane and i off and took off w/ the others.  assuming i wasn’t going to know anyone at this party, i brought my knitting along. thank goodness!  as people started arriving, i started to feel a little bit out of place. there didn’t seem to be anyone else from classes there, as it turned out, the birthday kid was the only one shane knew there, and everyone else seemed to know each other quite well. but that’s not why i felt out of place. we’ll just say that there were more tattoos in that jumping arena than at a harley-davidson convention, and EVERYBODY was dressed like johnny cash.  seriously, black from head to to! and a lot of skin…  me? i was wearing a long, beige-ish linen skirt and a pink blouse.  yeah.  out of place doesn’t even begin it describe it.  so i sat there and knit.

so after that bizarreness was finally over, dave picked us up and we went back to my folks’ which was just down the road.  they bailed us out on dinner, since the party was at an odd time AND they only fed shane cake and kool-aid.  SUPER! i was so thrilled. but we got home, FINALLY, and put everyone to bed (including me, since i woke up at 11:30 in shane’s bed.  oops!)

but i got to sleep in, since everyone went to bed late and here we are today. another fabulous day is in the works, so i’m plotting what i’ll do today. a neighbor just gave me some sweet pea seeds that i need to find a place for, although micah promptly dumped them on the ground and ate some… so i’ll plant the ones i have left, and i guess he’ll be pooping sweet peas.

just another fun day in the life……

***edited to add*** it occurred to me to check and see if sweet pea seeds might be poisonous. they are… but only in large quantities, so we should be good.  yeah. superfun!