Caryn was here to visit over the long weekend, and we did so many things that by the time I dropped her at the airport Sunday afternoon, I was sore and ready for a nap. We squeezed a lot into the two-and-a-half days she was here.

Friday we went ice skating, since she had never been. I haven't been ice skating in probably 15 years. I am pleased to report that while there was some flailing, neither of us fell. Not even once. When we were tired of skating, which only took about an hour, I realized that the Water Temple might be open, and decided to take her there. I love the Water Temple, but it's only open on weekdays and I'm at work. But it was open, and was beautiful, and I made a fool of myself but had great fun doing it. Then we went back to my house for a bit, and then out to dinner at Shiok (Singaporean food) with Dee and Charlotte. I gave Caryn the choice between Morroccan, Ethiopian, and Singaporean food (she wanted to try something new/foreign/exotic), and she chose Singaporean, and was really happy that she did becasue she really liked it.

Saturday we drove out to Santa Cruz for breakfast at Zachary's. The drive is easily 45 minutes, possibly closer to an hour. A little over halfway there she said "You go all this way for breakfast?" and I told her I usually only do it twice a year or so. She got to meet Keegan, who joined us in S.C. for breakfast, and after a few bites of her breakfast said she understood why we drove all that way to go to this place. After breakfast we walked around downtown Santa Cruz, and then Keegan took off for home and Caryn and I went to the Boardwalk. We spent several hours there, and I managed to avoid getting a sunburn (yay!). We drove up the coast from Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay so she could meet my parents, and we had dinner at the Princeton Seafood Company and it was very yummy. All in all it was an incredibly full active day, and we were both exhausted by the time we got back to my house.

Sunday I had to go to look at dresses for Lolly's wedding, and so I had to drag Caryn along to that, but she was excited to meet Lolly so it was all good. Given that the dress shop was in Campbell and that Caryn had to be at the San Jose airport by 4ish, we decided to stay down south and we went to the Great Mall, had lunch at Dave & Buster's and played a round of blacklight mini-golf at Putting Edge, which was pretty fun.

Then came the sad moment of dropping her off at the airport and sending her back to her husband and her life in Austin. And I drove myself home and promptly collapsed on my bed for a nap.

Tonight I had errands to run after work and by the time I was done I was starving, and going to the grocery store when you're starving is a bad idea, so I decided to get take-out. I was right by Armadillo Willy's (Texas BBQ) and decided ribs sounded good. Armadillo Willy's doesn't have servers. You place your order as you walk in, and they give you a pager. When your pager goes off you pick up your food at the window. Sort of a cafeteria style but higher quality food.

I placed my order, got my pager, and sat at a table to wait. Right as I sat down, a pager must have gone off behind me because suddenly this little boy, maybe five years old or so, shouts "DINNER!" and trots alongside his father to the pickup area, where he says, very entusiastically, "I love KC BBQ!!"

"They went soft. They wouldn't hit anybody. Even when they could get a clean hit on the boards they wouldn't do it. I've seen harder hits in a pillow fight in a Girls Gone Wild video." - a Sharks fan who works in my building

Accurate? No. Funny? Hell yes.

I just got the call that my mom is going to be spending another night in the hospital. She went in for an angiogram yesterday, which I knew was going to be happening. I didn't let myself think about it though because my dad's open heart surgery two years ago started with him having an angiogram. I got a message from my dad last night saying that they had found some blockages and they were putting stints in and she'd most likely come home today. He called today to say that her enzyme levels are still high and so they are keeping her another night. I talked to her, and she's chipper enough and it doesn't sound like anyone is super worried, they're just monitoring her.

I was supposed to drive out to Merced for Ricky's birthday party tomorrow, but I don't want to be three hours from the hospital. I don't anticipate anything going wrong, but I'd feel better being close enough that I can get there quickly if I had to. I feel really really bad about bailing on Erica and Ricky- she planned the party for this weekend specifically so I'd be free and able to go. I know she understands, I mean, it's my mom, but I still feel pretty bad about bailing on her and on the birthday boy.

So once again I tell everyone- READ AND OBEY THE MEMO . You are all officially put on notice.

This is an open memo to my friends, my family, and anyone else reading it. You are hereby put on notice that you are not allowed to do anything to yourself that requires a hospital (Ladies, you can still have babies, but you are not allowed to have any type of life-threatening complications). You are not to ski/snowboard/skateboard and break yourself. You are not to crash your car/truck/motorcycle/scooter. You are not to fall off a stepladder, sew your finger or forehead with a sewing machine, get stitches or participate in any activity that could cause you to require an ambulance.

Equally prohibited are illnesses which require any type of hospitalization. No extreme dehydration. No food poisoning. No heart attacks, strokes, seizures or collapsed lungs. No severe bronchitis, no dangerously low blood sugar, no pneumonia.

Do you hear me? No. More. I originally posted this after my dad's heart surgery, and several other people have had things happen in the interim, and now my mother. No. More. Hospitals.

(The end is the best part, but didn't make as much sense without context...)

Laura: it is SO much harder planning with a guy who wants to be "involved"
Judy: hee
Judy: (I'm sorry, but that's funny)
Laura: more than that, it is SO much harder planning with that guy who's two states away
Judy: yeah, I totally get that
Judy: what details are you being troubled on?
Laura: I'm trying to show him colors for the invitations
Laura: he can't visualize the ribbon and wanted to change it all
Judy: oooooh
Judy: no changing everything
Judy: he'll be here in 2 weeks, right?
Laura: yeah
Judy: can any of this wait til you're face to face and you can just show him?
Laura: we were supposed to do stuff last time
Laura: apparently he can't focus when he's around me
Laura: 8-}
Judy: hee
Judy: maybe you need someone to help keep you on track and on task
Judy: like, “we're gonna meet with (whoever) and do wedding stuff for two hours, and the rest of the time we can be all googly-eyed”
Laura: ew
Laura: googly stuff
Laura: BARF
Judy: you know you're all googly
Laura: how did I turn into THAT girl?
Judy: you got engaged
Judy: it happens to the best of us

I wish I could take a decent picture of my fingers. The flash keeps washing out what I want to show. My fingers are so incredibly banged up, it's crazy. I'm sure everyone has banged thier fingertips just right to bend or break a nail. When you've broken a nail, you totally notice how hard you are on your fingers.

About 3 weeks ago, I ripped off all of my acrylic nails. The proper way to remove them is to soak them off in acetone, but I was having a frustrating day and just kept picking at them. I was left with two hands full of very short, very thin nails. And I already knew that I am super hard on my fingers.

All my nails are still super short. They're too thin to handle any real length yet, though they are slowly growing back to full strength. Until then, my nail beds are their normal healthy pink. But the very top eighth of an inch, under the very edges of the nail, is a much darker pink, peppered by dark red spots. They look raw, and they look like they should hurt. Thankfully they don't. I guess I should paint them again and cover that up, but in a weird way, I kinda like the way they look.

**UPDATED** So it's a few days later, and I have managed to make the nail situation ever so much worse... If you click the picture it'll take you to flickr where there is a picture of what is under that splint (and don't worry, it's not gross).

Scene: My bedroom, 6:30 this morning, alarm clock beeping away. I roll over in bed, make an angry face at the clock and say forcefully "Quiet You!" and smack the snooze button.

(I think I might have been reacting to something in my dream in addition to the alarm clock, but I don't remember now. The only part of my dream I remember is that I took the bus to the fabric store to buy gloves and ended up pouring onion relish into a glass container and having to buy both the relish and the container. And that I was going to throw them both away once I had paid for them because I don't like raw onion chunks.)

Saturday was the first of many events leading up to Laura and Ben's wedding. Saturday was Laura's engagement tea, which is a super cute tradition that I'd never heard of before, but though was a really fun idea. Mostly it's a luncheon for the bride-to-be to celebrate her engagement with her friends.

As a gift, everyone brings a wrapped teacup for the couple to have and use in their new life together. Pretty typical wedding shower theme there. But what was different, and what I found really neat, is that a year after the wedding, the bride has to throw a tea party for the same friends that were there on Saturday, ad she has to serve them tea- in the cup that they gave her. So she has to remember who was there and who gave her which teacup.

I think Brad and I switched weekends. Usually he is home with his family working on projects for their impending move, and I'm usually out and about with my friends- shopping, hanging out, watching movies and having fun.

This weekend there was hanging out and fun, but I was also really productive around the house. Caryn is coming to visit at the end of the month, and that has been good incentive to finally finish getting my room the way I want it. All my framed art has been leaning against a wall in the corner for over a year. So Dee came over on Sunday and we hung stuff, turning my massive expanses of blank white wall into something pretty.

I could have just hung them myself, but I also wanted to put up shelves, and Dee has a makita. And thank goodness Dee knows about this stuff- I'm one of those "put a nail in the wall and hang a picture on it" people- she took me to home depot and we got drywall screws and photo hangers and all kinds of stuff. Good thing I don't plan to move my pictures around much. Part of what took me so long to get them hung is that it takes me a long time to decide what I like, and once I decide, it goes up and stays there. In my old place, my living room was done in B&W photography, but some of those belonged to my roommate. My bedroom was done in brightly colored flower posters,like this one, which I decided I wasn't wild about anymore.

I had collected a couple of new pieces, a gorgeous red piece and a black and white of a ballerina mid-leap. The ballerina didn't fit with the rest of the art because of its shape and the frame, which was fine because I decided I wanted that somewhere else anyway. Dee came up with a great concept, since I love black and white, and had the really cool monocrome red piece. We went to Michaels in search of a couple of new B&Ws and ended up finding a gorgeous blue piece that went with my room and the concept we had come up with for the wall. Ironically enough, the blue piece is an enlargement of a piece of one of the old flower studies I didn't like anymore.

Once the shopping was complete we went back to my house and tackled the project. We've all been complaining about the cold spring we've had, and then Sunday was gorgeous. My room is the warmest room in the house, so we had all the windows open and the window fan going. We tackled the main room first as it had the most to be done. There was much measuring and drilling and hammering, and my bed got covered in carboard boxes and shrink wrap and various detritus, but I am so happy with the result.

Then we moved on to where I wanted to hang the ballerina- over the mirror in the bathroom. You can't completely tell from the pictures, but the east wall of my room is about 16 feet high. Those shelves in the above pic are above door level- the pictures are hung even with the top of the doorframe, and you can see how much wall is still above the shelves. So the bathroom wall is that high too.

The frame for the ballerina gave her some trouble- it's from IKEA so why am I not surprised? This is probably my favorite pic from sunday:

She's crouching on the top of the vanity trying to fix the corner where the backing had popped out. We ended up reinforcing the frame's brackets with brads that wouldn't give way when the wire was pulled up against it. I love how it looks.

There are some smaller pieces scattered around, and I'm looking for a couple more big pieces to fill in some holes, but I love how my room turned out. It's what I have been wanting to do with it for a long time, but never got around to doing it. All the pieces but one have been around the house, they just never got put together. I'm glad that it's done and that I can stop thinking about it now.

I'm not sure when he was born, I just opened my email to a handful of pictures of him. Congrats to proud parents Heather and Brian, and big sisters Ella and Bethany.

**UPDATED** Micah was born at 4:06 am on Sunday April 30.