Happy 228th Birthday
7:54 a.m. - 2004-07-04


This week, my spouse took his vacation. He does this sometimes because he has a friend who has a cabin (really a house that is nicer than ours, and bigger too) so he takes the big stack of newspapers to go through and a few books and goes up there to be in the quiet for a week. The deal is that we get to go out to dinner while he is gone. This time we went to Pasta Primavera one night, and the Outback a few nights later. While he was gone, I put up the peaches and worked on Abby's sweater. He was due to come back on Friday, and when we found out that he was coming home in the middle of the day, we made plans to go see Spiderman right after I got off work. Now that is one good movie.

At Jason's on Wednesday, Jellie was telling us how good the movie was, making Alex jealous because he had not seen it yet. I asked Jellie if it ended happily, and she said yes, so I was looking forward to it. Some lady at the office is getting rid of her cat knickknack collection, and she had the stuff all spread out on a table for people to take. I took a lot of little figurines for Jellie, since she is so fond of cats.

The weather has been nice this week, with the fog rolling in just about every night. On Friday we had a brunch at work to celebrate the birthday of The Big Lady Boss. The food that is at these things is interesting in its variety: taco salad, lettuce salad wt bacon, krispy kreme donuts, croissants stuffed with ham and cheese, fruit, crackers and cheese, and quiche. Plus, my boss left to go home early for the three-day weekend, so not a bad day. Vi stopped training me temporarily because she got backed up in her work, so I am acting as her helper now, doing runs and set ups on the maps, and doing the odd map guarantee that comes in. There seems to be a lot of work to do, so at least I am not sitting around twiddling my thumbs trying to look busy.

Jason's leg is much better, but there is still a hard lump where the dog chomped him, so he may go back to the doctor to see what is going on. At least the infection is all cleared up and he is getting around as well as ever. He and the boys (Joel and Evan) went fishing on Thursday.

In an optimistic sign that our office has some life left in it (always a concern after the big massacre when they axed the closing and residential departments a year and a half ago) we came back from last weekend to find that a fancy new xerox machine was installed and a really fancy hi-tech filmreader/scanner/computer/tap-dancing-wonder of a machine installed in the film room. Marshall and I had a talk about the xerox machine, with me pointing out that it is hooked to the internet and storing all the images you xerox, and him saying that this is the shape of things to come, with the management able to spy on all employee activities and able to call up all the "jobs" done on the machine so they can tell if you are, say, using the office machine for personal business. But anyway, they would not be spending the money if they planned to close the office any time soon, so that is good.

Spent most of last evening fixing a pattern error in the cable pattern on Abby's sweater. Oh, I could have ripped the last four rows out and picked the stitches back up, but I do so hate to go backward, so I dropped the stitches in the four error places and picked them up with a crochet hook. I am very good at this, from fixing errors for people when I was a knitting instructor at the department store. It is all fixed now and I am nearly up to the underarm on the back.

Today I am going to make country ribs, potato salad, cucumber salad, and I already have a cheesecake ready. That sounds pretty good, having it ready, glossing over the fact that I did not make it, but bought it from Costco. Maybe I will make some rolls too. Tonight we will go see the fireworks as usual, at the junior college. I have to find my red USA T-shirt.