30 September 2002

How come my weekends never have enough time? Zwoosh! and they're gone!

So it's Monday morning and I'm running late. Status quo, I guess.

A few weekend anecdotes...

Friday night I drove up to Richmond to pick Matt up from the train station. (An aside: The airport is on the side of Richmond closest to us. That's cool. The train station, therefore, could not possibly have been further away.) I got to the station and the "Arrival" board said his train was running about five minutes late. Which I already knew, because he'd just called me a minute before from the last stop before Richmond to say they were running a little late.

So I sat down and waited. Did a little people watching. Almost fell out of my seat when I heard the woman at the ticket counter say, "Can't you do any better than that? Amtrack has to be hurting for passengers! Can't you make me a deal or something?"

When I looked around at the board again, the "5 MIN LATE" had changed to "ARRIVED." I hadn't heard it pull up! I looked out the door toward the tracks. No train. Well, maybe "arrived" meant it had triggered a loop a mile up the track or something. I got up and went outside to wait.

I sat on the wall and did some more people-watching. I was highly amused at the woman sitting on the other end of the wall who was obviously extremely embarrassed because her teenaged son and his friend were - hold on to your seats! - acting like fidgety teenagers. (Honestly, they were talking a little loud and pretending to jump over this low, decorative fence. They weren't being all that bad. But this woman was mortified. We waited maybe an other five minutes or so for the train, and she must have called him over about six times to tell him to behave.)

Finally, the train pulled in, and Matt and I went home. (No, I didn't go back into the station to check and see if the board had changed to "REALLY ARRIVED.")

Saturday was mostly devoted to the Hall - I had a lot of fun, but that always eats up a lot of time.

Sunday... Sunday was Baby Day.

Emma's birthday was in the afternoon. Braz and Kris had chosen "Clifford, the Big Red Dog" for her party theme. It was very fun and cute. Except that the red dye in the cake icing, when applied to a one-year-old, was even more of a mess than feeding a one-year-old usually is.

I'd post pictures - plenty were taken - except that Braz hasn't posted any yet, and Matt and I both forgot our cameras. But if you've ever seen Red Skelton in his hobo makeup - that's what Emma looked like, only instead of brown, her chin was red. And her hands. And her arms, up past the elbow...

And then that evening, just as I was thinking about popping a pizza in the oven for dinner, Colleen and Carl dropped by with Patrick. We did get some pictures of them.

Not many babies have both a black cat and an Elder God to watch over them...

"One day, son, all this will be yours." "What, the curtains?"

--Liz