Man, taking a day off in the middle of the week felt good!

I haven't been busy at work anyway, and yesterday was the first day that I definitely wouldn't have to be doing any work on that stupid proposal (even though it turned out that my actual last day to have to sweat it was the 9th) so I'd signed up to take the day off.

As it turned out, yesterday was also the first day of Elizabeth's vacation/unemployment, as she's taking some time off after quitting one job and starting another.

And Elizabeth is going to be giving gaming a try with our 7th Sea game. So she and I went down to Chesapeake to visit K.T. (who was about to go crazy with lack of adult human contact anyway, as Kevin's out of town all week) and make up Elizabeth's character for the game.

I would've slept in if I could've, but there's Penny. So I got up as usual, and saw Matt and Penny out the door a bit early, and then I found both my gardening gloves, and got the pruning shears, and spent twenty minutes convincing my bushes that they were not Expressionist art, but instead boxwoods, and therefore should be a little more... boxy. They still look kind of ragged, but I don't think I can do much better with pruning shears. My back aches today; it's been almost two years since I've done any kind of yardwork. I'm such a lazy wench, I know.

Then I showered and dressed and lounged around on the computer until Elizabeth showed up. We stopped at the Cheese Shop before we left town and bought a largish assortment of fancy cheese, and got sandwiches for K.T. and Elizabeth, and bread ends and house (because there's a law somewhere that if you live in Williamsburg and go to the Cheese Shop, you must buy bread ends and house, and also because we figured we'd need some sort of bread or cracker to have with all that cheese).

And I'd picked up some fresh tomatoes from the produce stand on my way home Wednesday, so when we got to K.T.'s, I cut up two of them and about four ounces of fresh mozarella, and tossed it in a bowl with a drizzle of olive oil and a couple tablespoons of balsamic vinegar for a salad.

(And ohmigod have I missed that salad, and now I'm going to have to start buying mozarella from the Fresh Market again, so I can have fresh tomato and mozarella salad all summer. I could eat about four tomatoes' worth of it in a single sitting. The only problem with it is that it's definitely not a make-ahead salad; even an hour of sitting in the balsamic vinegar will make the tomatoes all mushy and gross.)

So we got out our sandwiches and bread and cheese and tomato salad, and we watched the end of Miffy with Jess, and then we played with Jess a little, and K.T. put Pirates of the Caribbean into the player, and we ate and got into the appropriately pirate-y frame of mind.

(About half an hour into the movie, I found Jess standing at my knee, so I picked her up and set her on my lap. She did not squirm down, and after a few minutes, K.T. noticed that she was snuggled into my arm and sucking her thumb, so she took Jess into her room for a proper nap.)

And then we made Elizabeth's character - which is to say, she had a kind of general idea of what she wanted to do, and K.T. and I plied her with advice on how to do it, and being a relative novice to gaming (computer games aside), she just wrote down whatever we suggested she write down.

And I'm quite looking forward to her joining the game.

Jess got up eventually, and Kevin called from California to say there had been an earthquake but he was fine so K.T. shouldn't panic, and we sat around talking about... oh, lots of things.

We thought about putting in another movie, but by that time it was a bit past 5, and I'd wanted to try to get home in time to help with Penny's bath, so we just sat around and talked for most of another hour.

Of course Elizabeth and I got stuck in horrible tunnel traffic and I had to call Matt and tell him I wasn't going to be able to get home in time to do Penny's bath. Alas. But Elizabeth and I had fun chatting on the drive; we talked about babies and weddings and all kinds of weird tangential things.

Penny was just getting out of her bath when I got home, so I took over drying her off and getting her into PJs, and after we got her to bed I wanted Matt to be able to relax a little, since he was nice enough to pick up extra baby-wrangling duty so I could hang out with friends, so I made our lunches... So he decided to do the dishes. Hmph!

But then I got online with K.T. and Karen and we Halled - we're trying to wrap up the big climactic battle for Karen's plot, but since Hall combats always, always take about three times longer than you plan for (even if you plan for it to take three times longer than you expect it to) we figured it would be good to just plan for it to be spread over several nights. So we played until about 11, and halted just short of the actual round of combat.

The new guy showed up while we were doing that - he's been absent for more than a week, and I'd been wondering if he had decided to give up on us. But it turned out that he'd had a combination of ISP trouble and heavy work, and just not been able to get online. So we made a date with him to do his intro session on Monday.

So all in all, I had a really good, fun day off. Yay!

--Liz