We’re baaaaaack!!

Home at last, and it’s great to be settled once again, nice as the interlude in Florida was. We had a fabulous week. It was great to see everyone again, and we came back with great pictures and memories, suntans, and an addiction to Battlestar Galactica, which happened to be having a season premiere on the one rainy day of the week. It’s a terrible sci-fi series, badly scripted and acted, with impressive special effects and just enough of a plot to keep you guessing. We’re just dying to find out which of the supposed crew members is actually a cylon.

The camp had an archery range this year, a wonderful addition. Nearly every day found us out there dropping arrows. Michael perfected his bulls-eyes. I was happy when I hit the target. Michael actually won the midnight archery tournament toward the end of the week, although he insisted it was a very flaky scoring system. (Okay, so it could have been better organised, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was the best archer of all who participated! Basically they let you score your best three shots out of five, and pretty much let you have as many rounds as you wanted, so you could theoretically keep trying to improve your score indefinitely. Michael took one practise round and then two rounds of shots – same opportunity as everyone else – and won!)

Back to Real Life. We picked up our new rental upon our return. Now, I had joked that after the sleek Volvo we had the week before, anything would seem crummy by comparison, but this car actually is really crummy in its own right. Michael, sitting on the driver side, can touch the passenger door without even leaning over. It reeks of cigarette smoke. It gets terrible gas mileage. (We picked it up full, and within three days, it was empty. I growled that for it to have any kind of decent mileage, it had better have about a four-gallon tank, but no such luck.) And the sound system is pathetic. As Michael said, you know it’s a cheap sound system when you can adjust the volume just by moving your leg (it has a speaker on each door, which you can cover and thus muffle the sound). Hmm, that all sounds terribly whiny. Really, it’s more funny than stressful at this point, and we hope that its stay with us will be of short duration.

So we came back on Saturday, and went on to a surprise birthday party for Michael at Benjamin and Amanda’s place. I had really wanted to plan something fun for him, but it was tricky being out of town the entire week preceding, so I kept dropping ideas to divert his attention. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go out to dinner with Benjamin and Amanda to celebrate your birthday? Hmm, maybe we should just stop at their place and drive to the restaurant together.’ There were lots of friends to wish him well, and we had a great evening full of food, fun, and games.

Baby kicks quite a bit now. Sometimes I think I can identify a head or a foot, but that’s probably just imaginative projection. I am now officially feeling unwieldy and cumbersome.

It’s freezing out, quite literally as well as hyperbolically. Glad to be working indoors. Glad to be living in America, as opposed to Siberia, for instance.