Several Busy Days
We had a really great dinner with Jon Singer and JacqueM, at which I got to taste my first sake (Otokoyama was really good cold) and had some mildly good sushi and surprising tempura strawberries. Jon also gave me another of his astonishing Song Dynasty lookalike China Black glazeware pieces, a solid little bowl I now use for oatmeal *laughs*. Urls, recommendations, pens, crayons, origami, fiber, and thoughts flew. Always enjoyable.
Swimming and tennis for Jet every day has resulted in him sleeping well. Summer recipe for success, run the boy ragged.
I never knew that the UCC had a National Ministry of Imagination, Creativity, and the Arts (MICA -- who, btw, is one of my favorite concise prophets), and that the National Minister for it is a really excellent saxophone player and plays as part of a jazz ensemble that also goes around helping congregations tap their own creative potential for worship. It is part of the UCC "God is still Speaking" initiative. A jazz ensemble is one of the symbols for how Congregationalists work, each with their own unique gifts, but supporting all the rest. All with the same goal but unique ways of getting there.
The consulting gig was good. Solved an emergency and I ended up being able to buy some soft chalk pastels to play with and acrylic paints as Jet has suddenly become interested in painting by number and painting on rocks.
I also got a new celphone with a full qwerty keyboard under the dash. Jet covets it dearly, as it's the Verizon Blitz. It is cool, plastic, wide, has a nice big display, and little itty bitty keys on the keyboard, but it'll make texting a lot easier for me.
He wants it badly, eventhough he's never had a celphone, he keeps saying helpfully, "Well you now have two phones, Mom, can't I have that one?"
I've been taking advantage of it, and getting him to enter all my contact information. *laughs* It's a good opportunity to not enter the ones I no longer use.
My desktop is truly dead, and the HP guys aren't being nearly as helpful as they were last time, so we pulled all the data off the hard disk and we're converting to using the two machines we have. I might start looking for another desktop machine as it's a lot easier having each of us with one machine and the lappy for traveling; but I might just use the laptop as my machine now. I'm not sure. So that's the bad news, along with a little DVD player that John bought on sale that died on it's first trip out, our camping trip, so we're not very happy with our luck with technical things at the moment.
I'm hoping my celphone does okay. *sighs*
The garden is doing great in this weird for Colorado weather. We've had a thunderstorm every afternoon for the last three weeks, and our temperatures have been far lower than normal. But that's made the lettuce, sugar snap peas, radishes and onions very, very happy. There's also a strange purple grass that has intermingled with my red-necked garlic, and it's impossible to tell which is which until the grass spreads out horizontally. The garlic remains vertical, but that's at a development level where I'm just really nervous about the grasses sending out shoots instead of just roots.
I hate weeds that pretend to be what I *want* to keep.
The birds ate all my baby zucchini plants until I completely redid the bird netting. Now I have a dozen zucchini plants popping up. *headdesks* I think I've overcompensated, but we'll see how quickly they actually mature.
I've also made my first strawberry rhubarb pie and made it tart enough to make John very happy, but I have to add a spoonful of sugar before I can eat it (laughs). I also made a lovely blackberry syrup, just berries, sugar and water, and it's great in iced tea and plain soda water. I was too lazy to filter out the seeds, and they're almost like boba... *laughs* sweet bits that come with the drink.
Swimming and tennis for Jet every day has resulted in him sleeping well. Summer recipe for success, run the boy ragged.
I never knew that the UCC had a National Ministry of Imagination, Creativity, and the Arts (MICA -- who, btw, is one of my favorite concise prophets), and that the National Minister for it is a really excellent saxophone player and plays as part of a jazz ensemble that also goes around helping congregations tap their own creative potential for worship. It is part of the UCC "God is still Speaking" initiative. A jazz ensemble is one of the symbols for how Congregationalists work, each with their own unique gifts, but supporting all the rest. All with the same goal but unique ways of getting there.
The consulting gig was good. Solved an emergency and I ended up being able to buy some soft chalk pastels to play with and acrylic paints as Jet has suddenly become interested in painting by number and painting on rocks.
I also got a new celphone with a full qwerty keyboard under the dash. Jet covets it dearly, as it's the Verizon Blitz. It is cool, plastic, wide, has a nice big display, and little itty bitty keys on the keyboard, but it'll make texting a lot easier for me.
He wants it badly, eventhough he's never had a celphone, he keeps saying helpfully, "Well you now have two phones, Mom, can't I have that one?"
I've been taking advantage of it, and getting him to enter all my contact information. *laughs* It's a good opportunity to not enter the ones I no longer use.
My desktop is truly dead, and the HP guys aren't being nearly as helpful as they were last time, so we pulled all the data off the hard disk and we're converting to using the two machines we have. I might start looking for another desktop machine as it's a lot easier having each of us with one machine and the lappy for traveling; but I might just use the laptop as my machine now. I'm not sure. So that's the bad news, along with a little DVD player that John bought on sale that died on it's first trip out, our camping trip, so we're not very happy with our luck with technical things at the moment.
I'm hoping my celphone does okay. *sighs*
The garden is doing great in this weird for Colorado weather. We've had a thunderstorm every afternoon for the last three weeks, and our temperatures have been far lower than normal. But that's made the lettuce, sugar snap peas, radishes and onions very, very happy. There's also a strange purple grass that has intermingled with my red-necked garlic, and it's impossible to tell which is which until the grass spreads out horizontally. The garlic remains vertical, but that's at a development level where I'm just really nervous about the grasses sending out shoots instead of just roots.
I hate weeds that pretend to be what I *want* to keep.
The birds ate all my baby zucchini plants until I completely redid the bird netting. Now I have a dozen zucchini plants popping up. *headdesks* I think I've overcompensated, but we'll see how quickly they actually mature.
I've also made my first strawberry rhubarb pie and made it tart enough to make John very happy, but I have to add a spoonful of sugar before I can eat it (laughs). I also made a lovely blackberry syrup, just berries, sugar and water, and it's great in iced tea and plain soda water. I was too lazy to filter out the seeds, and they're almost like boba... *laughs* sweet bits that come with the drink.