(and rambling on, apparently). This turned out to be a long post!

Well, I’m not dead yet. I keep thinking I’m better, then I keep being not better. I’m mostly tired during the day, then an hour or so before bed, I can’t breathe and I cough my guts out.

But I’m still managing to socialize some. Yesterday, I met a few spinners at a local bookstore and we spun in the common area. I hadn’t spun since January. It was nice. I pulled out a hand dyed roving of superwash merino and alpaca. I can’t spin those fine fibers short draw with any consistency. I get thick and thin clumps. So I pulled off a length, wrapped it over the top of my finger and spun long draw, double draft off the fold. It took awhile to get back in the groove, having been all about guitar for so long, but I soon started to relax into it and enjoy the colors.

So here’s a catch up on photos over the last week or so since I started feeling crummy.

Mmm, we’ll back up a little further.

On Saturday night, a week and a half ago, Nate took his Christmas present from me out for it’s first ride with some friends and their cars.

(See the truck flying through the air on the right?)

It didn’t take long for Nate’s car to start making a weird noise, at which point everything stopped and the car was torn apart into little pieces.

I’m not exactly sure why I was so eager to enter Nate into a hobby so perilous. When you talk to anyone that runs RC cars, their car/cars are always broken. Some random part always needs to be picked up at the hobby shop and replaced before they can go out and run cars again. And yet, there we were.

As it turns out, the noise was undiagnosed, and eventually went away on its own. We had tremendous fun.

Liv’s birthday party was on Thursday. I was a walking zombie. It’s hard to post pictures of a wild and crazy party while politely omitting pictures of kids whose families may not want them seen on the internet. So you get a blurry, cropped photo of the party. And yes, that’s totally a grocery store cake. I didn’t want to spring $50 for an ice cream cake again (that caught me off guard the first time. Mercy). So it was my intent to make a cake for Liv and serve ice cream along side. Then I got sick, yadiyada, and in the end, Nate went to the store and bought one. It didn’t even say “Happy Birthday” on it. But it looked festive.

It’s been snowing on and off since Friday, when my in-laws came over to celebrate her birthday more quietly.

See the snow back there? In the twilight. It was the oddest color as the sun went down.

On Saturday, we took the kids out in the morning, came back for the babysitter, and Nate and I went out in the afternoon to shop for mattresses. Thanks for all the comments and suggestions, by the way. I really appreciate it. We first went to Kasala and tried their Celsius foam mattress.

Then we went to Sleep Country and tried the Temperpedics. Wowza. They’re expensive. Especially when you add the groovy adjustable base part. Nate tried the Sleep Number while I was still on a Temperpedic and didn’t like it at all, so I didn’t bother trying it. We went back to Kasala to try the Celsius again, and bought it. It’s warranted for 20 years, we get a 30 day trial period to try it out, and it was under $1200. They’re supposedly a group that branched off from Temperpedic and think their mattress is better. It has a different foam on the bottom that enables you to put it on a regular box spring, or slatted bedframe, or whatever. To me, it feels firmer than the Temperpedics, but it’s still completely comfortable. It felt good. It arrives Saturday, and I’m excited.

So, Saturday evening was rather mellow. I’d say quiet, but it wasn’t really quiet. Liv played with her new toy.

The girls read.

Clark admired the new electronics.

Yesterday evening, Clark was blowing bubbles on the front porch and watering flowers. I swear I didn’t set these photos up with the perfect colors and everything. I walked by and saw it and ran for the camera. It was so beautiful.

In this photo, he looks JUST like me at that age

Veronica read,

and then the girls came home from softball practice

And that brings us to today, when I’m still tired and not feeling well. But people are coming over at 12 and I have a guitar lesson this afternoon.

And finally, (I’m wrapping it up, I swear), my very good friends at The Web Flipper are going to be updating my site so I can post audio files, so you can hear me sing and attempt to play the guitar. So if the blog is down for awhile in the near future, that’s why.