I drew a picture of Q as he slept in his journal (sorry - syntax got sloppy - He doesn't sleep in his journal. I'll try again: "As Q slept, I drew a picture of him in his journal"), and absolutely bull's-eyed him. That's always a very nice feeling. Not sure of the quality of trying to put it in through a photo, but without a scanner, it's the best I can do:
Saturday?....Kind of fades into the background for me a bit. After an absolutely glorious sleep-in, there was a lot of house-cleaning, I remember that. And I gave Hobie a bath. I also know I carried a whole heap of wood into the garage from the stack in the back yard, and went to the dump with the week's refuse, as well as our Christmas tree. And we tried to have Q's friend Eli over, but he was booked solid. And none of his other friends were home, so we agreed to put the playdate off until after basketball practice on Sunday.
I also recall that around 4:45, as we were getting set to drive over to Mark and Ronadh's house to have dinner with them in celebration of her brother Peter's and her sister Kera's visit, I suggested that we (Janneke and I) play some ping-pong. We were going to have brunch on Sunday with Brad and Betsy, who love ping-pong, as well as Paige and Nicole, who also profess admiration of Tiny Tennis. And we were a bit rusty.
So the fluorescent lights over the ping-pong table weren't quite working like they ought to, and Janneke had the idea, before we settled in to play, of tapping them with her ping-pong paddle, to frighten them, I guess, into functioning properly. Actually, "bludgeon" might be a better word, because after six or seven whacks, one of them worked itself loose and hurtled earthward and shattered into a billion pieces all over the new table. Which was a lot of fun. Janneke cleaned it up.
Ronadh's siblings are a barrel of monkeys (fun-wise, I mean - not literally), and we had a grand dinner over there of enchiladas. The ones without meat had "JANNEKE" spelled out across them in strips of sliced pepper. It was heart-warming and hilarious. She'd also made a set without cheese for me, but she hadn't written anything out on top of them, in peppers or in any other sort of vegetable. Probably afraid of misspelling my name.
Home, kids to bed, and us to settle in and watch "The Flight of the Conchords". Got it on Netflix the other day. Here's a sampling:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JT5AQIlmM0I
I tried to draw T Saturday night, but I won't be putting that one up here. It turned out pretty grisly. I have a much harder time with her. I'm not sure why it is, but it's almost always much more difficult with her, and now that it's happened a few times, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. I'll keep at it. Stay tuned.
Sunday morning, I ran out to the Death Star (Wal-Mart) to buy replacement fluorescent bulbs for the ping-pong table, then dashed out to pick up the freshly made bagels we'd ordered the day before from Tunnel City, and around 11:00, the festivities began. Paige and Nicole came first with the one, the only, Rafael von Scrumpsh-Mouse - here he is:
http://www.rafilicious.blogspot.com
First time we've had them over, and not the last, I hope. They are a hoot, and they liked Brad and Betsy, whom they hadn't met before. (That's always our test for any folks we meet: we take them home, make sure they're house-trained, and see if they get on with B & B. When they don't, it's kind of sad, because after you've handled them, their mothers won't take them back. So we usually just have to have them put down.) After the eats, we played ping-pong like mad, and then I delivered Q to basketball practice at 1:00. Janneke went to pick him up afterward, around 2:00, and came home with Eli as well. (You may recall Eli from the blog entry, "Orange Tiger Finds Its Claws".) Q and Eli spent hours outside playing baseball, football, and basketball, and then came in to eat a little something before charging downstairs to play ping-pong. T tagged along with them on most of these activities, and they were both super-gentle and accommodating of her. No tears all day, I don't think. Not a bad run.
Then this evening, when Eli had gone home and we'd eaten out supper, we decided that what we should really do was to play some more ping-pong. So down we went, and Q, still dressed in his basketball practice clothes, suddenly felt quite chilled in the basement, and took a quick breather to run upstairs and put some pants and a fleece on. And when he came back down, he was wearing a sly and sneaky grin, waiting for us to notice, which we did, that the pants he'd put on were his snowpants. Such a comedian.
Got an email from my brother Jim today with this picture:
It's the view from the hovercam of Brett Favre's final, Super Bowl Dream-ending interception against the Giants. All 22 men on the field are visible. All 4 potential receivers are visible. Three are open, two of them WIIIIIIDE open.
Brett threw to the fourth, and badly. As Jim said, "I guess we've got next year to look forward to. Youngest team in the league." Very true, very true. And yet I still feel like putting my foot through something. Q, though - he's already thinking about next year. Wrote Brett Favre a letter today, to ask him not to retire. You KNOW I'm sending that one out in the morning.
But now it's 9:00, and Janneke's curled up on Mongo with her sewing basket and a cup of tea, hemming a pair of shorts for Q and watching a Jane Austen production on "Masterpiece Theater", bathed in the warm glow of our wood stove. And I, to complete the stereotypical iconography, am wearing my bright white Air Jordans, boxer shorts and warm-up pants, and am passed out on the dining room floor, shirtless, drunk.
Ah, New England.
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