Vacation post #5
Dec. 29th, 2004 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperOkay, so this should actually be a post-vacation post, as I am now actually back from vacation and have been spending most of my evening slowly unpacking, doing laundry, sorting mail that's come in, petting the cat, and such like. But I'm not yet done chronicling the journey, so here's some of the rest of what I didn't get a chance to write over the last few days.
Most of Monday was taken up by the side trip I mentioned briefly in my last vacation post. I will also mention it here, but only briefly, as a trip in which it was necessary to confront old ghosts. They were confronted. That's about all I'll say about that here.
There were a few giggles involved with the trip, though. The first of these was that when we stopped at the the truck stop at the interstate exit closest to Marc's house, I discovered via playing with my handheld computer that the place had a wireless network. This let me download mail, though I couldn't get out my last round of Livejournal posts because I didn't have the laptop with me.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird was very, very amused by this, though.
The second and third of the giggles were posted about by Dara already over on her journal. I will add to the commentary about the billboard typo that I just have to wonder who got ripped a new one for "EIXT 59". At least, I HOPE someone got ripped a new one for that one. All jokes about Kentucky's lack of educational standards aside (and I speak as one who was educated in that state), there's a small but nevertheless present corner of my brain that worries that nobody actually noticed.
Anyway, we got back from our side journey round about 5:30 or 6--and when we'd gotten back to my younger brother's house, we discovered that my older brother had in fact arrived on the scene for a visit with us. This was heartening on many levels. Donnie's undergone a recent divorce and a severe hit in the viability of his band, but he did bring the good news that the band members (minus their lead singer, who has apparently just flaked out entirely in a number of not-good ways) have been making an effort to resume rehearsals with an eye to trying to get more gigs in late January. I'm really hoping that comes through for them. I am only an amateur musician at best, and I can go several days at a time without playing any music at all--but I need my instruments there, ready and waiting, for when I need them. And with Donnie having that much more of his heart and soul and life invested into music, I can really see how he needs it to not only survive, which is what he's been doing lately, but to thrive.
Donnie's also let his hair revert to its natural color--which is to say, these days, pretty much gray-white. It's kind of startling for me to see, actually, because my brother's only just shy of 40, and he has the hair of a man fifteen years older, only without the thinning. But he's got this whole almost Christopher-Lloydish look going, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, especially with some of the cute pictures Dara snagged of him with the children. ;) He also joined the queue of Relations Who Have Recently Asked Me to Fix Their Computers--as he'd recently installed some games on the system and was having the game crash for inexplicable reasons. Dara wound up tracing this to Donnie having an old version of DirectX on the system that wasn't playing nice with the laptop's sound drivers, and disabling DirectDraw seemed to make things happier. But not entirely happy, as there were still strange wobbles in the sound output. Still, Donnie was happy that he could actually settle in to play Street Fighter to his heart's content.
Donna made us spaghetti for dinner, and that was all good. And we had another phone call from Sarah and Becky, checking in to try to make sure when adults would be on hand at the house, as they were trying to figure out when they could arrive and leave without leaving the children alone. This was relevant as Didi had to get to her job and Marc, who was off for the week, had to head off for another round of testing for his official architect certification that he's been working on over the last many months. We assured Sarah and Becky (and through them, Aunt Eileen) that between Donnie being on hand for the afternoon and Dara and I returning between our scheduled lunch and dinner dates, the children would not go unattended.
And so, Monday night was pretty much more family domesticity, and that was pretty much all good too.
I can't remember now whether it was Monday or Tuesday where Meighan begged us to watch The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted with her, so I'll mention them here in between Monday and Tuesday. This stands out in my memory partially because of watching Meighan being really into the former of these two movies; they'd put the TV into closed caption mode because there were other things going on at the time, but Meighan was still watching the movie and mouthing the lines a beat before the characters actually uttered them or before the captions came on. That was kind of charming, at least in the "watching the young girl being clearly caught up in the movie" kind of way.
I didn't have the heart to tell her I'd actually seen the movie before. ;)
After things settled down enough to turn on the volume, we watched the rest of the movie and then followed it up with Ella Enchanted, which I hadn't seen before, but which had the same young actress who'd been in the previous movie. It was a DTV movie, and not bad for what it was: a Disney-esque variation on the whole Cinderella story. I liked that Ella's fairy godmother was actually an annoying, inebriated bitch, that a big plot point involved something that was unique to the movie and never showed up in the original fairy tale (i.e., the 'gift' that the godmother placed on Ella that forced her to obey anything anyone told her to do), and that Cary Elwes of all people was playing the villain. It was extremely odd to see him playing the bad guy, especially when I have him burned into my psyche as the handsome blond hero of The Princess Bride, but he also did a very good job with the smarmy evil.
The only thing that kept me from being annoyed by the dancing, singing, cutesy elves in the movie was that they were forced by law by the evil king (Cary Elwes' character) to be happy and frolicking all the time, and in fact were forbidden to hold any other profession besides entertainer. So naturally we get this little nebbishy elf sidekick character who wants to be a lawyer, and that was kind of funny.
Anyway, if you have to watch some movies with kids, these aren't bad ones to watch.
The first major highlight of Tuesday turned out to be lunch with Dara's ex-guardian Ercel, which was pleasant. Dara brought along her laptop, emboldened by my discovery the day before that the truck stop had wireless, and we swiped just enough packets to download our mail in passing. Yes, we are aware this is quite pathetic of us, given that we were a day and a half short of returning to our beloved MurkNorth and its sweet, sweet Internet connection. We were also kind of impressed that the truck stop's network registered on my handheld for about a minute's drive on down the highway.
Anyway, we met up with Ercel at an Irish pub called O'Neill's, which was very "generic Irish pub"-like. But they did have tasty salmon cakes, a friendly waitress, and an extremely tasty chocolate cake slathered in white chocolate sauce, a piece of which Dara and I split for dessert. Ercel insisted on buying us lunch, which was sweet of him. And we spent the entire meal having pleasant conversation, mostly focusing on my family gossip, what Dara and I are doing these days, and what Ercel's been doing to keep himself occupied. He's in his seventies now, but keeping himself pleasantly diverted by doing radio shows about the history of horse racing and working to clock thoroughbreds as well.
After we left the pub, Dara wanted to stop to take a picture of a building about which she waxed quite enthusiastic, and while we did that, just for giggles I got out my handheld to see how many networks I could spot in the area. The answer to this seemed to waver between "five" and "seven" depending on what side of the building we lingered on. Dara made jokes about us being Packet Ninjas, which made me giggle. But I made a point of just trying to download mail and nothing more. Mostly we were interested in seeing how common the networks were, whether people had given them names, and properly secured them. And it was kind of amusing to be driving down the road, hit a stoplight, find a network or two, hit the next stoplight, find more networks.
However, we ran into a snag. As we pulled out of the parking lot from our brief picture-taking sojourn, we heard a distressing flapping noise from the left side of the car. Dara pulled over and discovered we'd gotten a flat on the left rear tire. Annoying, but not unsalvageable. We pulled into the lot of a Goodyear across the street. Dara changed the tire (while I watched, just to remind myself of how it ought to be done, 'cause, well, ya know, I need to know that kind of thing), and then called the rental agency to report that we'd sustained a flat. The cause of it turned out to be a screw embedded in the tire treads, and so Dara was told to try to get the tire fixed if she could, and the agency would reimburse us for the cost. We weren't sure if we would have the time, but Dara promised them to do what she could, and turned her attention to getting back to Marc's so I could visit with my sisters who were supposed to have arrived by then. She drove with supreme care and kept to the slow lane the whole time.
Back at Marc's, Sarah andwildshadowstar had arrived, bringing with them Caleb (Sarah's newborn boy), Aunt Eileen, and Ethan (Eileen's grandson). It was very good to see them all, and Sarah and Becky presented Dara and me with presents as well as ample opportunity to admire little Caleb. Dara actually zonked out on the living room recliner through much of the ensuing noise--of which there was lots, with a grand total of seven, count 'em, SEVEN children in the house. But I held Caleb, who was a well-behaved little guy and put up no fuss when his momma handed me a bottle and encouraged me to feed him. He was also a big husky boy for being only two months old. He has big hands and big feet and a large mouth, and if these indicators work for babies as well as they do for puppies, Caleb's going to grow up to be quite large. ;) Sarah pointed out that his father is over six feet, so.
Two-year-old Lydia had that sort of awed interest in Caleb that children her size seem to get around babies, as if marvelling that there are creatures actually smaller than they are. I mean, they seem to get the "baby" concept; Lydia certainly likes playing with her dolls, and she's got her little sister Michelle around as a live baby example. But there was definitely an element of wonder on her little face as she trotted up to peer at what I was doing as I fed her cousin.
Dara and I, having already decided that Michelle would grow up to be an evil scientist (that cooing she does and the happy hand clapping clearly being a deceptive front) who'd destroy Kentucky with her Heat Ray, agreed that Caleb would definitely be her nemesis.
The new round of visitors couldn't stay all that long, though. We had barely enough time to exchange basic gossip and take a large round of photos before they scooted off again. But the photos were fun. We got a few of both generations of siblings: Donnie, me, Marc, Sarah, and Becky in one group, and all of Marc's children plus Caleb in another. And then as many as we could fit into a group, which was especially funny with the children as the grownups sort of all spontaneously decided to do rabbit ears over each other's heads. The only kid who didn't get into the spirit of the thing was Marc's boy Charlie, who promptly put his hands over his face and refused to budge them until Aunt Eileen offered him a quarter and Donnie offered to match her. And even then, Charlie only grudgingly consented. Lydia, however, was all about the bribery and kept running around to assorted grownups piping, "I wan' money!"
And Dara got in on all the picture-taking as well, as did Becky. In fact, we went through a whole gamut of cameras snapping pictures of everybody. Dara got in a couple of great ones of Donnie, one involving a huge closeup of him with a suitable slightly mad-scientist expression (he was actually peering at Dara's camera at the time, but it still looks funny), and the other of him grabbing Charlie by his ankles and holding him upside down by way of getting him into the photos.
After the photos, the appropriate slew of hugs was exchanged all around, and then Sarah and Becky and Eileen and the two kids they'd brought with them took off again.
Not long after, Dara and I had to set out again ourselves--to allow for a bit of extra time to go to try to find somewhere to get the flat tire fixed. Marc directed us to the nearest tire-fixing place that he liked, which we found with a small bit of effort. The men working the place couldn't help us, though; they were swamped. They offered to let us leave the tire with them so that we could go make our dinner date and pick the tire up the next morning, but Dara wasn't willing to get up any earlier to do that, so we thanked them for the offer and declined, going on our way.
On the way out from there Dara was compelled to snap a picture of the combined Arby's/Exxon building on the corner. This was not actually the first juxtaposition of an Arby's and a gas station we'd encountered during the trip--in fact, practically every single Arby's (with the exception of the first one we checked on Christmas night on the way back fromstarfallz's place, when we were trying to find dinner) we saw was one half of an Arby's/gas station combo. Dara was appalled by this on general principles and wanted to document it for photographic evidence to send off to her favorite "eyesore of the month" architectural crankiness site.
Maybe it was due to the reprieve from seven lively children; maybe it was due to the heat being turned up in the car. For whatever reason, I zonked out on the drive and didn't rouse up again until we were closing in on Joe Bologna's in downtown Lexington. We got turned around a little on the way in, but not irretrievably so, and we wound up walking in just about on time.
Joe Bologna's is a church converted into an Italian restaurant, and had come highly recommended by the LexFA crowd that constitutes the bulk of Dara's and my friends in Kentucky (LexFA = the Lexington Fantasy Association, for those of you who don't know already). Six of them plus relations showed up to meet us:starfallz and her mother, kitchengrrl and her husband (who had in fact come up from Texas to visit local friends), Scott who does not have a Livejournal but who regularly answers my posts anyway (HI SCOTT!), Mike and Sue from Louisville, and Linda from Louisville. Much pleasant conversation and tasty food was had by all, and the expected slew of photographs was taken. Dara and I got situated right in the middle of the table so that we could talk to everybody; for me, at least, this kind of turned into a tennis-match style of conversation as I kept whipping my head back and forth to try to keep track of what was being said on which side of the table.
The breadsticks were very good, soft fresh bread with garlic butter sauce into which the bready goodness could be dipped. I was less enthused about the linguine in white clam sauce, but hey, it was an experiment I wanted to try.
Dara made sad faces at me as I reminded her around 8pm or so that Donnie had said that he needed to return to Louisville, and I did want to get back in time to say goodbye to him. This resulted, naturally, in much amused discussion of the effectiveness of Dara's Sad Face on me and its comparative lack of effectiveness on everybody else. As it happened, we didn't get back to Marc's until 9pmish, but Donnie hadn't left yet.
And in fact he lingered for a while, because Marc and Didi wanted to watch another of the movies that Didi had gotten for Christmas: The Chronicles of Riddick. I only learned at that point that this movie was in fact connected to Pitch Black, and that Vin Diesel was playing the same character in both. Clearly, I am inadequately au courant with recent flicks, but from what I glimpsed of the flick in between trying to work on the book and trying to convince Lydia that I was going to draw on her Magna-Doodle for her one time and one time only (she really didn't like that, especially after she erased my drawing in progress and I refused to draw her another one), I wasn't really missing much.
Goodbyes were said to Donnie, who had to get going back to Louisville, and Dara and I retired early-ish to deal with the packing.
I'll post about today, well, tomorrow. Because I'm tired now and need to fall into bed.
Most of Monday was taken up by the side trip I mentioned briefly in my last vacation post. I will also mention it here, but only briefly, as a trip in which it was necessary to confront old ghosts. They were confronted. That's about all I'll say about that here.
There were a few giggles involved with the trip, though. The first of these was that when we stopped at the the truck stop at the interstate exit closest to Marc's house, I discovered via playing with my handheld computer that the place had a wireless network. This let me download mail, though I couldn't get out my last round of Livejournal posts because I didn't have the laptop with me.
solarbird was very, very amused by this, though.The second and third of the giggles were posted about by Dara already over on her journal. I will add to the commentary about the billboard typo that I just have to wonder who got ripped a new one for "EIXT 59". At least, I HOPE someone got ripped a new one for that one. All jokes about Kentucky's lack of educational standards aside (and I speak as one who was educated in that state), there's a small but nevertheless present corner of my brain that worries that nobody actually noticed.
Anyway, we got back from our side journey round about 5:30 or 6--and when we'd gotten back to my younger brother's house, we discovered that my older brother had in fact arrived on the scene for a visit with us. This was heartening on many levels. Donnie's undergone a recent divorce and a severe hit in the viability of his band, but he did bring the good news that the band members (minus their lead singer, who has apparently just flaked out entirely in a number of not-good ways) have been making an effort to resume rehearsals with an eye to trying to get more gigs in late January. I'm really hoping that comes through for them. I am only an amateur musician at best, and I can go several days at a time without playing any music at all--but I need my instruments there, ready and waiting, for when I need them. And with Donnie having that much more of his heart and soul and life invested into music, I can really see how he needs it to not only survive, which is what he's been doing lately, but to thrive.
Donnie's also let his hair revert to its natural color--which is to say, these days, pretty much gray-white. It's kind of startling for me to see, actually, because my brother's only just shy of 40, and he has the hair of a man fifteen years older, only without the thinning. But he's got this whole almost Christopher-Lloydish look going, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, especially with some of the cute pictures Dara snagged of him with the children. ;) He also joined the queue of Relations Who Have Recently Asked Me to Fix Their Computers--as he'd recently installed some games on the system and was having the game crash for inexplicable reasons. Dara wound up tracing this to Donnie having an old version of DirectX on the system that wasn't playing nice with the laptop's sound drivers, and disabling DirectDraw seemed to make things happier. But not entirely happy, as there were still strange wobbles in the sound output. Still, Donnie was happy that he could actually settle in to play Street Fighter to his heart's content.
Donna made us spaghetti for dinner, and that was all good. And we had another phone call from Sarah and Becky, checking in to try to make sure when adults would be on hand at the house, as they were trying to figure out when they could arrive and leave without leaving the children alone. This was relevant as Didi had to get to her job and Marc, who was off for the week, had to head off for another round of testing for his official architect certification that he's been working on over the last many months. We assured Sarah and Becky (and through them, Aunt Eileen) that between Donnie being on hand for the afternoon and Dara and I returning between our scheduled lunch and dinner dates, the children would not go unattended.
And so, Monday night was pretty much more family domesticity, and that was pretty much all good too.
I can't remember now whether it was Monday or Tuesday where Meighan begged us to watch The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted with her, so I'll mention them here in between Monday and Tuesday. This stands out in my memory partially because of watching Meighan being really into the former of these two movies; they'd put the TV into closed caption mode because there were other things going on at the time, but Meighan was still watching the movie and mouthing the lines a beat before the characters actually uttered them or before the captions came on. That was kind of charming, at least in the "watching the young girl being clearly caught up in the movie" kind of way.
I didn't have the heart to tell her I'd actually seen the movie before. ;)
After things settled down enough to turn on the volume, we watched the rest of the movie and then followed it up with Ella Enchanted, which I hadn't seen before, but which had the same young actress who'd been in the previous movie. It was a DTV movie, and not bad for what it was: a Disney-esque variation on the whole Cinderella story. I liked that Ella's fairy godmother was actually an annoying, inebriated bitch, that a big plot point involved something that was unique to the movie and never showed up in the original fairy tale (i.e., the 'gift' that the godmother placed on Ella that forced her to obey anything anyone told her to do), and that Cary Elwes of all people was playing the villain. It was extremely odd to see him playing the bad guy, especially when I have him burned into my psyche as the handsome blond hero of The Princess Bride, but he also did a very good job with the smarmy evil.
The only thing that kept me from being annoyed by the dancing, singing, cutesy elves in the movie was that they were forced by law by the evil king (Cary Elwes' character) to be happy and frolicking all the time, and in fact were forbidden to hold any other profession besides entertainer. So naturally we get this little nebbishy elf sidekick character who wants to be a lawyer, and that was kind of funny.
Anyway, if you have to watch some movies with kids, these aren't bad ones to watch.
The first major highlight of Tuesday turned out to be lunch with Dara's ex-guardian Ercel, which was pleasant. Dara brought along her laptop, emboldened by my discovery the day before that the truck stop had wireless, and we swiped just enough packets to download our mail in passing. Yes, we are aware this is quite pathetic of us, given that we were a day and a half short of returning to our beloved MurkNorth and its sweet, sweet Internet connection. We were also kind of impressed that the truck stop's network registered on my handheld for about a minute's drive on down the highway.
Anyway, we met up with Ercel at an Irish pub called O'Neill's, which was very "generic Irish pub"-like. But they did have tasty salmon cakes, a friendly waitress, and an extremely tasty chocolate cake slathered in white chocolate sauce, a piece of which Dara and I split for dessert. Ercel insisted on buying us lunch, which was sweet of him. And we spent the entire meal having pleasant conversation, mostly focusing on my family gossip, what Dara and I are doing these days, and what Ercel's been doing to keep himself occupied. He's in his seventies now, but keeping himself pleasantly diverted by doing radio shows about the history of horse racing and working to clock thoroughbreds as well.
After we left the pub, Dara wanted to stop to take a picture of a building about which she waxed quite enthusiastic, and while we did that, just for giggles I got out my handheld to see how many networks I could spot in the area. The answer to this seemed to waver between "five" and "seven" depending on what side of the building we lingered on. Dara made jokes about us being Packet Ninjas, which made me giggle. But I made a point of just trying to download mail and nothing more. Mostly we were interested in seeing how common the networks were, whether people had given them names, and properly secured them. And it was kind of amusing to be driving down the road, hit a stoplight, find a network or two, hit the next stoplight, find more networks.
However, we ran into a snag. As we pulled out of the parking lot from our brief picture-taking sojourn, we heard a distressing flapping noise from the left side of the car. Dara pulled over and discovered we'd gotten a flat on the left rear tire. Annoying, but not unsalvageable. We pulled into the lot of a Goodyear across the street. Dara changed the tire (while I watched, just to remind myself of how it ought to be done, 'cause, well, ya know, I need to know that kind of thing), and then called the rental agency to report that we'd sustained a flat. The cause of it turned out to be a screw embedded in the tire treads, and so Dara was told to try to get the tire fixed if she could, and the agency would reimburse us for the cost. We weren't sure if we would have the time, but Dara promised them to do what she could, and turned her attention to getting back to Marc's so I could visit with my sisters who were supposed to have arrived by then. She drove with supreme care and kept to the slow lane the whole time.
Back at Marc's, Sarah and
wildshadowstar had arrived, bringing with them Caleb (Sarah's newborn boy), Aunt Eileen, and Ethan (Eileen's grandson). It was very good to see them all, and Sarah and Becky presented Dara and me with presents as well as ample opportunity to admire little Caleb. Dara actually zonked out on the living room recliner through much of the ensuing noise--of which there was lots, with a grand total of seven, count 'em, SEVEN children in the house. But I held Caleb, who was a well-behaved little guy and put up no fuss when his momma handed me a bottle and encouraged me to feed him. He was also a big husky boy for being only two months old. He has big hands and big feet and a large mouth, and if these indicators work for babies as well as they do for puppies, Caleb's going to grow up to be quite large. ;) Sarah pointed out that his father is over six feet, so. Two-year-old Lydia had that sort of awed interest in Caleb that children her size seem to get around babies, as if marvelling that there are creatures actually smaller than they are. I mean, they seem to get the "baby" concept; Lydia certainly likes playing with her dolls, and she's got her little sister Michelle around as a live baby example. But there was definitely an element of wonder on her little face as she trotted up to peer at what I was doing as I fed her cousin.
Dara and I, having already decided that Michelle would grow up to be an evil scientist (that cooing she does and the happy hand clapping clearly being a deceptive front) who'd destroy Kentucky with her Heat Ray, agreed that Caleb would definitely be her nemesis.
The new round of visitors couldn't stay all that long, though. We had barely enough time to exchange basic gossip and take a large round of photos before they scooted off again. But the photos were fun. We got a few of both generations of siblings: Donnie, me, Marc, Sarah, and Becky in one group, and all of Marc's children plus Caleb in another. And then as many as we could fit into a group, which was especially funny with the children as the grownups sort of all spontaneously decided to do rabbit ears over each other's heads. The only kid who didn't get into the spirit of the thing was Marc's boy Charlie, who promptly put his hands over his face and refused to budge them until Aunt Eileen offered him a quarter and Donnie offered to match her. And even then, Charlie only grudgingly consented. Lydia, however, was all about the bribery and kept running around to assorted grownups piping, "I wan' money!"
And Dara got in on all the picture-taking as well, as did Becky. In fact, we went through a whole gamut of cameras snapping pictures of everybody. Dara got in a couple of great ones of Donnie, one involving a huge closeup of him with a suitable slightly mad-scientist expression (he was actually peering at Dara's camera at the time, but it still looks funny), and the other of him grabbing Charlie by his ankles and holding him upside down by way of getting him into the photos.
After the photos, the appropriate slew of hugs was exchanged all around, and then Sarah and Becky and Eileen and the two kids they'd brought with them took off again.
Not long after, Dara and I had to set out again ourselves--to allow for a bit of extra time to go to try to find somewhere to get the flat tire fixed. Marc directed us to the nearest tire-fixing place that he liked, which we found with a small bit of effort. The men working the place couldn't help us, though; they were swamped. They offered to let us leave the tire with them so that we could go make our dinner date and pick the tire up the next morning, but Dara wasn't willing to get up any earlier to do that, so we thanked them for the offer and declined, going on our way.
On the way out from there Dara was compelled to snap a picture of the combined Arby's/Exxon building on the corner. This was not actually the first juxtaposition of an Arby's and a gas station we'd encountered during the trip--in fact, practically every single Arby's (with the exception of the first one we checked on Christmas night on the way back from
starfallz's place, when we were trying to find dinner) we saw was one half of an Arby's/gas station combo. Dara was appalled by this on general principles and wanted to document it for photographic evidence to send off to her favorite "eyesore of the month" architectural crankiness site.Maybe it was due to the reprieve from seven lively children; maybe it was due to the heat being turned up in the car. For whatever reason, I zonked out on the drive and didn't rouse up again until we were closing in on Joe Bologna's in downtown Lexington. We got turned around a little on the way in, but not irretrievably so, and we wound up walking in just about on time.
Joe Bologna's is a church converted into an Italian restaurant, and had come highly recommended by the LexFA crowd that constitutes the bulk of Dara's and my friends in Kentucky (LexFA = the Lexington Fantasy Association, for those of you who don't know already). Six of them plus relations showed up to meet us:
starfallz and her mother, kitchengrrl and her husband (who had in fact come up from Texas to visit local friends), Scott who does not have a Livejournal but who regularly answers my posts anyway (HI SCOTT!), Mike and Sue from Louisville, and Linda from Louisville. Much pleasant conversation and tasty food was had by all, and the expected slew of photographs was taken. Dara and I got situated right in the middle of the table so that we could talk to everybody; for me, at least, this kind of turned into a tennis-match style of conversation as I kept whipping my head back and forth to try to keep track of what was being said on which side of the table.The breadsticks were very good, soft fresh bread with garlic butter sauce into which the bready goodness could be dipped. I was less enthused about the linguine in white clam sauce, but hey, it was an experiment I wanted to try.
Dara made sad faces at me as I reminded her around 8pm or so that Donnie had said that he needed to return to Louisville, and I did want to get back in time to say goodbye to him. This resulted, naturally, in much amused discussion of the effectiveness of Dara's Sad Face on me and its comparative lack of effectiveness on everybody else. As it happened, we didn't get back to Marc's until 9pmish, but Donnie hadn't left yet.
And in fact he lingered for a while, because Marc and Didi wanted to watch another of the movies that Didi had gotten for Christmas: The Chronicles of Riddick. I only learned at that point that this movie was in fact connected to Pitch Black, and that Vin Diesel was playing the same character in both. Clearly, I am inadequately au courant with recent flicks, but from what I glimpsed of the flick in between trying to work on the book and trying to convince Lydia that I was going to draw on her Magna-Doodle for her one time and one time only (she really didn't like that, especially after she erased my drawing in progress and I refused to draw her another one), I wasn't really missing much.
Goodbyes were said to Donnie, who had to get going back to Louisville, and Dara and I retired early-ish to deal with the packing.
I'll post about today, well, tomorrow. Because I'm tired now and need to fall into bed.
Greeting from Kentucky
Date: 2004-12-30 03:14 pm (UTC)Road sign typos..very common,it seems. I've seen quite a few..to me, that's scary. Gas station/food court places. Very common anymore,especially over the last three years, it seems.
The worst looking ones are the Mickey's D ones..look like a cross between a Mickey D's and a Borg cube.
For Christmas, one of my gifts was a watch with a built in universal remote..very easy to set. Wish I'd brought it to Joe Bologna's-I wonder if it has the range to work with that big screen TV they have? Scott
Re: Greeting from Kentucky
Date: 2004-12-30 05:24 pm (UTC)And yeah, it was cool to see you and everybody else. It's good to get reminded of what you folks look like.
So far, the loot tally for me is 'jar of cookie mix and a candle from my uncle', 'bath goop and a fluffy scarf-like thingie from older of younger sisters', and 'handmade choker necklace from younger sister'. We technically haven't HAD the holiday gift exchange here at the Murk yet, since three of the relevant bunch of us were out of town. We'll probably do that this weekend. :)