(no subject)

I am taking a moment to myself. I feel like I’ve been a bad LJ friend. While I work out the kinks of the new demands on me at work, I am reading but not really commenting that much. Also, the fact that the laptop keyboard is on the fritz doesn’t help. Reading LJ from the ipad is okay, commenting is a beast unless I have time.

Prepare yourself for another disjointed entry in bullet points:

• Thank you to hazelnutdarling or the virtual gift! You are a dear!
• The warm weather this weekend caused the irises to shoot up and I saw a hedgerow of forsythia in bloom on my drive in this morning. We are supposed to get 1-3 inches of rain over the next couple of days and the cold is going to return – poor, poor faked out plants.
• Nicole and I had so many moments this weekend where we just stopped and hugged each other and there were many I Love Yous and God Our Kids Are Cutes.
• I go back to ‘school’ this week. My Management Institute courses start Thursday and I have an induction dinner this Tuesday. I am a strange mix of nervous and tired just thinking about it. Oh, the life of an introvert!
• Nic made ribs for Family dinner last night. After I saw the two huge trays in the oven, I was surprised at all the food she was making. Don’t you know we ate almost all of it? Man. It was tasty, and I’m not usually one who even likes ribs. We were also joined by a long-lost friend who just moved back to The Commonwealth. It was nice to have his face at our dinner table. And The Don and girls were back. All was right with the world.
• The boys are having a Dr. Seuss themed birthday. Have I mentioned that? Prep is in full swing! Unfortunately, we happened to plan the birthday party the same day as the Cat Show when Thelma needs our help most. Duh. One of us will have to go out there after we put the boys down and hold down the Cat Show fort with her.
• I am purchasing running shoes this week and starting my couch to 5K because they just announced a Color Run in Roanoke in June. What an entry back into 5K land! How Fun! The Dona and I are planning to run it together, I think. Any runners out there with good shoe recommendations? I’m looking an New Balance Minimus – but can’t decide whether I need trail runners, regular runners, or should just get cross-trainers that are more multipurpose?

Thank you for the kind words about the car break-ins. We are surprisingly unemotionally impacted. I know it would be completely different if they’d come IN the house, though. But Tucker would have gotten a piece of them, no doubt. Crime seems to be on the rise in our neighborhood, which makes me sad. The next door neighbor told me his upstairs neighbor got her TV stolen in the middle of the day right out of her house. She was leaving her back door wide open for her elderly dog to come and go, though – so someone just walked right in. Sigh. I told Nicole that if they’d only stolen the car, we’d have gotten to get a new one. Instead they only took the cell phone charger. Meh.