Olivia is helping Natalie play a game on SesameStreet.com:

Olivia: “Natalie, is it blood or heart?”

Natalie: “blood.”

Olivia: “Natalie, is it heart or heart?”

Natalie: “heart.”

Bert: “You’re Right! Wow, you can probably teach old buddy Bert a thing or two!”

Sunday mornings are divine. Well, that is when the girls aren’t pulling each other’s hair out…

After Oregon Ridge, we stopped at Hunt Valley Bikes to check out the Africabike. Jennifer loved it, so we smacked down the card and bought it! 3 speeds, internal gear shifting hub!

Massive, plush seat:

We have to wait another week to get the front basket. For some reason, Kona didn’t ship it with the bike, but alas, it will arrive and we will claim it when the ever-attentive folks at HVB call us and let us know it’s in (ha ha ha).

Jennifer is still trying to re-learn how to ride a bike, but there is always hope. There has to be hope.

Yeehaw, I’m done with Mother’s Day shopping!

Friday was a real silly day.

Thursday 5:30pm my boss’s boss asks me to joing him in Frederick for a client meeting. No problem, I say. The meeting is at 10am and I leave at 8:15 and get there at 9:30. It is a typical manufacturing building - cinderblock, giant logo painted on the side, peeling. There is a greenhouse frankensteined onto the front entrance for some reason. Anyway, to make a long story short, it was a waste of time. Two and a half hours of driving for a 1 hour meeting that was laughable with a client whose CEO reminded me of someone out of Deliverance. Ah, Fredneck, how I love thee.

Laughed all the way home.

Then, I took the afternoon to go to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Anne Arundel County with the goal of buying cabinets for our kitchen renovation. Jen had called and tried to set up and appointment. The lady on the phone refused to tell her what they had in stock and said just drop by and order what you want. When we got there, a real bitchy woman informs us that we need to make an appointment to “design our kitchen”

Ahem. We don’t need to design anything. We have a plan, the number and sizes of what we need.

Jennifer says, “But that’s not what the woman on the phone told me when I called to make an appointment, she said just drop by. We drove a long ways to get here…”

Well, that helped a little bit. The lady pulls out a list of everything they currently have in stock, which is a fair amount of overstocks from Home Depot, brand new, in boxes. But, they have no 42″ cabinets, no corner cabinets, no skinny cabinets.

Why didn’t she offer to fax us the list in the first place? They do have a fax there.

We gave up. So much for trying to help out Habitat. Frankly, folks, I would recommend not going there. The people are anti-helpful and constantly fighting amongst themselves (we’ve been there twice.)

Anyway. We are going to Oregon Ridge today for a little nature and green week activities.

reminds me a bit of the movie poster for JAWS…

Lost in thought… or just lost.

“Why does Aunt Jane call me ‘butterball’, Dad?”

I do have an affinity for cautionary tales. Here you go:

We spare no expense when ordering lunch for client meetings. Naturally, we want to make sure everyone is 1) culinarily satisfied 2) feeling ill after the lunch.

I decided to try the “Calzone”

A round aluminum takeout dish just arrived. Black olives and mushrooms and a swimming pool’s worth of mozarella atop, wait, is there a crust?

“Selected Italian meats”

tomato sauce out the wazoo and uncooked dough.

Yum. Yum. Yum!