Pictures From Our Week

Time Capsule

We have a couple of big rubbermaid bins under our bed for collecting artwork and other papers that the girls bring home. They act as time capsules, of sorts. I'm sure we're not alone in storing memories this way. In fact, my mom had something like this, too.

When Margaret and I visited Mom in St. Louis 15 years ago she got out one of these time capsules, which included a vocabulary assignment that Dave completed. He had to create a sentence for each word, and for the word "slow" he wrote: "Why am I so slow?"

Well, I personally believe that people should slow down a little more. Here's a case in point. On Sunday we drove to Minneapolis to pick Claire up from her trip to China. On the way out of town we stopped to get some gas, and we were being efficient with our little stop. While I pumped the gas, Margaret and Elizabeth put up the rear seat in our van so the Sorvaags could ride with us. The seat was up before the tank was full, so they went inside to pick up drinks. When I came inside to serve myself some decaf, they were already in line to pay. "Are you just getting a coffee," Margaret shouted to me from the line? "Yes," I replied, "but the creamer is empty." The gal running the cash register was nice enough to come right over to refill the creamer dispenser, allowing me to make my coffee all sweet and fru-fru the way I like it.

I was surprised that Margaret was already done in the line when I finished with my creamer because I didn't take that long to fill it up. But she thought I was taking too long and prodded me by saying, "Come on Juan Valdez, what's taking so long? Are you harvesting the beans? Get your donkey and let's go!" With that she shooed me out of the store, ran ahead of me, climbed into the van and closed the door.

As I approached the van, a Kwik Trip employee came running out yelling, "Sir! Sir! We rang you out, but you never paid!" It seams Mrs. Valdez was in too much of a hurry to ever finish paying for our gas and food.

I think she could take a lesson from Dave.

Chat with Claire

Occasionally when I'm a on the computer in the family room and Claire is on the laptop we'll connect via gmail and have a small chat. Well, that happened last night with Margaret and Claire, only Margaret was on the laptop and Claire was... in China! Sounds like she really likes where they are staying, but she doesn't like the stinky, primitive toilets :)

Gus's Proud Achievement

Notice the difference? No, no I don't mean the dorky guy in the foreground of the second image. Look at the background. The parks service cleared out the brush in front of the new bench. Grumpy Gus's blog must really have some clout to inspire that kind of change in 24 hours, huh?