Late summer stuff

I didn't realize so much time had gone by since I last posted. I suppose I've been busy, or perhaps a bit distracted. We had company this past week, my niece and her son, but I don't have a single photo of their visit because of this:

My new, finally activated, smart phone! Which I hate, despise, and abhor. It's so complicated and I don't like complicated. It can do so many things, I now understand why people walk around staring at their phones all the time. It takes a lot of time just to understand which of its fifty billion functions the phone is using (by itself) at any given moment. I seem to have no control over it. I used it to take some photos while Risa and Josh were here, and if you push the camera button it goes clickclickclickclickclickclickclick and suddenly you have seventy-eight pictures of the same thing. Which I feel I have to go through and examine, and delete the less good ones, which takes time, time I do not want to spend sorting through seventy-eight photos of the same thing. Also, I don't know how to get them off the phone and onto this blog. That is, I don't know an easy way. I could transfer them to my Dropbox account, if I could remember the password, and I could email them to myself if I could get my email set up on the phone. And I'm sure there are other ways, probably involving stupid Facebook or other things I don't want to deal with. It all sounds completely impossible, and so I have decided to stop taking photos with the phone. For now, anyway. I have also deleted the game "Inside Out Bubbles" which I loaded on the phone and then the twins grabbed the phone away from me and played the game for four hours. After that experience I decided we are not going to have any games on the phone. The thing is, I thought I installed a couple of other games on it, but I can't find them. I know that the next time the twins get ahold of my phone, perhaps some weekend morning when I sleep late, they will find those games and play them for four hours. I hate this phone.

Risa claims it is a wonderful phone. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. But maybe things will get better.

I'm not in a very good mood right now, and I suppose that's affecting my opinion of the phone. Our big black cat Pie Bear is in the vet hospital with diabetic ketoacidosis, to the tune of $2700 for the weekend, or more ($2700 was the minimum quoted, and I had to leave that much as a deposit). JUST when we're starting to get our feet on the ground again financially, this happens. I'm going back and forth in my mind about whether we should have just let him die, not taken him to the hospital (I found him under a bush in Clifford's yard this morning, near death). I don't want him to die, but he is sick (diabetes and maybe more), and we've spent so much money on him already with hospital visits over the last two years. He's reached that point in his life where he's just really really expensive. But I still love him dearly, as do we all. In fact, I miss him right now. He tends to hang around me in the evenings and I like the company. I also am not in the mood to have another pet die right now (of course, when is one ever in the mood?). Thus, $2700, or whatever higher number it turns out to be. It goes on the credit card. We'll pay it off somehow.

Let's see, what's happened over the last two weeks? The last week of July was Lego camp (I think I posted at the beginning of the camp). Here's Kid A on the last day of camp with a pyramid he built:

and here's Kid B (in a too-big Lego shirt) with a sort of town that he and some other kids built:

I don't know why there's so little in the town -- he couldn't explain it to me. I was really sorry to see the end of Lego camp. It gave me three delightful hours each day to get things done. I got my hair cut, did housework, rearranged the twins' room, etc. I didn't do the taxes, nor any prep work for teaching, nor any writing. But it was still a good time.

That last week of July was also the end of baseball for Kid A, celebrated with a pizza party with the team. We were glad to have the summer season end, because it's a great bother to be going to sports events twice a week at dinnertime, but other than that I enjoyed it. Here's Kid A up to bat:

His hitting seemed to get worse as the season went on, not better. I should have worked with him on batting practice. All the best players were getting lots of coaching from their parents. I feel bad about that.

The other thing we did, the first weekend of August, was move furniture. Here's the room arrangement we finally ended up with for the kids:

It seems to work pretty well. Beds on opposite sides of the room, a bookcase for each boy. You can't see, but the loveseat (covered with the red plaid blanket) is on the wall right when you walk into the room. This means that we could potentially open it up (it turns into a bed) if someone stayed overnight.

And we moved furniture in the living room. We moved a big corner bookcase into the kids' room and that made it possible to move the buffet back where it belongs, in the living room,

and put a bookcase where the buffet was, in the dining room.

It's a little odd to have a bookcase in the dining room, but not too odd, especially since it sticks out about half as far as the buffet, so we're not always running into it. We did this so that it would be easier for six people to sit around the table (us and the relatives), but then we ended up eating out every night while they were here (OK, one night it was pizza in the park, but we didn't eat at home anyway). Still, it's a good rearrangement.

The visit with the relatives was good, though unphotographed -- we went swimming twice, rode bikes, went out for ice cream four times, ate at various restaurants, played mini golf, went for a hike in Eldorado Canyon State Park, walked on the Pearl Street Mall, and caught crayfish in the creek near our house. Lots of good summer stuff.

And now we're counting the days until school starts. We've got one more full week at home, and then comes the partial week -- their school starts Thursday of that week -- and then my school starts the following Monday. Roll on, fall, we're nearly ready for you. The kids need to get back on a schedule.

Think good thoughts for Pie Bear, and our bank account, and my new phone...