Amanda and her parents are in Long Beach with the Kai. Amanda is there for a conference and everyone else is on vacation. As it is, I am alone at home for a few days. I slept in and got up at 830am. Crazy. Of course, in my real life singlehood times I may not have gotten up until 1pm

She sent me a great picture of Lonan visiting the cockpit whilst on a layover in Oakland yesterday:

Apparently, they went to the Aquarium of the Pacific this morning. LK liked it so much that they may go back in the afternoon after his nap. Amanda and I were there a long time ago.

I have not been taking many 1234 pictures recently. Those are pictures I take around 12:34pm as a way of documenting my life (an alarm on my phone goes off to remind me); I had heard about it on KUOW. In a way, I am usually in the same place at that time, so the pictures might get a little boring. Maybe I’ll start taking them at another time.

Amanda started feeling ill during dinner last night (ear pasta with a spicy tomato, olive, and caper sauce). She ended up being violently ill all night. Hard to say what it was, since no one else got sick.

She ended up not going to work, which was good, since typically she has to be almost dying not to go in. She ended up sleeping a lot. I was tired all day too as I did not really sleep either.

Ate Piglet just slurped down a bunch of Pedialyte that was on the coffee table that I had bought for Amanda. She seriously loves the stuff. Now she is purring happily in my lap. Too bad I have to get up and get my tea from the kitchen.

DK and I finished installing the dishwasher today. It’s nice. Curiously, the control buttons, which are on top of the door, are very hard to press because the are recessed underneath the counter. I was going to install it so the door would protrude slightly from the counter, but that was impossible to do since the mounting brackets (which attach the dishwasher to the counters and prevent it from tipping when loading/unloading dishes) required it to be flush to the end of the counter. I guess counter tops nowadays have different geometries. I may cut away some of the counter top lip to make pressing the buttons easier.

DK and BK took the Kai out to dinner at Red Robin, where he had “chicken-on-a-stick! Real chicken!!!”. Amanda and I had a bit of adventure finding a place to eat. We originally tried to go to Tango in Capitol Hill, but as we had no reservations and it was Saturday they had a wait. Amanda did not want to eat at the bar because of the poor service we got there last time (which was years and years ago). After much consideration and discussion, we eventually went to Cafe Flora; I had thought that it might be easier to drop in without reservations.

Which turned out to be true. We magically got a nearby parking spot and immediately got a table. We had a kinda mixed appetizer plate with cracker-like things, olives, pickles, spicy peppers, baba ganoush, and caramelized onion preserves. The peppers and onions were truly amazing.

Amanda got a polenta dish. The exact details escape me, but the polenta was covered with various squashes and goat cheese and probably other things. Amanda subbed the goat cheese for the original Gorgonzola as she has had bad experiences with it. I had hand made spinach fettuccine with Jerusalem artichoke sauce, parmesan, portobella mushrooms, spinach, and fried Jerusalem artichoke chips on top. It was pretty tasty.

We did get dessert; Amanda got something called “Oui Oui Cherie” which basically looked like a Hostess Ding-Dong with hazelnut sauce. She liked it well enough. We did discuss what Hostess or Little Debbie snacks it looked like. I had a butterscotch creme brulee. Yummy.

We picked the Kai up. Now both Amanda and he seem to be asleep.

I had my usual bi-weekly meeting with REI today. They are always fearful about meeting in Seattle because of the freakish parking people. I have to give everyone’s name to the parking authorities so that they will be “on the list”. Woe to those who try to park without being on the list. The first time they came they were innocent of the situation, but were able to park.

“Are we good?” they asked.

“There is no problem. You’re on the list” replied parking person in a sinister voice.

They were all creeped out about the experience, but one time they did not get on the list for some reason and there was hell to pay. Or so I heard. Now they have parking anxiety when the come into town. Perhaps we should just meet at the HQ all the time.

Back at home, DK dropped by and helped me start installing the dishwasher. We headed out to Lowe’s to get supplies, but we did not finish the job before dinner.

We had dinner at BK’s place… soup, biscuits, beans, and salad. Tasty. There was also berry cobbler and ice cream, but I had eaten too many biscuits.

Amanda’s dad came into town today. Since our kitchen is all messed up, we all had dinner at El Sombero. It was good; we had not been there in a long long time. When Amanda was a primigravida, I think we had been going there three times a week (during the third trimester at least).

I like our new clothes washer. Getting so excited about home appliances has clearly marked me as a boring old man.