I made an inspired dinner of olive oil mashed potatoes and kale, stuffed portabellos with garlic, mustard, and cheddar, bread, brie, $3 wine, etc.. I actually got everything timed right which is hard to do when I am picking up Lonan Kai from 5:30pm to 6:15pm and his bedtime routine starts at 7pm. And Amanda is starving when she gets home. I think I got dinner out at 6:30pm. Had I another 15 minutes to work with it would have been awesome, but one does what one can. We do not really have complicated meals or eat together at the same time much since Lonan Kai was born.
It is 9pm now. I have just finished cleaning and the other evening chores. Amanda is still sick. Lonan Kai and I have so far resisted infection.
Lonan Kai had some secular easter celebration thing at school today and came home with candy and whatnot. Amanda and I ate his candy. Bad of us perhaps.
Amanda is surfing the net upstairs. I am in the office as I have just dumped the recycling in the garage. Armando is rolling about on the desk in front of me. Lonan Kai is asleep and hopefully will stay that way. I do not know where the piglet is. I think I might go upstairs and finish the bottle of wine.

After many moons, I added more pictures to the gallery. Of course, they are from Febrary 2008, which means I am over a year behind. Then there’s all the digital pictures I took before 2006. And all the non-digital ones I want to scan in. Someday.
I don’t have many pictures for the 29th of February and the month following. Surprising, but perhaps not really.

I worked on and basically finished our taxes yesterday. I will let them sit for a bit and then recheck all the numbers. We will be getting a lot of $$$ back which is good in these harsh economic times. Now we are considering whether or not to put money in our IRAs (which of course will change everything). Eh, retirement.
A few options:
1. Put in the max, feel good about our thrift, do nothing about helping the world spend its way out of the economic morass that it is in.
2. Don’t save the money, get our tax refund, go on wild vacation. rawr!
3. Don’t save the money, get our tax refund, keep the funds on hand for nonbudgeted stuff. That might be smart.
I had heard that saving money is basically you giving your future self a loan. A good way to think about things.
Amanda ripped the splinter out of my thumb the other day. She does not feel my pain. She is still sick, but it is hard to say with what as she seemed fine this morning. Lonan Kai seemed too warm, too; we gave him some ibuprofen prophetically earlier.

I cropped the image in a previous entry
because this one looks more coolly apocalyptic.

If having a toddler in a sweater with apples, a penguin cup, and yellow fish container could be apocalyptic.

Evidently Amanda was greatly influenced by Heather and Andrew’s expert reading of children stories yesterday. She choose to go a more artsy direction and gave a sparse interpretation of the stories by reading perhaps one-third of the words in a monotone voice.
“Barn. Field. Little Pig. Learning. Horse. Weather vane. Golden.”
Brilliant!
I had one of those “doh!” moments when I realized that the reason the kid in Have You Seen My Cat? could not find his cat was because she was having kittens. I was always confused about the large number of cat figures at the end. Oops.
Amanda and I are sick. Hopefully it is only a 24 hour thing and Lonan Kai will not catch it. Of course, maybe we got it from him.
edit: Amanda says that I realized nothing about the story and had to be told that the cat had kittens. I would have been clueless forever otherwise.