Well, I watched the Nephew today. Amy went to work, only cried a little, called me a few times on the phone and survived the whole ordeal. And I had a delightful time with my darling nephew. He's so cute! And he's such a happy baby. Very contented and easy to soothe. Boy, I love him. Here's a picture of him I took today and emailed to her.

I thought it would be fun for her to have a few glimpses of her baby today so I took about 5 pictures of him in all his cuteness and sent them off with little messages from him. I also sent them to her husband. They dug it.

As long as we're on the subject of pictures, here is a photo of Joey. She's celebrating her air hockey victory on Kid's Day.

That's my girl!

I like the whole picture thing. Here are two photos I took of us on Easter after church. It wasn't very warm that day so I was wearing my favorite fuschia ribbed turtleneck. The one that I got for $4 because it was 75% off at a favorite department store of mine at their winter clearance sale. I'd have gotten 3 or 4 more but they only other colors available were red (which I don't wear), cream (of which I have 2 already) and black (again, I have this color covered). Oh well. So anyway, I took a few of us trying to look normal and then I took one of us in the sunglasses trying to be all Joe Cool. Or is that Joey Cool? (BTW, my dad used to have a friend whose last name was Cool. I thought that was really hilarious.)

and

It got mighty warm today. Well, relatively speaking, I should say. It was 80 degrees in the house at 5pm, which I thought was abominable but there was little to be done about it except blow a fan on myself to dry my sweat. By 6pm, the outside temp was lower than the inside temp so I opened all the windows and that cooled the house down a lot. I'm thinking that I'm not looking all that forward to hot houses again. I mean, I love summer. But the heat makes me sleepy and our house gets plenty warm. Maybe we need to get an air conditioner. I'm thinking even a small window unit would be better than what we're doing now, which is basically nothing.

Or I'll just have to hang out at Brit's house with her air conditioner all summer. That wouldn't suck too bad. :-)

Last night I finished our current bookgroup book, Emp!re F@lls. It was an interesting read. For many pages in the beginning, I was just slogging through. If it hadn't have been a bookgroup selection, I would have ditched it but I stuck it out. By about page 120 or so (of an almost 500-page book), I started getting interested in it. I wasn't crazy about the writing style--almost every chapter was a change in POV which I found irritating at times, interesting at others. But the story ended up being compelling. Compelling enough that I had to read until 1:30am, even though I knew I'd have to be awake at 6:15 to receive the Nephew this morning. The ending wasn't great and one of my friends felt like there wasn't enough closure for her tastes but I felt there was enough closure. I just didn't like what happened in the book. And it came out of left field so there was no preparing for what happened. But for me, the measure of a good book is whether or not it compelled me to read it, not whether I liked what happened in the book, and this one was very compelling. Also very disturbing. I can't imagine what the discussion will be like. Yikes! Now I can start on The S*e*c*r*e*t L*i*f*e of B*e*e*s. I can hardly wait.

I've really been in a book-reading mood. For awhile, there, I wasn't reading much of anything besides what I trolled on the net and the few catalogs and magazines that came to the house. Now I'm back to being my voracious reading self. I like this self much better. I love the feeling of accomplishment when I finish a book, especially when I'm able to squeeze in a non-bookgroup book because I'm a relatively slow reader and having time to read both the bookgroup selection and a book of my own choosing makes me very happy. I've had Ah@b's W!fe on my bedside table for over a year and haven't picked it up yet. But I will start it as soon as I finish Bees.

Time to get reading.

Ta!

--L