A great week

I would have blogged from my mother's house, but she has dial-up and is on Mac OS 9. In other words, ssssssllllllllllooooooooooooowwwwwww. Unbelievably slow. It took an hour and a half to get into my .Mac account to change the storage settings so I could stop bouncing email.

But... we had a GREAT week of vacation. Best yet. We flew out on Monday from Oakland to Portland on Southwest. They let us preboard even though G is technically too old (if they had asked, I would have told the truth...). True to form, they served us Kraft Foods-Nabisco-Honey Maid Soft Baked Oatmeal Raisin Snack Bars, which I could not even bring myself to eat, as it contains no fewer than nine forms of sugar. Y'all know I am not a macrobiotic, all-tofu health nut. But...! That seems beyond the pale. (Although it doesn't really nudge the cold PopTarts they offered us on another flight out of first place. The guy next to me and I just handed them back wordlessly. Ew.)

Got in just fine, Mom picked us up, and then we realized that one of our bags hadn't made it. It turned out that the TSA had (probably) held back the duffle bag--containing G's booster seat!--because it contained a sleeve of 6-8 cans of pâté from my uncle to my mom. It's a little hard to blame them, as I'm sure it looked like a good-sized metal cylinder.

Southwest loaned us a booster seat and later paid some guy to drive the bag 2.5 hours from Portland to my mom's home. (wow) We met G's third grandmother (really, Jack and Anna's grandmother) and Jack and Anna, G's adored cousins, in Portland for lunch. The highlight of lunch was Anna, with wet fingers, managing to squirt a quarter of lemon past me and G into the corner of the restaurant without it touching the table at all. That takes skill! (Olive Garden only gives out two crayons at a time. Kinda lame.)

We checked back in with the airline before leaving Portland (no update), and left for mom's house, on the Long Beach Peninsula. We were there for the Kite Festival! We stopped at Costco on the way, in Warrenton, and I encouraged Mom to buy a DVD player. She ended up choosing a DVD/VHS player, despite my protests, but it turned out to be the right choice. I hooked it up and put her displaced VHS player in her bedroom. She's now ecstatic to be able to watch TV and iron. Um, yay, Mom.

We got a ton of stuff done that week. Mom always has a list of things she needs me to do, or to help her do, mostly on the computer. Unlike previous visits, I didn't end up making her cry at all (this is monumental). Part of it is that she is finally getting more self-confident on the computer and willing to try things & guess what something does/is. We got Retrospect Express installed and backed up her whole computer onto 2 DVD-Rs. Phew! She has a nice G4, but damn! Why did they make them so you have to use their horrible keyboards to open the CD/DVD drive??? I ended up downloading a program to assign to the F12 key on her new (larger) USB keyboard just to open the freaking drive. Smooth move, Apple. Gotta rethink that one.

Later in the week, I buried Max's ashes next to the grave for my mom's last dog, Rosie. Both great dogs, although Max still takes the award for "You Were Such a Pain In the Ass But Damn I Miss You." I was remembering how it was nearly impossible to barricade her from my bed and I'd invariably come home to a nest of black dog hair on my bed. Thanks. Rosie was a Mastiff-GSD mix, a leggy, somewhat graceful, tall dog. She looked (and sounded) scary but was a total marshmallow. Huge sweetheart.

G behaved very well during the week. We went swimming at the local overly heated & chlorinated pool twice. He is really coming along in swim lessons. I'm impressed! At one point, he swam two full strokes with his face under water. It's wonderful to see.

Mom always likes to take us out to one big dinner when we visit, so I'd packed a nice dress for me and G's dressy clothes for him (navy slacks and cardigan and white long-sleeved shirt, plus natty red tie). She took us out to the Shoalwater, which isn't usually so pricey, but I encouraged her to get an appetizer, we both had drinks and then wine, and we all got dessert, so the bill was over $120. Boy, was I glad I wasn't paying! Everything was incredibly yummy, even G's Kraft Mac & Cheese! (some kinda boil-in-bag thing)

We also had one of my favorite dinners, cold cracked crab with mayonnaise, and buttered French bread. Yum.

Our flight back wasn't till 7:20, but Mom doesn't like to drive in the dark, so I encouraged her to drop us off really early so she could get an early start back. She ended up dropping us off at about 6 and got home while it was still light. We had gotten to Portland about 1, so we had some good time at Powell's City of Books (something like 4 floors of books! Paradise!), then got our watches fixed at the local Sears (who knew? I kind of liked my dress watch always reading 5 minutes to 6, though). We hit the mall's Radio Shack, bought mom a new USB microphone and USB hub (so now, she can finally plug in her scanner that she never uses, her protests to the contrary; and she can speak French to her French-learning program), and headed over to the Bay something-or-other restaurant for an early dinner so we wouldn't be paying the inflated prices at the airport. (I still paid $3 for a very small amount of iced latte and a lot of ice while there. Um, thanks, Coffee People!)

Painted my nails (only dropping the nail polish bottle once) while waiting for the (late!) plane, then loaded with all the other B passengers. (On the way down to the plane, I learned that the only way to get into the A loading group is to log on to southwest.com just after midnight on the day you leave. Wow!)

G had never in his life been so far back on a plane, and for some reason, was zipping the whole time--About the orange horizon from the sunset: "What is that, Mom?"; about the tray table: "Can we put it down now, Mom?" then "I want to put mine up. Put my drink and snacks on your tray table. Now I want it down again."; and then, about a million times, "I want my wings!" (they always have little packets for kids with a 4-color pencil/crayon, activity book, and stick-on wings. they didn't have time or something and I didn't hear the end of it. They did give him some just after we deplaned.) I read the SkyMall magazine, having brought all sorts of other stuff to do; I just love that magazine. Cool things and really stupid things, all in one. Paradise!

We got home to an empty house (Maddy being at friends') that was still messy (damn those lazy elves!), and a crammed-full mailbox (I forgot to do anything about the mail; fortunately, I had asked a friend to stop by a few times and she took one load of mail inside). Good to be home. I do wish the elves had cleaned up, though.