Two bits of wisdom slyly entered into my stream of consciousness today during lunch. It was probably just a coincidence, but I found them oddly comforting, nonetheless...

First, as I was eating my Jimmy John's sandwich, I looked up and saw a sign on the wall in front of me that said:

"If you do what you need to do, when you need to do it...then, SOMEDAY, you can do what you want to do, when you want to do it."

Second, as I was digging in my purse for a piece of gum after eating my sandwich, I found a fortune from the last time we went out for Chinese:

"Your present plans are going to succeed."

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In other news, how 'bout that GM UAW strike?

-Em

As you have probably already noticed by now, Thinking Out Loud has a couple of new additions. 

1) In the right-hand column, as an extension of the "Our Favorite Websites" links, you can now see my latest Flickr pictures. For now, I am reserving my Flickr space for "practice photos" (i.e., ones I'm trying to be more artsy-fartsy with).

2) In the left-hand column, under the heading "Recent Photos," we will still be using the in-site photo album feature for snapshots of people and places (because I know a couple of you have bandwidth problems and cannot view Flickr photos).

We'll see how this combination works for now. At times, I may have some redundancy (e.g., if there is a picture or two from here that I want to add to my Flickr "portfolio"). Either way, you'll be able to see the "most recent" of each photo album (in-site or Flickr) from the three-picture previews in each column.

Comments, concerns, and suggestions are welcome!

-Em

I was going to wait to post about our Labor Day weekend until I'd downloaded pictures, but apparently this morning I am distracted enough not to want to dive into the piles of work (albeit virtual piles) surrounding me. You know those days when there's so much to do, you just don't know where to start? Yes, I'm sure you do. Dumb question. Anyway, so I am procrastinating on getting started and making that oh-so-difficult decision.

Instead, here's what we did over the weekend...

We took Friday off, dropped Molly and Sammy off at the kennel (poor girls) and began our drive down to (as Kiya would say) CAN-tucky. Drew's sister Brie, her husband Charles, and our three nieces Mikayla, Kiya, and Kaitlyn, now live in Kentucky, just over the river-border from Cincinnati. The drive down was extremely frustrating, unfortunately, but we were the idiots who didn't think about timing and hitting Indianapolis during rush hour the Friday before a holiday weekend. The stop-and-go traffic around the city combined with the route we took (down US-31), which took us through town after town of stoplights most of the way through Indiana (again, we should've known better) got us into town a couple hours after we had planned, so we just checked ourselves into our hotel, tried to find some food for a late dinner, and went to bed.

Saturday morning we awoke feeling less frazzled and partook (ha) of the free breakfast at the hotel. We called Brie to make sure they were ready for us, and headed over to pay a visit. Saturday was a pretty leisurely day. We received a tour of their house, read and did art projects with the older two girls (mostly me), played Wii  with the older two girls (mostly Drew), worked at coaxing almost 20-month old Kaitlyn to come to us (both of us, and not an easy feat), and just enjoyed spending time with the kids (and their parents, too) in general. Drew's parents arrived late in the afternoon Saturday, then we all went to dinner. After we got back from dinner, my mother-in-law and I took the three girls on a walk to the park. It was definitely an enlightening experience...the realization of how long a walk with a 7, 4, and almost 2 year old can be! We retired to the hotel that night, feeling pretty tired after our full day with the girls.

Sunday we woke up, repeated breakfast at the hotel, and met up with Drew's parents and the CAN-tuckians to head into the city to the Cincinnati Zoo. It was great! I will post pictures later this week. The remainder of the day was spent eating lunch, swimming with the girls in the hotel pool, napping (all of us except Mikayla, who is 7 and DOES NOT NEED A NAP, duh! ), eating yummy Cincinnati pizza, and Babcia (my MIL) and I taking the girls on another walk to the park (this one took even longer, and it was getting dark and we were within a block or two of "home" when a search party of Drew, Brie, and Drew's dad found us trying to coax Kaitlyn away from the ants she was determined to play with on the sidewalk ). We got back to the house, got the girls into their PJs, then watched the big fireworks display between Cincinnati and Kentucky on TV and said good-bye to everyone.

Monday we got on the road home and made better time (with less frazzlement as well!) with an alternate route back north. We stopped for lunch at a Sonic Drive-In (both of our first times), but were a little disappointed by the lack of specialness in the food, besides the whole drive-up, eat-in-your-car experience. We got home that evening, unpacked, and started laundry and other chores that would end up making us feel like we weren't behind on everything for the whole week before heading to bed early.

It was good to see Drew's family (minus sister Luanne and family) and spend time with the nieces. It was also interesting to see that part of the country, with its rolling hills. It reminded me of the mission trip we took to West Virginia the summer after I graduated from high school...very similar to that type of country...which brought back a lot of neat memories.  All in all, it was good to get away, even if it was a short trip, and spend time with "our kids." We're looking forward to seeing "our other kids" (Alex and Conor) at Christmas, as we've decided to fly to Washington state to stay with my brother Blaise and sister-in-law Nicole over the holidays.

That's it for now. I'll add a link here when I upload pictures of the zoo and the weekend in general.

-Em