When the Laptop Breaks, it's the Blog that Suffers

We have, shall we say, a flight of broken laptops right now: one from the 2004 G4 Powerbook vintage, which crashes every time you even slightly nudge it; one 2007 Macbook Pro, which only gets a wireless signal if it's sitting on top of the router; and one month-old Macbook Pro which is no longer on speaking terms with its own keyboard and trackpad. This is not to say that Apple does not offer a high-quality product. Leave Apple out of this. This is merely to say that my desktop (a delightful '06 Mac Mini) is the only functioning computer in the house at the moment, and it's all the way upstairs in my office where it was really really hot for a couple weeks there, and then we went on vacation to Santa Barbara, and then my older sister came to visit, and that's why I haven't been blogging. I am mainly making excuses for the benefit of the various grandparents who follow this blog. The rest of you probably didn't even NOTICE that there was only one post in all of August, and I think I'll go eat worms.

Anyway, it's been a busy month. The gutters done been fixed, which is great, although now they need to be painted, which I frankly don't plan on ever getting around to, so we'll probably hire someone. A bunch of gross overgrown bushes were cut down during the gutter project, and now the carcasses are sitting in the side yard waiting to be 1) chopped up and stuffed into countless yard waste bags; or 2) dragged across the street in the middle of the night and thrown into the woods, hopefully without any cops noticing; neither of which I plan on ever getting around to, so we'll probably hire someone. To chip everything, that is, not drag it across the street.

Meanwhile, we all went to Santa Barbara and enjoyed lounging around with Gramma and Grampa Richie and Kelly Ann. We experimented for the very first time with sharing a room (i.e. Chris, me, and both kids), and it went well until the last couple nights, when both children took turns crying and keeping each other awake. It's a good thing that didn't happen the first night, or we would have spent a lot of money on some enormous hotel suite for the remainder of the trip. When the room-sharing was good, though, it was very good; Soren and Sigrid seemed to enjoy waking up in the same room, and Soren even sang a few songs to his baby sister. The only one I can recall went something like "The dark night is oooooverrrr, and the sun came up! Yes, the sun came up! Oh, the sun came up!" It was very sweet. When we weren't sharing a room, we were doing all kinds of things like walking to Shoreline Park, driving R/C boats in the pool, going to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, visiting with friends, buying tiny orchids for each other, and waiting for the batteries in Soren's new toy train to wear out. We had a wonderful time, and I'd love to write in more detail, but it would be so much quicker just to post pictures.