E-A typical day at Alli's house

A friend from England just sent me this picture of Alli, the girls and my Mom. Although the girls will soon forget, I wanted to post this picture to remind them of their trips to Aunt Alli's. My Mom did a fantastic job of including Molly and Fin in Allison's life by going out there an average of one or two times a week. They would watch movies and read stories together, go for walks and then give Alli a back rub before her afternoon nap. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

Last Sunday I went 15 hours without sitting down, but somehow managed to get no sympathy from my wife. Steve Hall came down and spent the night at Point Roberts on Saturday. We woke up at 6 am Sunday to join our Dads for a game of golf at the local course. Despite a little rain at the beginning, it turned out to be a great Spring day where we had to worry more about mosquitoes than getting wet. Although none of us shot particularly poorly (keep in mind I consider a 116 not that bad because the course is over 6,000 meters long and I haven't touched a golf ball in 2 years and am pretty unskilled to begin with), it still took us almost 5 hours to finish. This posed a little bit of a problem because we were having people over for Easter in the early afternoon- and I wasn't finished until 12:30. Oh well, I knew Les had some helpful toddlers at home to help get everything ready. I managed to buy the beer, get some ice and still make it back before anyone had arrived.

The afternoon's activities were mostly outside based around the bonfire. This in itself was quite the activity, as the fire took almost an hour to really get going despite the use of large quantities of paper and gasoline. Maybe Fire Fighters (and wannabees as well) are better at putting out fires than starting them. Nah, we'll just blame it on the rain from the night before.

With the fire roaring and the beer flowing, we brought the toddlers out to play, and set up a backyard Easter egg hunt. We were smart enough to keep the eggs well away from the fire.......we definitely didn't want to see any good chocolate melt. The ham, buns, chips and vegetables went over pretty well, for a little while at least. I noticed consumption greatly slowed down over time, and I figured everyone had had their fill. However, around 8 in the evening, when I finally stopped tending the fire and helped myself to a sandwich, I got a closer look at the food. Apparently what goes up must come down- and the large plume of smoke that carried up most of the organic waste from our garden, eventually lost momentum and settled down over our table. At that point in the day however, after so many hours on my feet, with very little to eat, I figured a little extra ash wouldn't do anything more than add a smokey flavor to the sandwich. And I was right.