No Power

I had planned to do a bunch of posts today with pictures from the past couple of weeks, and some stories from the weekend. Well, I can't get to the pictures because we lost power yesterday because of high winds. Our power is not restored yet, and might not be until later in the week.

We had a great weekend though. I had a hair appointment late Friday afternoon, and then Yuta and I went to a movie on Friday night while the kids were at my in-laws' house. We saw Tropic Thunder, which was funny, but I don't think I enjoyed it as much as I would have a couple of years ago. Robert Downey, Jr., was the highlight of the movie for me.

The jury's still out about my hair. I liked it while I was at the salon, but am not sure any more ... it's a new highlight color, and looks more stripy than I like. And while I typed that sentence I learned something. I thought stripy was spelled "stripey" ... in fact, we have book that mentions a stripy zebra, and for years now I've been sure that the book had a typo, but I never looked it up. But my spell check just caught the mistake when I typed stripey. This is funny, because I also wanted to spell grimy with an "e" this weekend - a small amount more about the game where that happened later in the post.

On Saturday we had some friends over - a family that we all really enjoy, and everyone gets along. I met the mom through a homeschooling mom's night out, and they've got three kids, two boys that are 9 and almost 11 and a 4 year old girl. Even though it might not seem like it by just looking at the kids' ages, from our perspective it's nearly a perfect match. Taipan has a lot in common with both boys, and they all enjoy playing together, and Taisim gets in the mix quite a bit too. It's also the kind of interaction where we feel that an adult isn't always needed in the same room to supervise. So the past two times we've gotten together the adults have played a game or two. On Saturday we played Snatch, a game that I love, but don't get to play too often. It's a word game, and one I enjoy more than Scrabble. If you like Scrabble, you'll love Snatch :-) Anyway, in the game you spell words with letter tiles, and once a word is spelled, it can be added onto with additional letters, as long as the core meaning of the word changes. Someone made Rim, which someone changed to grim. A 'y' was flipped, and I was waiting, waiting, waiting for an 'e' so I could spell grimey ... which isn't a word. But the 'e' came, and I spelled the word, and everyone told me that I didn't need the 'e' after all. I still got grimy, and the 'e' was left in play. I didn't connect it to how stripy is spelled until I typed it in this post. I'm going to pay more attention to words with a long i that end with a y and see if there are any that do have the e in there.

Back to our friends - we usually try to get some Rock Band in too, but we didn't get to that this week.

But, speaking of Rock Band ... we are the proud owners of Rock Band 2. Our power went out before we got a chance to give it a try, but the song list looks great, and I can't wait for Yuta to open them all up for us!! Yuta was also given a Rock Band t-shirt with the game, which is a nice bonus.

I took the kids to the Cuyahoga Falls Natatorium yesterday while Yuta was working. We went to go to the pool, and we were all pretty excited about going. We'd been there once, and I forgot how loud it is - there are a lot of water fountains and sprayers in the kids' area, and it is incredibly loud. Next time we go I want it to be when Yuta can go with us. Taipan was done with the pool after about 30 minutes, where Taisim could have stayed in for another hour probably. There's a cool treehouse to climb in and around, with a slide and climbing rope there too, so after the pool we went to the treehouse and played for a little over an hour. They've got a Subway too, so we got pretzels and cookies and a smoothie and some fruit to snack on while we were playing. All in all it was a fun time, and I hope the four of us can go back soon.

I'm trying not to stress out too much about not having power. We're leaving town on Thursday, and I had planned to do a lot of laundry today in order to prepare for the trip. I've already found the closest laundromat, and can go there if needed, but it'll have to be after work, and I'm not sure if the kids will be interested in it.

I'm going to go back to work now ... I'm sitting in Starbucks, and may be here again tomorrow, though I might try working from the laundromat or the office in Independence.