Ah, it's so quiet around the house. The kids have been down for over an hour. Michelle is asleep next to me. And my three "guard kittehs" are also asleep in the room, two on the bed and one curled up on the LazyBoy chair.
Saturday - It's been a nice weekend. Saturday Claire and I went to a Step and abs class. When we got back the whole family went to the Cafe on the Oval for a hearty lunch. In the afternoon Claire went to a birthday party held at Fredrick's Pastries. (I'm envious that they have the simple web domain pastry.net. That's forward thinking!) All of the girls got to tour the facility and see how the cakes are made. Then each of them got to create their own fancy cake using the tools of the trade. Abby had her friend Chloe over to play, which turned into a sleepover. While Claire was out baking, Michelle, the kids, and I piled in the van and went swimming at our local Y.
Sunday - Today started off on a wrong foot. I brought Claire and Abby to Mass early because weeks ago the online schedule showed them as serving today. When we got there, the "scheduled" server was already setting up. How that happened I don't know, but it didn't make the girls happy. After Mass the whole family ate breakfast at Donut Fresh Express. When I got home I dug into my weekend projects. First and foremost, clean the wood stoves. Since we finished off another ton of wood this past week, it was time. I also did some minor work on Michelle's van and the house furnace.
Keynote - Claire called me mid afternoon to help her with something on her ePortfolio, a requirement to graduate. She's been working primarily in Keynote, the Apple equivalent to PowerPoint. She needed help in making text flow around a placed graphic. I dug through the menus, the built in help, but couldn't find it. Eventually I google'd for help and found that yes, much to many a geek's surprise, Keynote can not wrap text around a graphic. In Pages (Apple's "Word" equivalent) you can, but not in Keynote. The lameness of this can not be overstated. Other than this issue, Claire has been quite comfortable in using Keynote for her class presentations.
Old Friends - The highlight of Sunday was the arrival of my junior year college roommate, Christian. He is in town for a few days on business and we had a great time catching up on news and sharing stories. After a dinner of take-out Chinese food, our family also introduced him to the series, "Chuck". Since he is, like me, a geek at heart, he enjoyed the humor, the action, and the hint of romance in this "Nerd Herd" technician by day, (accidental) spy by night drama.