Mid-March Updates

Hello, blog.

I can't believe it's been nearly two weeks since I've last spoken to you. It's been an insanely busy month.

We started off at the beginning of it by taking a volunteer day at our church's preschool, running errands and doing miscellaneous chores around the place. We worked hard, but also enjoyed ourselves. And we were rewarded with free tickets to Disneyland as part of Disney's Give-A-Day-Get-A-Day program. We were lucky we got our volunteer day in when we did, because a week or two later, Disney reached the maximum number of vouchers it was planning to give out this year for the program, and shut it down. What was the max? 1 million. That's right-- in the span of less than 3 months, 1 million people signed up. What I'm more curious about is how many of those people actually return to volunteering on their own. Someday, when Todd is older, I'd love to take him to the one of the animal shelters here and volunteer.

First weekend in March, we took a trip down to Rowland Heights, where Allan grew up. Friends that he's known since age 5 and now live far away were all in town at their mother's house that weekend, and he wanted to visit with them. Two of them we had already visited nearly 3 years ago, when we were going through Seattle on our way from Vancouver back down to Santa Barbara. The other kids there were either quite a bit older than Todd (ages 9 and 11) or quite a bit younger (ages 2.5 to baby) so there was nobody really his age to play with. We walked up the street a few houses to Allan's mother's house and visited with her and her dogs for a little while. It was nice to see folks we wouldn't otherwise see on a regular basis.

The following weekend (this past one), we again took a trip down to LA, to Sara and Jason's house in Topanga. Every March since 2003, Sara has held a St. Patrick's Day dinner at her place, serving boiled cabbage, potato leek soup and corned beef. The food is delicious, the desserts are divine, and the company is mad. These days, most of us have graduated and dispersed across the country, but enough of us are still in Southern California that we were able to see each other for the 8th annual dinner. We took Todd, who had a grand time playing with Sara's cat. I even tried stroking its super-soft fur, but apparently the cat knew that I wasn't overly fond of his ilk, for he flattened his ears and took a swipe at my hand! Yikes! I rest my case :-D

This week Allan has been busy with jury duty, which just happens to coincide with the one time at work where he actually has a hard deadline to meet (for once! He's really earning his paycheck now!), so he's getting little sleep himself these days, going to court in the daytime and working at night. We're really looking forward to this coming weekend, where we can do nothing but rest and relax... and then spend the week after that enjoying Disneyland for Allan's 40th birthday with friends and family!

By the time we get back and settled into the daily routine again, it will be Spring Break (yay for kid-less week!) and the end of March. Let's see if April is any less hectic than March, because May promises to be another busy busy month!