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07 January 2004 - 08:11
music: Angra: Angels Cry
I am happy to be home. ("Fetch? Ball? Fetch?")
current obsession: ...Dreamtime? Anyone?
I didn't see Smaug!
I just got back from about a week in Nebraska with my bro, his girlfriend, their cats, and my maternal unit. Things went well, which is to say nobody got in a fight with anybody else -- though at one point my bro was swearing at Adobe Photoshop for being stupid -- and it seemed like everyone was having a good time. And they want to have me back again at some unspecified later date.
When I got there I was told they'd been having lovely unseasonal weather. (In Nebraskaspeak, that means it wasn't forty below with windchill and there wasn't snow on the ground except where it was still melting from being put there in a huge pile by a snowplow.) BUT. In a couple of days the nice warm weather was going to be over and there would be coldness and snow. Twenty below with windchill coldness, and three to seven inches of snow, or something like that.
(Note to my European readers and other sane people: Twenrty below is twenty below Fahrenheit, which means about thirty below in sane-people measure. And three to seven inches would be around seven to eighteen centimeters. Unimpressive to you Finns, I'm sure, but I normally live in a place where one inch of snow for the total winter would be unusual, and it does get below freezing but only at night.)
Before the days of crappy weather set in we went to the zoo in Omaha. Jeff took some photos of the trip, naturally, and the ones he and the maternal unit and I liked went here, so go look if you want.
(Course if he checks his usage statistics and notices this page links to him he can read all of the stuff I say here. And then he'll mock me for using such a service as Diaryland, because don't you know that you could just write your own little program and have your journal on your own website and so on? And yes, I probably could. Blargh. Maybe even the program-writing part.)
We also went to Nine Mile Prarie, where we didn't take pictures.
I was well-fed and nicely cared for. We played some Cheapass Games, which I failed to win but I seem to be the least competitive person in the family so that's fine. I must be defective because I like playing the game, and winning's nice but not a big deal at all.
I bought around a hundred dollars of books. About half of that was two hardcovers from Barnes and Noble. The rest was a lot more books from A Novel Idea, the bestest bookstore in Lincoln and on a par with Coas. Coas just needs cats. A Novel Idea has two kitties, Silas and Okay (or perhaps OK, I'm not sure how his name is spelled). All used bookstores need cats. Cats and books go together so well.
I like my bro's cats but missed my own. His are more easy-going that Vvai and Gvitwit. They don't play fetch or try to kill people.
The most shocking thing that happened while I was in Nebraska: My maternal unit had some vacation time left over and she took it to spend time with her kids. (This is the lady who made it possible for me to skip school in junior high by "missing" the bus, since she couldn't just leave work to come home and take me to school.) She came to the zoo with us. I was shocked.
It was very nice to visit the relatives, the only relatives I have that I don't want to avoid, but the cold and snow thing reminded me of why I'll be happy to visit Nebraska but I never want to live there again.
I just wish the Thai food place here had five spice tofu.
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