A bit of this, a bit of that.

I know, I know... I've gotten out of the habit of posting. It seems nothing very interesting happens lately, or nothing I feel like blogging about anyway. Between the house all torn apart, the weather being on-again, off-again, and, well, I don't know what else, but I've been busy and unmotivated all at the same time. So here's a catchup post.

We went to Steamboat last weekend, with the kids. It was a real old-fashioned road trip. The kids and I even stocked up on road food at Wal-Mart before we left. It took about 6.5 hours to make the 5.5 hour trip out there. The first cry of "I have to go potty" was precisely 3.7 miles into the trip (I'm serious, I looked at the trip meter!). We learned that M-Moo has a shy bladder and has trouble (ok, she can't) going potty on the side of the road and is spotty, at best, going in gas-station bathrooms. This problem was solved by letting her ride in the car in a diaper and changing her after she had to go potty.

We spent Saturday with the big people skiing while the little people had a fun day with a sitter from our friends' Montessori school. It's a long drive for the kids to spend the day with the sitter, but they had a great time, and so did we. Steamboat, for those who have never skied there, is intermediate-tree-terrain heaven. Me, being a less-than-stellar tree skier, struggled a bit, but it was good to get out of my comfort zone.

Jim, of course, decided to take out a sizeable tree with his shin. Seriously. I heard the "oof" and turned around in time to see the tree falling on him! Our friends heard the "crack" and thought for sure he had broken his tib-fib. But the goofball barely had a bruise. The tree he hit with his shin turned out to be so rotted out that it just disintegrated where he hit it and fell over on top of him! Entertaining to the last!

We drove home Sunday, making it in 6.5 hours with only one stop at McD's in Vernal, where we stayed for about an hour to let everyone decompress. Our house is still in a state of disrepair. The bill for the water mitigation people was nearly $7000! That gave our insurer enough of a heart attack that we got "bumped upstairs" to another claims adjuster who apparently handles a higher dollar amount than the first lady who was handling us. The independent adjuster came out today to take his measurements and samples and we should have a dollar figure for the restoration work in a few more days, maybe by the beginning of next week. From there, we should be able to figure out whether we will just be restoring to what we had or making some upgrades. We have some ideas of what we'd like to do, a little remodeling, a little upgrading, but have no idea what we'll be able to do until we get the insurance number.

I bought 4 tomato plants at Home Depot today. They are Early Girl bush variety and I'm hoping to keep them indoors until mid-June then set them out on the deck and have some garden-fresh tomatoes this year. Of course I got some basil to go with them, as well as the wasp/yellowjacket traps I went to Home Depot to get (why is it I can't go to Home Depot to get something without spending at least $100 on something else that I never intended to get?!).

I made hamburgers tonight. G'pa Larry gave me some hamburger buns the other day because he had bought two packs instead of one. I winged it and mixed in some breadcrumbs, onion, worcestershire sauce, and egg. They turned out absolutely delicious, but of course I tried to burn down the house again by broiling the hamburgers. There is obviously something I don't understand about how broilers work, because I almost start a fire every time I broil something. This is why I leave almost all meat-cooking to Daddy-J!

As I type this, it is snowing again. They are calling for 7-11 inches tonight, so I may try to get in the last day of spring powder skiing tomorrow morning.

Oh, and work-wise, we settled one of the big scary cases that make up my work life. The case had been inactive for about a year, but the threat of the case kept everyone's stress level significantly higher than it is now that the case is settled. We had several significant victories in one of our other cases last week, so all-in-all it was a good week at the war!

That's probably enough. Everything is all set for Miss-D's birthday party on Saturday. She is uber excited, and I'm looking forward to it too. I just ordered her birthday cake from Mrs. Backer's, a great pastry shop down in Salt Lake. I can't wait to see her face when she sees the outrageous flowers all over her birthday cake! She has no idea what's coming. I also had them do a set of little flower cupcakes for the kisd to take home as favors... so cute!

I'll try to keep up with things a little better. I have a new computer now, a cute little Asus Eee PC, as my laptop is on its last legs. Daddy-J has his computer people working on building me a nice desktop with heavy processing capabilities and a really nice monitor to do my photo editing on. Once that's up and running (who knows when) I'll get back to taking and editing photos again, so I'll have something to show you other than just my boring words!