{{Moms of wee ones}} I wouldn't want to go back there. There were options and possibilities for babysitting, but I rarely had the energy to go to the trouble of setting it up.

It gets so much easier. School helps. I have a great mom network. Kids have sleepovers. My mom friends will call me and ask if I can take their kids for the night. I call them and they take mine. That is why I have managed to attend all the F2F events. My children stayed with their friends. Went to school, were fed, and homeworked.

And then before you know it they are old enough to stay by themselves. Like cutiehead Nick!

Suzi + Red = Hott

I would love to babysit for Buffista babies, too.

Vortex, thanks for asking! No, the mug has not turned up, but we got new locks put in, mostly because we've been needing to do it (we haven't changed them from when we moved in) and also I just wanted to silence that paranoid part of my brain, thinking the mostly not possible.

Hopefully replacement mug will be acquired today (we punked out after dinner and watching Friday's Dr. Who and just puttered around and went to bed). I am also operating under the assumption that the original mug will turn up right after we buy the replacement and use it so that it can't be returned. Sometimes you gotta use Murphy's Law to one's advantage, right?

In exciting news, the new brew is bubbling happily in its fermentor! Tom is very excited. Burble burble burble.

Suzi + Red = Hott

No shit! Absolutely bee-yoo-tee-ful.

Nora, glad you got the locks changed. Better to be safe than sorry.

The new cat, Elliot? Is fucking heavy and he tried to push me out of bed last night. Honest to god.

A few weeks ago my son walked in the front door from practicing ball in the driveway. He put his ball down on the chair in the hallway and went to get something to drink and took a bathroom stop. DH and I were sitting in the LR and said hey and watched him. He came back to go back out to practice and the ball was gone. All 3 of us searched everywhere. We were sitting 15 feet from where he left it. We looked in the most crazy places. Never have found it. Still makes us crazy.

Other exciting list annihilation news! We have VoIP phones at home. I set them up when we went north for the summer. We got home August 12th. Today I hooked them back up at home. Fear me with my productivity.

Ran over a barricade? Did we find him safe and not mortally wounded?

Yeah he was fine. He was just really pumped from the show, dancing out on the sidewalk, and then decided to charge a barricade. He knocked it nearly to the other side of the street, and then he just kept running.

I think that I have gnomes. They follow me from apartment to apartment. sometimes I when I can't find something, I say out loud "hey guys, I really need ____" then I stop looking for a while. I look again, and I often find it. dont know why, but it works. There's a great science fiction story about how the entire world is rebuilt every minute, and the reason that you sometimes find something in a place where you know you looked before is that the gnomes forgot it in 2:58, but not in 2:59.

and the reason that you sometimes find something in a place where you know you looked before is that the gnomes forgot it in 2:58, but not in 2:59.

Or else that happens when they make a change in the Matrix....

Suzi + Red = Hott

Thirding this comment.

The new cat, Elliot? Is fucking heavy and he tried to push me out of bed last night.

Elliot nees to understand the rules of his new home. No pushing the human out of bed!

The only rule I have is "No walking on the keyboard." Which my cat still breaks sometimes - he'll just walk on it really fast so I don't have the chance to shoo him off.

Cats really have no sense of right and wrong. But they do understand that their actions (such as doing things their humans don't want them to do) can have consequences, and they decide on a case-by-case basis whether it's worth risking the consequences.