Eeep! Listen to sj. Step away from the research. Do dishes, play with Toto, catch up on threads you don't sub to.

Thanks, guys. We are pretty pleased we've taken the step (even though we've been living like marrieds for years and years).

I did some dishes. Now they need to dry, and stuff needs to soak so I can do more (I'm really embarrassed by the current state of my kitchen. It just kind of became last priority this week). And, Toto doesn't feel good. He didn't even come into the kitchen when I fixed myself lunch. But, I can catch up on other threads. That might be fun.

I did the glance at other threads thing earlier. This lead to my looking at the Library Thing. There is no way I can imagine having time to do this.

There is no way I can imagine having time to do this.

Me either.

LibraryThing makes its own time.

I lie, it steals time frome everything else. So addictive!

Congrats on making it legal, GC!

Happy anniversary, Laura - 17 year anniversary on the 17th, I think you deserve a parade for that.

We celebrate our first date anniversary, but not first kiss (which was 6 days before the first date). They're just too close together, I think. That's in December, and wedding anniversary is in May, so that spreads out the celebrating pretty well.

Edited for homophone trouble

Hee. All this anniversarying! Cute.

Library thing...well, so far I've done one big bookshelf. I have another big bookshelf and two small bookshelves. And then I have to figure out if I've missed things....

But now I'm going to go play with the results. It's quite fast when you have a CueCat, though...

That's a lovely story, Laura.

And, one Israel story. I'm going to have this in actual linear form at some point, but I figured I'd start with this one, even though it's actually from the last day of the trip.

There's a woman here in the states who will buy big bagfuls of teddy bears and give them to groups going to Israel, so that the groups can distribute them to kids in hospitals. She apparently does this often enough that the El-Al people at Kennedy all know the drill on how to deal with the "Yeah, this woman gave me this big bag to bring on the plane" people. Anyway, we'd gotten a few of these bags.

So we went to the Rambam Hospital in Haifa. On the way to the pediatric ward, they handed the bears out to us so that we could each give a bear to a kid. I got one that had a sort of nautical patch on its stomach. As we were walking, I heard some people saying, "We can't give these bears to kids!"

About half of the bears were WWE beanies. One was dull grey and said "The Undertaker" on the front and "Lord of Darkness" on the back. Another said "Two Words: Suck It." Yet another said "A Can of Whoop-Ass." The trip leader announced that we should all examine our bears, and she would collect the inappropriate ones. I looked more closely at mine. The "sort of nautical" patch actually said, "SS Titanic: 1507 Souls Lost." I decided it would go in the "inappropriate" pile.

We still had plenty of bears, though. Most of them were the same -- white bears with gold angel wings. Seemed nice -- a sort of cuddly guardian angel. Then someone read the tag attached to the ear. It read, "..I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live." We decided that giving out these bears might spark an international incident, but that they would be OK without the tags. We tore off the tags, which were choking hazards anyway, and continued.

We split into small groups and each went to a different floor. The first room my group went into had an adorable little girl, maybe three or four years old, and her father. Someone in the group asked her what her favorite color was. She clearly didn't understand the English, so one of us who knew Hebrew translated it into Hebrew. She didn't understand, but her father did, and he translated it into Arabic. She answered in Arabic, her father translated it into Hebrew, and the guy in our group who knew Hebrew translated it into English. Her favorite color was red, so we gave her a bear with a red ribbon around its neck.

We then sang and did the dance to "I'm A Little Teapot." It seems that seeing a bunch of adults do the "tip me over and pour me out" part of the dance will make even kids who don't understand the words giggle. We repeated the routine in about five other rooms -- I gave my bear to an Arab boy who'd already been given a Santa bear by someone else, but his mother didn't want him to have the Santa bear, and he was looking upset. His mother let him keep the angel bear, and he looked so relieved. We also did the same routine in the room of a 15-year-old who spoke English. She clearly thought we were nuts, and we felt dumb doing it, but we couldn't think of anything else to do, and it at least gave her a bit of surreality in her hospital stay.

Inappropriate bears! Hee. I'm sure your song and dance routine did much to distract the little patients and their families.

I'm back from the parade. I was concerned that the growth of the city would transform the parade into a more formal affair. But still as hokey as ever. There were 3 marching bands in kilts. Our new mayor, a woman for the first time. Lots of residents on bikes dressed or painted appropriately. About a dozen trucks from various local bars playing live music and being rowdy. University football players and cheerleaders. The green pig. Lots of dogs. It lasted maybe 30 minutes. Still picked up some pink cheeks.

It was fun. I'm glad I insisted on attending this year. Next year I may decorate the bikes and do it right.

What is up with those bears? Oh my word.