4 more boxes packed. I am up to 57 and rooms are starting to look really empty.

Burrell, I have that phone! Apps I love are mostly kid related, though I love playing Paper Toss and Katie is obsessed with Angry Birds. Another fave that Noah and Grace both crack up over? Talking Carl. We also have Brain Pop which is educational and fun (with quizzes!). Noah deleted Textropolis off my phone which makes me feel tragic because I was 61% finished with the whole damn thing. SO SAD and mad.

In other news, our Vitamix is here. I think for my birthday I should have you all come over and we'll have blended drinks of various stripes. We'll call it the Eat Like Grace party.

Also, Burrell, Today's Groupon half off cookies at Platine would be perfect as it is near you and I hear their cookies ROCK.

I'm snacking on steamed broccoli topped with shredded gruyère, and trying to decide what to make for dinner.

Are the cookies good, Kat? Good to know, I'll pick that one up.

Isaac is also very excited to hear that Angry Birds is fun. He wanted me to download it.

What I really want to find eventually is a good GPS app, but in the meantime I've downloaded FB and a few games.

Also, simultaneously scared and amused at idea of a Eat Like Grace party. It doesn't involve sardines, does it?

Well I did miss my flight to San Jose, but they were able to book me on a flight to Oakland, and there was a very nice man in the same boat who volunteered his son to drive me to my car.

Nice, Perkins.

My couch is available if you end up needing it, though.

Thanks! I think I'm good though.

On summer mornings, after breakfast, Mother would essentially put me out with the dog to get me out from underfoot. Hill wandering, creek wading, hiding in the empty middle of a huge bush of some sort with books and a blanket. Getting blistered occasionally from poison ivy.

The bookmobile came out to our little wide spot in the road once a week, and sometimes we'd go into town to return or get more books.

Vacation Bible School for a week in June, moving through the stages from kid on one of the classes to teacher when I got to high school. Then, later in the summer, the church festival, where the ladies would cook insanely good chicken sandwiches and bring their best pies and potato salad, and the men would be lopping up the water melon. Another hierarchy to pass through was handing out slices of pie and watermelon to being trusted to cut the pie, to being one of the waitresses taking orders from the old folks who would always exclaim about how big you were getting.

The best summer was the year I was unofficially dating the preacher. Unmarried clergymen, much like Jane Austen's single rich men, were definitely in need of a wife, and the unspoken jockeying for position among the eligible girls was fierce. I didn't even know I was competing, until I realized Rev. Dave was picking me out to talk to. Oh, the thoughtful/jealous looks. And the weekend I was home from college during the winter, and he kissed my cheek after church. Scandalous!

That summer, there was a field trip to the Pittsburgh Zoo, where all of us country kids stared at the white-tailed deer in the cage and going, "No, really, they have them in the zoo? Don't these people get out?" Mid-afternoon, with most everyone who wasn't thirteen and younger was hot and bored, Rev. Dave, who had grown up in Pittsburgh, sidled up to me and suggested getting some pizza at a place he knew nearby. So we snuck off for a couple of hours, ate pizza and played pinball, then went back to the zoo, where the chaperones were giving us looks and the kids were going "Where did you two go!"

He eventually went to a more populous/less rural parish--at which point he kissed me once, because now that I was no longer a parishoner he wasn't breaking any rules--and that was the end of my summer as the preacher's girlfriend.