I was sure I'd be married by 22. But the last time I thought about it with husbands in the picture, I was 18. We were planning to run off together and find TKD black belts and marry them and tour the country fighting. Ah, crazy kids.

Later on it was assumed I would have lots of kids, father unimportant. His main job was to only diverge from my genetic template in order to make the kids brighter, stronger, better soldiers. He couldn't make them not look like me. And he had to make them taller.

I actually went looking, and discarded many almost-theres.

And then I became me.

I've skipped to the end.

Dad got here yesterday and we went to get Thai food. The Thia House was named the Best Thai place in New England in 2009 by Yankee Magazine and it was really good.

Then today we went to the Shelburne Museum, which I knew very little about it. It's big. Your admission is good for 2 days and it will probably take 2 days to see everything. Currently they have several temporary exhibits - one of Vermont antique firearms, 1 of Papercraft in 3D which is spread over 2 buildings and is truly amazing, including altered books, and clothing exhibit in High Style 1690-2011. We didn't get to that one.

Plus their regular, permanent collections include Impressionists - Manet, Monet, Dega, Cassett. Plus hand carved furniture by Tiffany. There's a steamboat, a train depot, train engine, train cars. All kinds of houses and buildings. It's truly amazing. A general store completely stocked. Apothecary, barber shop. I don't know how many straight razors they have on display but it's a lot.

It's just amazing. This is the museum story of how it came to be [link]

It's incredible.

askye, it looks like it's worth visiting Vermont just to see that!

It is! Just going in the general store was incredible. Electra Webb bought out inventory of general stores going out of business. So there's bolts of cloth, and probably 2 dozen assorted shoes.

And in the steamboat they have several of the staterooms set up as they would have been so there's clothes and accessories. I took some pictures but some places either it didn't feel right or flash wasn't allowed so I just didn't.

Askye, I'm definitely adding that to the list of things to do in Vermont, along with "meet Askye". I don't think we'll be getting back up there this year but maybe next year.

Cabinets are all but packed. At least their insides. Still stuff on top, but I can't reach that stuff. I think I'll leave the workbench for next week. I'm pooped. All this lifting can wear ya out.

And in SoCal news. It looks like the 405 in Orange County is at a crawl. But in LA, in the Carmageddon area, clean n green zipping by. Guess where my commute is? Yup. In the OC. Cest la vie.

Bummer omnis. I'm guessing that most folks in the Carmageddon zone got out of work as early as possible.

I have a friend who's a nurse at UCLA Hospital. She says that the shifts this weekend are falling heavily on folks who live in a reasonable range for street-driving to work.

sj -- yay! that would be great.

Yeah, I left work before 11.

OMG. I coded. (ME!) I researched, added and tweaked plug-ins.

My eyes are crossing.

Can someone pretend they are an author looking at my blog, maybe interested in entering my giveaway and tell me if anything's confusing or crazy looking?

I need a beta or two. Dan made sure it was secure, but he's not a designer or codemonkey.

Oh, yeah, URL. It's www.eringriggs.com

Thanks for any eyes.

Xpost with Natter, so maybe I can tweak anything and go to bed.