Visit from Grandma & Grandpa

We were all so happy to see my parents last weekend, and grateful that they came from Idaho to visit us.

We had a great time at the park

We visited the Springs Preserve and the Nevada History Museum

Grandma & Grandpa brought Nora a pretty new dress

The grown-ups had a great night out at Zarkana, a show by Cirque du Soleil

 We also visited the strip and saw the Bellagio Conservatory 

We ate some good food, celebrated my birthday, and Mom and I went shopping one afternoon while Nora and Grandpa napped. We had a wonderful time!

After Grandma and Grandpa left, Nora asked about them daily and we had this conversation several times:

The Whirly Pop

Every Sunday night we have popcorn for dinner -- it's become a tradition. We use the Whirly Pop (a bridal shower gift from one R.T.L.) and I love it!

1. The Whirly Pop makes healthy popcorn -- just 1 tsp of oil and you can pop as much corn as you like. (Then, of course we add butter and salt.)
2. Cheap popcorn. We have this bag of popcorn in the fridge that's been there since we moved. We use a quarter of a cup each time we pop. That bag (a year's supply) cost about as much as a 3-pack of microwave popcorn.
3. No unpopped kernels! Or at least very few. In tonight's batch -- just six left unpopped! And the rest was perfect. Yummy. What a great dinner.
   

What I've been reading: One of my professors has recommended several books that I've tried. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson was an awesome sci-fi flavored novel about a marketing consultant obsessed with tracking down the story behind some "footage" released on the web. The other novel by Gibson that the professor recommended, Neuromancer, I couldn't get into at all and quit after the first 60 pages -- too sci-fi techie for me. Also, The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century -- kind of a dry read. Now I'm finishing Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, a cultural biography of Mormonism's founder and a very interesting read, and I just started on Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and I'm very enthused by the first bit of The Golden Compass, which I started last night.

Sweet Corn and more

It's been a very eventful week. I started school on Wednesday and things are going great -- I really like my classes, professors, classmates, and my work at the reference desk is going well. (If you want to hear about my first few "real" reference questions, I'd be happy to talk your ear off about it. Call! Email!) I'm really, really interested so far in the stuff we're covering in my classes and I've been recapping it all to Michael, whether he wants to hear it or not. By the time I graduate HE'll be qualified to be a librarian, too! I'm so lucky to have a spouse who is an excellent listener. :)

Pretty corny, huh?

My spouse is also very cute as a corn cob. Yesterday was the Sweet Corn Festival in Urbana. It's kind of a strange thing -- not much sweet corn is grown around here. It's all feed corn. Also, you'd think this kind of festival might take place around harvest time, right? Well, they haven't harvested the corn yet. But it was a fun event, nonetheless. We saw a cool band that played covers of Michael Jackson, 38 Special, and Journey.

Last night we went to Hessel Park for a little "Shakespeare in the Park." A community theatre group did a production of Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a pretty uneven performance, to put it nicely, and we left at intermission. But it was fun to be there for a while and observe the crowd, if nothing else.

Titania and the fairies

I think Dobler's got the right idea here. Just stretch out next to Michael. And relax.