It's practice

Have finished what I can with the thesis at this point. Later this afternoon I'll be going with mother to the hospital for her checkup, since she has decided that she lacks the proper words to describe her joint ache. (The hospital waiting room is SUCH a depressing place. I'm bringing a book, even if there's a chance that the wait won't be that long.)

A new lavender plant has sprung up in a corner of the garden that's almost (but not quite) at the furthest point from where the original lavender plant is. You have to wonder about that. I've been trimming the bush steadily this year so it hasn't had the opportunity to produce seeds. It could be the roots but then, it's all the way across the yard....

Right, recap time!
Let's see... Tuesday:

Kate's place. I think she warned us that there's not much to eat there right off of the bat. I dragged over all my presents and put them under the tree for Movie Day the next day. I also brought along candy canes (fruit flavored, multicolored ones since the peppermint ones are getting boring) which Lusine and I each had one of when we went to Valleyfair in Kateryna's car.

Valleyfair is crowded. By crowded I mean that it's better than the day after Thanksgiving but there are still enough people around to make you think of a school of those tiny tropical fishes milling around a coral reef. Kate needed to buy presents. Lusine's there to...I'm going to say "soak up the atmosphere", since she did miss Black Friday and I'm sure she's missed the feeling of being stuck in an overcrowded mall (aHEM). We went to the Mac store where both Kate and Lucy immediately proved their ...I don't know what to call it... by using the web access available to the computers in the stores to check livejournals and school grades/email. Kate demonstrated the thing that is the new Mac OS to me. It's very pretty and (I think) much better than anything Windows came up with after 2000. However, being the geek that I am, I remained very sceptical (because really, just how flashy do you need a pictorial interface to be?) and was accused of being a nitpick (while wondering when the heck I'll get to try Ubuntu because really, WHEN?). The new ipods are there. The new iphones are there. I'm not sure if they are the type with or without the phones and either way don't much care.

Food court that day was empty enough (a relative term, I assure you) that we had indoor seating. The guy at the place where I got my food didn't quite know how to use the cash register and I felt bad for him because the line was REALLY building up there. Lusine had something from McDonalds, which Kate was empathetically Not Happy about and expounded to at length why she was Not Happy about it (while I was amused to realize that my mind's somehow established that Kate ranting over her food is a "comforting" sight). (Normality was redefined sometime last year, I think, after the Cake That Would Not Bake incident and before I got used to the toaster.) There were discussions about Christmas decorations in a store, which I really didn't follow, and Spiderwicks movie posters everywhere. We only had to use the cell-phone-location once (like echolocation except shinier and ... not) to locate Kate before we left for Kate's once again.

I think we were warned, once again, that Kate Has No Food In House, Yes. Either way we stopped at the plaza by Homestead and went to Blockbusters where we tried to pick out movies. The actual process isn't so much "picking out" as grabbing all potentially fitting movies and shuffling them through a random elimination process. (We kept Ratatouille, which I was really happy about because I really wanted to watch that.) The Blockbuster place also sold Shrek character shaped candy dispensers with little fans on top which is...neither here nor there, but I remembered it, so you get to read about it. Then, because as Kate has said, No Food, we went to Safeway (conveniently in the same plaza) and got food which isn't really food. By which I mean we got a lot of junk food (no pies though, despite of Lucy's assertions about Pushing Daisies). (I talked my parents into watching Pushing Daisies with me. After three episodes my mom and I went out and bought a pie.) We dumped the lot at Kate's place, petted Kate's rabbit, and rediscovered tinsel. Or at least Kateryna and Lusine did. It comes in different colors and is very...um...shiny. And sheds a lot less than the one we have in the kitchen in Davis and so probably made a better feathered boa. We started to swap presents.

I'll end this recap with a photo from the day: