Sunday morning coffee

Oh golly, it's hot today. I love it. I especially love it while I'm sitting here in a bathrobe, in the cool dark air-conditioned house while everyone else is still asleep, drinking my coffee. I'm going to love it even more though, once I'm outside in it. I'm becoming lizard-like in my middle age, transmogrifying from lounge-lizard to swamp lizard I think. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.

What a wild couple of days it's been. Some friends from Ireland visited with us overnight after landing at O'Hare airport. They had their newly wed son and daughter-in-law with them, and the DIL's father came down from Minnesota to meet them at the airport. All five of them stayed with us overnight, while the girls stayed with grandma to make room. All lovely people, and we had a grand time. The husband works for the Duchas, the Irish heritage service--the equivalent of our National Park Service. What I thought was going to be a simple night out on the town with a few friends, however, got hijacked into a full-blown sister cities event, and I ended up having to arrange a casual dinner for 22 people, including the mayor, village manager and some trustees. Not how I really wanted to spend my Friday night.

The good thing is that after dinner, only a few of us continued on to Rosa's Lounge. Our Irish friends loved it, and it was a lot less college/touristy than some of the other northside blues clubs. Rosa's was great--great sightlines, great sound, and Carlos Johnson was cool and funky.

Saturday morning came sunny and warm and beautiful. MizBubs made a delicious blueberry coffee cake--the best coffee cake I've ever had in my life--and we had fresh cantaloupe, cherries and blueberries. Then, at 8:55am CST, we went into action: time to buy tickets for Tom Waits!
Manda worked the phone--unsuccessfully as it turned out, getting about 20 busy signals in the time it took for me to get through on the computer. Ticket sales were limited to 2 per person, and they checked for duplicate orders, so we used separate credit cards and mailing addresses. Bottom line, we gots us 4 tickets in the first balcony for August 9 at the Auditorium Theater!

Our visitors departed around 11am, and then we took off for Kalamazoo. The guy I bought the canoe from was really nice, and of course, a brainiac. He's built some canoes from a form (he sold his form last year) and we got to see examples of his work. He started a biotech firm with some friends a while ago, so his time is limited now. We fastened the canoe to the roof and made the drive home in under 3 hours. Now I have this beautiful canoe skeleton on my back porch, waiting to be resurrected.

By the way, it's the one year anniversary of the release of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Tim Burton. My youngest watched the DVD again last night while I worked on MizBubs' resume, and I'm listening to the soundtrack now. Ooompa loompa.