Home again...

What is the purpose of tea? I mean aside from using the cup of liquid to warm your hands on, I find no real purpose in it. No matter what kind of tea I drink it just taste like watered down twig water; three to four teaspoons of sugar or honey do nothing to improve the flavor. Why is that?

All I gotta say is that tea has nothing on coffee.

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Arrived home from the states to a house that was, well, a few steps above freezing, but not many. It was 44° degrees in the house when we arrived at 1pm. We have been having difficulties with a leaky heating system and we opted to leave the heat off. Unfortunately the water heater is part of this system and we left it on. The buckets that we placed in the closet under the leaks were filled to overflowing and there was a bit of water on the floor. Luckily not too much.

However 6 hours later the house temp is now 54° and it's dark outside. This might sound like whining to you but let me put it into perspective for you:

At some point in a 6 hour period a person is required to use the bathroom...'nough said?

We had a great visit. I spent every conceivable second with J. I even made her late for work a couple of times and managed to get her to skip a class. If she has senior-idous it's all my fault, but it was so worth it. (Unless of course she fails to graduate in May in which case I will take no blame and yell at her, in true 'mom' fashion.)

I got her hooked on 'The Gilmore Girls' by making her purchase seasons one and two; can you believe she’d never watched the show before. She’s Rory (in a not so naïve ‘little birds dress her in the morning’ clueless about boys way) and she’d never seen the show! She watched both seasons pretty much straight through and harassed me continually, for hints of what was coming up next when she couldn’t take the suspense any more. We spent many hours of laughing so hard we almost puddled. We shopped, we ate, we finished each others sentences and we argued of course. It was heaven and I miss her already.

I saw the Ya-ya’s in groups and individually. We went to see the NIU production of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ it was very cool and hilariously funny and sad. I loved it. We ate a lot of chocolate cake from Portillo’s and watched movies. Little Miss Ava is finally at an age where she speaks, J fell in love with her and I wouldn’t be surprised if she begins to pester Shannon for some more face time with the kid. There’s a good reason we call the child Miss Sassy Pants, she takes after her mom, Ms. Sassy Pants.

We had one good snow while we were there and that was enough for getting a taste of what we’d been missing. A couple of mornings of scraping ice from the windshield and several days later when it was brown slush and my car was white from all the salt on the roads, the fun was officially over.

S and I spent a day in Chicago shopping and eating at a cool new place that Ya-ya Mel told me about. It’s called The Grand Lux Café (?) I think. The entrance is on Ontario but really it’s on the corner of Michigan Ave. and Ontario over the Anne Taylor store. It was very cheesecake factory-ish without the crowds and hours of wait, and without the cheesecake too, but to compensate they make your dessert to order (so you have to order your dessert at the time of your meal). It was good.

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The flight back was from hell, but only in that it was a long overnight flight during which no one got any sleep.

Well, we arrived, napped and then we ate and now it’s 8pm here and we’re crawling back into bed to watch a movie and get some sleep. It’s back to the salt mines for S tomorrow and besides that, my down comforter is stridently calling.

I think we’ve got the temp up to 57° now.

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Ok, so stop calling and e-mailing. I’m not dead, or retired or in a coma. I think I was a bit depressed before the trip and it’s hard to write in that state. I’m feeling better and more re-energized now. Hopefully this last trip will sustain me until the next one in May. Love to all and thanks for your concern.