It was the busiest of times...

Ok, in terms of many people, it hasn't been that busy, but for us, we've been having a pretty busy summer. July started out in a nice calm way, with a couple of days of vacation for me, anyway. Unlike most vacation days, I purposely made an effort to NOT run around and do errands, or accomplish projects. Therefore, our upstairs bathroom remains a womb-like peach. Sometime when it cools down I'll get some new paint, but for now, it says peach. I also need to rebuild some sense of color conciousness....this effort sort of destroyed what little confidence I had in my ability to pick out a reasonable shade of paint. Granted, the downstairs bath came out really welll - I can pick out tan like nobody's business! When it comes to brighter colors, though, I'm a bit lost. But, you've got to keep trying if you don't want to earn some horribly bland nickname like "Champagne Livvy" right?

We were really glad to see our friends the McKernans, who came to visit for the holiday week, and came to the 4th of July parade with us and the Daguannos. We couldn't provide the entertainment value they're used to - alas, no quasi-klan type organizations, but we did get the f-14 flyover, so that's got to be worth something, right?

Sadly, we lost a friend that week - Bob Gray, great guy, gourmet, and fabulous Pirate suddenly passed away at the age of 50. I can't believe that someone so full of life could disappear on us. He and his wife Anne hosted us at their annual Pagan parties. I can never think of anything even remotely adequate to say, do, or even feel at these kinds of things, it's like whatever part of me that person occupied is suddenly torn away, I just feel the absence of that part. I also feel the shadow of age as well - 50 seems so young, and not far away. In any case, we were glad to be able to attend the funeral, which was probably the "best" and most touching example of such a thing - people were so honest and unaffected, which, ironically, made it very affecting.

Mid-month we headed up north to visit with Sara, who very generously allowed us to invite ourselves to visit her during her family week up North.
Unfortunately, it was a bit murky weather-wise on Saturday, but we had a great time hanging with the Sjobergs, who we haven't seen in quite some time. Sunday we all had a blast in the sunny weather. Of course the best part was quality time with our gal Sara - wish we could do it more often!!

Birthdays were really low key this year, as seems to be inevitable when they fall on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday was a big day, though - 10 years since Casey and I met. How weird is that? Even so, we were really low key about that too. We're really good with the give-them-as-you-see-them kind of gifts, so events don't get a lot of gift-giving attention. Still, we did do well on the gift front..... we went to play golf with Dad out at the club, and he noticed that we were still using some pretty old equipment, ("That driver is about 5 generations of techology old!") and I believe it offended his golfing sensibilities, so he offered to get us new drivers for our birthdays. Well, no good deeds go unpunished, so his reward for his very generous gift was to have us go out to his club again to play with the gifts. We do love them, though, and have vowed to try to drink a little less and improve our games a bit more!

Needless to say, for those of you who know me well, the weekend of the 21st was spent reading Harry Potter book 7..... I was proud of myself though, I did manage to take my daughter out for breakfast before I sparked up the cartoons & started reading. Guilt over the perceived neglect actually had me doing more activities with her than I probably normally would, and we went to the playground and shopping as well. Mostly, I read from the second she went to sleep until about 1:30am. I was also amazed I was able to refrain from finishing the book that night - again, thoughts of being zombie-mom the next day had me putting off finishing until Sunday. Sigh - great book, but so sad it's over.