Last weekend I got to meet Jill, aka GlossyVeneer! She had some vacation time she needed to use up before it expired, so she and her husband decided to go on a vacation to Southern California.

I’ve been reading Jill’s blogs (she has a running blog too) for over a year now. I think Jill has been following my blog about as long. We follow each other on twitter, and we’ve commented and mailed back and forth quite a bit. Remember how I donated that custom-painted pottery piece to help with fundraising for a marathon last year? That was for Jill. Given all that, I guess you’d say we’re pretty good friends by internet standards.

So of course when I found out she was going to be in town, I immediately invited her and her husband Kevin to come have aebleskivers with us!

Mmm, bubbly cooking aebleskivers…

And they came! And we all ate aebleskivers and talked and laughed and had a great time. As Jill said, it was one of those great internet/blog meetings where there was no awkwardness at all, only recognition and an invitation to come back and visit again anytime.

I only knew Kevin a little, from the hilarious Conversations with the Hubby series on Jill’s blog, but was instantly comfortable with him, and so was Troy. Of course, Troy is instantly comfortable with pretty much everyone in the world. He’s just fabulous like that. Though after meeting him I have to admit that Kevin is pretty cool in his own right, in a geeky sort of way—as all the best guys are. (You all know how I feel about geeks, right?) Even Annalie was relaxed with Kevin after about the first minute, which is a huge compliment.

After breakfast and conversation and plying Jill with a few lemons freshly-picked off the tree and some homemade vanilla and a sparkly magnet, we pointed them towards a farmer’s market in Carlsbad, told them to come back anytime (seriously!), and wished them safe travels.

I love meeting internet people. Who’s next?

These are rather unfortunately called Raspberry Strippers but they are surprisingly easy and quick to make, they look elegant, and man are they ever delicious. They have been one of my go-to cookies for years now. I made them one rainy afternoon at my parents’ house when my mom needed a dessert for a dinner she was taking to someone from their church who’d recently had surgery.

We usually have lunch at OJ’s, a Mexican restaurant near my parents’ house, with my mom and her friend Donelle (whom I’ve known my entire life and is like an honorary aunt—she occasionally comments on this site as “Aunt B”) when we’re in Omaha.

When we visit Troy’s stepmom, almost the first thing Annalie asks is, “Can I play with your jewelry?”

This is Kailyn. She’s one of the Kay girls, the closest to Annalie in age, and they’re good buddies. She usually sits with us in church and invites Annalie to come to Sunday school with her. This visit was the first time that Annalie went to Sunday school not once, but twice. Now that she likes Sunday school, we should probably work on actually getting ourselves to church on a regular basis when we’re at home, eh?

Kailyn went with us to see the stage version of High School Musical at the Rose Blumkin Performing Arts Center. The Rose is the home of the Omaha Theater Company, one of the oldest children’s theater companies in the nation.

When I was growing up, the Omaha Theater Company’s home was the Emmy Gifford Children’s Theater. I saw dozens of plays there over the course of my childhood, some on school field trips and many more with my mom and brother. From an early age, The Emmy Gifford instilled in me a love and respect for live theater, and I have extremely fond memories of it. The best thing was how, after every single performance, the cast invited the audience to stick around and ask any questions they might have about the play. Can you think of anything cooler than that!?

In the late 1990s, the Rose (which was formerly the Astro Theater) was donated by the Blumkin family to the Omaha Theater Company, and renovated with a multi-million dollar donation from the same family. Since the Rose opened, the Omaha Ballet Company has been established and performs in the same theater.

I was very excited to take Annalie to her second play here. She loves the movie version of High School Musical this play was pretty good. Annalie LOVED it. I think I’m going to have to make it a tradition to try to get tickets to a show each time we’re in Omaha from now on.

Annalie drew this picture in the car, on the way to Leslie & Ed’s house. I asked her to tell me about it. “This is a picture of me coming up to your bedroom because I had a nightmare. See, here’s my bed, downstairs in my bedroom, and here’s me on the stairs. I’m going up to ask you if I can sleep with you and Daddy. These are the stars and moon outside, because it’s night. Oh, and that’s the door the garage, down there. I didn’t go down there but I drew it because that’s where it is.”

Troy took this photo of me getting my hair done. In the background on the right, my mom is talking to Trace, who has been my mom’s (and my occasional) stylist for 15 years. We share a love of the movie That Thing You Do! and its music, and have awesome conversations about movies and TV every time he cuts my hair.

In the background on my left, you can see Annalie and her cousin FJ watching a movie on the DVD player. FJ’s mom, my cousin Tressa, just happened to have a hair appointment at the same salon at the same time as my mom and me. So we got to see Tressa one more time, and Annalie and FJ got to hang out with each other one more time. Very cool.

Troy’s stepmom gave us this photo of Troy and his dad petting a goat at a park in California. It was taken when Troy was about 2 1/2, in 1972. On the back Troy’s mom wrote, “Troy, Keith, and friend.” I love her inscription, and also Troy’s seventies-licious sandals and Keith’s plaid-tastic pants.

Annalie took this photo of me when we were visiting my Gramma. I don’t post photos of my Gramma here because the internet makes her nervous and she doesn’t like her picture to be online where just anyone can see it. If you’re a Flickr friend, you can see the pictures there.

Rachel and Jeff invited us and my parents over for dinner, which was really nice. I love to eat out, but when we’re traveling we eat out SO MUCH that we always especially appreciate when someone invites us into their home and cooks for us.

The path to Rachel’s backyard garden (which is set down from the main part of the backyard) looks rather enchanted, don’t you think?

It’s working well for growing peas, anyway! Annalie was quite excited when I asked her what kind of plant this was, and she immediately recognized the peapods.

Hills are great for running down. Don’t you wish you had the energy of a five-year-old?

Annalie and Gramaw Debbie didn’t plan to wear matching outfits that day. Honest.

Two extremely random photos. We were in the parking lot of a movie theater when I glanced over and saw the antennae all lined up. I just liked it. If you’re from Omaha, you probably know where these antennae are. Any guesses?

Driving down the main street in my parents’ neighborhood, I cracked up when I saw the BK sign and made Troy go back later so I could take a photo. I was tempted to photoshop out the ‘G’ so it would be even funnier…but I refrained.

If you’re a good detective, you probably picked up on the clues in the title up there and the above photo and figured out that Erin (who normally lives in Oregon, where we visited her and Rocco last fall) is in California. She’s working in Pasadena this summer, doing an internship involving figuring out how to send satellites into orbit, or something that sounds totally unrelated to her field of expertise which is geology. You’d have to ask Erin to explain it better.

Even though Pasadena is a two-hour drive from where we live, and even though Erin and Rocco (who’s flying down this weekend) are coming to our house for the 4th of July weekend, we drove up there just to have dinner one day last week. I don’t want Erin to be that close to me all summer and end up only seeing her twice! I’m going to take advantage of it as much as I can, traffic be damned. So I dragged Troy and Annalie up there with me. I even roped Brenda and Bug into coming with us, because I was excited for two of my best friends to finally meet each other. Too bad they couldn’t stand each other.

Just kidding!!! Everyone got along great, which was no surprise to me. Erin and Brenda are both very likeable, and they’re both friends with me, so they must have at least a few things in common.

We picked Erin up at her work and drove downtown for pizza. We ate and talked and laughed, and after dinner we let the kids run around for a few minutes by this funky fountain that had what looked like a bug totem pole in the middle of it.

The shortest route to the minivan from the restaurant was right through the courtyard of City Hall. Pasadena has an impressive city hall, I must say. There’s a huge fountain in the courtyard and the building glowed in the late-evening sun. We happened across a wedding rehearsal as we walked through, which was rather comical because we kept trying to get the kids to quiet down and they just kept asking louder and louder, “But WHY do I hafta be quiet? WHY can’t I run?”

We took Erin back to the college dorm she’s living in for the summer, and I had to laugh because it smelled exactly like every college dorm I’ve ever been in, like fabric softener and pizza and communal living. Seeing the Christmas lights Erin had strung up around her room made me smile too, because Erin and I always had those up in the dorm rooms we shared as college freshmen many years ago.

Erin made Bug and Annalie’s night by letting them climb up on her loft bed for a few minutes. Then we had to go, because it was getting late and Troy had to go to work the next day. We didn’t want him to turn into a pumpkin on the two-hour drive home (which was actually a three-hour drive thanks to the lovely SoCal traffic). We said our farewells, got everyone buckled into the minivan, and headed home. As we drove off, Brenda said, “I like her! She’s fun.” I had to agree.

See you again soon, Erin!