The rest of my photos from our Omaha trip are in the photoset Omaha 11/2008 on Flickr. Go forth and view them! Or not, it’s up to you.

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I’ve had one of those days. You know how sometimes you’re just annoyed by everything? Maybe that doesn’t happen to you, but it does happen to me sometimes.

Normally I’m a pretty easy-going person. I roll with the punches and I don’t lose my temper very easily. But once in a while for whatever reason—lack of sleep, hormones, too much time spent around large groups of people, not enough caffeine—I get all snappish and impatient and generally not much fun to be around.

Today there was a whole list of things bugging me. In no particular order:

On top of all these things, today Annalie found this kite we have that folds up into a little zipper pouch. I bought it once to give as a stocking stuffer and then never gave it, so it’s been floating around the house ever since. Annalie really wants to fly that thing, and each time she finds it and asks I tell her (1) kites are Daddy’s department, and (2) it’s really not windy enough here and we should probably take it to the beach.

This afternoon Annalie trailed me around the house for ten minutes asking me over and over and over if we could go fly the kite, pleeeeeeease, but I really wanna fly the kite naaaaaooooow, etc. I patiently repeated items (1) and (2) the first 56 times she asked me. When she asked me the 57th time, I snapped. “Oh, for—GIVE ME THAT KITE.” I grabbed it out of her hand and stuffed it in my top dresser drawer. Then I announced, “I am giving myself a time-out.”

As I marched myself down to the kitchen I could hear Annalie saying wonderingly to Troy, “Mommy’s giving herself a time-out?” Heh. At least my announcement distracted her from getting upset about losing the kite. I poured myself a cup of coffee then went back upstairs to sit on the deck in the sun. The cats came out with me and Lily rubbed against my bent legs as I leaned against the wall, sipping my coffee and taking deep breaths.

My mom and my husband both say that when I am in a bad mood they tend to tiptoe around me a little bit, and that it affects everyone else in the house. When I am my normal self and they tell me this, I feel like a worm. I don’t mean to make everyone feel like they have to walk on eggshells around me, I truly don’t. And I hate the thought that my grumpiness is making them grumpy too. When I am having one of those days the thing that often snaps me out of it is remembering that I could be causing someone else to have a bad day too.

So during my time-out, I drank my coffee and said a prayer and decided, as Lloyd Dobler said, to just be in a good mood. Or to at least fake being in a good mood till the real thing arrived.

It worked. Even though nothing on the above list has changed (except that Troy did call our landlords and leave a message about the faucet), I’m not annoyed to the point of scaring my family anymore. Right now I’m sitting at my desk in our library with my laptop and a cup of coffee, looking out the window and enjoying the evening breeze. I am feeling downright serene.

My mom and dad were here on my mom’s birthday, November 4th. As you probably know, that also happened to be election day this year. When I was little I remember having trouble with the idea that election day wasn’t always on the same date, because one of the first election days I can remember also happened to be on my mom’s birthday. In my young mind election day was always November 4th.

Annalie came in to wake me up that day by announcing, “Mommy, mommy, come and see! It’s raining!” I love rain, and it doesn’t rain much in Southern California. My mom knew I wouldn’t want to sleep through all the rain. As it turned out, it rained pretty much all day. Wasn’t that kind of the weather to send me a present on my mom’s birthday?

Annalie always wants hot chocolate when it rains. I can’t say I blame her. So I made myself some coffee and Annalie some hot chocolate (with special Halloween-shaped marshmallows my Aunt Julie had sent to her) and we sat on the patio under the roof and enjoyed the rain for a little while.

Then we got started on the cake! My mom loves coconut cake. I’d been wanting to try a recipe that had coconut milk in it for ages, and I figured this was the right time. Annalie loves to bake too and she was more than happy to help.

She especially loves using the whisk to mix the dry ingredients together. That has been her special task when we’re baking since she was very small. She gets quite indignant if I try to do that part myself. If I am baking and she is in another part of the house, I will stop and go ask if she wants to stir the flour, because if I offer her banana bread or cake later and she realizes she didn’t get to help make it, her feelings are quite hurt. I can’t say I blame her. A girl likes to know she’s needed. So Annalie is the Official Mixer of Dry Ingredients in this house.

When we had the eggs out for the cake, Annalie asked if she could have a boiled egg. I decided to boil the rest of the dozen since we were leaving town in a few days, and I knew we’d eat up the boiled eggs quickly.

When I boil eggs, I use an egg-poker thingy to poke a hole in the shells, and then I stick the eggs in ice water for ten minutes after they’re cooked. That makes them much easier to peel later. And since we visited Erin & Rocco a couple of months ago and I saw Erin do it, I also splash a little vinegar and a few drops of food coloring into the ice water. It dyes the eggs, which (1) makes them easy to tell apart from any raw eggs in the carton and (2) is fun! Erin has the best ideas.

Right as we were in the midst of boiling eggs and making the coconut cake is when my laptop went into a coma. It froze up and I restarted it, and when it came back on the screen was totally blank. The lights were all on, but the hard drive wasn’t running. It was not fun. But I took a few deep breaths and drew consolation from the fact that we do have an old computer with internet access. Also I was pretty sure Troy would be able to fix it. He’s smart like that with computers. (He did fix it, and it didn’t even take much effort on his part. I am typing this post on my laptop in fact. Though I’m not really expecting it to last much longer. I will probably be jumping on the Mac bandwagon soon.)

After we took my mom out for Mexican food (her favorite kind) for dinner, we came home to frost and assemble the cake. Annalie thought we should dye the frosting pink. My mom is a pretty easy-going sort and said that would be fine.

Of course, what we didn’t think about was that with pink frosting and flaked coconut pressed all over the cake, it would look like a giant Hostess Sno-Ball. We got a good laugh out of that.

I think in the end it looked rather pretty, especially with all the candles lit. And it made a mighty tasty breakfast the next morning, too!