Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Star cat loves her new-to-her kitty tower. She can climb it instead of just jumping and chilling like she did with her old pedestal; there are hiding places galore; and she can sit up higher to observe the situation (i.e. when babies come over, she can see them without being reachable by them! She thinks this is the best feature, by far.). Yay for craigslist and freecycle. I can't recommend them enough to people. We also inherited some canning jars this weekend, and regifted our old cat post. Good stuff.

We enjoyed our first venture into canning pears this week. We ran out of jars though -- hence the freecycle request -- and will finish up later this week. We think it worked out, but we haven't sampled the goods yet. At least all the little jars did the "pop!" that says they sealed. That's gotta be a good sign, right?

I remembered this week, though, that I don't like to grocery shop by myself. I always forget where the things I need are located, so it just takes much longer than when Wayne is there as well as I tend to backtrack or wander. But the biggest issue I have is that I get motion sick trying to read prices and names and calculate the best deals in my head at the same time. It's funny -- I don't experience motion sickness in the car, but I do at the grocery store and the library and the video store. Reading book titles and call numbers at the library while walking makes me dizzy, as does reading video titles at the video store. Lucky for me it is rare indeed that I'm grocery shopping without Wayne!

Conference weekend has been enjoyable. We've been able to catch all the sessions (though I admit to being distracted by Thomas during the last one!), and had a nice time with Karl and Angela and Thomas today. Yesterday we snuck out to visit a cool German butcher shop in Mountain View and a "European open air market" with tons of cheese selections and fresh bread and produce across the street. We wish these two shops were closer to us, for sure, though it's probably better for our budget that they aren't. And during the priesthood session, Angela and Alyssa (and Thomas and Ethan) came over to hang out. And the talks were all good...I already want to go back and review the things I've learned. What a great weekend.

Wednesday while Wayne went to another artist lecture and got frustrated with how disorganized people are, I hung out with Kate and Robi. We didn't end up following our plans, but I still was glad to see them. Wayne came home late, but earlier than I expected him; one can only take so much of disorganization before needing to take a break.

The only other highlight of the week was the car seat shopping venture. We did some research, and decided to skip the infant-only seat and go straight for the convertible. It's not so cool as it sounds -- nothing pops down to let in sun and wind or anything. But hopefully it will fill our needs until the little one grows into the front-facing car seat/booster seat we already have. The trick is, a convertible needs to be able to recline a lot. So a bigger seat takes up even more room in our tiny car. We thought it would be smart to test out the car seats and see what fits before buying one. Lucky for us, Target was kind enough to let us leave our driver's license with them and take floor models out to our car one-by-one -- no purchase necessary. It was nice indeed, because only one of their floor models fit in our car in the fully reclined position. Unfortunately, the most compact length-wise just happens to also be the largest width-wise...but what can you do? The middle seat in the back of our car won't be usable, but technically there isn't a seat belt there anyway. And so as soon as our new car seat arrives, we'll be ready to go. Or, whenever the little one decides to come; she is still pretty high up and comfy cozy.