Rain Last Night In Virginia, Overcast This Morning

Halle In Her New Outfit

A Dog's Life

It's 6:30 and I have been up for almost an hour, sitting here by my lonesome, as everyone else is sleeping on this rainy morning.  Jill should be up soon, then Hayden, getting ready for school.  I hope Evie sleeps in because she has had a couple of bad nights.   At the moment, the sky looks threatening, the wind bending the trees.

Yesterday was a long day because we really did not have much to do until 3:40 when the girls came home and it was too hot and humid to do anything outside, like walk the dog.  As I mentioned yesterday, Evie and I walked Halle to school, a mistake because it was so hot.  It cured me for the day of going outside.  Around 10:30,  I decided to get out of the house and drove to the shopping plaza about ten minutes away.  It has just about anything you could want which is nice for Jill, major stores, great restaurants, and now a movie complex.  I parked and did some browsing for deals at Sports Authority, then had a coffee at Starbucks, and finally stopped in Best Buy, a store I have not been in for a long time.  I looked at cameras, wondered who still buys CD's or DVD's because they still have a large selection.  I was home by 12:30 and had leftover carnitas for lunch.

Most of early afternoon I read, watched the French Open, and took a nap.  Evie spent a good part of the day on my computer, looking at pictures from our kids visit to Chautauqua last summer.  Each year she makes a photo album of the previous year and everyone loves to look through it, especially the kids, who like to see picture of themselves from previous years.  Right now she has winnowed the thousands of pictures down to around 250 and will then have to winnow that down to around a hundred, lots of work.  This year, instead of printing out photos and placing them in a photo album, she is going to use Shutterfly and make an actual photo book as long as it's not too pricey.  It should be really neat.

At 4:00, I took Halle off to a doctor's appointment, waiting for her for an hour by browsing Harris Teeter once again, ordering an ice coffee from Starbucks, and sitting there for a half hour reading my book before going back to pick her up.  When I got home, we relaxed with Jill and the girls for an hour, with a glass of wine, then took them to the shopping plaza for dinner, at their favorite, Chick-fil-A.  As usual, it was super crowded with workers standing outside in the drive through, to take orders and pass out drinks to move the line quicker.  Interestingly, there was plenty of room inside, most at the take out window.  After dinner, we went to Target as the girls wanted to help Evie pick out their matching summer outfits, especially Hayden who wanted to make sure they picked out something she might want to wear.  After much browsing and angst, they found some decent tops for our four granddaughters, and Halle also got an outfit.  We couldn't quite make it out of the plaza before stopping at Zinga, a make your own sundae place, with various flavors of yogurt ice cream and all the fixings.  They love it, making their own sundaes, weighing the ice cream down with candy, nuts, cherries, syrups and whipped cream.  Yuk.

We finally arrived home around 8:30, time for a reluctant Halle to go to bed.  We then sat up, talking with both Hayden and Jill till about 10:30 when we all went to bed.  Drew was in Limestone, PA for the night, where he was working.  He will be back in town this morning.