(no subject)

Today is Delia's first day of nature camp. That means that I'm going to be spending every afternoon this week (except Friday) sitting outside and reading. I'll be ducking around and trying to stay out of sight of her camp group for fear that Delia will cry and cling. She might be old enough not to do that this year, but her performance at her pre-school's camp makes me suspect otherwise-- She kept trying to get me to take her home and kept crying. She'd admit afterward that she'd had fun, but she really didn't want me to leave her there some mornings.

My reading goal for this week is to finish both of the last two Harry Potter books. I've been putting them off. They're so big and heavy. I can tell that they're going to be hard to lift. Combine that with my general dislike of the fifth book... Well, they've not been at the top of my reading list. I'm hoping that, what with being stuck there with nothing else to do, I can finish both this week.

I'd take my laptop and write, but my battery only lasts about 45 minutes under good circumstances, and I'm not comfortable using the laptop actually on my lap. It's a pity because I could use that time to catch up on e-mail. I have an awful lot of messages that have gotten buried and that I really want to answer. I could use several hours with no access to distractions to answer those. (My apologies if you're one of the people waiting for a response. Once upon a time, I wasn't nearly this flakey.) Last year, I read a lot of manga while sitting and waiting for camp to be over. I averaged about seven volumes per day.

I stay at the park where the camp is because, while the walk isn't long, it is strenuous. We live at the top of a rather steep hill. The camp is at the top of the same steep hill, about a block and a half over. There's just no connection to the camp anywhere except at the bottom of the hill. Going there and coming home, we have to go down the hill and then up it again. I can't do the round trip twice in a day and still be able to do anything else at all.

On the bright side, it's not supposed to be all that hot during the next few days. I can handle the 70's without too much trouble. I'll stick a water bottle in my backpack and maybe a snack of some sort, something that I can let Delia share on the walk home when she'll be tired and hungry or feed her at home right before I collapse. I'm holding off on my shower until after camp. I don't want to shower and then apply sunscreen and bug spray. I'll wash the ick off afterwards.

(no subject)

We spent most of Father's Day with Scott's family. There's a tradition there of all the adult men going golfing (Scott, his dad, our brother-in-law and his dad. I expect that, in a few years, our nephew will go, too).

Delia and I took Scott out for breakfast. He requested IHoP and ordered stuffed French toast. Delia had a pancake with fruit on it arranged to make a face. I had a burger. Both of them enjoyed their food, I think. Mine was merely so-so, especially since I'd requested that they not grill the bun but got a grilled bun anyway. (At least they left off the tomato, onion and mayonnaise as I'd requested.) We then tried to pick up Delia's pictures at JC Penney, but the photo part of the store wasn't open yet, and we couldn't spare the 40 minutes to wait.

While the guys were golfing, the three kids watched a movie. That required some negotiation as what Delia's willing to watch is rather more limited than what her older cousins are interested in. Delia still doesn't like anything with a villain (unless it's one of the movies she watched a lot when she was younger), and she was convinced that Lilo and Stitch 2 would be terrifying.

After getting the kids settled with some popcorn, my mother-in-law, sister-in-law and I looked at the wedding registry for the daughter of one of Scott's cousins. There's a big family gathering next weekend, and we figured that it would be better to drop off a shower gift then than to ship it. It's just too far for any of us to go to the shower. The process of making the decision was hard because my sister-in-law and I wanted to look online while my mother-in-law wanted to go to the store because she doesn't trust/understand online shopping. Also, the registry wouldn't print for us. We could get five items to print but no more.

I went with my mother-in-law to pick up the gift. The Target is only about five minutes drive from my sister-in-law's house, so that wasn't a hardship. We ended up tramping around the store quite a lot because the item we'd picked was on sale. My mother-in-law felt that we had to add something to it to bring the cost up to $20 per family.

Dinner was interesting in a not so good way. My mother-in-law is on an anti-sugar, anti-high fructose corn syrup kick and put artificial sweetener in her broccoli salad. I'm allergic to several artificial sweeteners, enough so that I get psychosomatic symptoms even from those that don't produce genuine illness. I don't allow Delia to eat anything with artificial sweeteners, either. I don't want to find out the hard way that she has allergies to them, and I'm generally suspicious of putting weird chemicals into kids' bodies when it's not necessary.

In this case, the sweetener was splenda, and my mother-in-law tried to convince me that it's harmless, good for you, absolutely natural and so on. I was upset that she hadn't thought to tell me that she'd done it. She just figured that it was fine. Sadly, it tasted vile (which was why I asked her what was in it. I was rather hoping for an excuse not to eat the portion she'd prepared specially for me, omitting an ingredient that I can eat but that she thinks I can't). I spent the rest of the evening trying to get the flavor out of my mouth and wondering how much of my headache was due to exhaustion and how much to stress over the artificial sweetener.