The "friends bandwagon" just keeps rolling along.
Lynn arrived from Houston today. It's nice when you are such good friends with someone that you don't feel the need to kill yourself putting on an air of "housewife" but can let the dust lay where it is and not have to apologize for it.
Oh, not that I didn't do anything to get ready for her arrival. I got the sheets on the bed changed, dusted her room, scrubbed the tub, and got clean towels up, but I didn't worry about making the house look spotless. Or even decent. The table was still piled with stuff, the laundry pile towering over me in the laundry room, and the kitchen counter only partially cleaned (and that only because Walt usually does it!) and I forgot to sweep the floor, which is always covered with dog hair and remnants of things the dogs have chewed up.
When it was time, I drove out to the Sacramento airport and waited until Lynn called to let me know she'd picked up her luggage and was waiting outside for me. I love the era of cell phones. How many times I've circled an airport, round and round and round again waiting for someone to come out, or paid for parking for half an hour while I waited in a waiting room. Now I find a nice shady place to park, read my book and wait until the person I'm waiting for calls on the telephone. (In San Francisco, I don't even go near the airport, but wait in the next town over. There's a great parking lot at Kaiser, where there is even a bathroom for patients only--and I'm a Kaiser patient, so feel no qualms about using it!)
It was so great seeing her standing there. The last time I saw her was in 2006, when she was out here for a conference.
We did pretty much the same thing then that we did this afternoon--sat around comparing photos and getting caught up on all the news. And we had lunch with several of the women that we are going to Tahoe with tomorrow.
After she'd settled in here and had been thoroughly inspected by all the dogs, and helped break up a dog fight between Barkley and Sheila (and after Barkley had been "jailed"--put in the cage to separate him from the others for a bit), we took off and went to the grocery store.
Going to a grocery store with Lynn is a real experience because she definitely does not do things by halves. We took two shopping carts, so I could get things for tonight's dinner and she could buy stuff for dinner at Tahoe tomorrow. I had thought it might be easier to put a lasagna together, but she suggested a taco bar and her cart was piled high with every possible thing that you could imagine for such a thing, including both chicken and beef and the right accompaniments for each (there are only going to be seven of us there!) She also bought so much wine that they gave her a free cloth bag with separate bottle compartments to carry it all in.
To look at her cart, you'd think she was doing her week's shopping, not just shopping for an overnight!
We got it all home and then settled in with wine and french bread (and some of that good olive oil I bought in Siena) and visited until Walt got home from the wine tasting he was attending (he usually goes to a wine tasting a week, at the food co-op).
I fixed one of my favorite easy dishes, plum chicken, with gelato for dessert. Lynn mixed up a salad, which gave me the chance to use the salad servers that I bought in Monterosso. (A woman on the tour was going to be leaving and going to Spain, so showed us all her salad tongs that she had gotten in Italy before and said that she loved them and could someone please buy her another set, if they found one. As it turned out we all bought her another set! I decided that I would keep mine instead of giving them to her, since she already had so many others!)
I bought stuff to make pesto lasagna, which I loved when we had it in Portofino, on Sunday night, completely forgetting that our oven still isn't working. I may have to microwave "bake" it and hope that it turns out all right.
But anyway, we ended the day early, since Lynn was on Houston time, and how we just have to get up and be ready to leave for Tahoe at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. It will be so much fun to see all those women again.
There is no internet access at Walt's mother's cabin so, thought I am taking the computer with me, I won't be able to post an journal entry until I get back on Sunday.
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