China Revisited

"When are you leaving?" Walt asked.

I looked up with a jerk, saw that it was 2:20 p.m., checked my calendar and saw that I was supposed to have Sheila at the vet's office at 2:40. I was still in my pajamas.

It's been that kind of day. A week or so ago, I put in some time and got half of the pictures from China up on Flickr, but I OD on that stuff quickly. What with putting a journal book together, and doing a bunch of other things with the photos, including a slide show to show to a friend at lunch this week, I really was sick of looking at our photos, to tell you the truth.

But I heard from the woman who runs the Internet Users Group here in town. Shortly before we left for China (and she left for England), I worked with her and the group teaching them how to make slide shows. This is the follow-up meeting and she has invited people to come and bring their slide shows.

I told her that if she didn't have enough shows, I could bring China pictures to show. She said that she had her own trip pictures and if nobody else volunteered, we could both run our slides.

But to put together a slide show of a small percentage of the pictures, I had to finish sorting them and getting the good ones up on Flickr.

I pretty much worked the entire day and managed to get up another 4 days worth of photos. I have two more days to go and will get that all done tomorrow.

Then I can start thinking about which photos I want to use for a coffee-table type of book. It's darn expensive coming home from one of these trips! LOL.

Sheila and I got to the vets with 1 minute to spare. I don't get a lot of one on one time with Sheila and I enjoyed reacquainting myself with her again. As she gets older, she has really taken on the role of guard dog, so she spends all of her awake time either looking out the front window, or lying on the patio, not asleep, but taking stock of all the sounds and smells that come to her. Rarely do I ever see her sleeping during the day.

But she was very excited to be going out alone with me. She sat by the car and waited until I opened it for her, and then sat in her spot in the back seat with her nose out the 2" of window that I open for her. We took her camping in the days before Lizzie came to live with us, when she was an only dog, and she took her place in that spot and didn't move for the entire 2+ hour drive into the mountains. She is a very loyal guard dog.

The appointment went well and she now has all her vaccinations up to date. She was such a good girl that I decided to buy her a hamburger. We went to Jack in the Box and I got a plain hamburger--just meat and bun. I broke it up into little pieces for her and put it on the back seat, but she wouldn't eat it because that would mean leaving her guard place at the window, so I found a place to park and fed it to her. She was thrilled. A whole hamburger all to herself.

We came back home again and I went right back to China until time for Jeopardy and then putting together a pizza for dinner. After dinner I finished off the last batch of photos I was working on and then we headed out to the theatre.

This was opening night for the Davis Musical Theater company's production of Peter Pan, a new production of the show that opened DMTC's history 29 years ago. Walt worked tech for that show and when, in his opening remarks from the stage, Director Steve Isaacson reminisced about that very first show, he called out to Walt, in the audience, to make sure he remembered too, about painting the set for the last act while the first act was going on.

When the show was over, I had a piece of opening night cake and chatted with the costumer and Walt got a tour of the rigging for all the flying scenes. Two other member of the company came to talk with me about China, so I was quickly back in China mode again.

With luck, I will have all of the photos fit to print on Flickr by tomorrow and I won't have that hanging over my head any more.