Monday night

Hello dear family! It's about 11:10pm here and I've just finished up a little internet surfing and will be heading to bed but wanted to check in with everyone. Ian and I spent the weekend with my friend Ginger (we made these AMAZING chocolate chocolate chip brownies with cherries which we used as a base for chocolate brownie ice cream and topped with magic shell -- then we watched the Dukes of Hazzard movie -- it was just like piling on the badness...) But, to work off some of those calories, we also did a bit of gardening. In fact, we completely removed one of the big trees in front of our house and replaced it with shrubs. That was the weekend.
Tonight we played a board game, NAFTA-rail (Ata and Greg will both be familiar with it) and moved all of my studio stuff upstairs in preparation for making the room downstairs into a guest bedroom -- very exciting! Ata, it turns out that Beth and Nathan will be here for about three days the week before you arrive, so they'll get to test-drive the room. Ian's friend Yoshio is coming up to Seattle from San Francisco to interview for a job in May, so he'll also stay with us for a couple of days. (Yoshio was the Japanese man who served as one of his groomsmen -- he's married with two kids and we'll be thrilled if they move to Seattle!)
I've been to two French classes so far (tres bien) and have been listening to the language CDs in the car. It is so fun! I haven't quite perfected the nasal french accent yet, though. I'll keep trying. (Ata, now we count spaces on the rail game in both Slovenian and French -- we'll teach you when you get here. :) )
I'd love to hear from Jaki and Mike on this blog sometime! Mike, I don't know what happened with Mason's b-day present. I looked into it and they never charged my credit card, so I'm not surprised now that it didn't arrive. :) I'll contact them and have them send it again. My apologies to Mason for a very belated b-day present!