The Queen's Rambles

We made it home after a very uneventful flight. Thank goodness! With the luck we’d been having, I paid special attention to the emergency instructions and was prepared to crash land. We arrived in Dulles a full 44 minutes early. How often does that happen? Obviously it’s an extremely long flight if you arrive that early.

I don’t have much time to write tonight. We feel like it is the middle of the afternoon since we all rolled out of bed around noon. I feel bad that Mike has to work tomorrow. The rest of us will have a little time to get acclimated to the time zone before we have to start going places.

I did some research about unsticking photos from glass and my instincts about the water wre correct. I wouldn’t do this with modern photos–I have no idea how they print them. Old photos that are processed chemically can be soaked in water with no harm done. I spent a good long time soaking the pictures and slowly peeling them apart. I am quite pleased with the results! My mom is going to mail them to me when they are dry and I’m going to try to find a photo restoration place if it doesn’t cost too much.

This is me at fifteen months. Elsa looks just like me, only much chubbier. I’d never seen this picture so it was sort of exciting to discover it.

I also found a picture (haven’t scanned it yet) of me after my first post-college summer of living on my own. I was thin (for me!). I about died of shock. My friends and I used to go walking for an hour every evening (like 2 am, we were stupid) and we didn’t have any money for junk food.

My new plan: as soon as the weather cools down a bit, go walking for at least an hour every day. We have a few different little lakes that we can walk around a couple of times. When Erik is in school I’ll drop him off and go walking. I’m not sure if the weather will cool off before school starts or not.

If you want to be disgusted, scroll down.

My poor, poor Mikey. It doesn’t look nearly as bad as I thought it would, but it looks bad enough. He’s bruised up today. He’s not looking forward to showing off the damage at work tomorrow, but he can’t exactly hide at home until it all clears up. It will be awhile, I’m afraid.

Oh my. Look at the time! Ten pm and Erik is still awake. I better go get him and make him soak in the tub for at least 30 minutes to get off all the Oregon grime. He and Mike have both been “Oregon-ized.”

The first day we were there my sister was trying to get Erik to do something and said “I just want to get him organized!” We all looked at her like she’d lost her mind. Organized? Her? What the hell?

Turns out she meant, Oregon-ized. It became a running joke all week long and it surely did occur. Rule number one on the Oregon visits: Never take clothes you love. They WILL have ground in dirt from top to bottom.

PS: Thank you guys for all helping me spell!
PS2: My e-mail inbox reached capacity on 8/10 so if you sent anything to my MM account I didn’t receive it.