Mama Nabi slept here

With Jrex being gone for six weeks and this big old house all to myself, I've really been enjoying having house guests. Last night, I got to host fellow blogger, Mama Nabi. No, we'd never met in real life, but it felt like I was welcoming an old friend and her family despite that. She and her husband, daughter and dog are moving from Florida to California, so Dallas is along the way.

When they arrived, I was chatting with my next door neighbor and her son. I figured it was better to do the doggie meet up on neutral ground, so I was outside with Muttola. Their dog is 1.5, so I knew that Muttola would do her (in)famous puppy take-down at some point. Sure enough, in our front yard, she pounced with a huge growling bark. It always sounds like the beginning of a dog fight, so I try to warn other dog owners what's coming. After that, the dogs were off and running. Literally. We got them into the backyard and they tore around. All night, all morning, they kept chasing each other in circles around the house. I could tell that Muttola has become middle aged cause she kept trying to just lie down for a while, but couldn't resist their dog for very long.

It's so interesting to meet people who's lives you've shared via blogging. In some ways you know them well and in others, it's all new. Filling in the details around the known narrative is a lot of fun. MN went to a college that I'd visited and applied to, I got to hear more about the school where Sansangnim will be working and I got to meet MN's daughter. After seeing so many pictures, it was fun to meet her in person: fearless and playful with the dogs, shy yet eager with me, she quickly warmed up and asked for a house tour.

For dinner, I'd made a new recipe from Sunset magazine with mixed results. What had sounded like a refreshing salad with mango, shrimp and herbs was spoiled by mint that turned out to be really zingy and almost too hot to eat. Not very fun. Thank goodness I'd been seduced by the lure of Central Market and went a little crazy with the charcuterie platter (see all the weird terms I've learned living in wine country? I had no idea what that meant until I went to a wine tasting and found out it was just a sampling of cured meats).

In any case, I saw them off this morning and am now back to the grindstone with lots of work deadlines. Not so fun. Especially since the downstairs AC died AGAIN this morning. The guy who fixed it Friday already told me that he's ordering us a new fan motor, so at some point this week, he'll just call and say he's 10 minutes away and can he come over. Makes it hard to plan to do anything away from the house!

At least there are only 12 days left before Jrex will be 'home'. He's packing in all the final farewells, lab work, closing down his lab stuff, figuring out the shipping for his samples and his mice, trying to get last minute writing done, giving a talk on lungs to his lab (this just in...one more thing to do, Jrex!) as well as trying to sort out his Texas medical licensing.

I've told him that when he gets here, he gets to have a 'potato week'. For the first week, he doesn't have to think about baby stuff, house issues, or anything demanding. He can sit around and watch TV the whole time if that's what he wants to do, or go exploring, or do whatever. I figure he's earned a rest! (plus, I can always use more wife points, right?)