Yay family!

This weekend has involved some pretty wacky sleep schedule things, although I have also managed to catch up somewhat on dishes, take out some trash, do some laundry, get a little bit of vacuuming in, and modify a skirt which really required a slit up the side in order to be wearable.

There was also the S-themed family dinner, featuring Guide Dog Aunt, Woodworking Uncle (who has located a distinguishing hobby in addition to the fishing, skiing, and tangoing), Tay, Tay's Young Man, and a cameo appearance of Infamous Cousin. The poodle and Sharkface also attended, with the guinea pig wheeping from his enclosure. The menu wound up including, among other things: salmon, strawberries, sourdough, soft cheese and savory snacks, squash, salad, soba salad, and satsuma marmalade. (No soft meat crowns.)

Since dinner involved cooked salmon, Infamous Cousin scrammed before it went in the oven, but not before happily bonding a bit with Tay's Young Man about delicious sushi.

Tay has been back in town about a week, and is happy to have hit at least the end of tomato season, though sad to have missed the local avocados.

I realized that Tay has not yet met JD and Teshi! At some point we must fix this. I also mentioned that a few of my #cupcake crowd from work are musical and it would be nifty if they happened to get along with the musical members of my family. Purple is a synthesizer kind of guy. phone does computer stuff and plays live bass. At this, Tay's Young Man did a bit of a double-take. Apparently there are not that many people in the world who go by phone. They are vaguely acquainted. And I realized that I sort of register #cupcake as family now.

Guide Dog Aunt let in Sharkface, who was very happy to see everyone. Since everyone did not make much of her (as we'd been warned) she kenneled up and settled down quickly. After a while she came out and flopped on her mat next to the couch.

The evening's entertainment, after dinner, was baking crackers. Guide Dog Aunt had mixed up the dough before dinner, but hadn't prepared all of them by dinner time. So there were shenanigans involving the pasta-roller, which is also useful for crackers. I sang the roller song, which surprised Tay. (There are a lot of little songs from our childhood, and shared context makes them hilarious. Perhaps I will get around to recording some of them at some point, just for history's sake.)

Sharkface decided that my hand was delicious and licked me and my cardigan sleeve all over. Sharkface is a guide dog puppy. This means that her come-when-called is a little different from most dogs. Most dogs will stand in front of you and look at you expectantly. A guide dog needs to do something else to make sure that their person will realize they're present and waiting. A guide dog sticks their head between their person's knees, generally. One of the things that Sharkface will grow out of is the tendency to wallop people in the crotch a little bit. This head-knee training also sometimes results in a phenomenon that Guide Dog Aunt calls "up-skirt nosing". That was about when Sharkface decided that the backs of my knees were delicious. Since she was not sharktoothing me, this was fine, if tickly.

Next time there will be another lettered theme, which should be delightfully wacky. At some point I'm to hang out with Tay and Tay's Young Man up in the city. He'll let me know when they're playing the tavern, also.