I had a pretty busy morning.  I did some work for myself and I did a good bit for Scott as well.  That went on through the early afternoon.  Around 3:00 Amanda and I went to do some early voting.

When we got back Amanda and Milly made cookies.  I played with Milly for a bit while Amanda finished up the baking while talking to her mom on the phone, but then I had to go to the bathroom.  Milly told Amanda she had to pee then peed on the floor.  That was the second accident we’ve had this week.  I think I forgot the mention the other one, but the other one happened when she was in the bathroom, told me she had to pee, then did so (which I knew from the splash sound I heard as I was walking to the bathroom from across the hall in the office to help her).  I think she needs to learn to take her pants down when she needs to go.

We had a good time at the cookout.  The purpose of it was to see off the Johnsons, who will be heading off on a mission trip to Sweden for five weeks in just over a week.  The Stufflebeams couldn’t make it, and only two-thirds of the Sawyers could come, and the Hausers had to come after another get together, but we had fun.  The kids all played outside for the most part, and when it was time to eat they ended up taking over the kitchen table while we parents stood around or ate in the living room.

The Sawyer boys and the Andrewses left at about 8:00 and the Hausers showed up a little after.  All the kids were put to bed by 8:30 the those of us remaining sat around talking until after 11:00.  The only interruption was when we heard one of the kids making some noise.  It turned out to be Milly, who was singing along with her Violet doll.  As we all stood outside the door to the laundry room to listen to her she started making struggling sounds.  She had pooped shortly before going to bed (still a struggle), so I went to check on her.  It turned out that Violet’s batteries had died and the struggling sound had been her trying to activate the doll.  Reece gave me some batteries and we didn’t hear any more from her.

I find listening to Simon and Moni talk about Germany and their lives pretty fascinating, which I mentioned to Amanda on the way home.

David Andrews had talked to me about playing Civilization V this evening, which was odd because I haven’t played it in a while and was planning to see how it runs on the virtual Windows machine on my iMac, so I think I’ll try that out before I head off to bed.

Speaking of the iMac, I figured out how to do home/end/page up/page down all on my own.  You hold the command key and push a direction.  I’m getting very used to a lot of the keyboard shortcuts (or hotkeys) and such, but I’m having to relearn them for Photoshop.  I tend to use a lot of hotkeys.

I’ve also discovered that I’m not a huge fan of iPhoto, mainly because it doesn’t make it easy to access the image files directly, and since I’ve got nearly a decade of images stored and filed away in a system I’m very used to, I don’t really want to switch.  It’s got some nice features, but they’re not worth switching up to me.

Zach Dotsey