Twins!

Alison wrote half this post. You guess which half :).

Our kitchen remodel is finally done!  It took a little over two weeks and just under $500, and it looks absolutely amazing.  Alison is so happy.  With the new white and silver color scheme, even the grey tile floor, which used to look dark and dingy, looks good.  Alison wants to put a few finishing touches of decorations on the walls, but other than that, we're done for a while.  In a couple of years, we do want to replace the counters with something higher quality, but that can wait.  It's perfect for right now.

Rea said that she didn't like white cabinets like we have in our kitchen right now, and that they look worse than they did when they did before we redid them.

She also was calling the silvery backsplash that we put up stink bugs (and poop bugs) and saying that they smelled terrible. I am not entirely sure what that was about. She thought it was hilarious.

We had to spend Saturday afternoon (after finishing the backsplash) putting tension wire in the bottom of the goat yard fence; we didn't add it when we first built the fence as it didn't seem necessary.  But pregnancy seems to do crazy things to goat brains, too; Lala has been crawling under the fence, through holes even Clarabelle and the chickens rejected as too small, and grazing on the grass by the swingset (and eating the onions and swiss chard that overwintered in our garden).  It's weird, because Lala is hugely pregnant; we're assuming it must be twins, if not triplets, because she is massive.  And yet she forced her way under the fence.  Maybe goats get cravings, too.  Anyway, the tension wire seems to have stopped her escape escapades.

I had another 1AM epiphany this week, and I now have a fourth game that I am working on. It is currently called either the 'Auditing game', or 'Cook the books'. It seems a fair amount like Resistance in terms of weight. We have been playing it at lunch, and everyone wants to play it more. Perhaps I will try to make a kickstarter campaign out of it if I can't attract a publisher for my other games. My reason for targeting this game over my others is that this game has fewer components than my other ones, and therefore would be cheaper to produce.

Speaking of publishers SaltCon is coming up. I am volunteering to help out for it this year. It looks like it will be pretty fun (for those who like that sort of thing). I am also considering joining a board game designers guild.

Last year at the con I played a prototype game 'Robots on the line', which is currently having a kickstarter campaign. It is a good game, and so I wrote up a review of it. The fun part about it is that Phil Hunter (the guy who is making the game) quoted my review on the kickstarter page (which, by the way has gathered $27,000 as of this writing, and is only a quarter of the way done.) Phil Hunter is also a member of this game designers guild that I am considering joining.

This week, Rea is starting another preschool co-op, with the other kids her age in our ward.  She is very excited.  When we were all sick all last month, she started to get really eager to see other kids her age, so she thinks this will be great.  Alison thinks it sounds nice, too; there are six moms who will each teach one week, so that means that she gets five weeks of Tuesday and Thursday mornings with only one kid to take care of.

Today for dinner we had steak and ravioli and smoothies (this originally read 'steak and ravioli smoothies', which would be much more different). I messed up cooking the steak so it ended up falling apart like roast... Weird. When the girls had a hard time drinking all of their water I started calling the smoothie 'nectar' and pretending to be a humming bird. They really liked that and wanted nectar to drink, so they all drank their water very well after that.

The weather is still strangely nice, so Alison and the girls have started going to the wilderness for preschool with Max again.  The girls have loved that; they play outside with Max all morning, then have a picnic lunch and play more until it's time to go home for naps.  Rea is really pushing Alison to go back to 4 hours a day spent outside; this time it's Alison that's having trouble adjusting!  Rea even wanted to be out in the pouring rain on Tuesday.  But it's good for all of us.

We opened a year old cheese this week. It was supposed to be a Parmesan, but the increased fat in goat milk is makes it a lot softer than a Parmesan usually is. It still has a strong flavor (similar to a Parmesan), but it is a table cheese. What are you going to do?

Rea reminds me that we were making a fire tonight, and that we were pretending to be out camping. We need to set up some summer camping trips. Perhaps we will try to get a big camp ground and invite the whole extended family along with us.