Plumbing and lug nuts and fruit flies

 Last week we mostly got ready for our trip to California. Friday night, as we were doing the last dishes before we left, the sink started leaking. Mike went and looked at it and found that some idiot somebody had taken two pieces of pipe, one of which was threaded and one wasn't, and just shoved them together as if that made an appropriate join. We had to leave it unfixed (just shoved together again) in order to leave on our trip, so hopefully it stays working until tomorrow when Mike can fix it.

On Saturday we drove out to California. The drive there went fairly uneventfully. It went fast, too; we didn't have to stop for nursing a baby or anything, so we actually made it in twelve hours. (Twelve hours is still an insanely long drive.)

But it was worth it, because being at the beach house is wonderful (although we missed Andy's family). The kids had a blast playing with their cousins all day every day. Alison stayed up late talking to her mom and sisters; Mike stayed up playing video games with his brothers-in-law. (There was one where they were movers moving furniture that was hilarious to overhear. [Mike says it was hilarious to play too.]) Everyone enjoyed digging in the sand and walking on the beach and collecting shells. 

Rea went boogyboarding three times, once with Sara and twice with Mike. She is very good at it now! Sara was nervous at first, but ended up riding waves right alongside Rea. Rea enjoyed keeping up with the adults when she went out with them.

We walked over to the park on the bay a couple of times, too, and the kids had fun on the playground. Alison took a book on database design and had Mike explain it to her; he's been telling her about his master's program, and that was the first class that really caught her interest. Mike finished all his finals while we were there, so he doesn't have any more to do this semester! We're excited for him to have some free time.

When we asked about what the kids liked about the trip, the food was also much-lauded - especially Grandpa Craig's fruit snacks. Katie didn't make her specialty pie, but we had mint brownies and three kinds of pie, and a Thanksgiving feast, and pancakes every day, and all of those were very popular.

Rea and Sara and Ellie had a lot of fun together, and Timmy, Gideon, Kendrick, William, and Aelfric all hung out in various configurations and usually got along well. Timmy was the big older cousin. Boo and Victoria and Lydia are all within a year of each other, but they're not old enough to quite be ready to play as a group. Sometimes they hung out together, and sometimes they tried to steal each others' toys and screamed at each other. (Mike and Rea inform me [Alison] that they played together more than I thought, so that's nice.) 

On the way back, our front right tire suddenly exploded a mile outside of Baker. Mike was taking his nap, so Alison got us off on the side of the road. That woke him up, so we all worked together to find a solution. We have a spare tire, but our car has stupid, awful locking lug nuts and we'd lost the key, so we couldn't just put it on and take the exit right ahead of us. We had to call a tow truck.

Mike waited for the tow truck while Alison walked into town with the kids. They were real troopers; we actually had quite a fun walk and no one even whined. Alison is very glad for our weekly Nature Group; walking 1.5 miles in the desert was no big deal after that (no switchbacks! super easy)

The tow truck came promptly and took Mike and the car to some mom-and-pop auto repair place that was basically some guy's garage. But he got the tire off and the new one on in less than 15 minutes, so we were very happy with him. 

Then Mike drove back to find the rest of us. Mike's phone had refused to charge the night before, so we only had one working phone at this point. We'd left it with Mike to coordinate with the tow truck, so we'd told him to look for us at the first fast food place in town and we'd try to borrow a phone and specify. We made it to a gas station/DQ and went to the bathroom and to wash our hands, and Mike was there before we could even get a phone to call him. It was very fast.

On our way out of town, we decided to get takeout from The Mad Greek to celebrate how well everything had worked out. (We were incredibly grateful we didn't break down half an hour earlier, in the middle of nowhere.) The food was delicious and we enjoyed most of the rest of the drive. (The kids got whiney by the end. Alison commented on how a flat tire, a tow truck, and a 1.5 mile hike through the desert were SIGNIFICANTLY easier to handle than whiney kids the last few hours of a 12 hour drive.)

We got to bed more or less on time and were up to teach Elders Quorum (Mike) and Primary (Alison) for 9:00 church. Alison realized that she forgot to take her medicine the night before and woke up in an incredibly bad mood (unsurprisingly) and was absolutely voracious all day (rather surprisingly, although in retrospect it makes sense - she has noticed that the medicine decreased her appetite whenever the dose changed).

Then we unpacked the car. Mike cleaned it out, including the cupholders. That turned out to be a mistake, because Rea had stored souvenirs in hers. She and Alison ended up going through the big garbage can for chips of chert, pottery shards, small scraps of paper with notes on them, and shells. They managed to find most of them, luckily.

Before we left, we had a few fruit flies, so we left out some dishes of vinegar and dish soap. They successfully caught quite a few, but there were many, many more when we got home. Obviously they're living on something, but it looks like we'll have to deep clean the house to figure out where the kids stashed the half-eaten fruit. Time for Organized Simplicity again!