Parentheticals

 We Organized Simplicity'd the kitchen this week. It was really nice to move everything around to places that make more sense, now that we've been here for over a year and know better how we use the kitchen. It was a big job - it took two days. And we keep opening the wrong cupboard for certain things. But it's very nice to have it done. Next up we'll have to do the front room. Alison is excited to rearrange and is considering painting it. She would have to pick a color, though. Mike has also been working on adding drip lines to our sprinkler system to water his berry bushes. It's getting hot, so it will be good to have it done. Mike finally went back to the dentist, and they filed down the filling, figuring that the pain was because the filling was too tall and was putting pressure on his jaw. It is feeling somewhat better, but not all the way, so he might have to go back in again. We watched another episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The kids whined a lot, so ...

 This week, we were still not sick! Yosh! Monday we had our next-to-last Crowned with Virtue meeting of the year. The girls have enjoyed getting together, and Rea learned to love embroidery. The boys have had fun playing too. We don't know yet if it will continue next year. Mike was on call during a release this week, which meant he worked a lot more hours than usual. Luckily, his masters program has a one month break during May, so it worked out OK. He also found out about another 18 card game contest being put on by his publisher, Buttonshy Games. The challenge is to create a rules-light RPG. Our family loves playing rules-light RPGs, so the idea of creating one appealed to us a lot. When we started throwing around ideas at the dinner table, Alison suggested that an RPG based on the format of the best Disney movies would be awesome, but that you would have to sing, so that wouldn't work. Mike took that idea and decided to make the songs into cards, so that you could play with...