Busy, busy

What time would it be if all the clocks were stopped?
~ Zen question

I wasn't really looking forward to this weekend, or even the preceding week. I knew it was going to be busy, and around Thursday I began to panic big-time. I didn't have Mother's Day gifts yet for my mom and Bob's mother, and I needed to finish getting Barb's birthday gifts, and I had to wrap things, and I had to mail the box to Barb, and we were going to be gone all day on Saturday, and then Mother's Day was today, of course. I also had a bunch of freelance web design work I needed to get finished, and I knew I wasn't going to have time over the weekend.

So I decided I'd better at least get the shopping done in one fell swoop, so I went out on Thursday night after work and did it--got some pretty glass things for my mother and Bob's mother, and finished getting a few things for Barb--then wrapped them that night, and got the box ready to go to Barb, and I felt better about things. I know it's silly to feel so overwhelmed, but Bob was gone, too--he went to Las Vegas for a few days last week with his dad and one of his brothers--and he's always the one who calms me down.

I got up early on Friday morning and started the freelance stuff, then finished it late Friday night, so I didn't have to worry about it over the weekend.

On Saturday the son of one of Bob's friends graduated from college, and they had a party afterwards, so we went to that. It was in Warrensburg, about an hour and a half away from here--the town where I was born, actually. We stopped at the post office on the way so I could mail the box to Barb, and I ended up standing in line for about a half hour. Or, well, not standing in line, but waiting--they have a new thing where you take a number, then can stand anywhere in the lobby area that you want to. Which seems fairly stupid to me. What's the big deal about standing in line? The new system just causes a lot of confusion, you can't easily tell how many people are actually in line and who's just waiting for other people, and it's just dumb.

It's not like you can actually go anywhere other than the main room, because they just call out the numbers in normal voices, not over a loudspeaker or anything. But anyway, I guess they're trying to make the experience more pleasant, even if I do think it's dumb. I wonder if, when you go in there in the middle of the day during the week and no one's there, you have to take a number?

The party was nice. It was held in a country club on a golf course, and another storm blew through midway through the party, and we all stood there and looked out the windows at the blowing trees which, now that I think about it, was pretty dumb, since someone announced that we were supposed to be under a tornado watch. Nothing happened, though, just rain.

We stopped at the grocery store on the way home because I was cooking today for Mother's Day. I always feel guilty about going to my mom's, thinking that I should have everyone over here, but my house is really too small. So I suggested that rather than her actually cooking the meal, we should all bring dishes, and that's what we did. It worked out great, even though I had to get up earlier than I'd like on a weekend, to cook. Mom made a meatloaf and rolls, and I brought chicken and rice and a green salad, my sister-in-law brought a taco casserole and bean salad, and my sister brought a pasta salad.

While we were at the store last night, we were standing in front of the poultry coolers, trying to decide which packages of chicken were the best buy. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around. It was an elderly Oriental woman. She said, "You on honeymoon?" I said, "What?" and she said, "You on honeymoon?" She pointed at us. "You touching like on honeymoon." We laughed; we'd been standing there with our arms around each other, I guess, without even thinking about it. Bob said, "No, we've been married twenty-seven years," and she said, "Good for you!" and walked off into the dairy aisle.