Let's Just Start Again

Ugh.  These past few weeks have just been awful.  Fortunately, I'm still here, but I just have had a really bad time of things lately.  My work has  become pretty unbearable.  They have recently increased our hours, and though that does mean more money, it's not really a raise because our hours are increased.  I am now making $10 less an hour than I did.  Which would be different if I liked where I worked, but it's just made everything worse. I've felt just stuck and not really able to do much of anything once I get home.

Enough of that though.  Fortunately, we had planned a bit ago to go to Baltimore this past weekend and visit one niece and her husband, and also get to see another niece and her family.  After a few weekends in a row when the weather was just terrible, this weekend the weather was lovely!

This guy went with us, and had a great time!

We got to see my niece Amanda's kitties. They are both black kitties, named Clancy and Yuri.  Unfortunately, they are not impressed with Dug ...

This is Clancy - she is extremely talkative!  Yuri is very shy.

On Saturday, we got to go to my great-nephew Zach's basketball tournament game.

Here he is after taking a shot in the warm-up.  It was a good game, but they lost in the last 9 seconds by one point.  There is another game on Wednesday night, and if they lose, they are out of the whole thing.  If they win, they play in the finals on this coming Saturday.  It's amazing the variations in height among fourth graders.  :-)

And then later in the day on Saturday, we took a walk in my niece's neighborhood, and visited a [new to me] yarn store there, That's the Point.  It's a lovely little shop the sells yarn and also needlework materials.  I didn't spend much time there, since everyone else was waiting for me outside, but I did buy a skein of yarn produced from a local alpaca farm.  I figured I wouldn't be seeing that anywhere else.

We made our way back to Philadelphia yesterday after brunch, and spent the day catching up with laundry, etc.  I had taken today off work (thank God!), so it's been a lovely day at home.  I treated myself to a manicure, and signed up for the Loop bus to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival in May.  I'm so glad that they decided to take a bus, now that Rosie's is gone!  I've missed going the last couple of years, so I'm really looking forward to it.

So that's the news from here.  I'm going to try to post more regularly, because I do enjoy it, and it helps me keep some perspective.  I have a couple of things to show you, and some other updates on some things.

Have a great week, and thanks for sticking around!