Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Okay, we've slacked off big time. Sorry. BTW- Natalie and Ulli did make it to South Bend, albeit a day later than anticipated. And Kevin's mom and aunt made it here without any glitches, thankfully. I swear there is a traveling curse in my family. Any trip I take using an airplane is bound to be late or some freak accident will occur, preventing my travel. Kevin and I missed our connecting flight to Egypt due to a bad engine on a Delta plane and ended up losing a whole day stuck in a second rate hotel in New York. We missed the first day of our Egypt tour at Giza and the great pyramids (although we did make it up by staying a day longer). Another time, Kevin and I were supposed to fly with my family to California to see the King Tut exhibit, but the night before I broke my eye socket at Aikido and air leaked from my sinuses into my eyelids causing alarming swelling. I had surgery instead of the trip (it was okay since Kevin and I had seen the good King Tut stuff in Egypt and Kevin got some cool pictures of my eye). And my favorite: I flew out to interview at Notre Dame with Dave, a fellow BYU student. I warned him of my curse, but he didn't believe me. We made it to South Bend just fine, but along the way back, our flight was diverted to Fargo, North Dakota, so we could deliver airplane parts to the local airport. Random. We ended up sitting on the tarmac for over an hour. Oh well, I would never have been to Fargo otherwise. So, Natalie and Ulli's travel tragedies aren't all that surprising to me. It didn't end there, however. Sometime during Natalie's trip back to Utah, her Wii games were misplaced and lost. Her trip out here was a bit more costly than we had anticipated. But thank you for coming! I really enjoyed having everyone visit. Mostly our guests slept 'til noon and relaxed. Everyone loved Riley, and it was really nice to have extra dogsitters around.

As for other news, I went to an allergist last week (I made the appointment three months ago while my hayfever was driving me nuts). They tested forty different compounds on my back (it's quite painful being stuck with over forty needles) and discovered I am significantly allergic to all forty compounds and severely allergic to all but two. Joy. It's a miracle I'm alive. The doctor sent me home with literally a bag full of drugs to try. I'm actually worse than my sickly sister- how can that be?!

As for Riley, he's huge. Kevin's been teaching him tricks non-stop. Riley can now sit, come, lay down, shake, crawl, rollover, retrieve, hide, and play dead. I don't know who I'm more impressed with- Kevin or Riley. He's also taken a liking to agility exercises. A fellow dog owner we've met on our walks has a little course set up in his backyard where he practices with his dog. He's taught Riley how to jump over a two and a half foot hurdle, and Riley will now jump over piles of bricks or other obstacles around. We're thinking of putting him in agility school after obedience school. Riley is now six months old (almost seven), so he can start obedience school. He'll begin in a couple of weeks. Riley has also reached the "lapdog" phase meaning he'll sit on you whenever you sit down. As soon as you sit down on the couch or floor, he plops himself down on your lap (or laps- he's now big enough to cover me and Kevin). He's still doing great and keeping us very busy.

School starts next week. Joy. Classes may actually be a nice break from the breakneck speed my lab work has been going at. It's been raining here in South Bend for the past couple of weeks. It usually clears up in the day, enough to make it muggy, then big thunderstorms develop in the middle of the night so the thunder can wake you up, and it doesn't matter if your eyes are closed or open because the lightning is so bright. The storms have been severe (as you've probably heard on the news), but South Bend's been okay. Good luck with school and all! And go see The Simpsons' Movie, for no other reason than spider pig.