dual personalities

Daughter #1 breezed in on Friday night and stayed until Monday morning–such a treat! Per Friday’s blogpost, we watched The Odd Couple and enjoyed it thoroughly. Later in the weekend we watched McClintock! (1963) which I had not seen in forever, due to it usually only being available in terrible pirated form. But you can see it on Amazon Prime now in all its widescreen glory and it is worth it. One of the top-grossing films of 1963, it is John Wayne as John Wayne surrounded by familiar faces. Everyone has a lot of fun and there is a fight in a mud pit. Maureen O’Hara is on hand to be willful and stubborn and ultimately she gets spanked (as does Stephanie Powers on an earlier occasion) and everyone cheers.

We also did some estate sale-ing…

Needlepoint rescue of the week

…and local shopping and had lunch at the Women’s Exchange. We searched the house for some lost counted cross-stitch pattern books and never found what we were looking for, but we unearthed a few gems. We also made a spontaneous trip to the STL Zoo to see the new-ish bear pits. It was probably not a great idea considering it was the Labor Day weekend, but we battled the crowds and found a place to park (a mile away) and visited said pits. Sorry, I don’t have a picture of the new Grizzly bears. They were large and scary, but not as scary as the polar bear who is huge…

We rode our beloved zoo train around…

and even took an obligatory selfie…which I will not share because it is truly heinous.

The wee babes and their parents came over on Sunday and even though they were sniffly and a bit under-the-weather, they ran us ragged.

Lottie loves this little chair…

…but the stairs are just the right size for sitting and thinking and taking a moment…

(I wasn’t kidding about the runny nose)

The OM stayed out of the fray per usual…

And we did have a dance party!

Dance Party!

After daughter #1 went home to COMO, I did laundry and picked up the house and caught up on the phone with daughter #2 and ordered my Christmas cards online. Don’t kid yourself–it’ll be here before we know it!

Today I am back at the salt mine for a busy and stressful week. I’m taking it one day at a time.