Sara Ann—Welcome to the family! The C-Section went well, and Petula returned my calls this morning while I was out for breakfast. (Hmm, I'm guessing on her spelling, we'll find out if I'm right or if I'll have to edit this entry later.)

I slept in at Dayle's, after our late night watching TV, and then headed out for coffee and brunch. I got so wrapped up in all my errands that I never stopped for a true lunch, but we did have a lovely dinner together. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I dropped the car off for an oil change, and with the hopes they might find and FINALLY fix the squeal coming from one of the belts on the car. Sadly, they needed me to come back again Sunday with the car, so that'll have to wait for tomorrow. But while the car was getting the oil change, I browsed the mall, bought a medium-sized purse (yes, sometimes we need so many bags and purses because we just need one of every Goldilocks size!), and then browsed all those little hair-clip-and-accessory stores for silly little things to add to the purse. Gee, can you tell I just got paid and felt like being a little free with my money!? I can't tell you enough how wonderful it is not to be biting my nails over every little penny any more. Just the freedom to buy a $5 trinket or three $3 trinkets without thinking that this translates into eating more frugally is an amazing place to be in again. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job?

Afterwards I swung by my favorite—the bookstore. I could browse bookstores, stationery stores, and art supply stores every day as a hobby. And I can even be self-disciplines not to spend too much money, if I need to, which is a relief. But back to the story—Dayle mentioned earlier in the day that "Organizing from the Inside Out" was her "bible" of organization, and so I decided to pick up a copy for myself. I'd borrowed hers over breakfast and read nearly 1/3 of the book before going out for errands. It's nice to read how many of my internal dialogues about organizing really are healthy and helpful ways to organize your life, so it's a book to fill in some of the gaps in my own already home-grown style. I also bought the "Time Management from the Inside Out" book by the same author, which Dayle joked she hasn't had *time* to read yet. I plan to give her a cliff-notes-summary based on my reading. *grin* And I finally picked up a PHP computer book, which should help me figure out this gallery photo album software to help my family assemble photo albums online to share with one another. My goal is to host the albums so that with all the new babies and life events, we can just upload the photos and send links rather than send huge photo files to everyone.

Then it was time to get food for our dinner, so I picked up some diet soda for both of us, fresh roma tomoatoes, fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, a huge hunk of fresh parmasean (because I saw it on Dayle's shopping list on the fridge), and our favorite Trader Joe's spread of cream cheese, pesto, and sun-dried tomatoes. She whipped up some chicken, chopped up some romaine, and threw together huge bowls of lettuce, basil, tomato, chicken, balsamic, and mozzarella. Of course, we almost completely demolished the dip during food prep, and finally polished it off with our salads. Oh, yum.

We finished watching several more episodes of "Young Blades" (a very silly sword-fighting show over on PAX) with lots of stops and starts and replaying while laughing and over analyzing the plot (or lack thereof) and the characters. If anyone *has* been watching YB, and can explain the episode with the "Invincible Sword" please drop me a line. I think it was a case of "Tru Calling" crossed with the end of season one of "Witch Blade" where time rewinds and the character gets to make a different choice, but I'm not fully convinced. Silly television, definitely.