Imperfect Blogging and Fallen Browinies

Ugh. My blogging has so ground to stunning halt. I am constantly thinking of things that I want to write about, want to share, but this particular time in my life seems to be one of immense busy-ness. And I do not love the busy-ness. I love having nothing to do. I crave time to play in the river at my mom's house (hi, Mom! I think busy-ness or no, we're coming your way this weekend). I crave time to read, to camp, to hike (without a time goal, damn Imogene training), to go somewhere just for the fun of it, or to have NOTHING to do for a whole weekend. And also to have twice weekly visits from the laundry fairy. Anyway, I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Walk Slowly, Live Widly this evening and she posted about imperfect blogging. And I think that's it. If I want to blog I should blog and forget about making every post a try for the World's Best Blog Post Ever. Of course, even imperfect blogging takes time so I am probably kidding myself, but I apparently need to kid myself about regular blogging or growing my hair on a rotating cycle of approximately six month intervals. Since I have presently given up on growing out my hair, I will work on more regular blogging. In six months when I've failed at regular blogging, I'll switch and start working on growing out my hair again.

So. Onward. This is what we've been up to:

As mentioned in my last post, Moses and I celebrated our 10th anniversary in May by heading to Moab. I got Moses a spiffy camera so that he could pose with it and make faces at me while I photographed him with my less-spiffy camera.
Moses also went to D.C. for a week to sit in hotel conference room and read grant proposals and then took Garion to Utah for a few days of field work. He's been busy too.

The first week in July we headed to Washington state to visit Moses's mom, step-dad, and assorted siblings, nieces, and nephews. This was the first time Garion had met many of his cousins and shenanigans ensued.

Here's a sampling of the cousins (notice the 2-year old totally doing his own thing off to the right--that is the totally adorable part of 2-year olds):

On the way home we went to visit Moses's oldest brother who lives with his wife near Lake Shasta. We visit them because they have a boat. Oh, and also we like them. And they gave us Harley. Garion would have ridden the inner tube thingy all the way home to Flagstaff if he could have.

The drive from Flagstaff to Washington took us approximate 3 days each way. Ohmygoodness. Garion and Harley were champs for the most part. This was on the way home after about a week of not enough sleep because it stays light until 10-freakin'-p.m. in the Pacific Northwest:
Between the traveling, Garion's attended Invention Camp (he invented a mind-reader), swimming lessons, and summer FACTS (basically a place to park your kid for the summer if you work) and that all requires dropping off and picking up and for some reason that is all more onerous in the summer. Seriously, why do we not have teleporters yet?

Tomorrow night we are going to the Wednesday evening Concert in the Park (yay for Flagstaff in the summer!!) We're meeting some friends and several other families and engaging in some sort of pot luck dinner. My assignment was dessert. I made peanut butter cup cupcake brownies and they sank. I think though that if I make everybody consider them from this highly artistic angle they will not notice:
As in, "yes you may have a brownie but only if you hold it over your head at this precise angle to look at it before you eat it."