I must refer you back now to my entry of February 19. There you will see the famous cupcake carrier that I coveted. Well, Pat (my mother-in-law) was nice enough to buy the carrier for me and I've been trying to create a reason to make 36 cupcakes to take somewhere. In the meantime, I decided a little repurposing was in order because I needed to take smoked trout deviled eggs to an appetizer party. The eggs are on the bottom and top levels, there are ice packs on the middle level to keep everything cool, and the apples are bumpers to keep the round egg plates from shifting. Plus Si ate one of the apples at the party so that was an added bonus.

Our first batting casualty of the season......brothers and sisters should probably not practice batting with aluminum bats so close to one another. You can make your own inference as to where the responsibility lies, but upon questioning we simply refer to it as "the accident."

Ry and Si performed with their school last night at a Peace Concert in Oakland. They sang four beautiful songs - one African, one Latin, one Hebrew, and one English. Afterwards, we went to Kirala for sushi (not without first convincing them that this did not, in fact, count as a recital, after which we would be forced to go to Fenton’s), and it was unbelievably good as usual. As we were leaving at about 10:10 (and Kirala was beginning their closing process) we marvelled at the fact that in Barcelona, restaurants would just be starting to serve dinner. How did we do that? I suppose when in Barcelona........

You'll notice to the right that I've added the ability to subscribe. It's not an RSS feed per se - it's Blogger's version - the Atom....same idea. Apparently you subscribe and your computer will search for my updates and put them into your Favorites folder based on the time period you specify - every day, every 4 hours, every 15 minutes, etc. I truly have no idea how this really works, but people have asked about it enough times I thought I'd give it a go. If I've done it wrong I'm sure I'll figure it out in the next few days, but let's keep our fingers crossed. So now those of you who keep forgetting to check up on me will have no excuse to not know all about what fabulous things are going on in Oaktown.

Baseball/Softball season is here.......yea!! Here are the cuties in their uniforms. The team names are a crackup. Si is on the Golden Girls in her girl's softball league, and Ry is in Little League on the.....are you ready?.......Sand Gnats. Apparently that is truly the name of some minor league team, and truth be told, it's started to grow on us. However, whenever Scott yells "go Sand Gnats!" I still have to turn and say....huh? Sand Dabs? Sand Crabs? Oh yeah, Sand Gnats!

I love this new Moisture Stick I bought at Whole Foods last week. I always find it messy and inconvenient to carry regular lotion in my purse and this solves that problem. It kind of looks like chapstick when you open it, but doesn't have that waxy feel. I really like using it on my face which tends to get dried out throughout the day. But it can also easily be used on any part of your body....rough elbows, heels, backs of hands (personally I don't like lotion on the fronts of my hands....I just have to wipe it off anyway, so why waste the lotion?), etc. Of course, I also like the fact that it is 100% natural and organic, formulated without the use of harmful chemical preservatives (parabens), synthetic fragrances, artificial colors, harsh surfactants (sodium lauryl sulfate), or petroleum derivatives (petrolatum, mineral oil and silicones). (Okay - yeah, so I directly lifted that last part from their website.....you got a problem with that?)

So some network execs have been reading my blog and found a way to make the money that I apparently left on the table. If you go back to my September 28, 2006 post, and then again to my October 3 post, you'll see that I'm enamored with the idea of freshening up BINGO because it is, after all, a very fun game of chance. It looks like ABC agrees and National Bingo Night will hit the airwaves Friday nights beginning in May. You can send my intellectual property residual checks to my home address.

Speaking of games of chance, I was introduced recently to the wild, wild world of Bunco (or Bunko). Let me just say, if you're longing for the glorious old days of college drinking games, this is the grown-up, seemingly acceptable version. It is not actually touted as such, but believe me, after going to a Bunco game, you'll understand my allusion. Check the Wiki description.....it blew my mind that the biggest following right now is with affluent suburban women. Believe me, that is not the crowd I played with. And no disrespect to my bridge-playing friends, but this ain't no bridge game either. Again, the game of chance thing? Key. Drinking during a game of chance? Key. Changing tables and switching partners for every round? Key. Trying to count and keep score after several rounds (and yes, I do intend the double-entendre)? Key. And a pot of money to divide up amongst several category winners at the end? Well, there's nothing more to be said.

There was a lovely little 4.2 earthquake here last week. I tried to go on and blog about it right away, but blogger wouldn't let me in, so maybe they had some damage! Anyway, one of my favorite websites is the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program site, where you can go immediately to see what the richter scale measured the quake at, and, nerd that I am, register whether you felt it and fill out a little form about your experience. I've been doing this every time I've felt a quake for about a year, so I know my zip code is well-represented in tracking quakes. It'll show you a quake intensity map by zip code, as well as how many people responded by zip code, so you can keep track of how many of us nerds are busy.