Rainy day and Heddy the Hedgehog

When I was young, rain was just a nuisance. It prevented me from playing outside so I quickly got bored with indoor activities. Not so now that I'm older and have lived with JH for 44+ years; he LOVES rain, storms, lightning; now I, too, have learned to appreciate them. So, yesterday was perfect. The steel wool sky never let even one sliver of sunshine come through and it dumped buckets of rain on us. Our friends Susan and Paul came over and we went to a little barbecue place in Fairdale; it is housed in an old log cabin. The owners have spruced it up, adding fresh flowers, window boxes for flowers, pots of flowers on the picnic tables. The whole front now has an awning covering the outside dining area so that's where we ate then sat and talked for a while, the whole time listening to the rain pelting the metal roof of the awning. Of course what continually draws us back to the place isn't the decor, it's the delicious food, especially the smoked ribs. Yum.

We left there and went to an Italian restaurant nearby for spumoni, cannoli, and cheesecake with coffee. The coffee was so good that the four of us drank almost the whole pot!

After Susan and Paul left, we drove to Bardstown to deliver one of Rob's paintings to Doug who was going to donate it to a charity art auction. We were surprised to find Cheryl home and got to visit with her for a while. They have planted flowers and vegetables in various beds around the house and up the hill behind the house. Doug converted the front of a storage shed into a potting room. It looks like a small greenhouse that extends out from the front of the existing shed. Everywhere I looked I saw new plantings and neat little areas with large, flat rocks or sculptures. Loved it!!

Our next stop was at Brenda's where we were surrounded by girls. There was a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, one girl was drawing, another brought in all their American Girl dolls and accompanying items and showed us EVERY PIECE of it. For instance, one of the teeny picnic baskets contained a full meal of a sandwich, cupcake, potato chips, thermos (all pretend, of course). What I would have given to have one of those when I was little. Hmmm. In fact, they look pretty interesting even now. :-) Then they brought out the best "show and tell" item -- Heddy the Hedgehog! She is small enough to fit into the palm of one hand. She seems to like being petted as long as you rub her quills the direction in which they lay down and you don't get around her face. If you turn her onto her back, she sort of curls into a ball. Libby and Ellie decided she needed a bath so they filled the bathtub with a couple inches of water. Heddy just walked around in it, licking her lips. (Do hedgehogs have "lips"?) Then they took a toothbrush, squirted baby body wash and shampoo on it, and gently scrubbed Heddy in a circular motion. She seemed to like that, too! I had never been that close to a hedgehog so all that was fascinating to me.

When someone commented about L and E possibly coming to Louisville, they both piped in: "OH, but we ARE!! When Sarah flies to New York, we're spending the night and going swimming and eating at Vietnam Kitchen and having turnip cakes and drinking hot tea and going to Mandy's house and making S'mores and...." They haven't forgotten one thing we'd talked about doing when they come here -- and that was something we'd discussed a couple months ago.

We also got to visit with Kaitlin. She is leaving in a couple of days to go back home to finish her senior year in high school. After graduation, she's moving to Bardstown to live with her Dad and Brenda and going to school at St. Catherine to study early childhood education. She couldn't be with a better mentor than Brenda! She and Sarah showed me their renovated room upstairs. It's perfect. Their house is old so has nooks and crannies that newer structures don't have. So their room has dormer spaces for chests, tucked away closets, another set-back for the computer, keyboard, and other things. Now they even have their own bathroom upstairs. What more could teenage girls ask for? Oh, yeah. They have a hedgehog cage in their bedroom, too.

My book club is reading Water for Elephants for July. We got a kit through the state library system which has enough books in it for the whole group. It also has discussion questions and the book on CD. Since I'm in charge of the discussion, I ended up with all the goodies. Jerry and I have been listening to the book whenever we take trips of any length of time. We got so involved yesterday that we sat in the darkened garage to finish a chapter before coming inside. Yep. We're hooked.

Later this morning we're meeting Amanda at China Inn for lunch then, while Jerry meets with a couple of students at Spalding, she'll bring me back home. She's donating blood this afternoon.