We are headed back to Los Angeles and in a few short hours, we will be getting on a plane. Our trip started with Wilmer Valderrama (a weird full circle story I must tell) and I am not sure how it will end. Moments ago I found Kyle’s stuffed toy, Oliver under the bed and then I proceeded to crawl under the dusty floor to retrieve little Oliver. What a mother will do.

The kids are eating yogurt and we are packing up. It was nice to stay on the beach and play in the sand. I will miss the ocean waves, the sunshine, Trader Joes, the excellent Mexican food and the beach lifestyle. Disney Land was better than I expected and Lego Land didn’t do it for me. I think my favorite parts were watching baby seals with Kyle, playing on the beach with Eli and building sand castles with everyone. Thank you Alan and Kat for the lovely accommodations. You guys rule.

I took at least 600 pictures and haven’t been able to post them. Tonight I will. Now we better cross our fingers and hope that we come home to and untouched house. (Eli had a dream that someone stole all his stuffed animals while we were away.) Have a nice Tuesday.

(Oh, and Wawa we are excited to see you!)

Truth be told, it all started about four days ago when my spacebar went on the fritz. Errr!

This week, due to my utterly lame, non-functioning keyboard, everything I do on my laptop came to a complete standstill: no email was being sent, no posts were being written and no pictures were being worked on — that is until this morning when I hit my limit. I was trying to type out an email to a friend while the sentence I was typing suddenly became the longest word in the world:

howareyouthismorningcarolIamsorrywekeepplayingtelephonetagwitheachother.

To make this email coherent, I literally had to go back and pound the spaces back in between the words. ERRR! AHOY! OY! I thought about thrusting my laptop across the room and then I took a deep breath.

You see, Dave told me a few days ago that he would help me clean my keyboard and somehow instead of doing it myself, I have been waiting for busy old him. When he returned from taking Kyle to school, completing frustrated, I pleaded with him,

“HELP ME NOW! Don’t even think of pouring the milk into your cereal before you take my keyboard apart. I can’t handle this anymore.”

Dave unlocked my fragile little keyboard from its position and started shaking my laptop and blowing all the stuff that had collected underneath the keys.

“Beth, this is loaded with cereal crumbs. You need to get something to blow all of this stuff out.”

Go figure that my laptop is filled with crumbs because it sits directly under the cereal cupboard! But this is my convenient little place. Sure, I know that I risk spilling Frosted Mini Wheats or Kix all over my computer every single time I reach for a box and I know you can often find me eating my dinner over my laptop while reading CNN or having a cup of tea while enjoying my favorite websites, but even I can see that the risk of eating while perusing the internet is getting a little crazy.

Moments ago, dressed in my puffy purple coat, (because it colder than it should be in March), I returned from taking Eli to pre-school. I walked in the house, didn’t even take the time to take my coat off and grabbed my laptop. I took it into the hallway, plugged the vacuum in, opened the keyboard, uncoiled the hose, turned the vacuum on and suctioned every last crumb that our heavy duty vacuum would pick up. I am not sure if using such a high-powered sucking device on my delicate keyboard was a good idea, but something had to be done. The spacebar was still sticking and before I blew another gasket, I remembered that Dave had some special laptop cleaning wipes in his office. I found them, pulled a couple out and started to clean the innards of my laptop. I blew underneath the keyboard a few more times and then I put my computer back together. In what would have taken me three hours to write just moments ago, only took me a few short minutes (if you exclude time for editing). Woohoo!

I feel so much better now and I have so much more to tell. But for now, because I need to go and pick up Kyle from school, I will rejoice in the fact that I am really back. And just think, this time I wasn’t away due to some interpersonal existential crisis. YIPPEEE! How great is that? Hey, and thank you everyone for all of your wonderful and amazing support. You make the world a better place.

We just got back from Moab. The sun was shining. The sky was blue and I learned a new vocabulary word. Woohoo!
I took this with my friend’s wonderful camera. It took me a while to get the hang of it. You should see all the blurry photos I took. My camera is still far far away in repair land.

More to come after I get some sleep. Hey, and thank you everyone for your comments. And again, I thank you. I absolutely love all of your lying stories.