REI

Grace woke up early today. I'm not sure why she's been doing this lately; it was 7 am today. She seems tired then for most of the day after she's gotten up early so I don't really understand, but there isn't much I can do about it either.

She had preschool today and then afterwards she was going to a friends house for a play date. That Mom picked her up from school so I had a few hours to myself. Unfortunately I talked for a while and then had to go back home and turn the Crockpot down because I accidentally left it on high and I only needed it on high for an hour, not most of the day. So I ran home and turned that down and then headed to Schaumburg.

Have you heard of the store REI? It's a cool outdoor store - they sell pretty much anything related to the outdoors. I've received their catalogs and shopped online at rei.com for years. And they've had stores kind of in the area but they were a long drive away. Now they have a new store in the town Julie works in so I drove down there and checked out the Grand Opening which today was the first day. I found some replacement gloves for myself since my gloves that I've been using have a hole in them. And I got Grace some new gloves too since she seems to outgrow everything for some reason. I also got a free t-shirt and nalgene bottle that both said Schaumburg Grand Opening on them. After that I picked Julie up and we went to lunch at Red Robin and then I came back home.

I had about an hour to do whatever I wanted since Grace was still at her play date, and I had planned on doing a little yard work since it wasn't too cold out and ALL of the leaves fell off the big box elder tree we have in our backyard last night because of a fairly hard frost (26 degrees.) But I ended up just relaxing for a while. It felt good, but now I have even more work to do this weekend.

So then I went and picked Grace up and we came home so I could finish making dinner. It was a good one: beef roast in the Crockpot with gravy, mashed potatoes and caramel apple pie for dessert. Unfortunately I didn't have time to make a vegetable but there was plenty of food.

We heard from our friends in Zimbabwe today and things aren't so great there. The electricity is out much more than it's on - if it's on at all. And that means they can't access the internet either. It's also hard to keep food fresh if the refrigerator isn't on.

So that was today in a nutshell. Tomorrow starts a weekend full of work around the house. Hopefully I can get a lot of those things crossed-off my to-do list.