Peace and Quiet?

It's been a strangely restful 24 hours.

The explanation? Caroline has had a sleep-over playdate at her friend Lani's house. I dropped her off at 2pm yesterday, and Roger picked her up about an hour ago.

It's very disconcerting to have a whole 24 hours without Caroline in the house. She's done the occasional sleep-over (two, to be exact, and for each of those she left just before dinner and returned at around 10 am). Roger and I keep looking at each other with a vague sense of not knowing what to do with ourselves. It was so QUIET without the constant chatter about ponies and cats and Power Rangers and gymnastics and coloring and...well, you get the idea.

So, trying to take advantage of our strange, free time, Roger and I did what any self-respecting couple would do...we went car shopping. I kid you not. (Have you ever tried to do that with a child in tow? It's not fun at the best of times, and take a kid along and it's miserable...although Caroline has given us a reason to escape overbearing salespeople. Anyway, we're starting to think it's time to replace my beloved Mazda MPV. It's been the perfect car...not a van (I refuse to drive a vehicle with sliding doors. I REFUSE), more like an SUV with van-ish interior. So, we looked at Ford Explorers, Nisson Pathfinders, Toyota Pilots, even a weird Cadillac SUV type thing that seemed like a station wagon on steroids. It was our first outing and we just mainly looked at styles and seating and such. It reminded me of how unpleasant car shopping is. Funny, I like shopping, and I like cars...but the two things together are just icky.

Then, we rewarded ourselves with dinner at our favorite local restaurant, Zin. We indulged in a bottle of "Liar's Dice" zin (a great wine from Murphy-Goode) and an appetizer of the restaurant's famous fried green beans. We shared an amazing salad of beets and orange slices and frisee lettuce in a meyer lemon vinaigrette, and then I had a lamb dish with olives and little gnocci and broccolini on the side...very yummy. We ended up chatting with the people seated next to us, who were in Healdsburg for the weekend wine tasting and escaping from their apparently frantic lives in SF. They were amusing, and exclaimed about the wine in the sort of language that one only reads on wine labels. And yes, it sounds even more pretentious out loud and heard from the next table.

Segue to Monday morning, where I would have slept in but for an early conference call with lawyers on the east coast. I hung up with a list of 3 new assignments...good income, bad for play time. Oh well, it all keeps me in fabric.

And, after getting time to do one massive legal project today, I made a few more blocks. And Caroline reappeared, happy and tired and bursting with tales of her adventure at Lani's house. Lani is a friend from pony camp, so they both adore horses and can enact scenes with the Bryer horses for hours on end. Lani has two new kittens, a fact about which Caroline is very envious, AND they got to go ice skating and to a candy shop where they were permitted to share a foot-long gummy worm. Could any girl's 24 hours be any better?!