Best weekend of July, but it's only half-way over ...

Hello, Blog. It's been a while. I've got some bad news.

Your cuteness factor just dropped three whole points.

Reason No. 1: Jack.
Jack's our nephew. Well, my soon-to-be nephew. Yeah, we're old now. Aunt Erin. Doesn't roll off the tongue yet, but hey. Sorry, Blog, your html code just doesn't compare to babies.

Reason No. 2: Julius.
Julius, aka Caesar, is our kitten. Well, it's our kitten who's living with my brother and his fiance, which they'll be giving us after the wedding. T minus 2 months and three and a half weeks from now, we'll have a cat.

Reason No. 3: Goodies.
We had a wedding shower. Technically, I got a wedding shower. And it was AWE-some. We have a coffee maker that tells time, makes the bed, feeds the goldfish and tells us where ships are in the Pacific. It's neat. We also have real pans, real dishes, real cups, real towels and real lamps. And a bunch more real stuff. Getting it home was the tough part. Eek.

But, there's nothing cute about getting home. You know in "Cops" when they arrest those women on crack who freak out when they get handcuffed and brace themselves against the car door frame and it takes three cops to get her in the backseat? I was pretty much like that, without the cops, drugs and handcuffs. It's so hard to leave, especially after such a short trip; we left Thursday night, got to my mom's Friday at 7 a.m., slept three hours, bonded with my family, drove three hours to Cincinnati, slept seven hours, did the baptism thing, the party thing, the boating on the lake thing, the sleep thing, the shower thing, and then the 11-hour drive thing.

Sigh. Not a lot of time to sit around on the couch.

When we got back to Wisconsin, I thought I saw a huge cloud hanging over the city. No. It was just the humidity. Seriously. It's like, 156 degrees. This is WISCONSIN. Where's the snow. Where is it.

And, in better news: The paper clip idea that I wrote about on Sunday in The Northwestern is working out nicely. I got an e-mail today from a man who said he's mailing me a used CD for my half-used box of matches. Yesss. I'll keep you posted about the CD.

(That photo: So me and Julius. Yessss.)