Dinner

Dave: "... and you have to eat all of the green beans"
Jessie: "You said I have to eat half the green beans!'
Dave: "No I didn't!"
Jessie: "Yes, you looked at my plate, and you drew a line, and you said I had to eat this half of the grean beans"
Dave: "That was yesterday! Today I said you had to eat all of the grean beans."
Jessie: "No you didn't, you said half"
Dave: "You're not going to tell me I said something I didn't. I've had top salesmen try to tell me I said something I didn't. I remember sitting across the table in St. Louis from three guys in Armani suits who were trying to do that. It didn't work for them, and it won't work from you"

[Later, after reporting the conversation to Me]

Jessie: "I know what you were telling Mommy"
Dave: "What?"
Jessie: "You were talking about those three guys in jumpsuits."

Sunday at the Manse

Stacy was right and I don't post enough on Stranded in the South. So Stacy, this one's for you.

The weekend has been consumed with property ownership and parenthood, and it has been good. It's only Sunday morning so it's not over, and any minute now friends will be over for breakfast (their daughter has a spontaneous sleepover with Jessie last night) and they will come to get her and we (Dave, of course) will feed them.

It's a lovely, cool fall morning. Yesterday we cleaned a bunch of stuff out of the dining room in anticipation of actually *having* a dining room again once the studio has been moved. We also put up the beginnings of the Halloween decorations in the front yard. We still need (according to Jessie) a couple more tombstones under the grim reaper, and we can't put the cobwebs filled with spiders up on either side of the screen door until we buy new little finishing nails (I have managed to lose our existing box of them).

A few days before Halloween we'll turn the pumpkins on the steps into jack-o-lanterns. J wants to make a jack-o-lantern snow man out of them and I'm inclined to acquiesce, but Dave isn't sold.

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Breakfast is over, sad friends are parted (Jessie and Grace were together for *18 straight hours* and only had one tiff that needed intervention), and now the rest of the family is off to run errands while I gird my loins to continue the painting. Painting and parting are such sweet sorrow!

My Battle Cry

It's Sunday. I am taking the weekend off from work. Well, not the whole weekend entirely off from work, but most of the weekend off. I am luxuriating in catching up on my blog reading. Ren linked me in to Stephen Fry's blog and a great Wallace and Gromit site (which includes info on a new short film). He's so wonderful. And Bridget has provided me with a what's your fill-in-the-blank-blog-thing. Oh I love it:

What Is Your Battle Cry?

Striding on the mountains, swinging an oversized scalpel, cometh Siyeh! And she gives a bloodthirsty roar: "I'm going to hump you until you are unable to sit properly, then bake cookies!!!"

Find out! Enter username: Are you a girl, or a guy ?

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but I must end with this racy little gem (by way of Lilith Saintcrow) on the steps to writing a romance novel: