Sunday, June 22, 2014

And NOW, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!

(No, silly, not my wedding announcement, I need a guy first, remember? Know anybody?) 



What I mean is, Raquelle is BACK, with the latest greatest adventures from the Family Reunion! Sit back and enjoy DAY TWO!

DAY TWO 
(oh wait, I just said that)


Highlight: I should say “getting out of bed,” but that’s never a highlight for a non-morning person. However, those who WERE morning people appeared to be deeply enjoying the morning’s breakfast of some kind of waycool fancy omelette thingie.

Lowlight: My stomach wasn’t awake enough for a waycool fancy omelette thingie. I blearily gnawed a cold piece of gluten-free banana bread. The world is a glooby bluggy place in the morning. This is me:



WHOA! Insertion from Heather: You can't just skip over breakfast like that! :iz shocked:

Heather Highlight: The waycool Breakfast Team headed up by the Awesome Uncle Mitch created Amazing Omelettes for us. Notice all those capital letters? That shows my enthusiasm! They were excessively good.

Unca Mitch cooking

Yumyumyumyum


Heather Highlight: Also, the breakfast conversation was tremendously fun. Once everyone downed an omelette or two and chugged enough coffee, the entertaining stories started to flow. A fun aspect of our family is that it is LOADED with storytellers. I just about laughed myself sick over Uncle Brian's tales of Varmints In The Woods and Hannah's story of Joshua And The Cheese. :D :D

OK, back to sis.

Raquelle:
Highlight: Everyone assured me that the pond was so stuffed with fish, you couldn’t NOT catch one. I’ve always felt deprived and incomplete in life that I have never yet caught a fish, so this made me happy.

Highlight: Tim agreeably promised to take me out to the gazebo overlooking the pond and show me all I needed to know about fishing.

Highlight: Tim was unperturbed by my Extreme Reluctance to whack up a worm and put its dismembered fragments on a hook and obligingly did the dirty work for me.

Highlight: Sheila joined us for a few minutes and overawed me with her ability to whack up aforesaid worm herself and bait her own hook.

Sheila and Tim: Mighty Worm Wackers

Lowlight: Sheila occasionally found relief to the jar the dismembering process afforded her finer feelings by verbalizing the problem. “Ooooh yuck, you can see its guts!” she’d say, or “Eww, it’s still wiggling!” I implored her to keep it to herself. In retrospect, I’m concerned about the long term psychological effects of repressing one’s conscious and subconscious feelings when confronting a scene of harrowing violence to the Oligochaeta subclass, and I hope she doesn’t have any long term emotional traumas from my request. Also, that if she does, she won’t sue me.

Lowlight: Some stinkin’ worm snatched my bait of the hook and ran off with it. Fink! I expostulated loudly and told the nasty fish what I thought of it. (Hint: It wasn’t complimentary.)

Highlight: Sheila explained to me that one of the most fun parts of fishing is talking trash about the fish. I agreed.

Highlight: Tim patiently re-baited my hook. 

Highlight: I CAUGHT A FISH! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I CAUGHT A FISH!!!



Lowlight: It wasn’t an impressive fish. It was a peevish 6-inch blue gill. I threw it back. That is, Tim threw it back. Do I look like the kind of girl who could take a fish off my own hook? Ha-ha-ha! Thank you, next question.

Highlight: Over the course of the next hour or so, I caught THREE MORE FISH!

Lowlight: They were all silly little fish.

Highlight: Of course, I don’t have to tell people that they were silly little fish. I can just swagger around and say, “Who me? Yeah pal, I caught FOUR FISH” and everybody will be, like, awestruck or sompthing.

Lowlight: Dad says I throw a ball like a girl. (I do.) I also cast a fishing rod like a girl. Tim could sent his hook sailing out across the pond, where it would fall in about six miles away. I could only get my hook about six feet away. I mean, on the good tries. I might have caught four fish, but I also caught my own fishing rod, Tim’s fishing rod, AND the gazebo. 

Tim was patient and didn't say the things he was probably thinking about silly dumb gurlz.



Lowlight: I really wanted to catch a giant tuna......Alas! Someday, maybe, when I'm truly reaching for the stars and following my heart............. 



Highlight: Hangin’ out with Tim. He’s a goofball. His sense of humor kept me in stitches.

Lowlight: Watching the rippling water eventually made me slightly seasick, even though I was standing on firm ground. I called it quits and went in. Some seaman I’d make.

Highlight: Elsa and Jason and I went to WALMART. Because, you know, someone must go to Walmart every single day. It is the Law of Reunions. Maybe more than once! Elsa and Jason were in quest of a volleyball, so they could be all active an' stuff. I was in quest of ingredients for banana pudding, so I could get fat an' stuff, I guess. J




Highlight: Aunt Carol caught us on the cell phone at the critical moment when we were JUST about walking out the door at Walmart to inquire if we’d looked at the grocery list on the fridge.

Grocery list? *cough*

Um, so we went back into Walmart and came back laden with Ro-Tel canned tomatoes, peppers, and paper towels. (Trust us, the paper towels give the fajitas extra flavor.)

Lowlight: I signed up for meal clean-up after lunch. What was I thinking????



Highlight: Hannah signed up for clean-up too, so we had fun cleaning up and scrubbing handwash together.

Highlight: After lunch I made banana pudding. Yum! Slurp! Nermy, nermy! (Grandma’s favorite word!)



Lowlight: After lunch, Aunt Sarah had to head for home. We all lined up in a big gaggle and waved goodbye as she beetled off down the driveway.

Highlight: After lunch, Mom and I, armed with six pages of handwritten instructions (no joke) from our local seamstress, undertook to do a fitting with Gramps on the new civilian outfit our friend is sewing for him. (We personally have not ventured into sewing gents’ clothing yet.)

Highlight: Gramps is a patient fella. We kept him at the fitting for about an hour.

Highlight: Gramps is also a handsome fella. He looked dashing.
Yes, the Roberts ARE the backbone of Texas history, 
thank you for asking. 

Highlight: Fitting Grandma for her new ball dress and evening bodice. This went quicker, since I actually knew what I was doing this time.

Highlight:  Grandma is an elegant lady. She looked chawming!

Highlight: I’m ackshually pretty stylish myself. *preen*



Highlight: Did I mention that there are people who actually like to cook in this family? Dinner was DELICIOUS!
Y'know, this is turning into a food blog, not a reunion blog!

Highlight: While the parents sat around after dinner and conferred with Grandma and Gramps on some stuff, all us cousins went for a WALK.

Highlight: I have cool cousins.

Lowlight: Most of my cousins are in better shape than I am. They rapidly outpaced me.

Highlight: Susie and Sheila obligingly dropped back with me and we solved the world’s problems. The Founding Fathers ain't got nothin' on US.



Lowlight: Are we STILL walking? Can we turn around now?

Highlight: Everybody else finally turned around.

Highlight: When we returned, Susie and Tim and I tried our hand at fishing again. I didn’t catch anything this time, not even the gazebo.



Lowlight: The parents had been talking the whole time and hadn’t cleaned the kitchen yet. Can you believe that?!!?!?! Bummer!  



We all pitched in to clean up the mess.

Highlight: After dinner it was time for movie night. That is, time for the slide show of family photographs that Mom and I had spent two bazillion hours on. It was more than a thousand photos. And NO, that’s not a nervous tic you see in my left eyelid, THANKYOUVERYMUCH!

Highlight: First I made two big batches of popcorn. Like, real popcorn, not that partially hydrogenated, framinized and glomminated microwave stuff that causes heart disease, kidney failure, ingrown toenails, and crankiness on Tuesday mornings. We had packed along a great big bag of popcorn, because we ALWAYS bring EVERYTHING, even an EXTRA kitchen sink. Y'know, the essentials.



Lowlight: I think I oversalted it.

Highlight: Everybody ate it anyway.

Highlight: Everyone seemed to enjoy the slideshow. Cries of, “Hey, remember that?” and “Oh, that was at such-and-such!” and “Wow, we were so little then!” peppered the viewing.



Highlight: After the slide show, a bunch of folks headed for bed. Some others stayed up to watch a movie about an action figure named “Mega-Mildew” in a city called “Metro-Citibank” or something like that (I didn’t catch the details). Heather and I were sort of TV-screened out, so we went outside and sat on the stairs overlooking the water, enjoying one of the biggest moons we’ve seen in forever. It was a gorgeous evening. The frogs were singing loudly and the turtles were........wait, I guess turtles don't sing. Too bad, 'cause there were enough great big turtles at this place to have put the Vienna Boys Choir to shame.


Full moon rising over the lodge


Highlight: Going to bed after a long, fun day........




Now don't forget, if you want the REALLY big moment you've all been waiting for (i.e., Raquelle's wedding announcement), you need to interdooce her to somebody, okay?




Stay tuned for Day Three...........

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