The kind of rain you have to squint to see.

I'm gonna post right now because it's 1:46 in the afternoon and I'm already tired out. Not because I have much to say, so I'll chatter as though you were all here in my kitchen, and I could make you a cup of coffee and a slice of my new favorite cranberry pumpkin bread. I'll even bake some extra berries and brown sugar on top the way you like.

Toby and I cleaned up the Aumsville Toddler Spa facility, loaded our stuff in the Jeep and trundled back up to PDX in a yucky rainstorm this morning. Can your really say rainstorm in Portland? It's just kind of spitty out, and grey. I used to love the big storms we got in Texas and New York. Tokyo, for that matter, has some impressive weather what with being on a modest-sized rocky island in the middle of several oceans and such. Portland needs to commit to a more passionate take on rain.

I cannot believe how much crap we had from just staying there a week. We made a big trip to Walmart (yay, capitalist oppressors, seduce me with your cheapness- and the fact that fricken everything is now made in China anyway) and also schlepped my mom's steam cleaner back to take a whack at our downstairs carpets before putting the house on the market this weekend. It took 8 trips in and out of the stupid lackluster rain to get it all in there, and half of it will wait to be unloaded until J I can get to it later.

Toby really actually was kind of helpful, sort of. He'll carry stuff around now, and understands the full meaning and ramifications of, "put that back right now." He likes to have jobs to do, and it's way easier to convince him to lug a bag of frozen pierogies equal to his weight into the house than it is to get him to stop running around barefoot in the garage careening in circles while flapping his hands for no obvious reason. I think it's all a shell game from here until he graduates high school. Look, honey, a college with coed dorms! If you get a 1600 on your SATs we'll make sure that's where you're kept.