okay, now that i have actually given it to moe, i’ll post a picture of the painting i did for her. i didn’t post one before because of the very real possibility of her seeing it here:

apart from that, it was so much worse a holiday than i antipated that it’s astonishing. we arrived to find a house that resembled the tornado-spawned detritus of the north pole, which had been picked up and deposited in no particular order in milwaukee, and within five minutes of our arrival, moe was on the phone with her veterinary friends discussing how to make the dogs vomit, and then discussing whether or not we should go to the emergency vet because one of the dogs wouldn’t vomit after eating several bars of dark chocolate (which is poisonous to dogs) in her mom’s bedroom. and when moe asked her mother if there was any other food-like substance in her room that the dogs could potentially get into, her mother “couldn’t remember”, so i went and checked and found another bar of chocolate on the bed, and a stash of chocolate, at dog’s-eye-level, under a pile of other stuff.

once we had determined that the dogs didn’t, in fact, have to go to the emergency vet, i proceded to get sick – complete with vomitting of my own. it was at least partially because of the fact that moe’s mother’s housemate, an itenerant nurse named delena, but who everybody calls ann, had, for some gawd-knows-what reason decided to start smoking cigarettes again, and despite the fact that she was polite enough not to smoke anywhere except her bedroom, it had an effect on me.

we had breakfast with moe’s father and his wife at a restaurant close to where we were staying, which was more an excuse to get out of the house than anything else, and i did get a potential web-design client while i was there(!), but it was still more of an excuse to get out of the house. we had a number of incidences like that, one of which was my expedition into the rainy nights of the outskirts of portland to return grandma brink to her home in molalla, to which i have been several times before, but not recently, not when i was sick, not at night, and not without some other person in the car than grandma brink, who is blind in one eye and doesn’t see so good out of the other. fortunately i didn’t get lost, otherwise i could well be wandering the outskirts of portland in a desperate attempt to get home. portland itself is layed out on a grid and is very easy to find your way around, but that grid ends, abruptly, and beyond that point, dragons live here.

we watched Ratatouille, which moe’s mother, who works in food service, didn’t like (then why did you buy the DVD???) because it featured a rat in the kitchen, but which i thought was quite amusing – especially the transformation of Ego, which i thought was a cute play on words, but nobody else got it.

after a snowy drive home, i was feeling somewhat less sick, so we watched Wallace & Gromit – The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which was given to us by a couple of friends who know us well enough that they were able to give us one gift that both of us liked. as moe said, it’s great to have friends who know you so well.