I'm baaaaack

Still trying to catch up on all the e-mail and messages I missed by being gone on Friday. Normally, I'm pretty good about telling people I'm not going to be anywhere near a computer or phone for however long I'm planning to be gone, but I was a slacker this time. I actually started jonesing for a computer fix yesterday and if it wasn't already so late when I dropped my sister off, I would have stayed and checked e-mail and posted some stuff here and answered messages....but I was tired and work comes calling pretty dang early.

Anyhoo, I went to Portland for the weekend with my family. Friday night was a small pre-party get-together at my aunt's house to talk about who was going to do what the following day and what time everything was happening. Saturday was my grandmother's 2nd 80th birthday party, again at my aunt's house. Yeah, I know, 2nd? The first one wasn't good enough? *shrug* Who knows...my extended family is weird. So, a bunch of people I rarely see showed up, ate some barbeque, drank a bunch of wine and played catch up with each other. My aunt is seriously anal about everything (her entire house is white and she doesn't much appreciate kids) so there were little tense moments throughout the day, but besides that, everything went well. Ok, wait, there was that incident where my grandmother asked me if my dad had seen me holding my one month old 2nd cousin and commented that dad would be so happy if I had a few of my own... riiiight. That wasn't even subtle! Sheesh...

Sunday was a family obligation-free day, so my cousin Tara, my sister and I went shopping. After Tara headed home, my sister said she was starving....literally wasting away to nothing right before my eyes....she might need me to carry her bags because she wasn't sure she had the strength to go on.... cute. So we headed up to the top floor of the new shopping center in the middle of downtown and ate at Todai - an-all-inclusive seafood/sushi/japanese buffet. $23.95 for as much lobster, crab, shrimp, fresh sushi and sashimi, tons of different salads, fruit and desserts as you wanted. After all that, Brandy fell into what might go down in history as the most severe food coma ever. EVER. The girl couldn't even hold her own head up in the car on the way home. I was just happy she didn't blow up.