It was a very fine weekend, despite getting off to a rather inauspicious start. We drove up to Fairbanks on Thursday morning without incident (thank goodness!) and spent Thursday afternoon and all of Friday hanging out with Ted’s mom. We went to Lilo & Stitch again (Beverly hadn’t seen it), and rented Training Day (very good) and Ocean’s Eleven (pretty entertaining) and basically had a very nice relaxing time.
Saturday we drove back down to Anchorage, stopping for four hours at my aunt and uncle’s cabin out in the middle of nowhere. They had some other friends there as well, and we all had dinner together and Ted and I went out on the lake in their little boat and puttered around and saw a loon and *later* we saw an otter and *before* that we saw a momma duck and TEN ducklings, and while we were driving down the Parks Highway we saw a black timber wolf with gold eyes who was all wet and looked really rather bedraggled and miserable.
And there was a very funny bit where Nathan, who was the 7-year-old son of the people who were at Pete and Eileen’s, was following the letter if not the spirit of the law about not pointing his super-soaker at people. He swung it around in an arch in the general direction of the adults, spraying my leg. I made this sharp noise which can’t properly be described in text; it’s more or less “Aht!” but the ‘t’ sound isn’t so much pronounced as simply there because the sound is so abrupt.
Anyway, it’s not a sound I ever thought about, but Nathan looked extremely startled and subsided, while all of the adults stared at me and then began to laugh. “Gosh,” said Aunt Eileen, “I wonder where you got *that* from.”
It’s a Malone sound. *laugh* I’d never ever thought about it, or even heard myself doing it — although Ted says I do it to the cats all the time — but it’s a sound I picked up from my mother. Usually it’s done in sets of two or three (ah-ah-aht!), not one, and Eileen said that she used to do that when Nathan was just a baby, and it bewildered his parents but the *baby* knew that it meant not to do whatever he was doing. In fact, I was telling Shaun about this, and I made the noise, and Zilli flinched and hunched down with big eyes, so clearly I *do* make the sound at the cats, and *they* know it means they’re being bad! *laugh* It was pretty funny. :)
Pete and Eileen are building a house out on the lake, and it’s going to be sooooooooo neat. I can’t wait to see it when it’s done. *laugh* Neither can Eileen, whom I’ve never seen so excited over something before. It’s really neat. *beam*
Sunday we got up and did our shopping and all the usual sorts of things. We brought 2 boxes of books we’d liberated from Ted’s brother Brian over to Title Wave, and got another $130 or something in credit (yay!) and we got Chantico from my parents’ house and then we went to Lord of the Rings, which is now playing at the (three) dollar theatre. This was the third time I’d seen it, and to my surprise I enjoyed it far more the 3rd time than I did the 2nd time. The first time, I liked it a lot, but I missed probably 20 minutes of it because my tummy was upset and I kept running to the bathroom, so I think the 2nd time I mostly just wanted to see the bits I hadn’t seen, which made the rest of it veeeeerrrrryyyyyy looooooooong indeeeeeeed. But this time I just really enjoyed the whole thing. And it had the Two Towers trailer, too, so that was cool too. *laugh* Aaaand Mom came over and I scanned in some old family photographs (really old, like turn of the (19th) century) so she could send them to some distant relation who sent us copies of pictures of people who may or may not be related to us, and that was the only time at all that I spent on the computer this weekend, which was _awfully_ nice.
And I read another book and I made some cookies and that was my weekend! Oh, hey, does it count as reading books if you listen to them on tape? I think it does, so I put two audio books down on my reading list. :)