I am feeling a lot better this weekend. Last week I felt like my head was going to explode -- long story, no need to go into it here.

On Thursday I left work early and we went to Salem to see Jamgrass at the Oregon Garden. The show started at 6pm and we got there at about 6:10pm. The venue is a beautiful grassy bowl and when we arrived the full family scene was out with lawn chairs and picnics and all kinds of people kicking back enjoying the music. I heard someone say they ran out of beer before 8pm -- I don't know for sure but a new act came on each hour and by 8pm the family scene was slowly clearing out and "the tribe" was bouncing around and dancing along the fringes. By 9pm when Yonder came on, the lawn chairs were gone and the area in front of the stage was crammed with dancing fans. My first Yonder show -- finally after several close calls -- and I can see why Bob and Walker are such huge fans. They're whacky, funny, talented and very cute.

Yesterday I had the day off and for the most part I kicked back and caught up on some odds and ends and then watched several more episodes of the Sopranos. I'm almost done with Season 1.

Today we went to the Farmers Market early and I'm about to go to the kitchen to get the stuff cleaned up and put away and start making some fun food for the weekend. Tonight I'm making peach ice cream. Other ideas for the weekend are grilled vegetable sandwiches on homemade foccacia (too lazy to look up proper spelling), hummus and salsa. We'll see how far I get.

Yesterday I checked my page and noticed that it's all goofy and there are dead links. Funny, because those links weren't dead when I put them up. I checked my directories and the stuff was gone. How does this happen? Actually there is a whole bunch of stuff in there that looks goofy -- duplicate files and stuff that I don't remember putting back up there. So a project for the next week will be to get that all cleaned up and reorganized. I've been spending all day on the computer at work so when I get home I don't even want to look at a computer.

My latest thing is The Sopranos. Am I the last person on the bandwagon or what? Auntie bought the first season and it's been traveling around the family and finally made it to our house and Bob already zoomed through it and so it's been sitting here. Last Saturday I wanted to watch a movie so I started watching Kiss of the Dragon and about 20 minutes into it I decided it was too violent. So then I was going to finish watching Phantom Menace since the DVD player is back upstairs -- but the cables to attach it to the TV were not so I was like, "Hm, what should I watch? Hey, here's this box with the Sopranos." And ever since I run home from work every night and park my butt on the couch to watch some more. I LOVE Tony Soprano.

Earlier this week I made some fabulous pizza sauce. I roasted a huge tray of tomatoes along with a big red onion and about 8 cloves of garlic. I ground the whole thing up in the food processor and then ran it through the ricer. That ricer is handy -- I need to find a better place to put it so I can grab it more often. When I was ready to make my pizza I put the sauce in a pan and added several teaspoons of Penzey's pizza spice and let the thing cook down for over an hour. For the crust I used the Cook's Illustrated recipe for deep dish -- the one with a potato. And for my topping I roasted a bunch of squash and zucchini with Italian spices and then stirred in some marinated artichoke hearts - spread that on the pizza and sprinkled the whole thing with parmesan cheese. Came out excellent.

This weekend I finally fixed my One Click -- I don't know what I did to it but it was all goofy so I reinstalled it and invested a teeny bit of attention and know have advanced from a basic user to an intermediate basic user. For my power hour yesterday (in the yard) I hacked back Rhodies. I don't know how healthy these plants are. The one out front looks mighty peaked and the super tall one in back -- I'm trying to whack it down to my height which means I'm going to have nothing but sticks when I'm done. Yesterday was our 6 yr. anniversary and Bob took me to see Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and we had a nice dinner.

So can you tell that I have these major dry periods where I can't think of a thing to blog about?

Well first, I think this opinion column from The Onion says it all: "while watching The Empire Strikes Back, the second act of which is practically all Yoda, not once did you wonder what he looked like naked?" And even though I think the article is hilarious -- I have to admit, in all my endless wondering about Star Wars things, I never once wondered about Yoda naked.

In other news, Bob bought a digital camera this week. He's already made a couple of movies which he showed me yesterday. One was "Bobman makes iced tea" and featured music by Topaz from High Sierra. Another one was called something like, "What my kitchen looks like, blurry." Tonight he went to the Jazz Fest and train tracks for more footage. Yay.

My garden has finally kicked into gear -- better late than never. Last weekend was my first tomato harvest -- I got 6. (My early girl remained a single stick all summer long until I finally pulled it out to save it from complete embarassment.) Today I got about 46. Last weekend when I saw Mom she gave me about 10 lbs. so yesterday I made pasta sauce and today I made minestrone with the leftovers. I think I'm going to make some pizza sauce and some salsa and get caught up for the rest of the weekend. Gardens have a way of making you hate them.

Finally, my cousin Kathy gave me an Obi-Wan Kenobi bank. You put money in (or press a button) and it lurches around with a light saber and says stuff about the Jedi. Then you can wave your hand in front of it and it will keep going. Now I have a Darth Vader phone (rings like the Darth Vader theme), an interactive Yoda with light saber, the Obi-Wan *and* and Darth Maul action figure. I take everything out of the box and actually play with it. Screw this collector stuff.

Oh, also we saw Great Big Sea, The Young Dubliners and Seven Nations on Tuesday night and it was super fabulous.

We went camping at Crater Lake this weekend. We met a whole bunch of the family there. The camping part was super fun -- we had a great campsite with lots of room for everybody. But the smoke from the fires was bad and when we drove to see the Lake on Saturday, it was too smokey and we couldn't see it. And the drive home today seemed to take forever and I'm unspeakably tired and will have to fill in more later.

Go to Trader Joes and buy the chili-lime mayo -- then use it on everything. It will change your life.