KateOhKatie blogs

I’m home!  From my grand Kirksville>>Kansas City>>Baldwin City (that’s in Kansas)>>Lawrence>>Baldwin City>>Lawrence>>Baldwin City>>Kansas City>>Kirksville trip!  And might I say, I’m now intimately acquainted with the finer nuances of the rural highways of extreme eastern Kansas.

I’m certain this will come in handy when I appear on Fox’s new game show “The Rural Highways of Extreme Eastern Kansas.”  Sure to be a winner!

I started out my trip with the fastest stop at my parents house EVER.  I was in and out in 4 minutes, flat (yes, I timed it).

Walk in the door.

Leave with said water, bars, apple, pillow, and blanket.

After that, I partook in a fun adventure called “I-35 in Rush Hour” (this will NOT be a Fox game show), which encompassed chapters called “Miss my exit because of that bitch in the Geo” and “forget if I’m on the north loop or south loop”, as well as a sequel entitled, “Momentarily consider taking the 12th St. exit, finding a jazz dive at 12th and Vine, and spending the rest of my days bemoaning such blues-worthy themes as “I lost a DPN in the couch cushions” and “why the hell won’t the cats shut up?”  It fits rather tidily with the ongoing theme of life as tragedy, no?

Ultimately I ended up in Baldwin City, home of Baker University and my good friends Stef and Mandi.  Unfortunately, I was supposed to be in Lawrence–20 miles away.  After a few quick phone consultations, I determined how to get to Lawrence from BC, and in no time flat was at my cousins house.  From there, we quickly left for dinner at the Free State Brewery (yum!!!), where Kaitlyn (flower girl #2 in the youngest>>oldest procession) and I got this cute photo:

And this Just Plain Funny one:

Kaitlyn colored a lot, and I watched:

Then I colored, and she watched.  But I don’t have a photo of that one.  Also, I just realized that I rather resemble Cousin Itt in the photo above.  Oops.  I had my head turned toward Kaitlyn, and was resting my cheek in my hand.  Really.

My hosts for the evening, and Kaitlyn’s parents:

That’s my cousin Susan and her husband Mike.  I am forever indebted to them for showing me such a good time in their fair city.  Also, Susan reads this blog:  Hi, Suzy!

After dinner on Friday night we went back to their house, where I shamelessly bribed Kaitlyn with a Barbie movie (Barbie Swan Lake, I believe).  She and I watched it and cuddled and had a grand old time.  I love that little squirt.

Saturday morning, my hosts gave me a grand tour of the University of Kansas campus, and other points of interest in Lawrence.  For example:

Hunter S. Thompson’s house:

And a WWII memorial.  I didn’t take the requisite “stand waaaay back and get the whole thing in the image” shot, so y’all can’t really know what it looked like, but I did take a photo of Kaitlyn inside the memorial:

(after seeing this image, it shall be literally impossible to deny her resemblance to her Great-Grandma J.)

and one of the ceiling:

Followed by a couple of the muses (?), humanities (?) which adorned the memorial’s walls:

The one on the right is “science.”  I don’t remember what the one on the left is.

Then we had lunch at the Aladdin Cafe on Massachusetts St., where I had the best combination of felafel/hummus/pita EVER:

It was so good, I forgot to take a picture until I’d already eaten half the thing.  Damn.  Wish I could eat it again.

(by the way, it’s YEE-ro, not GY-ro or GEE-ro.  For the record.)

I almost got the Jasmine vegetarian special:

Yum.  Vegetarian dolmates, anyone?

After lunch, we wandered up and down Mass. St. and looked for ways for Kaitlyn to spend her worldly treasure of $6.  Along the way, we stopped in The Toy Store (that’s its name), where I couldn’t help but get a pic of these wooden dolls:

So “Asian” isn’t an ethnicity now?  Only African American/black is?  Really?

A case of PC-ness taken too far, methinks.

But it gets worse.  Because check out the white/caucasian family:

I’ll address each problem separately:

1)That caption, in case you can’t read it, says “Modern Doll Family.”  So, now what?  Are the “Asian Family” and “Ethnic Family” not “modern”?  Must you be white to be modern?

2)It is genetically impossible for two red-haired people to have a dark-haired child.  OK, so they adopted.  How modern.

3)What about families with two mommies or two daddies?  Or no mommy?  Or no daddy?

They should just have mix’n’ match families.  Grab bags. Big bins against the wall.  “Yes, I’d like one black mommy, one white mommy, two black girls, and one hispanic boy.”

If you’re gonna do it, do it right.  That’s all I’m sayin’.  Don’t judge the legitimacy of one family type over another.

Stupid dolls.  When I was a kid, there were 4 kinds of dolls: white with blonde, white with brunette, medium-skinned with dark hair, and dark-skinned with dark hair ?  Leave them all generic enough looking, and there’s something to please everyone.  Bah.

Damn, I’m sounding crochety again.

Moving on…

We stopped in here:

Where I came this close to buying this:

But I didn’t.  I did, though, get one that says, “One duckling, two ducklings, three ducklings”.

Yes, for the nonexistant Hooplings.  The Hooplings we don’t even intend to have for years to come.  Those Hooplings.  Jeff doesn’t like me to talk about it.  So I won’t.  Except to say that the onesie is VERY cute (yeah, yeah, no photo), and very tiny.  That is all.

I can’t wait to have Hooplings.  Well, yes I can.  But you know what I mean.

But back to my scintillating narrative…

After we finshed our tour of Lawrence, I had to get going on the next leg of my trip:  to Baldwin City (for real this time!) to celebrate Stefanie’s birthday.  For that, we went back up to Lawrence, and had dinner at On the Border:

Birthday Girl Stefanie is on the far right, there.  See me waaay at the back?

Then we went to a bar, I sober-chauffered people around, and then I crashed on the couch watching Clue with Mandi (in the blue and black shirt in the photo above) while everybody else partied the night away.  I was tired.  And, also, an old lady

I didn’t get to stay in BC very long, so I sort of felt like a bad guest or something, but I had a lot of fun while I was there!  I was glad to be able to help Stef. celebrate her birthday.

Sunday I woke up bright and early, and headed up to Kansas City for a brief hair-dyeing session and Stitch Knitch sale-visiting session with Mom, as well as a broken computer looking-at session with Dad.

The fruits of my LYS sale labor can be found on my Rav stash; it’s the three skeins of Borroco Comfort sock, the Cascade 220 for a hat for Jeff, and the Di.Ve Teseo to make myself a Calorimetry.  Lurve!

And so ends the nearly 500 miles logged on my odometer.  I’m glad to be home with my new yarn yumminess.  Knitting shall ensue–worry not, my friends!