It’s Monday night and we’re heading back from Baltimore. We had planned on staying until Tuesday, but the weathermen have been calling for gloom, doom, and snowstorms.

I should have expected it. This is, after all, WVU’s spring break.

The trip was lovely. We got in Friday night, and picked up crabcakes from Kibbie’s. Excellent start to a vacation I must say.

Saturday we went to DC. Spent the morning visiting with Liz and Aunt Chris, and taught them the basics of tearing apart a computer. Both of them were tentative and more than slightly uncomfortable with it at first, but we got the case off, showed them how things look, and even got Liz to pull out the modem, so they could see that it wasn’t so bad. We were going to try to remove the CD-ROM, but didn’t have a good screwdriver. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll inspire Liz to become a computer geek.

We took the Metro downtown to meet Kim and Mike to go to the Air & Space museum. This is where I relearned that I have a seriously hard time comprehending things unless I do them or experience them myself. Despite this, we eventually made it safe and sound to the Mall to meet Kim and Mike, only 20 minutes late.

I was in sixth grade the last time I went to Air & Space, and it was as interesting as I remembered. Only thing I might do differently is go on a weekday, when there might be fewer kids. I’d hoped that we would have a chance to spend a bit of time in the Natural History museum, but that was not to be. Next time. We had a very nice dinner afterwards. We went to a place called Legal Sea Food (I figure that if you’re by the ocean you may as well take advantage of the fact and eat seafood.) Following that we made it back to the car without incident, although I was, I admit, fascinated by the entire trip on the Metro in a way that I am sure irrevocably labels me as a hick, but so be it.

Sunday was a day of much running around. Made the usual trip to the grocery store, which was, after lunch, followed by a trip to Lowe’s to get the supplies necessary for our projects. The trip to Lowe’s was quite stretched out, as we discovered that we could not, anywhere, find a small 386 battery. The battery is for a timer my Dad had gotten several years ago, and although she has another timer she likes, she thought it would be nice to have another timer.

This was not to be. Apparently 386 batteries are available only West (by God) Virginia, as they were not to be found in: Lowe’s, K-Mart, Mars, or Best Buy We also discovered that retailers are insane when it comes to stocking batteries. K-Mart had batteries in four separate locations, Best Buy in two. Whatever.

Then home to start the projects, only to discover that we really did need more fabric to recover the chairs. This led to a trip to entirely too many places to discover that not only have all the local fabric stores gone out of business, but that no one carries fabric. Luckily, in a flash of brilliance (even if I say so myself), I suggested that we look at the curtains. We ended up with a very nice pair of green drapes for $17 that we took home and chopped into fabric squares. In retrospect we decided that we could not have gotten that much material that cheaply, which is somewhat disturbing. Once this was done Michael did a lovely job recovering the chairs. Plus we have enough material to recover two more chairs, for whenever Grandmom wears out the material on these.

Today’s task was to thin out the shrubs in the front of her house, a task that went far more easily than I had expected. The problem was that some of the shrubs have gotten so out of control that I’m not sure whether they can be thinned out. But the rest went well, and I’m hoping that they’ll be much healthier now, and that after two more years of this, we’ll have them back down to a manageable size. Surprisingly, the task went both easily and quickly, which meant that we had the rest of the day on our hands. After a long involved discussion on how to find some of the larger book stores in the area, we decided to see a movie, since Grandmom said that as long as we were there to help her, she thought she could manage.

We discovered that all the newly released movies looked absolutely horrible, but managed to find a theatre playing The Last Samurai and Master and Commander. As The Last Samurai didn’t start until 6:30, the choice was easy. Consensus: We all liked Master and Commander. Grandmom liked Russell Crowe’s captain, I liked the doctor, and Michael didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Plus the movie was only $3.50 a person, so Michael’s popcorn and soda cost more than our tickets. (And let me tell you, boy was the popcorn not worth its price. Yetch.)

Got back to Grandmom’s house to the Aunt Chris calling about the weather. Got on-line and received a message from Dad warning about the whether, followed finally by a check of probably weather for Baltimore, Morgantown and Frostburg. WARNING! STORMS! SNOW! Okay, okay, we can take a hint. Better leave tonight.

But NOT until we went to dinner at G & M’s.

And now we’re racing back to Morgantown to avoid the fearsome storm. All I have to say is that there had BETTER be snow on the ground tomorrow.