Not a great weekend

Jen got around to taking her new used car to the inspection station. The good news is that it passed. The bad news is that it started smoking right after it did. (Her original account made it sound like the car started smoking when it was still in line and that she still passed in spite of that. I was imagining flames leaping out of the hood, and a blasé attendant saying "Okay, you're good to go.")

So she spent most of her day getting that straightened out. Then we watched the Princess Diaries to make sure it was an appropriate movie for Lily. I remembered liking it okay. It is of course the perfect movie for Lily, because it's all about Maria Von Trappe telling a girl that she's secretly a princess.

Hector Elizondo reprises his roles from...well, every movie he's ever been in. Julie Andrews is usually pretty great and this was no exception.  Anne Hathaway gave a really good performance as well. It's to her credit that she's not overshadowed by the other two actors.

Before we started watching, Jen and I were trying to remember the name of the fictional country in the movie.

Jen: I think it's Munrovia.
Me: No, isn't it Genovia?
(Julie Andrews mentions the country is called Genovia.)
Me: (Pointing to self) Winner!
Jen: Congratulations, you're the 13 year old girl in this relationship.

At about this point, I picked up Jen's phone and went to plug it in. When I did, I saw that she had a text message, so I said "Hey, I saw that you had a text massage, but I didn't look to see what it was" and gave her back her phone. She looked at the message, and got a look of horror on her face, and I asked "What's wrong?" She read the message out loud, "Are you going to go to Ed's funeral?" Ed is the name of our next door neighbor.

So Jen called and learned that Ed had indeed passed away on Friday. We had no idea. He was an older fellow, but in apparently good health. When it snowed, we always tried to get his sidewalk too. We'll be attending the service tonight and we'll be helping out his widow whenever we can.

Sunday was a little bit better. I went to birthday party with Lily. It was at a McDonald's Playland. Lily was impossibly well-behaved for the whole thing. Always said please, always said thank you and got really engaged when talking to my  friend Amy. Lily was telling her about a dream she had yesterday morning where some kind of creature was stealing her pitas. Also, there was some kind of robot-mommy. And Lily was telling her about this dream like it was the most important story in the world, and Amy, bless her heart, was listening as if it were.

We came home and Jen set a new record with her hula hooping, keeping it up for a solid twelve minutes. I credit Lily, who was cheering her on with the chant, "Mommy! Queen of the hula hoop, queen of the world!"