Countdown

Just a few days left now. We're scheduled to depart Medford at silly o'clock on Friday morning, flying to Seattle and on to LA. We have a tight turn-round in Seattle and I took a bit of a panic attack yesterday wondering whether we should try and bring our flights forward to Thursday and stay overnight in either Seattle or LA. Needs further consideration, but if we do go with the original plan, I hope it all works out OK - we can't afford to miss our BA flight from LAX on Friday afternoon.

(Late update - just heard from our agent. He can get us on a direct flight from Medford to LAX on Thursday evening at 17:08. No refund for our cancelled Alaskan Air flights, I'm afraid. We'd need to add a hotel room as well. Tempting.)

Easter Sunday was nice - the sun returned and I went for a bike ride whilst Lucy and Jo went to church. Lucy made Angel Cake for our dessert - with strawberries and cream - yummy. Cade was home for a while and he and Braeden hung out on the settee:

They were enjoying watching the girls play fighting:

Buster was sensible - he doesn't get involved when Holly and Shelby play around like this. Sometimes young pup Shelby forgets it's just play and snarls and snaps at poor old Holly, who is looking whiter/greyer in the face each time we visit.

Both Scott and Lucy took the day off yesterday (Monday) and Scott and I drove up to Myrtle Creek to play golf at Cougar Canyon. It's a nice layout with lots of elevation changes, but we'd never played it this early in the year before and it was like the course was just waking up after the winter. They only charged us winter rates, which was nice, but there was lots of loose grass cuttings everywhere and there were damp patches too after the heavy rain the area experienced when we were in Palm Desert. The result was that Scott and I kept losing balls, which were either plugging in the damp areas or hiding under the loose grass cuttings. It took the edge off of our fun, but it was still nice to get out there again.

On the return trip, we dropped in to the DMV office to pick up the info for Braeden to sit his written driver's test - he turns 15 on 8th May. Next stop was Albertson's to pick up tri-tip for the BBQ. If, like me, you don't recognise the name of this beef cut, here's the explanation:

"The tri-tip roast is a triangular section of the sirloin primal and comes from the point where the sirloin meets the round and flank primal. Some may know it by other names. Ask for a 'California cut' and see if that helps."

This is what it looks like:

Clear now? Anyway, it was delicious.

Tonight (Tuesday) we are going over to Rich and Jen England's place - this seems to have become a regular fixture on recent holidays. Looking forward to it.