My great grandmother and mother holding me when I was about six months old.

My great grandmother passed away last night.  I found out this morning, and I’ve been mulling over her life all day.  Her name was Eugenie and she was a beautiful woman.  Born in 1909, she grew up in Russia.  She moved to Shanghai with her family, and in 1934 she met and married her husband.

World War Two necessitated that she flee Shanghai with their two sons, and they ended up in Australia.  Her husband stayed behind and they lost touch during the war.  When the war was over, she and her sons moved again to San Francisco, where she lived until her death.

She was a great cook, a devoted volunteer with the Russian Orthodox Church, and a talented seamstress.  I have a cookbook of her recipes, and Wes and I enjoy preparing the recipes she perfected over the years.  I remember that she made really legendary pickles, and every time I’d call her she’d always respond to whatever I said with, “That’s wonderful, darling!”  I can hear her voice in my head even now.

She was over one hundred years old, and her passing eased years of suffering, but it’s always hard when someone you love, a part of your family, is gone.  I do look forward to seeing her again in Heaven someday though.

Anyway, if you’re into Russian food maybe have a bowl of borscht or dig into some pelmeni in my Great Grandmother’s honor, huh?

This post is in honor of Wes’ brother, Neal, who asked me to write a post about the World Cup.  And who also once brought a dead beaver to Thanksgiving dinner.  Hi, Neal!

So I guess there’s this soccer game going on right now?  Between a bunch of teams?  And the whole world really cares and is all excited about it?

I don’t know.  I looked into it, and apparently the most common score in a World Cup Finals Match is 1-0, which gives me the impression that watching these matches must be frightfully dull.  They score once in how many hours?  And they’re not allowed to bare their chests because FIFA doesn’t allow them to anymore, so we red-blooded females don’t even get to ogle the muscley men dashing across the screens.

But, according to people who know things, the World Cup is a huge deal.  Because everywhere other than America regards soccer as a Very Big Deal.  Therefore, this is like a global Super Bowl.

Now, I’m a huge fan of the Super Bowl.  It’s like mini Thanksgiving for me, what with the gratuitous food and encouragement to constantly stuff your face while not moving.  The football game?  Meh.  Sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes it’s a snore, and sometimes it makes the people watching the game around me shriek in outrage while I snap my attention back to the game and try to figure out why everyone’s so angry.

From what I can tell, though, only America cares about the Super Bowl, because Americans are really the only ones who play football.  So essentially, we as a country decided to thumb our nose at the world’s favorite past-time and invented our own special game.

In the global playground, we scoffed at the kids playing Four Square and took our ball, squashed it flat by sitting on it, and then coaxed all the biggest kids to beat each other up trying to steal it from one another.  Which I suppose is better than if we’d had all the biggest kids beat up the Four Square kids first, before playing with our weirdo squashed ball.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that this a post about the World Cup.  And about football.  And somehow it’s also an allegory on foreign policy, with the moral being that perhaps our politicians would do well to remember that the other kids can play Four Square all they want as long as they stay on their side of the playground.

See?  We can all learn so much from the World Cup.  And for that, we can thank my brother in law.

You guys, I am beat.  Work has been a blizzard of tasks, I’ve been scurrying around all over town, and I’m so tired I can’t even think of a good item to add as the third part of this list.  Blah.

I have ultrasound pictures though!  And a healthy, dancing fetus!  And clean laundry that’s folded and put away!  So I guess even though I’ve been slacking as a blogger this week I’m not completely useless.  I’m getting a lot done at work, but that’s not nearly as cool as folded laundry.

Ugh, I’m too tired to even pretend to be coherent.  I promise I haven’t forgotten that I said I’d share my pictures.  I haven’t.  I even had my very gracious sister in law scan an old photo of me that really showcases the ginormous glasses I used to sport back in the dark days before contacts.

I’ll get to it.  I promise.  Sometime between now and next year, definitely.

Hey, guess what?  It’s been so crazy around here, what with the relentless Pregnancy Files updates, that I completely forgot to mention that I’m skipping town for a few days.  Wes and I are going to go hang out in Eastern Washington for awhile, so the blog will be a bit quiet owing to the fact that I have not a laptop and, as such, will have to resort to telling every inane thing that happens to me to some unwitting family member.

Don’t you just wish you could come too?

The good news is, we’re all caught up to where I am in pregnancy so you won’t have to read through the updates every day.  This also means I’m actually going to have to start coming up with content every day again.  Heh.  I’ll ruminate on that all weekend.  I hope you all have a lovely time doing whatever it is you’re doing.  See you on the flip of the vacation!

(A special note to anyone thinking of robbing us while we’re gone…We have a savage, bloodthirsty dog loose on our property who will not hesitate to devour you where you stand.  Also, our neighbors are watching the house for us while we’re gone.  Because they’re awesome.  So, for your own good, stay away.  Please.)

Hey y’all.  I’m working on a video for work that has to be done by Sunday or the whole fracking universe will implode and we’ll all be left crawling around without limbs and opposable thumbs which will necessitate us having to find other ways to open cans of soup and there will be problems.  I’ll catch you on the flip side for Things That Do Not Suck Thursday.  Which is tomorrow.  Which means this week is almost over.  Which means I’m taking another pregnancy test soon.

Please excuse me while I quell my stomach butterflies of excitement with copious amounts of work.