Freebies and Birthdays

I was at Rhonda's house way back when and she turned me onto a nice little free magazine put out by the Kraft Foods company, called Food & Family. Like all company sponsored recipe and idea magazines, it always references one of their own products in as many ingredients as they can, but that really doesn't matter much. It's a slick magazine and has lots of good stuff in it. Especially for free. Right after I signed up I started getting regular emailed newsletters, but yesterday was my first actual hard copy. Am I trying to coerce my readers into signing up? Nah, just telling you it's worth a look.

I picked up Sarah after school yesterday and brought her to my place. She did homework while we waited until it was time to go to my sister's house in Burien. It was my nephew Jesse's 20th birthday, and we were invited up for barbecued beer brats. We stopped off and bought a couple birthday cards on the way, as well as a gift card to Fred Meyer. Why two cards? This is one month with a three rapid-fire birthdays in short succession. My sister's husband Mike had a birthday on Saturday, and his brother (whom I haven't seen in quite a while) had his birthday the day before that. Then of course Jesse's was yesterday. Because I was out of town on Saturday, I took Mike his card yesterday.

Funny thing about those two brothers--They both married sisters! Isn't that wild? My sister Jackie was originally married to Dennis, who was the older brother. He's a great guy and I miss seeing him all the time, but as often happens, he and Jackie had their differences and parted ways many years ago. During their marriage though, Jackie introduced my other sister, Denise, to his brother Mike. After a while they got married and had two great kids. She is the only one of my family of siblings that is still married to her first spouse. Way to go Denise... You must have gotten it right. I need to go out in visit Dennis one of these days and see how he's doing. He remarried right after his divorce and has been living out in the sticks near the Cascades ever since. He's a big guy, and we always called him "Big Dennis" and my brother "Little Denis." Although they have different spellings, they sound the same and it eliminated confusion.

Well, back to work...