Awesome Saturday

...it's always awesome when you get to start the day with brunch at a terrific breakfast place (Ted's Bulletin, famous for homemade Pop Tarts, OH MY GOD) and end it with drinks and late-night appetizers with your dear cousin (Ruth, who was in town to visit Uncle Dan). Too bad I didn't get to see much of Drew and Rachel...

I met Warren Binford, a Willamette Law prof, in town at American University to deliver a lecture on legal education, for breakfast with four other people, all of whom are Willamette Law grads. One brought her boyfriend, a guy named Bishop, who is a graduate of West Point and William and Mary School of Law. He and I ended up getting into a long talk about STEAM education, whether I should push Rachel harder toward science (no, he said). Warren has been asked to be part of the Hillary Clinton campaign, so we talked about that, and about Oregon politics, etc. It was a very stimulating breakfast and a reminder that I need to do this sort of thing more often.

Afterward I raced over to Uncle Dan's just in time to give Rachel and Drew hugs before they took off for a birthday party that Rachel went to at a bowling alley. She had a couple of strikes and the birthday girl's mom, Caity, told Drew that "Rachel's so SWEET!" I hung out with Dan and Ruth for a while, drove home, stopped at a crafts store to get wrapping material for some bread I had agreed to bake for last year's McKinley auction (the woman who bid $40 finally connected with me, and I'm on the hook for two loaves this week and two after spring break), then went back to Rockville to meet Ruth for drinks. She insisted I eat something for dinner, so I had three appetizer-sized sliders. Yum!

When I got home, Rachel and Drew had just finished watching a movie, so I went upstairs to her room and crawled into bed with her (Drew had said she was starting to sound like she was getting a bad cold, and she seemed really out of sorts, whimpering, "Mama," so I stayed with her until she was close to falling asleep. That seemed to reassure her). Afterward, Drew and I talked until nearly 1 a.m. about our days, and then I went to bed.