On Saturday evening, to celebrate Shelley's promotion and raise at work, she and I and Jenn and Kenny dined at the Northridge Claim Jumper, which offers a delicious Mother Lode cake for dessert, and heap-big entrees (and good pot pies). We went bowling after that and then returned home for a game of Settlers. Great food and fun and friendship. (My bowling scores reached only 112 and 109 -- about middle for the night's score range.)

Various other things on the weekend, mostly of the relaxing type. Some cycling, reading, shopping, movie-watching, making and mending -- lots of little errands and chores around the house. Not enough time for everything as usual, but at least we got the biggest taken care of: last week the dishwasher gave out, and we thought we might have to replace it.

We got down underneath it, though, and determined the root cause of the problem: too little water coming in because of mineral build-up causing water intake clogging. A couple hours dealing with this avoided the "need" to replace the whole unit. So there was both disappointment of not having an excuse to get a nice new spiffy modern machine, and a relief of dodging a new appliance purchase. Our machine dates to 1975, but since it works pretty well, and it's not simply a matter of popping the old one out and a new one in, we'll stick with it for now.

We played volleyball last night, where a ton of new people showed up. Not just random players though. So many young power-hitter guys -- you could all but smell the testosterone -- that the rest of us just let them play themselves, which they seemed happy to do.

Figured out what to do with the Battlefield: Glass components for the next round. That's a relief. More details on that at another time.