It's been very humid. Fortunately we got the A/C working just before the heat wave.
On Saturday we hardly did anything, but we did go to the grocery store and Shannon took me to a fairly new coffee shop. It had nice decor and I had a really good reuben and a coffee drink called "The White Nut". Then we just hung out at home for the rest of the day. We talked to my mom and my sister Joy in separate conversations. We're planning on getting together with Chris and Joy sometime in August, since we're only four hours apart and to meet halfway would not be a long drive at all.
This morning we went to church and it was potluck day (and a member of the church's 40th birthday). Somehow the word "kittywompus" came up, which no one who grew up outside of Iowa (including me) had ever heard before. It has the same meaning as kitty-corner or catercorner, diagonally across the corner from something. Lawrence (originally from NY) said "You know, like a can of wompus?" (I found out later that kittywompus or catawampus also means crooked or going all over the place, and that there is a Kitty-Wompus Airport in Wisconsin.) The other unusual phrase we heard was something like "put your whiskers in the water", and when we asked the woman what it meant, she said, "I don't know it's something my mother always says". So we asked her mother about it, and she said "It's like 'You're next'. I don't know, my mother taught it to me." Her mother, unfortunately, wasn't available for further questioning. We conjectured that it has something to do with preparing for shaving as a metaphor for getting ready for something.
I played some Lego Star Wars today and we talked to Anne, who is moving from Minnesota to Oregon soon. In the evening we walked over to Shannon's parents and talked with her mom for a couple of hours.
Lawrence invited us (and seven others, including Karen and friends of his from Cedar Falls) to see King Lear at an outdoor theater (Riverside Theatre) in Iowa City. It was really fantastic. I'd only read it (and that was ten years ago, for a high school class) so it was great to see it, and done so well. It was rather emotionally draining. The setting was a sort of dystopian future, which was cool. The only thing I didn't like was the music, which sounded like synthy marching music (?) - it really distracted from the gravity of what was happening.
We had a bit of an adventure trying to contact Lawrence since we forgot our cell phones at home. It involved pay phones and expensive phone cards and calling my mother-in-law to deliver a message. Lawrence compared it to a Shakespearian comedy of errors. I'm sure I've gotten together with people before I had a cell phone, but I don't remember how.
