Nothing short of magnificant

That is the only way to describe the weekend.

Friday afternoon, I had a chance to listen to a Google software engineer and Calvin alum, Jack Veenstra, talk about exciting work at Google. Like anyone needs to do that but still, what a treat. Jack demoed a couple of really cool features including street view in Google maps (in Europe) and how Google handled the cameras and the cars taking ALL those pictures. And he demoed the Android phone and all its cool applications. It runs on an open source platform. Srlsy. It has some cool features like ''where's your car?" You mark your car in the GPS program and when you need to find your car, the phone will beep when you are going the right way. Can you stand it? But the best, and I do mean the very best part of the talk was a question that I asked about integrated task lists. I asked when we could have an integrated task list in our Gmail and Calendar. (I mean come on Google, it's about time). To my delight, Jack smiled and said that yeah, we could probably have something like that soon. OH HAPPY DAY. OH HAPPY HAPPY DAY.

Saturday AM, we moved the leaves in our backyard. Since we share an enormous area with some cool, groovy neighbors, we share in the leaves too. Paul had the leaf blower going, Amy and two of her neat kids were raking and dragging and in less than and hour and a half, we had the whole yard cleared. By Saturday afternoon it didn't look like we had done anything but from the front of the house, the piles are huge. Hopefully the city will pick them up on Monday. Here's hoping.

No Saturday is complete without a trip to our fav store, Art of the Table. We bought a couple of delicious wines for our Saturday dinner, some excellent dried sun tomatoes and pesto dip, a couple of fabulous candles and my rad chocolate (and it's Jennifer's fault) Patricia's Chocolates. Heaven.

Saturday night, Paul made a prime rib that was nothing short of magnificent. We had friends for dinner - Pat, Mary, Margaret and Deb. It was a night of terrific food, great conversation and amazing wine. Nights like this are a gift and we were so grateful to celebrate the night in such style.

We ended the weekend quietly with a relaxing afternoon and roast beef leftovers. Of course, Mr. Handsome had a bit to share. He was doing the happy dance all the way to his bowl. Tomorrow, it's back to work while we back and finish moving our office. Happy Monday!