Last night RO and I went over to Matt and Sandy's for dinner and a movie. We watched Virus. What a bad movie. It wasn't even fun-bad.

RO and I went on a wine tour of Eastern WA. It was a bus tour with 40 others, including Matt.

We did stop at one great winery-- Apex Cellars. The others were nice, but not exceptional.

My parents left this morning. They have a wedding in Winnipeg this Saturday so they are off RVing across half the continent.

I actually enjoyed their visit. I wish I could have spent more time with them, but that didn't work out. Oh well. I'll see them at Christmas.

My parents really like the store.

Over the weekend it was Kent Cornucopia Days-- a large street fair. The fair ran right past our store. It created a lot of traffic for us. We doubled our usual weekend sales.

There were some problems though. The midway attracted lots off teenagers till late in the night. Saturday night a bunch of teenagers were walking behind our store when two of them started fighting. RO and I were just pulling in and saw it all happen. RO started honking his horn and I got out and shouted at them. They quickly disbursted. One of them grabbed a fountain pump that was laying behind the store. I shouted for him to drop it. He did and walked off.

We went out of dinner. When we came back more teenagers were hanging out behind the store. They weren't doing anything wrong, but we got them to leave. I don't want dozens of people hanging out behind the store. There is no reason to be there.

RO and I spent Saturday night at the store. Nothing happened during the night.

My parents are in town. I love my parents very much, but we are very different people. In their hearts they are good tolerant people, but I know they are uncomortable around gay people, so I wonder how they feel about staying at my house with three gay men.

I know my dad get's quiet when anything gayish pops up in the conversation.

Last night, our neighbour Ross came over for dinner. Ross and his partner live four houses down from RO and I, yet we rarely see them.

Ross is a train engineer. He told us that trains regularly run over people. We are in a bad stretch right now. In the last three months as many people of died from train accidents in our state as usually die in a year.

Many of them are suicides. Some of them are stupidity. If there are two sets tracks side by side people forget that trains don't always travel along the right track. He told us about a lady who put some pennies down on the right track, then stepped back to the left track where Ross promptly ran into her.

So, RO couldn't take all of Sunday off. He had to to open up the store and to fix up some displays.

RO and I met up for lunch. You could see that he was tired. Lunch started off nice, but both of us ended up with the runs.

So, it was a crappy day off. And then Boone called from the store. They had just finished a very large sale-- as much as we normally sell in five days. Within seconds I could feel my stress and tension fade away. It was like an instant vacation.

I didn't think I was that motivated by money, but knowing that July will probably be a strong month for the store helps.

RO and I are getting mentally tired,

Originally we planned on taking Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off. Then a large vendor for the store shipped us three palates of furniture. We scheduled delivery for Wednesday, so that we could leave for our trip Wednesday afternoon.

Well, there were missed calls and miscommunication between the truck driver and our wharehouse. We didn't get the shipment. It took a day and a half of calling around to find out where our furniture was, and to reschedule delivery for Friday.

So, instead of a nice short vacation, RO and I had three days of stress.

We are going to take Sunday off.

Of course, the down side to owning a store is that there are quiet days. Very quiet days. The kind of days where you sell less than what you need to pay your bills. Although, we knew it would be quiet this week. Many people take vacation this week and we're not a vacation destination-- yet.

We did have three different couples from California drop by our store for a little gift shopping.

One of the fun parts of owning a store is that some of our customers are very interesting and I get to chat with them.

On Sunday a lady who is a medic for the U.S. Coast guard dropped in. She told us some of here tales of riding ice breakers up to the Arctic and down to the Antarctic. RO said he was jealous of her. The lady told him to not be. Yes, sometimes she experienced wonders that very few people will ever see. But, most of the time you are very bored. You can't get away from the ship or shipmates for weeks. And if there is an emergency, real help can be thousands of miles away.