You may be thinking I mean the band - I do love them, but I really truly love the Warren, Emily, and Diana Smith Smiths with whom I:
- had Thanksgiving dinner: curried butternut squash soup with cilantro lemon yogurt, ham, scalloped potatoes with cream and italian mushrooms, cranberry sauce, rosemary rolls and red velvet cake for dessert.
- went to the Desert museum! It was beautiful and interesting: coyotes, snakes, desert flowers, parrot varieties.
- went to an ostrich ranch and took a monster truck tour there - as well as had many little lorokeet birds nibble on our necks, drink nectar from little cups in our hands, collide and poop above us in excitement. Diana was really fearless and marshaled the deer around her in the petting zoo adjoining the ostrich farm - her little hand completely sucked in by the slobbery deer mouths, she even got bit by an ostrich a the ostrich feeding cage and bounced back in no time to continue feeding them. We "fished" for ostriches as part of the monster truck tour of the ranch with grapefruit chunks and fishing poles. We fed goats that were in this two story shed thing with little holes that they stuck only their heads through - well, one stuck a paw through too. Diana stuck her head in through one of the empty ones! I know, this place sounds surreal - it is. Tucson is another realm, truly. Tim Burton's suburbia (from Edward Scissorhands) meets Dr. Seuss horticulture. The ranch is owned by self proclaimed red necks from Oklahoma. What else?
Ostrich meat is apparently miracle meat and
Ostriches are great with their diva-long theater eyelashes and their gray gulletty necks and over-dramatized ballet dancery stances with that killer middle toe with hooked nail! They are dinosaur birds who become docile when socks are put over their heads and whose beaks turn red during mating season. (Overwhelming amounts of experience occurred to me at that Ostrich ranch on the mountain down there north of Tucson.)
- went to In n' Out down there in Arizona. Provo has a new In n' Out and it is a phenomenon.
- had carne asada from a little Mexican place!
- watched Star Trek and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Enchanted
- talked, read scriptures, read stories to Diana, played with this wonderful little girl - she is precocious and loving, sensitive, sensible, and is fearless about dancing (like Warren somehow) and sharing like Emily (and Warren). This girl is doomed - by her wonderful parents - to be always wonderful.
