There's an App for That

The reason I haven't posted anything for a couple days is that we've actually been able to get out of the house and do stuff, so I haven't had much leisure time to spend with my laptop.   So, where did I leave off?

Thursday evening we picked Ben up at the hospital and all went out to dinner at a local Thai restaurant.  It was great to get out of the house for something other than a trip to the hospital or grocery shopping, and the food was good, too.

Friday Josh and I borrowed one of Ben & Laada's cars and I drove Josh to a nearby barbershop (which turned out to be across the street from the Thai restaurant) to get a much-needed haircut.

This has been one of those trips where I don't know how I could have done it without my iPhone.  Not only is it invaluable for keeping in touch with people via phone/text/email, but I was able to use the Yelp app to find a barbershop near Ben's house with good reviews that only charges $15, and then use the GPS to map out a driving route.  I don't enjoy driving in general, so driving an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar city when it's raining is even less appealing, but it was a lot less stressful being able to figure out exactly how to get where we were going first.

After the haircut, we took a little walk, which brought us to Top Pot Doughnuts. It shares a similar claim to fame as Ray's Hell-Burger in Arlington, in that President Obama paid a visit when he was in town.  After letting one of the employees talk us into buying a dozen donuts, we stopped at a cafe across the street for lunch, and then picked up some groceries on the way home.  Josh was pretty wiped out after all that, so he took a nap as soon as we got home.

Meanwhile, Ben was trying to find a way to keep track of his diet on his new iPhone.  He has to eat a lot of protein, but needs to watch his potassium and sodium intake.  He was initially looking for a way to download a spreadsheet program, but I suggested he look through the app store to see if they had some kind of diet tracker app.  Of course he found dozens of them.  While he was trying to sort through all the options, I booted up my laptop and searched through the app store myself.  Sure enough, there's an app called KidneyDiet.

While Josh was sleeping, Laska and I tagged along on a trip to the mall with Josh's aunt Priscilla and cousin Portia and baby Nora.  It was nice to have a little time off from tending to the kidney brothers.

In the evening, Josh and I went out to dinner with our friend Rob, who flew out from DC for the long weekend.  It was fun to catch up with him and hear about the various goings-on that we've missed while we've been on the West Coast.

This morning we went on a family expedition to a funky neighborhood of Seattle called Fremont, which is apparently the Center of the Universe.  Who knew?  They have a troll that lives under the bridge and eats cars (that's a VW Beetle in its hand).

  Here's Josh and Laska waiting for a chance to pose in front of the troll -- it's a popular thing to do...

After a quick lunch, we piled back into the car and drove to the Crest theater to see Megamind, which  I think we all enjoyed.

When we got back to Ben's house, Ben and Josh promptly fell asleep, and I got to work packing up our stuff and loading it into one of Ben & Laada's cars, which they lent us for the rest of the week.  I dragged Josh off the couch around 5 and drove us down to aunt Priscilla's house.  While we enjoyed spending time with Ben, Laada, Laska, and Larissa, after two weeks at their house we were ready for a change of scene.  And I'm sure they were glad to have the house back to themselves, since they had already had two weeks of house guests before we even got there.

We had dinner with our friend Rob again this evening.  It was a lot of activity for Josh for one day, but he did great.  He's still improving day by day.