So long in between!

I am really not as good as I like to believe myself to be at this whole blogging thing. Once again it's been a month since I last wrote, and an enormous spider in the garage prompted me to come inside rather than working on our garage sale (which, luckily, is about ready). I should have taken pictures of this spider, but it has to be the second largest spider I've ever seen. The first is the Hobo, which you have probably heard my stories of--as large as my spread hand. This was an ugly black sucker, easily two inches long, crawling around on the inside of our water heater cover. After standing still in shock and watching it, my mind went through the processes of what to do with it. I thought about taking a picture since I thought no one would believe me, but my first priority was to kill it. However, I didn't see how I could physically do so with just a fly swatter, even if I could get close enough to hit it. Josh is gone for the weekend, so I went to one neighbor, and then to another who kindly came over to help me out. However, after fifteen minutes of rearranging the garage (hard to do, as it is full of furniture right now), stripping off the water heater cover, and removing any place that seemed easily accessible, we still had seen no sign of the monster. Thus, I am inside, rather than out finishing up with the garage sale things. (I haven't told Josh the whole story yet--I don't want to worry him too much).
It seems like forever since I wrote last. I've been really bad about belly pictures, so I posted the two above pictures. The second one is at twenty one weeks, and the first at 22 (blogger seems to reverse the order). I'm now at 25 weeks, and people are beginning to notice, though most tell me I'm pretty small for 6 months. Funny, I don't feel that way!
We were able to take a real vacation a couple of weeks ago! We were gone for 9 days--the longest vacation we have ever taken together! We went up to Seattle, spent a few days in Victoria where we saw the Buchart Gardens, had tea at the Empress (a dream come true), watched a black bear walk across the road right in front of us(!), and just explored. Then we moved on to Vancouver and had a blast at Granville Island, watched one of the best Shakespeare plays I've ever seen (The Taming of the Shrew done as a western--this link will take you to clips of the performance), and saw the belugas at the aquarium (Josh is sick of me singing the Baby Beluga song!). All in all, we had a wonderful time. Pretty soon here, I'm going to put a flickr photo album together so that you can view all of our pictures. Watch for it! And here's hoping that my next entry won't wait for next month!