[Feanor of the Peredhil]

that anything said by Brinn or Mira about me getting us so spectacularly lost en route home from the airport last week that a fifteen minute car trip down NY-17 took over an hour and a half... is utter rubbish.

They are inventing it all. Yes, they may include many believable details, such as, "she missed the exit and decided to take back roads instead," or "I tried to called Kelly in a panic, but by then Fea had driven out of range of cell phone service!!!" but as I said before, these things are simply untrue.

Any mention of the pretty deer that we had to stop for, any discussions about how we cheered when we met with roads that had painted lines again... should be met with a raised eyebrow, as we all know that I - Fea - never get anything wrong.

Of course then we got home, and more or less settled in.

For about fifteen minutes.

At which point my only non-Barrowdowner room mate (how did this happen!? Kelly is Nienna now!) ran outside to greet her father and sister; her sister (age 14) would be staying with us for the weekend.

A few hours after Nienna and Lari got off of work, more of our friends arrived for the weekend! Brinn took it like a champ, I'd merely like to add: when I first invited her down for spring break, I had no idea we'd be splitting the bathroom eight ways over the weekend.

"It'll be insane until Sunday afternoon," I said upon learning how many people would be here,, "and then it will die."

And lo! On Saturday Night of the first weekend, we went to my favorite pub, and that was good.

It was hard getting us all to behave long enough to hold still for a tasteful photograph that barely involved tequila in any way, but - from left to right - Lari, I, Mira, and Brinn did in fact manage to hold still for photographer-Nienna while our various friends looked on in amusement.

It wasn't long after - a few hours at most, of french fries and cocktails- that I went to the bar to buy a drink for one of the girls, only to return with two drinks in hand! The flannel-clad smoke-scented drunk fellow at the bar had insisted I try what he was drinking.

Eyebrows raised upon my return. Why did Fea have this spare double shot of bourbon in her left hand? She already had a concoction that tasted - cloyingly - like bubblegum. I briefly explained.

Have you heard of awkward turtle? Well, it was a bit more awkward than awkward turtle... With nine young women around some pushed-together tables in a pub with a band and a spiky haired bartender, this uninvited and thrice-declined drink signaled the commencement of an awkward hurricane, in which awkward turtle (me), awkward palm tree (the as yet unintroduced Libby), and awkward balloon (Nienna) all get blown around in an awkward storm!

The next morning, we made art.

As is typical for a Sunday in the Household of the Peredhil, we went to the ceramics studio on campus and made things out of clay. Nienna, Mira, and I went straight into teacher mode, as Brinniel and all three of our non-Barrowdowner companions had never thrown clay on a wheel before!

As Nienna wandered and taught widely, I moved in closer for more tailored teaching. Elbows in, girls. Show that clay who is boss! A little bit wetter, that's the trick. And then, once I'd satisfactorily thrown a few porcelain cups of my own, Nienna settled in next to Brinniel to trim a bowl and to offer aid that was barely needed. Brinn learns fast. She's certainly better at bowl-making than I was when Nienna first taught me.

And then... well, then the week exploded, as school weeks are inclined to do. With all of us busy but Brinn, the apartment exploded a bit as well. There were some classes skipped, some groceries purchased, some meals cooked (you'll have to ask the others for a review of my cooking), until on Friday I brought Brinniel to the Corning Museum of Glass, mostly so that I could take pretty pictures of her making things.

A visit to the Peredhil Household, you must understand by now, means obligatory art making. You see this very brave gloved hand? That was a Brinniel hand that was working with glass that was hotter than lava! You read that right: when that molten glass came out of the oven, it was over a hundred degrees hotter than your average lava flow.

Which leads me to Friday night, once we'd returned from Corning.

Early in the week, Brinniel had noticed Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit, DVD Edition sitting on one of our bookshelves. Friday night, we sprawled on the living room floor for a nerd battle of epic proportion.

"It's not the Misty Mountains..." you might hear hesitantly thought aloud.

"Ered Nimrais, guys, Ered Nimrais!"

"I can't remember," the occasional Barrowdowner would groan, at which point another might yell out, "The answer is 'doubt'!"

One of my favorite moments was surely Mira joking that she ought to do herself in for not knowing the answer to a question we all obviously knew but her: the answer was Denathor.

I doubled over in my chair in a fit of giggles, "Are you going to do it while on fire by throwing yourself off a cliff?"

I tell you all this, yet the highlight was certainly yesterday's road trip to visit Rikae and half of Mac's genetic material.

We packed up our various purses and items of import, doubled back for a forgotten iPod so that we need not listen to Cindy Lauper on the radio, and followed the applicable Finger Lake north for a little while.

Upon arrival, we thought it best to acclimate our favorite little 'Downer-in-training to the terror that is Glaurung. She is a braver one even than Brinniel, who faced an art making process that burned hotter than the fires of Mount Doom! The child feared the avatar of Glaurung not even a little. Not even when it began to sing!

Of course a group photo with SkypeMac was obligatory, particularly given the amount of time we spent teaching him about awkward turtle. In honor of Lommy, Mac is now the world's leading expert on awkward penguin. I consider it a great tragedy that I did not manage to video Bubbles as he performed each awkward movement we described for him.

In effort to show you how difficult it is to organize a group photo of such proportion, I humbly offer my favorite of the batch, in which we are not all looking at the camera.

Of course in such instances wherein people must cram together as Nienna admonishes them to hold still, certain close relationships develop: Mac and I, it appears, shared a few accidental longing glances. I happen to believe, and others perhaps agree, that the most appropriate caption for that image is, "Fea haz cheezburger! Big Mac no haz cheezburger." This is, of course, subject to debate.

And now, I leave the details to the others...