Summer update.

All-you-can-eat. Running son won a pair of gift certificates for Sweet Tomatoes restaurant at his 4th of July race. After meditation, he decided that he'd take his friend, a member of the Teen Boy Squad, and they'd stay all day, taking the "all you can eat" premise to its fullest possible extent. They borrowed my older son's laptop for DVD viewing, took a GameBoy, and spent the day. Findings: the actual menu at Sweet Tomatoes, broken into categories, is approximately seven items: salad, soup, bread, ice cream, pasta, and a couple of other things. You can actually stay at Sweet Tomatoes all day and no one will call you on it. "We've been here since noon," they told a member of the waitstaff, late in the day. "Is that right," she replied. You can take a nap at Sweet Tomatoes. You can watch movies (Tommy Boy and Dumb and Dumber) and no one will bother you.

[I think it's clear that I wish I were a teenage boy, at least sometimes.]

I love trivia. Last night the historian and I were with my family, celebrating my sister's birthday up at a condo timeshare in Park City. The evening concluded with some rousing game -playing, led out by my son-in-law. We played 90s Trivial Pursuit, which was pretty darn fun, girls v. boys. The girls held their own, but the boys surged ahead when the girls fumbled a question about NBA players who had done WWF wrestling (oh! the shame, when I did not remember that Karl "the Mailman" Malone wrestled under the moniker "The Mauler"! and my homegirls talked me out of venturing it as a guess!), whereas the son-in-law knew that Master P had tried out for the Toronto Raptors. Oy! Still, it's fun just to play the game, and I would like to call on all SLC bloggers to have a Trivial Pursuit tournament sometime before the summer is over.

Poor Betty. Betty, despite being nine years old by the vet's estimate, and despite the vets having located what they said was a spay scar on her abdoment, is in heat. What? Are you f***ing kidding me? we said. Anyone who's ever had an unspayed female dog (disclosure: not me) knows, then, the messy ramifications of this event. Oh, the indignity, though it should be said that it has not affected her overall sweet temperament. And she has to be spayed, at her advanced age, once this is all over. Jeez. Sometimes it's hard to be a woman.

Job change. College daughter has resigned from her position as Membership Champion at Sam's Club and is now a Sandwich Artist again. Even though this means she will come home smelling of meat and vinegar for the remainder of the summer, I feel we should raise a glass to honest labor. Hear, hear!