Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

 Have you ever run into a friend in a place you weren't expecting them to be? I have stumbled into a Utah nursing classmate years later in Texas, a Texas friend in DC, and Utah relatives in Missouri--all unplanned--but for some reason I wasn't nearly as shocked for those as I was when I ran into my husband in Idaho Falls. As a reminder, we had traveled to Idaho Falls together, but honestly he was the last person I was expecting to see in the restaurant. The "Ploughman's Melt" and the "Oinker" It goes like this: I have a friend (from Texas) who moved to Idaho Falls with her husband, so when I'm in the area, I like to see her [aka Melissa]. Mark (from Idaho Falls) has friends who are still in the neighborhood, and he likes to meet up with them when he's in town. Thus, when we were in Idaho earlier this month, we arranged to hang out separately with our respective friends. Mark had plans to go to some particular restaurant [with the word "Eagle

 [Just some meta-writing here. Isn't it great how the title can mean "Idaho & me" as well as "Idaho home"?] Scrolling through my pictures of the Idaho part of the trip, I get the impression that we spent most of it in a museum or zoo...but mostly the zoo.  And that's where words are important, because no, I didn't take pictures of the "Olympic Swimming Aerobics" class I went to with my mother-in-law, or the mornings where we just chilled in the living room [and maybe watched "Leave it to Beaver" with my father-in-law]. I also didn't photograph the meals at their home with the time-honored plate and flatware settings, the trivets, and the rotating placemats [this is why Mark is better at proper table-setting than I am]. Or a compilation of my losses at bowling, blacklight miniature golf, or anything else that requires hand-eye coordination. Also, no pics of our rounds of hand-foot canasta [or the one-page list of rules for the

 I just got back from a long-overdue visit with my family. Lots happened. So we're going to take this recounting in stages. Stage 1: Airports First thing to confess is that I had a lot of problems with my water bottle. I bought a liter of water after passing through the security check, and amazingly I dropped it at least a dozen times in 3 different airports, all in one day. When we later started our trip back home, for some reason the TSA threw out my [empty] bottle, so I once again purchased a liter of water and unsurprisingly dropped it on the floor. Mark told me that I was allowed one more bottle-drop, and then he would have a coronary. Fortunately for his health, I did not  drop it again...but I did leave it in an airport shop and have to go back (minutes later) to retrieve it.  May this not be a foreshadowing of how I manage future children. Really, that's all I've got for airport stories [oh, except for the little vignette that Mark and I tried some "salted Cook