Where Should I Start

It's been a while, and there are a bunch of pictures and things I wanted to talk about so here goes

Indian food,

We're about to start looking for the ingredients for our chosen indian food, and I'm worried that I won't be able to find/identify some of these things. Does any one know where/how to find the following: garam masala, cardamon pods, fenugreek leaves, chaat masala? I'm heading to the grocery store today, and we'll see what I can find...

Piano

I've been wanting to aquire(not buy) a piano for quite some time, and a series of events came together to make that posible. Pianos are heavy. I was aware of this, but had still underestimated. I bought two furnature dollies, and borrowed a trailor and a truck(more on this later). I contracted two sets of elders to meet me at the pick up spot(they where paid in a home made lunch), and the five of us still had a difficult time getting it down the five front porch steps and lifting it into the back of the trailor. Once we got to our house, I had an even more difficult time trying to back up into our drive way. How do other people back up with trailors? I don't think I'll ever try that again with any other options. Once the trailor was backed up in our driveway, we unhitched it and manhandled it into our back yard and at a funny angle to our back poarch. Getting it off the trailor and onto the poarch wasn't as difficult as we'd imagined, but it turned out that it wouldn't fit through the sliding glass doors. Once I'd removed one of the doors(the other wouldn't lift out), there was a clearance of 1/2 an inch at the widest part of the piano. Of course, that clearance only existed if the five of us could have gotten the piano casters(wheels) lifted over the ledge and maintained the piano in a perfectly level state. This was not the case. While trying to use the "brute force", or "primative Pete" meathods of entry, the piano tilted into the house and was then dropped back to its original position. This caused the piano to slam down onto it's castors, and snap one of them clean off. Undaunted, we brute Peted our way through the door, and ripped off the other caster pushing it the rest of the way through the door. So now my piano is resting on some 2x4s.

Waterslide

A little while ago, we bought a bonzai waterslide in a garage sale. When we got home, we found that there was a large rip in one of the panels. No big deal. It came with patches. Big deal. The un-opened tube of adhesive only had about a split pea size drop in it. After going to the store to get some more, we ran into destructo dog problems. Bubu had decided that the slide would make a wonderfull chew toy, and had ripped out a much larger gaping hole in another panel.

Patriotism

So, I went a bought some duct tape and I fabricated the entire panel.

A sister in our ward borrowed our van to take some young women to youth conference and left us her 1978 Dodge pick-up.

Between the truck and the duct tape fix, I've never felt more American in my life.

Or maybe it's Redneck I feel...

I guess the question I need answered now is, should I put the piano up on cinderblocks?