Thoughts from the Little Blue Marble

This Blog is Now Closed!

2011-09-22T15:06:00.002-05:00

I have a new email address, but for some reason I can't associate this blog with it, so in order to post I have to sign in and out and it's all very annoying. So annoying, in fact, that I have decided the hell with it all and made a new blog.

So to hear about what I'm cooking and what The Kitten is up to, please go to

http://meadow-lands.blogspot.com/

from now on!

Cookery!

2011-09-22T14:23:00.002-05:00

For some reason this last week I've had the urge to cook all the things!

Last week we went to visit a friend who just had a baby and so we brought them a casserole, an apple cake, and 2 blankets my mom made. This is the same friend I gave the little blue sweater with the star buttons, if you recall. At the same time I made another casserole and apple bread for us, and so my oven was actually full! I don't know if it's ever been that full before!

This weekend I made another apple cake to bring when we played Battlestar Galactica, only I used Frangelico in this one because I was out of amaretto. It was good but I think the amaretto version smelled better :)

On Monday I spent most of the night making chicken croquettes from my cousin's recipe, because there are several stretches of time where they need to rest. The recipe made 15, so I froze about half of them and we had some for dinner on Tuesday along with glazed carrots (I leave out the parsley and pepper from that recipe) and roasted asparagus. The roasted asparagus was both incredibly easy and good! All I did was trim the ends, roll them in olive oil, sprinkle with kosher salt and a little pepper and roast for 10-15 minutes at 400, but I think they were Ben's favorite vegetable I've made yet! he told me I should have taken a picture, but I was too hungry :)

And yesterday I made adorable little mini meatloves! They were so tiny and cute! That recipe made 6, so we have enough leftovers I won't need to make any main dishes for a week! I served them with leftover carrots and green beans almondine with well-roasted almonds, yum.

I have bananas ripening on the counter which are destined to become banana bread this weekend, and last night I had an urge to make chocolate chip cookies, though I resisted it. I might make some dough tomorrow and just make 4 cookies and freeze the rest, hmm...

I'd almost forgotten how much I love to bake! It's like doing chemistry but ending up with baked goods, it's awesome.

I told Ben I was probably reacting to the change in the weather, fall is coming so I want to make things with apples and stock our larder! He cracked up because by "change in weather" I mean it's down to 92 F (33 C) :)

I am excited though, I think I'm getting better at meal-planning and coordinating side dishes. It's harder than it seems to make a whole meal ready at roughly the same time every weekday! Growing up my family ate dinner together pretty much every night and it's important to me that we do the same, it's a really good bonding time I think, so we are all formal about it, it's fun.

Socks!

2011-06-14T13:26:00.002-05:00

I decided these were finished even though the pattern has the "POLICE BOX" embroidered in all the white spaces at the top. But in the course of making these I have discovered 3 things:
1. My embroidery is quite wonky.
2. Related: embroidery is hard yo.
3. I don't enjoy embroidering tiny text on knitting nearly as much as actually knitting.

So they're done! They took me forever because I ran out of yarn just after the second cuff and discovered it was on backorder until August. But luckily there are a lot of awesome people on Ravelry and one incredibly gracious woman sent me more, leftover from a project she'd just finished, and refused to accept any payment or chocolate or anything, even for shipping. So nice!

They also took a while because I made a baby sweater while I was looking for more yarn for these (I figured anyone who worked at NASA had to like stars against a blue background)

And I was getting quite sick of plain knit stitches in dark blue, much as I love it.

But they're done and I got to give them to my sister in person! We went out to see them in New Orleans, it was so awesome to see her and meet Dan! We had a great time and ate lots of delicious food, yum.

And now I get to knit something that's not blue! I'm thinking hot pink, oh yeah.

Travelogue: Italy!

2011-06-07T16:09:00.006-05:00

On Friday May 20th we left Houston at 4 pm on an Air France flight that went wonderfully! Shortly after we took off they served us a dinner that was shockingly good for airline food, Ben got chicken and I got pasta, and we both had a little cold niçoise rice salad, roll with butter, dishes of perfectly ripe grapes, block of cheese, mineral water, and raspberry cake for dessert. We didn't get wine (which was included) on the way out, but we did on the way back, and I have never really believed in matching food to wine until then, but man it made such a difference! We had a little quiche type thing for an appetizer then, and I had a bite and it was ok, then I had a sip or two of wine and took another bite and the flavor just exploded, it was so delicious I couldn't believe it! So I definitely recommend Air France and their wine.

We watched Season of the Witch on the way there, with Nicolas Cage (I know, I know) and Ron Perlman (Eee! I really think he's actually a Neandertal, he's so awesome!) and it was really good too! We enjoyed. I knit a bit and then we tried (and pretty much failed) to sleep for a few hours.

As we came over England the sun was coming up, so the flight attendants raised up the windows and served breakfast, which was a good way to reset your internal clock.

We landed in Paris and we saw French bunnies playing in the fields! They were so cute!

But the rest of our time in Paris kind of sucked. The flights had been chosen by Ben's parent's travel agent, and we had about an hour and half between them. But it took us 45 minutes to get off the damned plane and into the terminal, after we took the world's longest and most boring tram ride around the entire airport. After that we ran into the customs line, which we skipped after we begged an attendant to let us jump the line since our flight was boarding, then ran into the security line, which we also jumped for the same reason. Then we ran through the rest of the Paris airport and were the last people to board the plane to Rome, about 2 minutes before they shut the doors. So not that much fun.

The flight to Rome was thankfully short and I blearily tried to sleep through it but with no success. Also they didn't feed us more than a cookie or two, disappointing.

We landed in Rome with no issues, and while I thought I saw Italian sheep or possibly Italian cows on the way in, upon further investigation they proved to be Italian haybales. Bu tit was still exciting.

We had a shuttle to our hotel, so we waited for that while drinking delicious apricot juice, which I ordered after confusing the Italian counterperson a bit, though probably about the same amount as I confuse American counterpeople.

Our hotel in Rome was kind of, frankly, sucky. I wouldn't have picked it. The elevator was extremely tiny and scary, the bed was only slightly softer than the floor, and there was no way to turn on the air conditioning, and by this point we wanted it on. We live in Texas, where it is on inside every building pretty much year round, and it was hot there. We asked the desk people about how to turn it on and they said, Oh, it's controlled by us, but we don't turn it on until June. So that wasn't much fun.

We spent the rest of Saturday trying to sleep and not melt until dinnertime. We'd met up with his parents, who had been traveling around the Mediterranean for 2 week already and had gotten into Rome the day before, and went to a close by place. I had been studying Italian, especially the words for food, and "alici" was not the word for anchovies in my book, so I ordered a panzarotti with them to see what they were. Yeah, they were anchovies, bleh. But you know, I was learning. I also had an appetizer of awesome prosciutto with mozzarella, so it wasn't all smelly fish, at least!

And then we got delicious gelato on the way back, yumm.

Our next day was Rome! His parents asked me what I wanted to see, but there was no question!

The Colosseum of course! It blew my mind to be standing next to this structure that has been standing there for thousands of years, that so many people visited, that so many people fought inside, died inside, cheered inside, yelled inside. Ancient Rome has always fascinated me, they had such advanced engineering skills and citizens had so many rights and comforts that we think are so modern, but at the same time they could be so savage, owning slaves, women had so many rights and still couldn't vote, and reveling in the bloodshed here.

And I can just go there and walk where they did!

Craziness. It was awesome though.

Us in front of the Colosseum!

And the Arch of Constantine.

Our ticket to see the Colosseum also included the location of the Roman Forum and a lot of different temples, the

This is us walking, as it turns out, entirely the wrong direction to get to the forum and those temples.

But it was pretty! We wandered around for probably an hour and half in the bright sunlight, though luckily I had slathered us both in sunscreen before we left that day. Sunscreen is definitely important, we saw some people with terrible sunburns and what I'm pretty sure was sun poisoning later in the trip, but all we got was a slight burn on the front of Ben's neck where I forgot to put some the first day.

We passed the 12 stations of Christ, which is apparently a thing, and lots of honeysuckle or possibly jasmine, it smelled awesome and was everywhere, before realizing we were not at all where we wanted to be, i.e. somewhere where we knew where we were. Indeed.

So, wandered some more and eventually found

A field of rubble!

It was the forum, it's just declined a bit since it was built 2700 years ago.

We were also near the Temple of Castor and Pollux, which I was interested in because I'm a Gemini, so I took lots of pictures of it and played with my camera's zoom, which is rather awesome.

Zoomed out again!

Overlooking the temples, now rubble.

Poppies grew everywhere in Italy.

By then we were getting hungry and quite hot, so we decided to walk some more! Of course. We passed a cat sanctuary in the middle of a city block!

The kitties had free rein to wander among these ruins. They seemed quite sweet.

We found the Piazza Navona,

which is known for the Fountain of the Four Rivers

And also for having lots of restaurants. We were hungry but mostly hot, and here we had our first experience with water in Italy. The tap water in Rome was awesome, tasted great and ice cold, they still use some parts of the original aqueducts to bring in spring water. But you can't get it in restaurants, or it's very rare, at least. When you order water they bring you a bottle of it, a liter bottle, and pour you about 2 fingers width in a little glass. You can pour more, but still, not exactly what we're used to. Also, no ice. I think we saw ice twice while we were there, and both times in an iced tea, which we also saw about twice (it's my drink of choice, I'm not a soda person.) We asked for ice, but the waiter told us the water was cold, it didn't need it. Well, the water was "cool", it had been in the shade, but not, by any means, cold. To us hot and thirsty tourists, anyway.

I had prosciutto and melon, yum, then gnocchi for lunch. I don't remember what everyone else had.

After lunch it was time for, yes, more walking! We walked to a bridge next to the Castel Sant'Angelo, which was apparently the pope's panic building. When you're the pope you get a whole building, not just a room. We walked down and I got to touch the Tiber!

I touched it! I did not fall in, but I slipped a bit and got some Tiber mud on my jeans, but it came off eventually. Upon reflection I think I used the bidet cloths to clean it off in the hotel later, oops.

It was quite nice next to the river though, nice to be out of the crowds for a bit.

This is the Castel Sant'Angelo, though it looks like a barge to me.

It may not be a surprise to hear the pope's panic house is not that far from the Vatican, which was our next stop. Unfortunately the only day we had in Rome was a Sunday, and so the museum, and thus the Sistine Chapel, were closed. But we could still go into St. Peter's Basilica.

Walking there we passed an aqueduct!

You might be able to tell I'm an engineer, huh? I love aqueducts and the Roman skill at engineering amazes me.

Ben attacking the Vatican

It started raining just after I took this picture, so we hide under a colonnade for a while, then went through security and inside the basilica. Apparently we were lucky actually, it only took us about 15 minutes to get it, and we heard later that the line can be 4 hours long on weekdays.

I did not take any pictures inside because I considered it a church, though I think other people were. Oh well. We saw Michelangelo's Pieta, one of his early masterpieces.

It's now behind a glass wall since someone I can't even think of words terrible enough for took a hammer to it in the 70s. I actually really disagree with this, I think a railing or something would have been a better idea. The glass wall is rather far from the sculpture and really cuts you off from it, it's rather remote, especially compared to the David, which has a railing but isn't enclosed, so you can feel much closer to the work, like you're actually seeing the actual piece, not just a picture of it. But then, there are a lot of things the Vatican does that I disagree with.

The rest of St. Peter's is large and in your face saintiness. It was worth much more time than we gave it, but our feet were killing us by then, it was hard to even stand and concentrate on anything else. So we left after about an hour.

On our way back we decided to make one more stop and saw the Trevi Fountain! We threw in coins because his parents told us to, but apparently we did it wrong, or something. Whatever. It was fun.

Aww. Then we took the Metro back to the hotel. I guess we ate dinner at some point in there, but I don't remember now. Hmm.

After that long day, we slept well on our ~~rock~~ bed!

Knitting

2011-05-11T12:03:00.006-05:00

Well, I guess I have looked at my wedding pictures long enough, I can post some different ones. How about some yarn?

Pretty, no? Of course I can't knit it that way, have to wind it up into little balls. The cat finds this process fascinating.

And of course those little balls won't keep my head warm! Start with some ribbing.

Not enough to keep my head warm though, maybe some vines would help?

Or some flowers!

And end with some stripes!

Of course I look doofy in it, as I look in all hats. (Maybe it's not the hats...)

But it's pretty and I made it!

The hat is from a kit from a lovely yarn dyer named Tanis, which came with the pattern and the yarn. I learned Fair Isle knitting to do it, which is knitting with 2 colors in one row. It's gorgeous and soft and I love it and marvel that I actually made it!

I am now working on socks for Steph, which are stalled until a very nice woman from Ravelry sends me more yarn, a baby hat which is stalled until I finish another baby sweater and have enough extra yarn to finish the hat, stripey socks which are awesome but I'm mostly saving for Italy knitting, and awesome awesome purple wrist warmers which I can actually work on! And there's another 18 million things I want to cast on, including something with these gorgeous colors:

Wedding! Part 2

2010-07-26T15:11:00.012-05:00

We planned the wedding with the idea that the ceremony was for us, and the reception was the party afterwards to celebrate it, and like all good parties the focus there was on the guests. But the ceremony was ours, and it was perfect.

My friend Ryan played Truly Madly Deeply by Savage Garden for us during the ceremony, this is a video taken by my cousin of the first part of it. He did a fantastic job, Ben said he never really understood the song until Ryan sang it for us! At one point we looked at each other and went to kiss without thinking, and then remembered we couldn't yet! The priest laughed at us.

We had our ceremony in a public park, we'd reserved the Pavilion next to it but the park was open, and as it was a gorgeous day there were other people there, at least that's what I'm told. Ben says a few people walked just behind us during the ceremony, and apparently someone drove past at one point, but I didn't see any of that. I saw Ben's eyes and the pastor's eyes, and Ryan singing, but that was all. I was very present and very focused, but only on us apparently!

After our beautiful ceremony,

We were married!

We recessed to Three Dog Night's Joy to the World (queued up to 1:42) which is also my parent's ring tone on my cel phone. I love it!

We came back up the aisle and did a sort of receiving line where we spoke to everyone before they left their seats, so they could sit down while waiting. I hugged everyone then, and again when we went around to the tables at the reception, so by my count I got over 200 hugs that day! A personal record! The amount of love we got was staggering, it made us so happy to see everyone who could come out for the wedding!

Then it was picture time! Formal ones

And not so formal ones!

The ride back to the Inn was much more relaxing. We were so relieved to be married finally!

When we got back to the Inn, our guests and the rest of the wedding party went to cocktail hour on the Inn's deck, which overlooked the river, while we took more pictures. As we walked around in search of photo ops, some of my friends called down to us to see if we wanted drinks, which we definitely did! Long island Iced Tea for me and Jack and Coke for him, and they were fantastic, and also the only drinks we had time to drink that night! We made it to the very end of the cocktail hour and I snagged one appetizer, though I heard that the rest of them were delicious.

Then it was time for our grand entrance!

Uncle John brought his bagpipes, this is him practicing before the wedding, and he piped us into the reception! He has a tradition of giving each niece and nephew an engraved broad sword on their wedding day, and after we came in he piped as we walked through an arch of my father holding our sword and my brother-in-law holding theirs. It was fantastic and fun and completely surprised me, I didn't know anything about it until 5 minutes before!

And then it was time to dance! We danced our first dance to this acoustic version of Jason Mraz's I'm Yours. We didn't choreograph it like the couple in the video, but we've taken dance lessons together and know each other's style, and we twirled and jumped and sang to each other and he dips me so perfectly! My favorite memory of the night is that first dance with my brand new husband!

A very close second to that memory was dancing with my father! I am basically the female version of him, and we apparently completely shattered all the "Daddy's Little Girl" stereotypes, according to my grandmother at least, by dancing to Oingo Boingo's Weird Science! (From :10 to about 1:10) We had a blast, he loved it, it was perfect for us!

We successfully made the rounds of the tables and talked to everyone there. I didn't realize it but apparently it's a north-eastern tradition to give cards to the bride and groom personally at weddings, I carried a very pretty bag and received one from almost everyone on my side of the room, but very few on his. But then we've gotten a lot in the mail from his, and he said he had never seen that done except in mobster movies! There were a surprising amount of things that I assumed were just part of a wedding that he'd never seen, and vice versa, I had no idea weddings were so regional!

We did get time to eat, we kind of rushed through it but the food was good!

And then we danced! The dance floor was busy all night, the DJ was fantastic and played to our crowd perfectly! This is a video Jake took that's rather dark but you can see how much fun everyone had!

And this is a video with some square dancing with better lighting! This is much closer to how the reception actually looked. The little boy is the son of friends of my parents, and he had a blast dancing! I picked him up and danced with him at one point, but he looked nervous so I put him down, and he ran off. I found out later he'd run right back to his father and told him he'd danced with me, very excitedly! So cute!

We had cake!

Mmm cake :)

We had alternate tiers of sponge cake with lemon curd and buttercream and pound cake with chocolate ganache and buttercream. It was very good :)

I tossed my bouquet pretty much just because Ben wanted to toss my garter while singing Usher's OMG to me! I did not appreciate that song at all until he sang it to me, and then it was vastly improved!

The end of the night came far too quickly, as it does. Our last song was The Proclaimers I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles), and the dance floor was full of people we love! The DJ did the thing where he cut out the audio for some of the "Dadaundas" so we could shout them out, which is crazy amounts of fun! I danced and shouted and twirled and was married!

We did it! I jumped up and down in triumph after the last song, I was so excited that we did it! We planned a wedding! And it was perfect! The whole thing was absolutely perfect, not because everything we planned came out exactly as we thought, but because after it was over we were married!

Wedding! Part 1

2010-07-26T14:54:00.013-05:00

We have been married one month today! Here are my wedding thoughts and pictures!

We had our reception at an Inn, the Inn at Lambertville Station, and our rain plan was to have the ceremony at the Inn as well, so made sense to me to stay over the night before the wedding there too. Ben stayed in the bridal suite, so he wouldn't have to move his luggage, and I planned to share a room with my little sister, who was my maid of Honor. She ended up changing her mind, though, and decided to stay home that night. It took me a long time to fall asleep that night, I was very excited and also I rarely sleep well in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar noises. I thought mostly about how that was the last night I would be spending by myself for a very long time, and how much better I sleep with him warm beside me, and how those weird noises couldn't possibly be someone breathing in the room behind me oh god oh god. (They weren't, I checked. Several times.)

Eventually I feel into a restless sleep, and woke up at what I thought was 6:45. This was too early so I tried to fall back asleep, but couldn't. Luckily when I sat up I realized it was 7:45, and a good time to wake up! The Inn delivers a continental breakfast to your room, so I sat at the little table in the room and had a very peaceful breakfast looking out over the Delaware River. This quiet time to myself was actually very refreshing and welcome before the busyness of the day.

I got a shower and as I was getting dressed the best man's wife, our groomswoman Danielle, came to see if I needed anything and if I was ready to move to the bridal suite, where we would be getting our hair and makeup done and getting dressed. She and her husband are Ben's best friends from high school, and they were incredibly awesome the whole week before the wedding, the helped us out with so many things I can't even list them all. She went to make sure Ben was out of the bridal suite and into their room where he would be getting dressed, and helped me move the dress and my luggage down.

When I got there I hung up my dress and steamed the small wrinkles out and stared at it for a while. I hadn't seen it in 3 months, since I brought it up to Jersey from Texas in March!

Then the people started arriving! The make up artist got there first and started Danielle, since she would be leaving with the guys before we did. There had been a mix-up with the hair stylist that stressed me out the day before the wedding, but it all worked out. When I contracted her, I knew the approximate time for the ceremony, 5 pm, but not what time I needed to be ready by. I assumed I could just tell her when I knew, but it turned out she had another wedding that morning and so got there a little later than I would have wanted, but in plenty of time to finish everyone.

Once that was done it was time to get dressed!

My shoes! (I got a pedicure after this pic was taken and my toenails were a pretty blue!)

At this point everyone ditched me at the same time! They all went to get dressed rather abruptly and left me alone!

But it was ok because I couldn't wait to see this guy!

He looks so awesome in a tux! It was strange, the whole day I spent thinking about him and talking about him and getting dressed hoping he would like my outfit, but not actually talking to him! He wanted to be very traditional and not see each other before the wedding.

At any rate, I was dressed! We took some bridal portraits which I will have when our professional pics come back, and then it was off to the ceremony!

We took a trolley there, which was nice because a lot of people rode with us, like my parents and aunts and uncles. It was a beautiful ride, right along the banks of the Delaware, green and breezy in the June warmth, sunshine and blue skies over shaded water. I really wanted the wedding to feel summery, like a lazy afternoon in a shady field as the grass flows in the wind, and that ride perfectly encapsulated it for me. It was warm but not hot, the breeze just pleasant on our skin. I knew as soon as he proposed I wanted a June wedding, and it was perfect.

We arrived at the ceremony site! It was perfectly set up, even better than I had ever imagined! We had 2 coordinators, one for the reception which was part of the package at the Inn at Lambertville Station, and one I contracted for the ceremony site, since I was planning everything from Texas. Both of them did fantastic jobs, but the coordinator for the ceremony was worth her weight in gold. She cost me what I was planning to pay for chair rentals, and she was absolutely fantastic. She set everything up at the ceremony site, I didn't have to do anything, and I couldn't believe how perfect everything was.

We had our ceremony in Washington Crossing Historic Park, next to a pavilion. There were 3 trees planted in a triangular pattern which we used as the backdrop to the ceremony, and several others providing shade to the guests. We had white wooden folding chairs for the guests, and white rose petals lining the aisle. The coordinator hung the cranes I had folded from the trees both from the trees behind the pastor and forming the aisle from the trolley, on lines with crystals that caught the light beautifully. She did everything, I just mailed her the cranes and told her what I wanted!

I watched from the trolley as Ben escorted our grandmothers to their seats, carefully walking backward so he wouldn't see me yet! He was aided by the pastor, who was also awesome. I'm not religious, but Ben is, and his family is. After much much searching, we found our pastor online. The advantage of hiring someone you don't know is you can customize the ceremony completely, you are in charge rather than having to work with someone who has a set idea of how they do things, so it worked out perfectly.

Then the music started. Ben escorted both of our mothers down the aisle to Here Comes the Sun, which was perfect in the setting. Then our bridal party started, to Walking on Sunshine! I loved the music, we put a lot of thought into it! I love looking at the pictures while listening to the songs again, too :)

Danielle and Rebecca, Ben's sister

Heather and Ed

Kyle and Stephie

Eddie and Julianna! She threw 2 handfuls of rose petals, but then was distracted by the cranes!

Then it was my turn! I expected to cry the whole way down the aisle, but I was smiling too much to cry. I walked in, holding my dad's hand, to Enigma's Return to Innocence, a song we both love and felt was perfect.

Ben did not cry either, though it was close.
I have a lot of favorite pictures of him, but this one tops them all. Listening to the song again and looking at this picture, with him so caught up in the moment and my Dad there and our guys behind him I am crying now when I didn't then!

10 days

2010-06-16T16:11:00.001-05:00

Does that sound completely insane to anyone else or is just me? I cannot wait. I am seriously so over the moon about being married it is hard to sit still. The previous week and most of this have been a blur of

carrying stuff up way too many stairs carrying stuff down stairs folding paper folding paper folding paper printing feeding paper into the printer cutting folding gluing tying moving boxes up moving boxes down comforting the kitten sleep precious sleep purring in my ear boxes boxes everywhere why did I move decide to move in Texas in June? That wasn't very bright my mother is in the hospital again? Do we need to find one closer to the wedding? more paper mailing checks mailing boxes more boxes folding paper folding paper am I in Hawaii yet?

I will be soon!

Wedding!

2010-06-01T13:29:00.001-05:00

We are in June! 25 days til the wedding! I seriously cannot think about anything else. I can't wait!

Wedding wedding wedding!

Camping! Kind of.

2010-05-12T15:04:00.003-05:00

This weekend we celebrated our one-year anniversary of being engaged and me graduating school by going down to Galveston and having a cookout and camping on the beach! Well, that was the idea. Originally about 15-20 people were supposed to come, but then someone got Lasik and wasn't allowed on the beach, someone remembered they had concert tickets that night, someone else got sick, etc etc etc. So it ended up just being 5 of us. But we dug a fire pit and cooked burgers and sausage, drank lots of beer, played Vodka (there is one rule. It's "vodka." it's my new favorite game :) ) and made lots of s'mores. Mmm s'mores, molten marshmallows of deliciousness. I will post a pic at some point maybe.

So between the s'mores, beer and vodka I was perfectly comfortable going to sleep in the tent, well, until the wind picked up anyway. Just as I fell asleep the tent, which had been flappity all night long, got suddenly much more flappity. And then tent walls were touching me in ways in which I was frankly uncomfortable with. So I had to wake Ben up and tell him the tent had come unstaked, and then try to hold it down from the inside while he he restaked it! And that totally didn't work, so we emptied the tent, shoved it in the trunk, and tried to sleep in my car. Which also totally didn't work. So we woke up our friends and told them we were going home, and since their tents looked like they wouldn't last much longer they packed up too. We got home at 3:30 am, took quick showers, and crashed. Woke up the next day, made the terrible mistake of going to Cracker Barrel on Mother's Day because my hangover cure involves lots of biscuits, and came home and crashed for several more hours.

So it was a fun night except for the wind! We need to go out to New Braunfels for camping, but I'm not sure we'll have time before the wedding. The next several weekends are already booked with various birthday and graduation parties, too.

Monday I sent out the last of my wedding invites! I am so excited! I've gotten one rsvp back so far, though it was a no and it was hand-delivered by someone I work with, so it only mostly counts. 45 days til the wedding! I'm pretty proud of the invites, too. I ordered blank pocketfolds and we designed and printed the invites ourselves. We got additional paper from Staples and I cut and printed the inserts, and then I hand-addressed them. I hated to mess up my lovely invites with my 5-year-old boy handwriting (it's gotten worse over the years, I never hand-write anything!), so I got a spiffy calligraphy pen and did my best attempt at calligraphifing them. I'm soo glad they're done and I hope people like them!

Obligatory pics:

Eee!

2010-05-03T22:53:00.003-05:00

I just finished my last presentation, I now have a Masters degree in Physics! I am so excited! And now I can put all of my energy into wedding planning, yay! I am doing pretty well on that too, I just need a spiffy pen so I can scrawl my terrible handwriting all over my lovely invitations and send them out this week! 54 days, it's getting so close! I am very ready, I can't wait for it to be here. I hope it will be a great wedding, but as long as we end up married I will be happy!

More engagement pics because I like looking at them! I love my expression here:

And his here:

He's so cute!

Shower weekend!

2010-03-29T14:32:00.012-05:00

This weekend Ben and I went up to New Jersey to do a million and one things for the wedding! We ended up getting them all done, which was awesome.

We flew up Thursday night and hung out in the airport in Philly for 3 hours waiting for Ben's best friend and our best man Kyle to get in, and so got to my parents' at about 11:30. Ben's mom had flown in from Nebraska a few days before, so it was nice to see everyone, and it felt like a sleepover party!

Friday morning my sisters and I got our hair and makeup trials, and both Emily and Kristen did awesome jobs! We all looked gorgeous, which was good, because Ben and I were getting our engagement pictures done that afternoon, as soon as he got back from driving an hour and a half each way to the tux shop his cousin recommended.

We took the train into Philly and Kyle and Ben's mom walked around while Ben and I met our photographer, Isabel March. She was actually one of the first vendors we picked, recommended to us by the coordinator at the Lambertville Inn, Melle, and we both fell in love with her pictures on her blog. Having awesome pictures of the wedding is really important to us, I want to look at them for the rest of our lives!

Here are a few from this weekend. This is Ben being pensive, though I love his little smile:

Ben said he set that one as his background and has gotten lots of compliments on it already!

So awesome! They make me smile every time I see them :) I can't wait to see the whole set!

My hair amuses me. I'll have to get the pics we took right after the trial from my mom, I started out with lots of curls but after I got changed and walked around in windy Philly, all the curls coalesced into a 2 or 3 megacurls.

So after canoodling around Philly, we ate delicious cupcakes from Reading Terminal Market, which had icing piped into the middle of them umm so good, picked up Kyle and Ben's mama Polly and went back to my parents' house just in time for my Grandmother and niece's joint birthday party! Family parties are fun, it was nice to be able to see everyone and introduce Polly and Kyle to them, so they'll have met them before the wedding.

Saturday was the wedding shower! It was at a beautiful golf course and everyone seemed to have a nice time. We got very nice and generous gifts and wore silly ribbon hats and managed to talk to everyone there twice. I can understand better now why people seem a bit dazed on their wedding days, I get nervous being the center of attention after not long at all, and there was less than a third of the people who will be at the wedding there! I'll have to get some pics from my mom of this too, although there were some on facebook by the time we got home :)

We napped that afternoon, then had cheesesteaks and panzarottis for dinner. We went and got water ice and ate it in the car with the heat on, since it was about 40 degrees out! I love that there was still a line for it though. Then we went to a birthday party for a friend of mine and drank YuengLing, the beer of choice in Jersey.

Sunday we got up early yet again and drove up to Lambertville and tasted the food for the reception and the cake. We made good choices, I think :)

We were home again Sunday night. The Kitten watched the Discovery channel with us, she is so odd. She ignores the tv most of the time, but for some reason Life caught her attention. I told her I would record the Fish episode of it for her, but it was bedtime for Kittens and Mandas.

Sick argh and weddingness

2010-03-04T10:59:00.001-06:00

I hate being sick argh argh argh. I got an H1N1 flu shot Monday morning and started feeling yucky, by Tuesday my head was congested and pounding and my joints were achy and then I managed to twist my back in a weird way and pulled something I think. Stayed home from work Tuesday, which sucks because I don't get nearly as many sick days as I think I should have now, and tried to come in yesterday but ended up leaving at noon and going home and crashing.

I feel betterish today, but I hate complaining about my back hurting and being sick so instead I shall complain about weddingness!

I want to be done with the wedding planning already! I've planned so much why is there still more! We have the reception place, the ceremony place, the officiant finally, the photographer the DJ the hair and makeup people, my dress is in my closet with my shoes, my brideswomen have ordered their dresses, and I even just got some slinky things to wear on the honeymoon that look even better on than I was expecting. I am ready to be done! But there are still flowers and invitations and transport and the tuxes to go.

It's been kind of surprising actually, finding out what I really care about for the wedding and what I'm like, meh whatevs it will be fine. The cake, for example, I love to bake and I love desserts, I thought I'd be more interested in the cake. It comes with our reception package, though, and the place we're having it at has awesome food and awesome desserts, so I'm pretty happy to leave it up to them. We'll pick flavors when we do our whirlwind visit in March, and probably a shape and some sort of decoration, but I'm really not thinking about it too much. I think Ben actually cares more about it than me, which is fine.

The flowers are boring me to tears. I don't care about them, I don't want to look at pictures of centerpieces, I don't want to decide anything about them. I just want white roses and blue hydrangea to magically appear there and be pretty and casually elegant and not look overdone.

But then we ordered our wedding rings this weekend. I was not expecting to feel so emotional about them, but just knowing that soon we will be able to see them and hold them and wear them sends shivers down my spine. Soon I will have the ring that has the other half of our pattern on it, and he will have the ring with the perfect mirror image of it, that complements mine perfectly and that no one else will ever match. Our rings are gorgeous and I love them. They're one of the only things I'd picked out before we actually got engaged.

We also need our plane tickets to Hawaii for the honeymoon, actually. I should look into that too.

Morning of Terror

2010-02-05T14:15:00.003-06:00

It happened again. How could it happen again? Is it spring already? It can't be! I thought I had til May!

Last night I stayed up too late, there was just always one more thing I wanted to do. So I was tired this morning, and coming in to work on things that will never go anywhere while I wait to find out if I'll have a job and what it will be just isn't that compelling. It was after 8 when I decided I really had to acknowledge the morning and get up. Got my shower without really opening my eyes, as I do. Put in my contacts and looked into the mirror, and THERE, right behind me, on the wall where it had obviously just watched me shower, was a HUGE, full-grown, minion of hell! Terror and loathing filled me and I instantly ceded it the bathroom. They have wings here! Who knows what it was planning!

I did the only thing I could do, other than curl into a ball, whimper, and figure out how to teleport to the surface of the sun where I could be clean of this abomination. I called Ben at work and sobbed incoherently. Luckily this is a prearranged signal between us, and he correctly interpreted it as, "Please come save me from the hideous freak of nature that is attacking me!" (By attacking me I mean existing in sight of me. It's a mental attack.)

He is most wonderful person on earth, and the only one I know who would leave work to come rescue me from a cockroach, and that is one of the many reasons I am marrying him. But he hasn't yet learned how to teleport to me immediately, despite my clear wishes on the subject, and so it took him ten minutes to get there.

So I waited. I couldn't allow the mentally-scarring beast to be unchaperoned, because the only thing worse than knowing a huge cockroach is right there is knowing a huge cockroach WAS just right there and now COULD BE ANYWHERE OH GOD OH GOD. Before I called it had been still, apparently hoping its huge, dark, disgusting body would go unnoticed on my cream-colored walls, but after a few seconds, and I am nauseous as I attempt to describe this, it began.. it began to move. Slowly, with gag-inducing motions, it extended its terrible legs and crept around my wall. MY wall! The wall I live in! Or next to, you know, near!

Its ghastly antenna flexing, it crept towards the shower. My shower! Where I had just been, completely vulnerable to it! I could tell it wanted to wash its own evil essence away, perhaps using my nice shampoo! I had to do something!

Acting quickly, I reached out and turned off the light. It froze, but only momentarily. It was emboldened by the return of the shadows! Perhaps its dastardly plan involved darkness somehow, shutting out the sun so it could more easily work its evil here. I couldn't allow that! I turned the light back on. Again it froze, but again only for a moment. Its long dark legs were still moving, still writhing terribly against my innocent wall.

The Kitten had since woken up and was attempting to console my obvious terror by rolling on the floor and waving her paws at me, but it was little help. There was too much evil emanating from the bathroom.

I called Ben again to inform him of the status of the hideous creature. "Ben, it's moving! Hurry!" He was two blocks away. I turned the light back off, hoping to confuse it just a little longer. Was its plan succeeding or not? How could it tell? It was clearly wondering if it could reach the shower faucet and enjoy the rest of my hot water.

Finally he was there! Looking adorable and capable in his bomber jacket, he came in and I pointed, attempting to stop gibbering in fear, towards the dark bathroom. He turned the light on and even he was taken aback by the size of the savage fiend lurking there. He closed the doors to prevent its escape, and then I heard it. The THUMP of victory. It was following closely by the toilet flush of safety and then the sound-of-hand-washing of peace.

Its reign of terror was over. I celebrated by only crying a little on Ben, and then letting him go back to work. Luckily his boss thought it was very sweet of him to overthrow the infestation for me.

Christmas Vacation

2010-01-04T14:41:00.002-06:00

Most of our vacation was spent not dying in a blizzard, this is harder than it may appear. Houston got a very rare half-inch of snow before we left, which shut the whole city down. About an hour after we landed in NJ, it began snowing there, and stopped a day later after dropping 20 inches of fluffy snow, which is about a 10-year occurrence there, not exactly common. It continued to snow in Omaha, NE, they got more snow on top of the 2.5 feet they already had lying around. So I am now COMPLETELY SICK of the cold and snow and boots and hats and gloves and coats and my hair exploding from static and dryness!

I HATE the cold anyway, it makes me sad and lonely to be cold, there is a reason I moved to Florida and then Texas! I have never been so happy to come back to Houston, it was glorious to see blue skies and palm trees and a complete lack of 3 foot snow drifts about. Of course the Houstonian lack of awareness that other people do in fact exist is made much more obvious after being in places where people actually realize that you are a human being and treat you as such, but you know.

Christmas loot lists seem to be the thing to do, so here is mine! First is a framed photo of B. and me from his cousin's wedding we went to last year, taken sneakily by his parents, and vying for my favorite present ever. That smile on his face makes me want to cry and sing and laugh and dance all at once, and when I am too blinded by it I look at his hands, holding me close, and oh I am going to marry him so hard!

Love love love.

The only possible contender is a letter written by my sister. This year she wrote each person in our family letters telling us how thankful she is know us, she made us all cry, especially my mom.

I got so much love for Christmas, it was more awesome than I can say.

I also got stuff though! More stuff than I can remember, actually, we shipped most of it so I get a second (actually like 14th by now) Christmas when it gets here.

But including:
Lots of pretty socks! I love socks.
A really pretty glass candle holder, like a hurricane lamp almost, with birch trees on it and a metal base in the shape of leaves.
Pottery from North Carolina, from my sister who lives there
A wedding frame for our wedding pictures, awww
Books about knitting!
A hand-made dice bag from my mom, it's really cool looking, I'll post pics
A signed copy of Storm Front, the Dresden Files book by Jim Butcher, signed with my name and a exclamation point! From our best man and his wife, who got it when Jim Butcher did a signing in Omaha. So cool!

And speaking of socks (I was, really!) I turned the heel on my knitted sock somewhere over Virginia, and picked up stitches for the gusset at my parents' house! It was surprisingly not as hard as I expected, I watched the sock videos on KnittingHelp about 10 times before I left, which really helped. The bottom of the sock is now 6 inches long, and I am almost to the toe! It fits on me now, though it's tight, and I will take pics but I need a pedi first :) It's soooo pretty, I love the yarn, I love the sock, and I am blown away that I fiddled with string for a while and now I can keep my heel warm with it!

I'm planning to get a pedicure and a haircut with Christmas monies, I think it's been about a year since I got a haircut. My hair is really long, longer than it's been since high school, but the ends need to be trimmed and evened out. I'm not sure how long I want it for the wedding, so I'll keep the length until I decide.

Overall it was an awesome vacation, though we were both glad to be back in our own homes and beds and once again be in charge of what we do and when. Travel is nice, not least when you come back.

Pictures!

2009-12-16T13:02:00.009-06:00

Us by the trees we will be married in front of in the summer:

Very romantic. I love those trees.

Also note he's wearing the scarf I knit him :)

Speaking of knitting,

It's a sock!

On four tiny needles!

A sock ready for travel:

Kitten graciously helped model the sock:

And also tried to eat the yarn, but that's understandable.

It's very pretty yarn. Here it is before I wound it, hanging with some friends:

Sock sock sock

2009-12-14T10:29:00.000-06:00

Sockity sockerson sockityness!

I started a sock! I have almost 2 inches of sock! It has ribbing at the top, and then is smooth, and it's knit using 5 needles, which is blowing my mind.

It's possible I'm a bit overexcited about this sock. Maybe.

I've been reading the Yarn Harlot blog and books,and she writes a lot about knitting socks, and they just seem so awesome, and I love socks, always have, especially bright pretty colorful ones, so I got sock yarn and tiny tiny sock needles, and as soon as I learned how to purl more or less successfully I started one!

It is full of tiny tiny stitches on tiny tiny needles, and I'm knitting in the round, as they say, so now that I'm doing the flat part I just do knit stitches all the way around, and it makes stockinette all by itself!

I had to start it a few times, the first time I started it I was unable to count to 2 successfully, so my knit 2 purl 2 ribbing got all messed up, but as it turns out I had messed up the cast on anyway, so I ripped it back and started over.

AND! I dropped stitches twice, but I fixed them! I feel like a real knitter and all, it's awesome. I used a video on Knitting Help and picked up my dropped stitches, and one of them you can't tell at all! The other got a little fuzzy because I had messed up the row before a bit, but I think the yarn is going the right way, just sticking out a bit.

I had no idea what my gauge would turn out to be, so I pretty much just started it and figured it would fit someone. It looks like it will be too small for me, but will probably fit one of my sisters. If they're lucky it may even get a friend someday and be a pair!

Home again

2009-12-01T18:01:00.001-06:00

So we're home again. I'll get some pics from my camera tonight so I can post them.

We flew on a plane and hung out in airports full of strange people, so of course we both caught a cold. Luckily we weren't sick up there, but we both woke up with stuffy noses and sore throats today. We might also just be allergic to Houston, it has some of the worst air quality I've ever seen.

And it's cold and rainy out, and I couldn't spend the day snuggled up in bed with the cat the way I'd prefer. Of course I'd always prefer snuggling with her to going to work, but you know. It doesn't pay as well.

There were people smoking inside at the party at my ex-best friend's house, and so our coats and the scarf I just made got all smelly, ick. The scarf is washable, luckily, and I ended up leaving my coat on my parents' porch to air out, figuring I wouldn't need it too much here, but of course now it's freezing here. Literally! The low on Friday will be 31 F! I can't take this kind of thing. I hate hate hate the cold, it makes me achy and sad and tired and grumpy. I need to live on the equator, or possibly the surface of the sun.

Our vacation was awesome though! We both really needed one. Thanksgiving was sooo good, my Aunt cooked and my Mom brought a bunch of sides, and they are both awesome cooks. Then we went to my cousin's ginormous house and B. beat him at pool, and only then told him he'd been up for 36 hours and hadn't played pool in about a year, which amused me :)

Saturday we went up to Lambertville and visited the park we'll get married in and the Inn the reception will be in, and went to the Church of the Missing Pastor to see if he was still alive. There was a lady there who claimed he'd "just stepped out," but had us leave him a note on what she said was his desk. Oddly she insisted we put it in a sealed envelope, which only makes sense if this "Pastor" is actually a spy and regularly receives secret communication from other spies posing as couples who want to be married. Even now he's probably busy decoding our message to try to find out where the documents are hidden. He's certainly not busy doing anything like, you know, calling us back.

7 months and 20 days!

2009-11-06T09:26:00.001-06:00

Til we get married! Tonight after work I'm going to pick up the dress I'm going to be wearing! It's in, it's bustled, it fits perfectly, I love it, and I cannot wait until he sees it. That won't be for the aforementioned 7 months and 20 days (and probably about 8 hours from now) when I am walking down the aisle, trying desperately not to trip and fall or forget how to walk, as I am capable of doing. I haven't had any more dreams about having to get married in jeans or a bathrobe since I ordered it, yay! Now I just have to figure out where to keep it for 7 months, and how and when to get it to New Jersey.

Most of the big wedding planning is done, the only big-ish thing left is the minor detail of someone to actually perform the ceremony. We had what seemed like a very nice pastor who was all set to do the ceremony, at least until he was kidnapped by dragons and held for ransom on the sun. Or whatever happened to him, I have no idea, because he hasn't returned emails or phone calls for 5 months. I sent my sister out to see if she could find him at his church, but no dice there either. So I need to see if his parents are ok with a non-denom person doing the ceremony. All else fails, I know one of my friends would get internet-certified for me, or since we're technically getting married in PA we can get a Quaker license and just need 2 witnesses for it.So we will be married, even if that pastor has accidentally traveled back in time and prevented his own birth!

Now I know perl and purl!

2009-10-26T12:57:00.004-05:00

My knitting instructor had to go Russia this week, so I am attempting to teach myself the second knitting stitch, the purl stitch. I got yarn in a color called Rose Camo, and it looks like a rose garden all mixed up. It is also the softest yarn they had, I love it!

I started with 26 stitches, and somehow ended up with a hole (bottom, to the right of center) and 27, but it's good practice!

Ben's scarf is coming along nicely! His is made using just knit stitch, but I like the wavy pattern it gets.

His is very soft and fuzzy too. I spent most of my time this weekend trying to figure out how to purl, so haven't gotten much further on his, but I'll do more of it this week.

The Kitten, keeping with her reputation as a strange cat, pretty much ignores the yarn but is fascinated with the knitting needles.

Wedding Updates!

2009-10-21T10:22:00.004-05:00

My dress is in! I had too many dreams where I was walking down the aisle wearing a bathrobe, or jeans, or my high school prom dress because I never picked out a wedding dress, so I ordered it possibly a bit early. But it's getting the bustle put in and I will get to take it home soon! Now I just have to figure out where to keep it in my apartment, and how and when to get it to Jersey.

My shoes are also in! They are incredibly awesome and I have to restrain myself from not wearing them all the time, I love them so much. I wore them when I tried on my dress and it is the perfect length with them on!

My brideswomen have picked out their dresses! I wanted them to be comfortable and feel attractive in their dresses, so I gave them a color and asked them to pick out whatever dress they liked. They ended up all liking the same dress, and it looks awesome on all of them!

We also (finally finally finally) have a wedding ceremony location! We will be married at the General Greene Pavilion in Washington Crossing Park, next to beautiful old trees and a green grassy field. Unless it rains, in which case we will be married in the Riverside Ballroom in the Inn at Lambertville Station, next to the rain falling on the Delaware. Unless something terrible happens to the Inn, in which case we will be married at the courthouse. Always have two backups, my father always says!

Because even if it rains and the food is terrible and the music sucks and my centerpieces are uninspiring and the cake falls off the table and people have to wait in line to use the bathroom, as long as we end up married at the end of the night, I will be happy. That is the goal, I have it written across the top of my wedding spreadsheets so I won't forget it.

The frost is on the pumpkins...

2009-10-06T12:48:00.005-05:00

...if by "frost" you mean 91 degree heat and "pumpkins" you mean the complete LACK of any sort of pumpkins whatsoever. Or apples, or anything else generally evocative of Fall in any way.

I went to North Carolina last weekend, and it was a wonderful trip. We drank apple cider and incredible peach cider and got lost in a huge corn maze and got pumpkins, it was a very nice way to enter October, which generally means Fall in most places.

Not Texas, though. It's definitely not Fall here. No pumpkins, no leaves turning, not even any apple cider in the grocery stores. The 91 degree heat and the humidity which makes it feel like 101 degrees (seriously) mean it might as well be July here, and you'd never know it wasn't by looking around.

I miss Fall. I miss apple cider and cool, crisp days with the vivid blue skies you only see in October in the north, and leaves falling and crunching under your feet as you walk along in your jacket, hands in your pockets and nose getting cold as you breathe the cool air. I miss the inexplicable smell of leaves burning even though no one burns them anymore. I miss the spooky feeling of being outside at night in October, an electric feeling no other nights have. I miss the nights cool enough to need an electric blanket, and the cats attracted like magnets to the warmth. I miss needing flannel sheets on the bed and extra afghans which hold me safe as I sleep.

Stepping outside into the wet-sock weather of a humid Houston is just no replacement.

We have a wedding posse!

2009-07-27T12:50:00.004-05:00

We finally got to officially ask everyone we wanted to stand up with us at our wedding, and they all said yes!

My brideswomen (I don't like the "maids" in bridesmaids, all of mine are grown women and that sounds so undignified to me) are my sisters and B's sister. When we thought about our wedding party, my sisters sprang to mind immediately, they are my best friends. I'm very excited to be getting a new sister out of the deal, also, and I can't wait for them to all meet!

B's groomsmen are his best friend from high school, a very great guy, his best friend from college whom I'm excited to finally meet after hearing so much about, and my sister's husband! B said that he was so welcoming and accepting of him as a new member of our apparently somewhat intimidating-to-new-people family he would love for him to stand up with him when he becomes an official member. He's so sweet! That must be why I'm marrying him :)

Our ringbearer will be my nephew and our flower girl my niece. They will be both be so adorable no one will be able to stand it! And my mom is going to hand-make the flower girl dress! Isn't that awesome?

Altogether they are our wedding posse, and they rock!

Cute email story

2009-07-23T14:21:00.001-05:00

From a weddingbee.com post:

This story is TOO cute not to share with every woman I "know"...

Recently, in a large French city, a poster featuring a young, thin and tan woman appeared in the window of a gym. It said: "THIS SUMMER DO YOU WANT TO BE A MERMAID OR A WHALE?"

A middle aged woman, whose physical characteristics did not match those of the woman on the poster, responded publicly to the question posed by the gym.

To Whom It May Concern: Whales are always surrounded by friends (dolphins, sea lions, curious humans). They have an active sex life, they get pregnant and have adorable baby whales. They have a wonderful time with dolphins, stuffing themselves with shrimp. They play and swim in the seas, seeing wonderful places like Patagonia, the Barren Sea and the coral reefs of Polynesia.

Whales are wonderful singers and have even recorded CDs. They are incredible creatures and virtually have no predators other than humans. They are loved, protected and admired by almost everyone in the world.

Mermaids don't exist. If they did exist, they would be lining up outside the offices of Argentinean psychoanalysts due to identity crisis. Fish or human?

They don't have a sex life because they kill men who get close to them, not to mention how could they have sex? Therefore they do not have kids either.
Not to mention who wants to get close to a girl who smells like a fish store? The choice is perfectly clear to me; I want to be a whale.

P.S. We are in an age when media puts into our heads the idea that only skinny people are beautiful, but I prefer to enjoy a treat with my kids, a good dinner with a man who makes me shiver and a have an ice tea with my friends. With time we gain weight because we accumulate so much information and wisdom in our heads that when there is no more room it distributes out to the rest of our bodies. So we aren't heavy, we are enormously cultured, educated and happy. Beginning today, when I look at my butt in the mirror I will think, "Good gosh, look how smart I am."

Wedding planning

2009-07-20T12:18:00.004-05:00

Is all I can think about! Apparently most people start planning their wedding when they're about 3, but I never planned to get married, so I'm making up for all that time now. I'm trying to spread out my excited wedding talk over several people, so no one gets so bored with it they break a window jumping out to escape it, but it's difficult.

The planning is going well, though! I have the reception site booked, the photographer booked, the pastor booked, the save-the-dates ordered, an appointment with my dressmaker, and my shoes bought! I'm deciding between a few outdoor sites for the actual wedding ceremony if the weather is nice, if it's not we'll have it in the reception hall.

We still need a DJ, to pick a place for the ceremony, and flowers! I'm basically planning a huge party, and it will be so much fun!

Well, hopefully. I want everyone to have fun, but either way, as long as we end up married at the end of it, it will be perfect!

He's back!

2009-06-15T11:59:00.003-05:00

My future husband is back on the continent! Yay! 3 weeks is a long time to be apart, especially if you were only engaged 2 weeks beforehand. But he's back now!

He got in on Saturday right on time at 4 pm. His parents were on the same flight, and since they had to pretty much exit the airport to get through customs and had a 4 hour layover, I picked them all up and we went out to a lengthy dinner. It was very nice to see them and they had a very nice trip, it sounded like. They told me all about where they went and how London was, which was very cool.

His sister had taken another flight home, through Chicago, but unfortunately the airline lost some of her luggage! Hopefully she'll get it back quickly. That's very annoying, especially if she had souvenirs from her semester in France packed in there.

After dinner we said goodbye to his parents and went home. I managed to keep him awake until about 10 pm, to try to get him readjusted to Central Time. It's so nice to see him again, we texted each other while he was in England but weren't able to talk on the phone, and I missed his voice and smell and hugs so much. I'm so glad he had a nice vacation and enjoyed spending time with his family, but I'm glad he missed me too.

He said he even missed the Kitten, though I'm not entirely sure she missed him. She ran under the bed when she first saw him, but was quickly convinced that he had all kinds of new things for her to sniff every inch of.

And he brought me back toffee! Toffee from everywhere he went! It's awesome! I had no idea there was so much variety in toffee, and it's all delicious. One of the toffees is in a gorgeous blue square tin, and another is in a red phone booth tin that converts to a coin bank when emptied!

Busy weekend

2009-06-09T14:25:00.002-05:00

I spent the weekend in New Jersey so that I could see my family and friends close to my birthday, show everyone my beautiful ring, and visit some wedding locations.

I got in late Friday night and celebrated at Wawa, one of the North-east things I miss in the South. Saturday my wonderful sister drove me all over South Jersey, so I bought her lunch and a pretty shirt. We saw two really nice wedding places, and I took lots of pictures to show my future husband. Saturday night my dad brought home cheesesteaks and we watched some shows he'd recorded and wanted to show me. It was very nice to be able to hang out with him and my mom when she got home from a cousin's wedding.

My parents' cat Frenzy, who had been passed through both of my sisters before adopting my parents, had lost a lot of weight over the last few months and was getting very rickety. She was never particularly social, though she always liked to keep an eye on what we were doing, but lately she'd become extremely clingy. She climbed into my lap for what was probably the first time ever Friday night, and spent most of Saturday night curled up with either me or my dad. By Sunday morning her back legs weren't working and she was crying out. None of us could stand to see her suffer, so my parents brought her to an emergency care vet to ease her way out.

She was sweet to Steph and the Kitten and a brat to just about everyone else for most of her life, and I never thought I would cry as much as I did for her. She was about 15, elderly for a cat, and she had a good life being spoiled by us. There's not much else you could ask for, I guess. I'm glad I got to say goodbye, and I'll miss the fuzzy thing.

So after all that, we comforted the dog who was very confused and wanted to lick everyone to make them feel better. I drove the tractor around the yard and moved compost, which was awesome and very good for taking my mind of things. Then after a late lunch with Steph, it was time for my birthday party.

It was a very nice party, I got to see most of my family and a lot of my friends. Everyone admired the new patio and deck my dad's been working on and the delicious kielbasa and meatballs my mom made, and had yummy cake. This would be about the time for my 10-year High School reunion, so I had my own instead, with people I was actually interested in keeping touch with. Steph made me an awesome ceramic wedding picture frame which I showed off to everyone, too! It was so nice to see everyone and catch up, and everyone seemed very excited about the wedding! There was much love, and it was awesome.

The weekend went by too quickly, as they always do when I'm home. Very early Monday morning I got up and saw my mom off to work before Rapid Rover picked me up to send me back to my real life.

Engagement story, the long version

2009-05-13T14:53:00.005-05:00

Ben and I celebrate the day we went on our first date every month, on the 12th. Usually we dress up and go out to dinner somewhere special, but sometimes we stay home and make dinner there. It's not too important what we do, we just do something together and don't let any distractions in. This month he asked if I'd like to go to Galveston and have a bonfire on the beach, which we haven't done since Hurricane Ike.

This sounded like an awesome idea to me! We packed up his mini grill, my set of lawnchairs my sister gave to me for my birthday last year, some food, some drinks and some sunscreen and drove down.

After searching several beaches, we found one that was clear and deserted and had convenient bushes nearby to make up for the lack of restrooms. We unpacked the lawnchairs and started the grill and poured the drinks.

The grill went out, blown out by the wind. We started it again, and it went out again. And again. And again. But after repositioning the car to block the wind and using nearly an entire bottle of lighter fluid, we had hot coals! The night before, I'd wrapped chopped chicken, red and green peppers, onions, mushrooms and lots of italian salad dressing up in foil packets. Somewhat nervous that the coals wouldn't stay hot and we'd have to eat at Taco Bell, we threw them on the grill and ate deviled eggs while we waited. And waited.

Roughly a million years later and after dark had fallen, we opened a packet and I cut into the chicken. It was cooked! It worked! Ben laughed at how wide my eyes got when I realized it had worked, I had really thought we'd have to end our day at a fast-food joint.

As we ate chicken and then delicious s'mores, the stars came out, much brighter than you can see in Houston. It was getting late and we still had a long drive home, so we packed up the car and got ready. Unwilling to leave, though, we held each other close and admired the beautiful view.

All of a sudden he went down on one knee and said,

You're everything I want.
You're everything I need.
(My full name),
Will you marry me?

By the time he got the last words out we were both shaking and crying and laughing at the same time, and I was hugging him so tightly I could barely say yes!

But I got the words out! Eventually we calmed down enough that he could actually put the ring on my finger. We stood there a while longer, admiring the ring and telling each other how much we loved each other, and looking at the stars.

The stars which are thousands of light years away, so the light we saw had been traveling through empty space for thousands of years just to fall down to Earth on that night, the night we were engaged to be married. I thought that was very awesome.

Eeeee!

2009-05-13T00:19:00.004-05:00

21 months ago tonight Ben and I went on our first date. Tonight we went on another, to Galveston Beach. We sat in lawnchairs and drank screwdrivers and grilled dinner and s'mores for dessert. We stayed until the stars came out, then cleaned up and prepared to leave. As we stood looking at the stars, he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him! I said yes!

May!

2009-05-11T09:53:00.003-05:00

It's May already! And it actually has been for a while! Here's a May list of what I haven't been writing about.

1. My mom came to visit me! In, you know, April, but whatever. It was so much fun! B.'s mom and aunt were coming down to see him, and his mom asked if my mom could come down too, so they could meet. I asked my mom and she said of course she could come! Apparently this is where me and Stephie get it from. I took her around to some quilting shops and a tea shop for lunch before B's fam got here, it was very nice. B was worried about what to do to entertain them, but I told him, they will want to sit and eat and talk, they'll be fine. And they did! B.'s aunt said she felt like she'd known my mom for years after talking to her for a few hours. My mom is so nice, everyone loves her. It was an awesome visit, and too short of course.

2. I'm done my finals! My other class goes until Wednesday, but I don't have a final for it, so it will be easy. Then I'm off for about a month! Yay! My summer class will run June 9th to July 11th, and I'll be in class Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, ick. But it should go fast, it's only 5 weeks. I have 1.0 more years of school!

3. Steph and I visited Heather in North Carolina this weekend! It was an awesome trip, we had so much fun. The kids are so cute and so much fun to play with, I can't get enough of them. Heather and Ed's new house is gorgeous, huge, and looks so nice with all the painting they've done. NC was so pretty, everything is green and lush from the rain. It was about 5 degrees cooler than here. It was funny, Heather said she couldn't believe how humid it was, she couldn't stand it, and I didn't even notice it! It was almost dry compared to Houston! We played with the kids and toured their mountain and went to a National Forest and a winery and shopped for pottery. I spent most of Saturday afternoon snoozing on the deck in an anti-gravity chair while the kids splashed in the wading pool and Ed grilled out. Sunshine filtered through leaves above me, a nice breeze, a cool drink, family next to me and happy kids running around, it was perfect.

4. Well, it would have been perfect if B. was there. We missed each other, it's very rare that we don't see each other for at least a few minutes every day. I don't know what I'm going to do for the million years he's going to be in England. My apartment might get very clean.

5. Tomorrow is our 21 monthiversary! We celebrate each month together. He had the brilliant idea of having a bonfire on the beach, which we haven't done in ages. I'm going to bring the telescope and beach chairs, and we'll cook out down there. I'm thinking about wrapping up cut-up chicken with peppers, onions, mushrooms and italian dressing in foil and throwing it on the mini grill he got for Christmas, it sounds good and won't be too messy. I can't wait! I haven't been to the beach in forever.

Happy Easter!

2009-04-13T12:23:00.002-05:00

We had a very nice Easter! I got out of going to 6 am church services, which B. was interested in going to up until I asked him if I should set my alarm for 5 am or not, so that was good.

I made a ham! A 7 lb ham, for the two of us! (It was the smallest I could find at the store.) I cut diagonal lines in it and stuck whole cloves all over it and cooked it with pineapple rings and cherries! It came out really good, and B. carved it very nicely. I made pineapple stuffing, which came out awesome as always, and bleu cheese rolls, which came out extremely, possibly life-threateningly, bleu-cheesy.

As I was cooking the ham, B. asked if I could make deviled eggs, which we both love. I started before I realized I didn't have any of the ingredients for them, so I tried to improvise. I didn't have any mayo, so I tried cream cheese, and the only mustard I had was stone-ground dijon. I had undercooked the eggs a bit, so I tried nuking them for a few seconds to cook them more. It kind of worked, but made the mix very lumpy. The only other creamy thing I had around was ranch dressing, which I mean B. loves, so I tried that. The mix tasted kind of,.. odd. I figured I might as well finish them, and I actually had paprika to sprinkle on them! They were still really warm and dinner was almost ready, so I threw them in the freezer for a few minutes to chill them down.

I kind of forgot about them until we were sitting down to eat, so B. got them and we tried them. They were frozen and crunchy on the outside and still warm and lumpy on the inside, and the filling didn't taste any better. "Bleh, bleh," was my reaction, and B.'s was only slightly more polite. Then the cat jumped up on the table in pursuit of ham and landed in them, which probably improved their flavor, but it gave us an excuse to chuck them.

Other than the disastrous eggs, it was a very nice day! I celebrated cooking dinner by taking a nap afterwards.

Weather

2009-03-27T13:05:00.005-05:00

Spring sprang a few weeks ago, it's been quite nice. Wildflowers are everywhere, blowsy little 4-petaled pink ones and white clover and of course Bluebonnets covering the mowed areas next to all the roads. The azaleas by the ponds here bloomed last week, huge bushes full of bright pink flowers. Last weekend the weather was perfect, sunny and 70 with a nice breeze. I spent most of Sunday afternoon sitting on the couch with the porch door open, letting the breeze ruffle my gauzy curtains, with the Kitten and a smoothie and a book. Perfect.

The smoothie was good too, vanilla frozen yogurt, frozen red raspberries, milk and just a bit of almond extract all blended together. I made a version with half a block of bittersweet chocolate chopped fine tossed in there too, which was also yummy.

I'd thought about going down to the pool here, but Boyfriend was busy, and pools are no fun by yourself. So the Kitten and I enjoyed the weather.

I planted seeds in the planters on my porch, thyme and forget-me-nots and catnip for the Kitten's garden. She likes to sit outside and stare intently at it, it's her hobby.

But unfortunately we only get weather this nice for a short time. The azaleas have already fallen. It rained most of this week, which washed the air clean and kept the temperature under 80, but it won't be much longer til I have to run the AC 24/7 like my neighbors. There is no break between having the heat on in the winter and the AC on in the summer here, you have to switch from one to other immediately.

Summer was always my favorite season growing up, but I think Spring has edged it out, in Texas at least. I really enjoy our 2 weeks of it.

I have the best boyfriend ever.

2009-03-19T11:27:00.003-05:00

I tried to go to bed last night around 11:30, but couldn't sleep right away, as I not designed for this diurnal life I lead. I ended up reading until about 1 am, then decided I really should go to sleep, as I had a 8:30 am meeting this morning.

As is my habit, when I decided I was really truly going to bed now, I went to formally invite the Kitten to join me. She likes an engraved invitation, but will settle for me chasing her around the living room for a while. When I went out, I saw her sitting in the corner by the front door, looking intently at the wall. I asked her if she thought she was in time-out, and went and scooped her up. When I stood up, my eyes followed hers to what she had actually been staring at, and saw the

HUGE COCKROACH

lurking right above my door, obviously planning an ambush!

I gasped in shock, seriously, and it is always a strange feeling when my lungs do things on their own initiative. I considered my options, but I don't keep Raid around because it wouldn't be good for the Kitten, and I hate killing bugs big enough that you can feel them crunch, *gag* and I usually miss anyway and then they run around my apartment and have time to put their hideous plans in action. And they all have hideous plans, I can tell, this one was just sitting on my wall getting all its little details straightened out and waiting until I went to bed to put it in motion.

So I called Boyfriend. At 1 am. To come kill a bug for me. And he came! He came right over and disposed of it, then washed his hands to humor me because he was near the bug, even though he didn't actually touch it. Then he hugged me for about 5 minutes and went back home.

I knew he would be awake, he's sleep-shifting because he has to work 6 pm - 3 am next week, but still. It was awesome. He didn't even make fun of me for it!

Oh yeah, I have a blog-thingy

2009-03-16T13:13:00.005-05:00

I had almost forgotten.

Highlights of the last month or so:

We went to Austin for our 1.5 year anniversary! It was really nice, we ate at a very cute restaurant downtown on Friday night. Saturday we went to the flagship Whole Foods, which is so big it has a parking garage, got lunch stuff and had a picnic in Zilker Park on the banks of the Colorado River. It was a bit chilly, so we sat very close and he kept my feet warm. It was a beautiful day, lots of people walking dogs, and all the dogs were extremely interested in the idea of food in their park. I took a very bad picture of us on my cell phone.

My dad came down to see me! He took a 30 hour bus ride after visiting my sister in NC to get here. It was a very nice visit. I took him to see some things we'd missed the last time he was here, and he entertained the Kitten while I was at work. He brought me rocks from NC! It was awesome, 3 of them are covered in rusty-red dirt, and 3 are nice quartz ones. Not only did he know I would love them, he literally rode a bus for 30 hours with a suitcase full of rocks for me! Best dad ever, seriously.

We met our friends' new baby girl! She is very tiny and cute. My mom had made her some very soft and fuzzy receiving blankets, and I had made some casseroles for the new parents, so we brought them and dinner over. Before she was born, someone lied through their teeth to the new father and told him that newborns sleep for 18-20 hours a day! I was very amused. She enjoyed watching us play Rock Band, though, so it was a fun night.

I've used my crockpot more the last two weeks than the past 6 months! I made chili verde last week, for which I tossed a chopped onion, chopped lean pork, a can of white beans, and 2 cans of green (tomatillo) salsa into the crockpot and cooked it all day. It was very good, we ate it in burritos with cheese and sour cream. I'm making kielbasa and saurkraut as we speak, because I had a craving for it the other day. Tonight I'm going to make irish soda bread and irish potatoes, and tomorrow make corned beef and cabbage!

It's very odd, you'd never know tomorrow was St. Patrick's Day down here. Apparently irish potates are a Philly thing, Boyfriend had never even heard of them. He's not a big coconut fan though, so I'll probably send all the ones I don't eat into work with him along with the other half of the soda bread, because my recipe makes such a big loaf. But mmm, irish soda bread for breakfast tomorrow!

Celebrate!

2009-02-13T09:22:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was Boyfriend and my's 1.5 year anniversary! We celebrate each of our monthiversaries, usually by going out to a nice place for dinner, but this one felt even more special than usual. It's a nice time to take a night off from everything we are usually busy with and focus on each other. I made braised beef short ribs, because the last time I made them he told me he wanted them all the time when he was old, not just because they're so tender you don't need to chew them but because they're so delicious.

Today is my mom's birthday! She is one of the most generous people I've ever known, I think sometimes she's given a quilt or afgan to everyone she's ever met. I have at least 5 in my house, and they are always warmer because I know she made them. My older sister planned a surprise party for her a few years ago, and I will never forget the look on her face when she walked in carrying her frozen lasagna and saw us all there. My Dad did a fantastic job keeping her out of the house while we set things up, though I'm still amazed she bought it when he said he needed shoes!

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day! Though I may just enjoy it because I like eating chocolate hearts. Boyfriend is a romantic at heart, so that makes it fun also :)

Christmas photologue - New Jersey

2009-01-25T15:41:00.011-06:00

Little kids are so much fun to get presents for!

He had so much fun!

She helped everyone unwrap their present, so thoughtful.

Sister and Boyfriend's surprise faces!

So cute!

We were all reindeer, but the dog was a bit confused by all of it.

Heather's birthday! The boys helped her blow out her candles.

Milly was upset we were taking her blanket from her.

Christmas photologue - Nebraska

2009-01-25T15:28:00.008-06:00

We baked 18 dozen cookies!

It snowed and was very cold (like 6 degrees!) This is the view from Boyfriend's parents' balcony.

His parents had a very pretty tree.

For some reason, they like to open presents at 6 am. I'm not sure why.

This is Boyfriend's surprise face!

This is my trying-to-be-surprised-and-not-fall-asleep face!

Why the Kitten and I get along so well

2009-01-25T14:48:00.001-06:00

Boyfriend says the reason the Kitten and I get along so well is that we have the same goals in life.

Find a warm spot to snuggle.
Look cute.

My cat likes watching TV about cats

2009-01-10T00:26:00.014-06:00

So this evening I took a nap with the Kitten and Ben played on the computer and watched TV. He recorded a show called Cats: In the Womb because he thought I would like it. I thought I would too, so we decided to watch it. The Kitten was fascinated by it.

I don't watch a whole lot of TV, but it's definitely been on before, and I've never seen her react like this to it. She watched the whole show with us!

She especially liked hearing the narrator say her name and talk about house cats. She wasn't as interested in the lions and would stop watching at each commercial.

She also liked hearing the mother cat purring and meeping. (It's a lot easier to see her perking up when the mother cat purrs on the original video; unfortunately, it lost some quality when I uploaded it.)

My cat is the funniest thing I have ever seen. Endless hours of amusement.

Where I want to live

2009-01-06T16:10:00.004-06:00

Criteria:

Palm trees and sunny beaches
Close enough to visit my family regularly
Has all 4 seasons, winter in moderation
Good hiking and camping and walking
Has houses that are not in developments
Good local government - schools, libraries, police, roads, recycling*!
The grocery stores carry gnocchi and prosciutto and avocados and nutella and stromboli
Lots of good restaurants, Italian and sushi and Indian and Thai and Chinese and pizza
Close enough to a city so that I can go to museums and theater when I want
Nice spas
Has people who don't call me "y'all" or "sweetheart" when they don't know me. Or "ma'am."
Cost of living is not too high

*Apparently Houstonians don't recycle because they are so "independent." Yeah, that's bright, wasting resources which are becoming scarcer is very independent, good job guys.

Oh yeah, and someplace I can get paid to live. That's the hard part, unfortunately. I love working in the space program, and I think it is the most important thing we as a culture should do for our future, but I am really getting tired of Houston. I don't want to buy a house here. I don't want to live here.

I've kind of kicked around the idea of getting a Ph.D and working for a university, doing research and teaching, and I think it could be cool. I'd have a lot more options on where to live that way. I'd probably focus on Astrophysics, cause that's what interests me most.

I just don't know if I would be as happy doing something that I liked in a place that I liked, if I'm not working on something I feel is as important to the entire human race as exploring and colonizing space. The space program gives us a direction as a society, something to work towards, something amazing that no one has ever even come close to doing in the thousands of years we've existed as a species. I feel that the work I do now, small a part of the program as it is, will someday enable people to live wherever they want, give people options about what planet to live on if we continue to trash this one and make it uninhabitable.

I kind of think of it like building Magellan's boat, I may never get to travel as far the craft I work on but someday people will cross the distance without thinking twice about it, and their lives will be better and richer and they will be more free than I can imagine now.

Maybe I can do research that is needed for space exploration, and help indirectly with it.

Photojournal - continued

2008-12-13T22:54:00.004-06:00

I got my hair cut and the color evened out, and my hairdresser blow-dried it straight. The first time I've ever had straight hair!

It was cute, but took her almost 30 min to do, so I don't think I'll be doing it myself! Ben liked it once he got used to it, but when I first walked in the door, he almost didn't recognize me!

We were supposed to go to a Christmas party tonight, so I baked a cake I will hereafter refer to as a Chocolate Ridiculousness Cake:

Yes, it has a layer of a creamy peanut butter icing topped with chocolate ganache dripping down the sides. Ridiculous!

But the party was canceled! So now I have a huge crazy cake we have to eat!

Ben and I split a slice, or at least that was the plan. He claimed the cake was much too rich as he finished the last of the icing :)

7 more days til Christmas break!

2008-12-11T12:42:00.007-06:00

The Shuttle flew over JSC! It's on its way from California back to Florida, and apparently when they fly over Texas, they circle JSC a few times, to let us see how cool it is. It's very cool!

I still can't believe that it's transported this way, it's crazy! Awesome-crazy though, not crazy-crazy.

I love seeing stuff like this over lunch. Totally worth standing outside for 20 minutes in the pretty-cold to see.

It snowed!

2008-12-10T20:53:00.000-06:00

It snowed! In Houston! And stuck to the ground, more or less! We got about an inch over a few hours. When I came out of work my car had snow on it, for the first time ever!

Luckily it didn't really stick to the roads, at least where they're not elevated, so I was fine driving my mile home after work.

Some people made a snowman than must have been 6 feet tall in the field next to my apartment, which was pretty impressive for an inch of snow on the ground! And when I walked into work, I walked over the grass and heard the crunsh crunsh crunsh sound partially melted and refrozen snow makes when you walk on it. I haven't heard that in so long! It made me remember trying to follow my dad's footsteps through the driveway after a snowfall when I was little, jumping and turning to try to land each foot in his footprint. Someone also built a little snowman next to my building, when I have no idea, but it's so cute!

One more Sunday

2008-12-08T10:07:00.002-06:00

I only have to work one more Sunday and then I will be done! I will have all the comp time hours I need this Wednesday, then next weekend/week I am flexing one more day, and then I will be done! I can't wait to go back to having 2 day weekends! I didn't mean to work the last 8 Sundays in a row, excepting travel; I wanted to spread them out more but then we got a hurricane and it ruined everyone's plans. But it will definitely be worth it.

I also can't wait until I am down with class this Friday. It was a long semester for one that was broken up so much by the aforementioned hurricane and a decent amount of travel by my professor. It was an interesting class, I like orbital mechanics, but it was hard to follow when it seemed we were out of class every other week with one thing or another. Next semester I am taking two astronomy classes, which I am very excited about, I like OM but I love astronomy. One class is on the origin of the universe and one is on the evolution of the solar system. I love having classes like that!

Diamonds, my opinion on

2008-11-30T16:51:00.004-06:00

I don't particularly like diamonds. I don't usually tell people this, because I know a lot of people who wear diamonds and every one I've seen is beautiful and perfect for the wearer, and I don't want to foist my own tastes on anyone else. But I would never wear one. I have some moral issues with them, but also, I just don't really care for the way they look. I like rocks that absorb some light, rather than refract it all. I like amethysts, and opals, and sapphires, crystals with pretty colors and interesting stories about them. The word amethyst actually comes from the Greek meaning "not drunk" because they thought it would protect you against drunkenness if you wore it or had it embedded in your cups.

Yay Thanksgiving!

2008-11-29T15:24:00.002-06:00

We had a very nice Thanksgiving at the home of some of Boyfriend's friends from his internships. I made sweet potato fries, brown rice casserole, apple pie, and a cranberry tart. Everything was very well received, Boyfriend really liked the cranberry tart, which was nice because it was an experiment and I thought I might have burnt it a bit :)

His friends Kara and John have a really pretty house a bit south of here, and love to entertain and show off all the pretty dishes they got as wedding presents. They made a very moist turkey, awesome mashed potatoes, salad, rolls and cheesecake, and another friend provided stuffing, asparagus and pumpkin pie. I love Thanksgiving dinners like that, among friends who each bring something different. It'd be better with family of course, but since we're going up for so long over Christmas we just don't have time over Thanksgiving.

Also, poor Boyfriend had to go to work at 7 pm, and the woman who provided the stuffing was working that day until 4 pm, so we kind of had to squeeze dinner in when we could.

Kara has been doing archery for fun, she's participated in some competitions and is really getting good. She showed us her set-up, she had a very modern looking metal bow and target arrows, with about a dozen little bits of leather that you wear in various places to protect yourself. Boyfriend shot off 6 arrows and hit the target 5 times, though he was shooting left-handed when he's used to right. I shot off 4 before my arms got too tired, and I managed to hit my arm with the bow string on one shot and give myself a gigantic bruise there. I got used to a tradition of propelling pointy things at targets on Thanksgiving at my Uncle's, so it was nice to uphold the tradition :)

Travel

2008-11-18T16:42:00.006-06:00

We had a very nice trip to Nebraska. The car ride is long, but I've always liked roadtrips. We switched off driving and sleeping. We left Thursday at about 7, stopped for dinner at Cracker Barrel so I could eat macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes, and arrived in Omaha about 12:15 pm on Friday.

We visited with Boyfriend's family and friends, it was very nice to see them. On Saturday we went to Des Moines for his cousin's wedding. The actual ceremony was nice, and since we had about an hour and a half until the reception we visited Iowa State University, half an hour away in Ames, where Boyfriend went to school. He had kind of mentioned it, but I hadn't really realized it: his campus is huge! Riddle was about a mile across, and then connected to the airport, but it could have fit inside ISU's campus several times. I don't know how he walked across it to go to class. We drove around it for about an hour or so, and I don't think we saw all of it. We did get to go inside his major building, and passed the dorms and apartments where he lived. It's always strange to me to see places that I personally have no connection to, that someone I am so close to has such strong ties to, so many memories of. It's odd the other way also, showing places where I have walked hundreds of times and experienced so much to someone who is seeing it for the first time.

It was a beautiful campus, full of old brick buildings and parkland. It seemed to be focused on the football stadium the way Embry focused on the airfield.

Then we went back to the reception, and I gummed some more potatoes and we danced the night away. I forgot my camera so I'll have to hope someone sends me some pictures to post. Apparently everyone liked my purple dress. Boyfriend said they don't give compliments directly in the Midwest, they give them to other people who then give them to you, which seems odd, but you know.

It is definitely a different world out there. I read an editorial in the paper on Sunday complaining that leftist college professors were leading kids into Communism, and that they should be watched more closely. Communism? Really? There are still people worried about that?

Speaking of being in a different world, on our drive back to Houston we decided that Italian would be nice for dinner, since I could definitely handle pasta by then. We were going to stop when we saw the lights in Wichita, which I still have a hard time thinking of as an actual place, but we missed it. There were no lights. I didn't have enough cell phone signal to search for a restaurant with it, so we asked for the closest place we could get pasta at the next gas station. The attendant looked confused and said, "Pasta? Oklahoma City, I guess." We had just passed a sign for Oklahoma City. It was 136 miles away! 136! I never in my life thought I would be over a hundred miles from an Italian restaurant! It was terrifying.

We ended up stopping at a very strange looking diner type place because we were hungry. There was a man wearing a huge cowboy hat sitting at a table with a straight face. I'm not sure how they do that. The food was actually ok though, I got roast beef which would have been really good on a hoagie roll with provolone but was still good over white bread.

We ended up coming through Houston at 6:30 am on a Monday, which was as much fun as it sounds. I had no idea traffic would be that bad that early, and I would never commute there.

The Kitten was extremely happy to see me, she meeped until I put down everything and picked her up and let her knead and roll around and purr on me to her heart's content. I hadn't thought to turn the heat on before I left, so it was 63 degrees when I got home, and she was a cold Kitten, poor thing. She was so cold she crept under the blankets with me and curled up against my stomach when I went to bed. She poked her little nose out so she could breathe and we slept the rest of the day. It was very nice to be home.

Solid food

2008-11-13T16:27:00.002-06:00

So after 2 days of tomato soup, yogurt and applesauce, today I ate solid food! Yay! I had leftover raviolis for lunch, which I cut up into teeny tiny pieces. After an hour I wasn't finished them yet, but I called it a good effort. My stomach was a bit weirded out that I was suddenly asking so much of it, but it was nice to eat more than 90 calories at once.

My mouth feels ok, it was a bit sore after all that chewing but feels better now. I'm ok as long as I don't talk too much at once or chew very much.

Also, ice cream is a bad idea. It seems like a good idea, and it was even on the list of recommended foods, but it is not. The retainer in the roof of my mouth changes size ever-so-slightly with temperature. With warm foods it's fine, it just presses more securely against where the graft came from, but with cold ice cream it got a bit loose and moved around a bit and that was bad.

Aside from needing a nap, I'm doing well though.

Gum Surgery

2008-11-11T18:19:00.002-06:00

So I survived my surgery. Boyfriend drove me around afterwards for an hour to get the drugs they'd prescribed and then home. Then I slept til he got home from work. I feel ok now, jaw a little sore and it hurts a bit to talk. I'm gonna try some tomato soup and chill on the couch. Very glad it's over with!

Ren Faire Pics!

2008-11-02T16:38:00.005-06:00

Ben is adorable!
I got a spiffy new shirt! And I like to twirl in long skirts.
Us together, very cute:

Chad and Deedee:
Deedee, Chad, me, Ben, Em, and Alex:

It was a beautiful day and we had a really good time. I got a new shirt, which is pretty spiffy, and I'm going to build a druid costume around it I think. Ben got a very nice belt pouch you can see in the first pic of him, and Chad got a new boots and a sword. Deedee couldn't wear her corset this year, so she wrapped a cord around her belly and tied it with a bow, it looks really cute. And Alex and Em got matching bracers and belt pouches, they look very nice.

Ren Faire this weekend!

2008-10-31T17:32:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow we are waking up at an ungodly hour and driving 45 min to our friends' house, and then joining up with them to drive 2.5 hours to where the Ren Faire is, to be there at 9 am when it opens. You know I really want to go somewhere if I agree to wake up at 5 am to go.

It should be so much fun!

It was cold last weekend, for Texas, it got below 70! Like to 65! It was so cold I turned the heat on and put the flannel sheets on the bed. Mmm flannel. They do make it much harder to leave the bed in the morning though, and the Kitten agrees.

But of course it didn't last, and it's back up to 70 today. But it's bright and clear and sunny and breezy and not too hot, and hopefully tomorrow will be the same. And I'll actually get to spend more than 5 minutes outside!

I've been working as many hours as I can to save up time for Christmas, so I haven't really gotten to go outside very much.

And today is Halloween! I think we're going to celebrate by going to bed early. We don't get trick-or-treaters at the apartment, unfortunately.

Happy Halloween anyway!

No Ren Faire this weekend either

2008-10-21T13:48:00.003-05:00

So I just found out that I won't be going to Ren Faire this weekend either, and possibly not ever. I thought this weekend was Pirate Weekend, and Boyfriend and I really wanted to go. But for some odd reason, the Ren Faire people chose to have Pirate Weekend on Halloween weekend, and Halloween Weekend the week before Halloween. Neither of had a burning desire to go to Halloween Weekend (especially the weekend before Halloween) and our friends can't go this weekend.

They want to go next weekend, but I have to go to the periodontist tomorrow so he can tell me when he do the graft (I started writing out what that actually entailed, but I got nauseous and dizzy and had to sit with my head down for a minute). I want to do it on a Thursday or Friday so I can take the weekend off to recuperate and feel sorry for myself, but I can't push it too far back because I'd like to be able to talk by the time we go up to the wedding in November. So next weekend was pretty high on my list of when to get it done.

Stupid Ren Faire. I also made Boyfriend cancel some other plans because I thought we were going this weekend, and that's at least the second time I've done that, so I don't think he's very happy. Stupid Faire, stupid lack of gum tissue, stupid lack of memory. Stupid lack of sleep and lack of time to go home and nap.

No sleep for me

2008-10-21T13:21:00.002-05:00

Last night I mostly just chilled at home, and went to bed with a book around 11:30. I didn't intend to read that long, but the book was really good (Last Argument of Kings) so I didn't end up turning out the light until about 1:30. The Kitten was curled up next to me and we were drifting off when suddenly there was a Noise. It was a scritching sort of noise that sounded like it came from close to my window, and the Kitten meeped and jumped over me to check it out. I didn't hear it again, but it was exactly the sort of noise a giant (shudder) cockroach would make if it was walking across the wall, I thought.

I grabbed my glasses and turned on the light, but I didn't see anything. The Kitten was still staring fixedly at the wall above my bed, however, her pupils dilated. Maybe from the light, maybe from her predatory instinct to hunt and kill whatever hideous monster we'd heard.

I regretted then having so many things hanging from my walls, all providing spaces for things to hide from the light. I looked (very bravely) behind the wall hanging and curtains, shook out the pillows, even moved the blinds.

Nothing.

But the Kitten was still staring at the wall. I tried staring at the wall for a while,
but nothing suddenly leaped into view the way it does after you stare at a 3D hidden picture long enough. Which is good, because no one should ever make a hidden picture of a giant cockroach 2 feet away from where you were trying to sleep 2 minutes ago.

I debated sleeping on the couch, but was determined not to give in. If I gave the cockroach my bed, it would want my bedroom, and then my bathroom, and then my whole apartment, and then maybe my whole life! Hopefully someone would notice if a giant cockroach came into work one day instead of me, and didn't just think I was trapped in Kafka's head.

So I turned out the light and tried to sleep, but the Kitten was still fascinated by the wall. For the next hour. It made sleeping a bit difficult, so I didn't get very much last night.

I've heard cockroaches don't like the smell of bay leaves, and they don't seem to be poisonous to cats, so I may recarpet my apartment in them.

It could be worse, I guess, I could be living in Papua New Guinea. No, on second thought, I would never live there ever ever ever.

House Season 4 and yay Friday!

2008-10-17T11:22:00.003-05:00

We finished watching season 4 of House last night, and I think I could have stopped at season 3. It was an odd season, they got rid of half the characters, but not really, and brought in a whole bunch of new ones and slowly whittled them down til they had almost exactly the same distribution as before. House's doctors went from a cute white woman, a black man and an ethnic white man (Australian) to a cute white woman, an Indian man and an ethnic white man (Jewish).

Last night we watched the last two episode, a two-parter which ended extremely, unnecessarily sadly. It seemed like the writers just wanted to make me cry as much as they could. Luckily my boyfriend didn't mind me sobbing all over his chest over a TV show.

I really like the character House, and the show has been really interesting, but I'm definitely not as motivated to go watch the 5th season now. It could be worse, I guess, they could have ended the season after the first half of the two-parter, as Boyfriend pointed out, but the writers may have been afraid for their lives if they did that.

But it's Friday now, which is awesome! Tonight I'm going to make a Joseph's Trifle to bring to a woman I work with's son's first birthday party tomorrow. Tomorrow we have the party and we may go to a soccer game with some of Boyfriend's coworkers afterwards. Sunday I will be back at work (sigh) making up more comp hours for Christmas. Somewhere in there I'll try to find time to sleep and snuggle with the Kitten.

It's finally cooling off here too, it almost feels like fall! Except without the leaves changing colors or the clear October sky or the crisp feeling in the air like you get in a real state. The humidity is still 90%, but the temperature is down to like 70! I take what I can get.

A morning with the dentist

2008-10-14T12:55:00.003-05:00

So I went for my semi-annual teeth cleaning this morning, and I have no cavities! Yay! All that brushing and flossing is working! Except as the hygenist was poking around with her little metal pick, she poked a sensitive spot and said that my gum is receding from one of my teeth in one spot. She had the dentist look come and look at it, and as soon as he saw it he told me I need a graft. I asked what caused it, and he said it might be a reaction to the braces I had taken off a year ago.

So, ick ick ick! I can't even think about what a graft entails. I'm just going to demand to be unconscious for as much of it as I can, including the entire healing process. Just wake me up next spring, really, I'll be fine.

I mean, it's not like I have a lot of extra gum tissue just lying around, where is it going to come from I don't even want to know don't tell me la la la .

And it's not like I can even ask for that much sympathy, my poor mother has had a root canal, a tooth break off at the gum line and two crowns put on this year.

I hate dental work. Although I like having teeth.

Home!

2008-09-20T11:06:00.003-05:00

I'm home! And I have power! And the kitten looks as if she may forgive me one of these days, if I keep the treats coming.

I cleaned out five very heavy garbage bags of food from the fridge, and cleaned the inside. It was pretty gross. The plants are back on the balcony and looking, well, not quite dead yet. The wall hanging is back up, my quilt is back on my bed, and I have internet! As you've probably gathered by now.

As soon as my belly is full of soup, I'm going to bed. We left at 2 pm yesterday and got in about 8 am this morning, so we made good time, but he got about 4 hours sleep and I think I got 2 or 3.

Yay for being home! I'm so glad to be here, safe and sound with the cat, and I'm so glad it's still here!

Evacuation

2008-09-12T20:04:00.002-05:00

So, since Hurricane Ike is apparently going to roll right over Houston, Boyfriend and Kitten and I evacuated,... to Nebraska. We wanted to be sure to be out of the way, but the hurricane actually looks like it will end up following us here. By then it will be mostly rain though, so we should be good. It looks like there will be a lot of flooding where we we live, but we both live on upper stories and Boyfriend moved his car to outside a friend's house which shouldn't flood too badly. We're keeping an eye on the Weather Channel, but we are extremely glad to be at Boyfriend's parents', safe and warm and full of his mom's meatloaf, which is second only to my own mother's :)

Getting out of Houston was orders of magnitude better than for Rita. We went around most of the city on Highway 6, which was not very crowded at all. We left at 10 am, stopped by our friends' to drop off the car and help them move some plywood around, and then left and were at the border of Texas by about 10 pm. We made pretty good time until shortly after we entered Kansas. It started to rain, and it rained like there was already a hurricane on top of us. Also, apparently the last one to leave Kansas at night turns off the lights, so it was dark, darker than I think I've ever seen. Add that to the fact that reflective paint hasn't made its way there yet, and I could see about 3 of the dashed lines from the median ahead at any time, so we lost our 70 mph average (that was actually the speed limit there). We switched off driving and the one not driving tried to get some sleep, but after straining our eyes for hours neither of us could take it anymore, so we pulled over to a rest stop and got a few hours sleep before we continued.

The Kitten was amazingly good the entire time. She spent most of the trip on the floor behind the passenger seat, and when we checked on her (about every 10 min the entire trip) she meeped at us and butted against out hands.

But almost exactly 24 hours after we left home, we finally made it to Boyfriend's parents' house! Kitten went under the bed at first, but soon emerged to eat and use her litterbox, and when I came to bed she crawled in under the covers with me and we slept for a few hours. It
was a very long journey, but I'm very glad to watch Ike do his damage from a safe haven.

Sister?! Sister!

2008-09-03T09:58:00.004-05:00

My little sister has gone home now, and I am back to the work and school round. Her visit was so much fun! We went rock climbing at a gym in Houston, where she scampered up the walls faster than I've seen squirrels climb; stayed up late watching the girlie movies 27 Dresses and P.S. I'm Dead Now (AKA P.S. I Love You, but I like our title better); rescued Stan the tiny gecko from certain death and voyeurism (he tried to watch us pee, but we thwarted his plan!);
went to La Madeline's 3 times in 4 days; bought more bath products than you would think any 5 people might need; and generally bonded very sisterly. It was an awesome visit, and like all visits went by much too quickly.

So, now back to work and school and such. I will write up our San Francisco trip when I get a chance, but in the meantime, if you haven't seen the pictures and want to, let me know. I took enough that if you scroll through them really fast it's like a flipbook video of our 8 day trip!

Boyfriend's Birthday!

2008-08-13T10:52:00.003-05:00

Months ago Boyfriend asked me, pretty much joking I think, to make him a Lego cake for his birthday. I agreed, but haven't said anything about it since, hoping he'd forget about it. He did, so was very surprised when he saw his birthday cake!

He liked it so much he refused to cut it! He said he couldn't disturb it, but I had no such qualms.

I got the recipes from my new favorite cooking blog, smittenkitchen. The cake is Chocolate Butter Cake and the icing is Swiss Buttercream, so a lot of butter went into this thing, which of course works out well. The pegs are marshmallows!

Boyfriend brought the leftovers into work and reported that his coworkers were very happy, and he seemed very happy with it last night, so I think it was a success!

Travelogue: San Jose, CA

2008-08-07T13:13:00.004-05:00

I now understand why anyone would choose to pay ridiculous amounts of money to live in California. As the plane was landing, the pilot announced that the temperature in San Jose was "a balmy 72 degrees, winds at 10 mph out of the northwest," and my reaction was, "72? What does that mean? Celsius?" It hasn't been 72 in Houston since January, and that was the low! I stepped outside and could breathe, it wasn't like walking into a used sweat sock at all, it was glorious! I ate lunch outside on a patio surrounded by flowers!

Mmm delicious almond apple tart thing with vanilla bean ice cream.

Walking through downtown Mountain View, where I stayed, I was surrounded by flowers, there were mountains in the background (the name of the town isn't sarcasm!) and I found a bookstore with more books than I have! Even counting the 30 boxes still in my parents' basement!

Also, while driving around getting myself throughly lost (it's my hobby, that's why I'm so good at it) I passed a Yahoo building, an AMD building, a Microsoft building, and a Google building! I was hungry at the time I passed the Google building, so I considered sneaking in to try their food, but unfortunately I think it was after lunchtime.

My company put me up at what may be the best hotel I've ever stayed in. The bed was soft and cushy, the bathroom arched and with glass shower doors, and the wireless internet perfect for playing World of Warcraft on for far too many hours.

My favorite part was driving around with the windows down the entire time, with the fresh air in my hair and on my skin. Luckily I'm going back on vacation! And this time I will get to hike and eat in more places and see old friends and meet their families and see the coast, and best of all, Boyfriend will be there to see it with me.

Frank R. Lopez

2008-07-21T16:54:00.007-05:00

Last Tuesday my great-uncle Frank lost a long battle with cancer and died. He had the cancer for years, but in the last few months it became too much for him to handle. He was hospitalized, though he hated the loss of his freedom, and a week before his death he stopped eating. I knew a soon as I heard that that the end was near, he had fought the good fight but there's only so long anyone's body can last.

He's not in pain anymore. He's not regretting the loss of his freedom anymore. He's not waiting anymore.

He was 76, and saw a lot and did a lot while he was here, and had his independence up until the last few months of his life.

He was the last male in my family of my grandparent's generation that I grew up knowing. My father's father died over years, and it was hard on the him and on the family but we all had time to say good bye. My mother's father died suddenly, quickly as he did everything. He never was big on goodbyes. I've thought a lot about which way was easier, on the person dying and on the family, and I really can't say. No one gets a choice of course, and there's nothing you can do either way, but still I'd like to go out like my Grandpop Joe, catching squirrels and up on the roof one minute and then gone the next.
I'd like to leave people laughing through their tears.

Pater et Mater in Houston

2008-07-01T16:06:00.002-05:00

My parents came to visit me! My mom flew down, and my dad took a train. Several trains actually, and a bus ride, but they both made it here safely. My mom arrived first, and we had a very nice lunch and took a nap (it's our family hobby) while we waited for Dad to come along. He was very hungry and tired by the time he made it here, so we had dinner at Frenchie's, which is the only place I've found in Houston that makes gnocchies. They are excellent comfort food after traveling for 3 straight days.

The next day Boyfriend and I took my father on a very nice tour of work so he could see what we do all day while Mom went out to lunch and on a tour of Webster's quilt shops with friends she knows from her quilting message boards. When her friend picked her up from my apartment, we invited her to come see all the examples of my mother's work I have in my apartment. I didn't realize how much I had! We showed her my gorgeous quilt, my pillowcases, my 2 wallhangings, my afgans, my table runner, and all the table cloths my mom has made me. I also have things made for me by my father and given to me by my sisters in my home, so I get to live surrounded by beautiful things given to me by people who love me, and every time I see them I am reminded of that. I'm very lucky.

A friend of mine invited me to take a Summer Pies and Tarts cooking class at Sur la Table with her the weekend my parents were here. At first I was going to decline, but then I asked my mom if she'd like to take it with me. Somewhat to my surprise, she accepted. My friend was sick and ended up missing the class, but my mom and I had a really good time! The class split into 4 groups and each made a different pie or tart with a very nice pastry chef telling us her tips and tricks. Once they were baked, we got to sample each one, and they were all delicious. I could tell my mom had fun because when she got home she found a Sur la Table not far from her and she and my sister immediately signed up for classes!

It was so nice to be able to spend time with my parents. They're very easy to entertain, they like to eat and nap and play with the Kitten and talk and that's exactly what I do! My father says he's going to try to come down twice a year now that he's gone part-time, which is awesome. That will almost double the amount of times per year I get to see him!

This is weird for me, but since I've been thinking more that I might have children one day, one of the things that worried me was how I can raise children that only see their grandparents and great-grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins once or twice a year? How can they grow up not knowing their family? But if my father, and probably my mother, come down so often, they will have a better chance of knowing their grandparents as they grow up. It's not the same as growing up 3 blocks from them, I know, but it's something. That won't be for a few more years yet, of course, but I wonder about stuff like that. I want my kids to know how awesome their grandparents are. Honestly, the older I get and the more people I meet, the more I realize how amazing they are, both as parents and as people.

Travelogue: Omaha

2008-06-21T15:22:00.000-05:00

I flew back from Florida to Houston on Wednesday. I had an hour to wander aimlessly through Houston Intercontinental and then I boarded a plane to Omaha, Nebraska. Boyfriend's best friends were getting married, and they had done him the great honor of asking him to be their best man. He loves them both to death, and he was very excited about the wedding.

Before the wedding Boyfriend wanted to show me Omaha's zoo, which competes with San Diego's to be the best in the country. It was a huge zoo, we barely covered a third of it in one day. We saw a small fuzzy creature that made me miss my little sister and how she would squeak over it:
Omaha has a new butterfly exhibit that is amazing, there were butterflies and moths everywhere, sitting on flowers, fluttering about our heads, having dogfights, strafing each other, and taking a breather on a convenient tree.

Now, I have heard of Tornado Alley and understood that this was a problem in the Midwest, and I understood that at the time, I was in the Midwest, but this didn't really come together for me until Boyfriend and I drove to his friends' house and halfway there he looked out the window and remarked, fairly calmly in my opinion, that we should get there quickly as it looked like tornado weather. The sky, which was already cloudy and threatening rain, began to get a greenish tinge I found extremely alarming. I have been in the same county as a tornado before, when I was 6 or so, driving to Florida with my parents. We pulled over the side of the road and they tried not to panic in front of the kids. Not exactly an auspicious introduction to them.

Just as we arrived at the friends' house, it began to hail. This storm was not joking with this hail, it wasn't just thinking about hailing, or tossing a few ice cubes down. This was serious, golf-ball sized, hope-you-parked-in-the-garage, chunks of ice being thrown from the inexplicably green sky! We ran down to the basement, where everyone else watched tv and I panicked to myself. Apparently imminent death from above is common enough to not warrant interrupting the movie there.

Luckily we survived the night, and the next which featured tornado sirens at 3 am which were pretty ineffective, as I was the only one who woke up and I had no idea what they were or what to do about them, or if I was in fact actually awake or just dreaming of panic.

But we survived long enough to make it to the wedding!

The bride was beyond beautiful, the ceremony gorgeous, the pastor funny and fairly brief, Boyfriend managed to not lose the rings, much to his relief, and everyone was happy and crying at the same time, as they do at weddings.

On the way to the reception we stopped at a lushly green park for more pictures. (Girl note: my dress was blowing in the breeze, it didn't hang like that constantly. I got so many compliments on it!)
The reception food was good, Boyfriend's best man speech was perfect, very funny and he made fun of the bride and groom just enough, the bride's father's speech made everyone in the room cry, and I added two more people to whom I can say, "I danced at your wedding!"

Travelogue: Florida

2008-06-20T13:24:00.005-05:00

I got to go to Florida on a business trip! It was my first work-related travel, and I enjoyed it very much. The strangest part about it was staying in a hotel room by myself, I've never done that before.

The hotel I stayed in was very nice, very family-oriented actually (the hotel where the conference was held was all booked up by the time I went to make my reservation) but the first room they gave me was on the second floor, which was accessed by an exterior elevator next to a hallway with a lot of bends and nooks, and was the last room down a fairly long, shadowed hallway. When I got to the door I discovered the hallway did not actually end at my door, it made a sharp right immediately afterwards and connected to other side of the hotel. It seemed like there were entirely too many places for people to hide (rapist nooks, as I call them) on my approach to my room, and I knew I would be coming back to it after dark each night, so just to save myself the worry I went back and requested a room change. The front desk was very nice, they hadn't really thought about where the room was, so they moved me to a room on the first floor in the middle of the hallway, where I could park 5 feet from my door and see all around me. The hotel was very nice and all, they had a security guard at the entrance to the hotel, but just for peace of mind and paranoia it was well worth the move.

The other major benefit to business travel in Florida is that I got to see my Uncle and Aunt! I went to school in Daytona, and I used to visit them at least a few times a semester, and I haven't been back and spent time with them since the year after I graduated, so I enjoyed catching up with them. Perhaps because they live so far away from where I grew up that they weren't as used to me being a child, and that I saw them more as I was growing independent and getting used to this whole being-a-grown-up thing, they were the first adults in my family whom I felt like an adult around. It was really nice to see them, we played dress-up (I'm all grown-up, yup yup) with the clothes they wear to the Scottish/Irish festivals they go to frequently. This is my Uncle and I preparing to defend our lands:
And my Aunt and Uncle being silly:
My Uncle has that social gene that my sisters have and that I seem to have misplaced, the one that allows him to have a conversation with anyone, anywhere. He's genuinely interested in everyone he meets, what their background is, where they've lived, what they've done in their lives. He has also rather inexplicably turned into a redneck despite growing up 3 blocks from where I did!

Driving back from their house in the dark along the same highway I used to drive back to school on brought back lots of college memories. I lived as a child in Jersey and as an adult in Texas, but I did a lot of my growing-up in Florida.

Traumitized

2008-05-28T08:55:00.003-05:00

I've had some rude awakenings before. My alarm has gone off before I thought possible to get me up for school the first day back after summer break, I've had people apparently not believe me when I tell them they're dialed the same wrong number for the third time, and even just last month I woke up to my toilet overflowing. That was a fun morning, frantic calls to maintenance, covering the floor with towels, trying to reassure the Kitten that she could still reach her litter box.

I would take a month of mornings like that rather than the way I woke up today. Possibly more. Really, if I could trade, however many were needed, I'd do it. I would enjoy my toilet overflowing every day if I meant I never had to wake up the way I did this morning ever, ever again, ever.

It started off innocuously enough. Boyfriend's alarm went off ridiculously early, as it does, and he got up and did his thing. Kitten crept up next to me and snuggled into the curve of my arm, and I pet her without really waking up. I was warm and comfortable, the Kitten was soft and sleepy, and I had at least 45 min before I really had to wake up. Boyfriend came along to kiss me goodbye, and the Kitten moved out of the way, then jumped over me to the other side of the bed.
Then.

Then the horror began.

Boyfriend flipped the covers off of me and said, "Come here, right now." I could tell by his face he was serious, so I climbed out of bed and asked "What? Why? What's wrong?" "There's a huge bug," he said, and I grabbed for my glasses because everything was a blur. The Kitten was on the bed looking up at the wall over the bed, directly over my head where I had just been sleeping, and it was not a bug, I wish it was a bug, I was prepared for a spider, maybe some sort of weird stink bug like we get here, a pincher bug, anything but what I saw, because I saw on my wall of my BEDROOM where I SLEEP all the TIME oh god i can't even type it a giant gigantic full grown hideous freak of nature COCKROACH CRAWLING up my wall not two feet from my pillow and oh god it was huge, I think it could have taken the Kitten back to its dank sordid lair and it was in my BEDROOM, which I may have mentioned that I had just been SLEEPING in.

Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god

Words cannot describe my terror and loathing of those foul things whose name I can't even type again. Boyfriend grabbed a tissue and went for it, and I left the room before I began shrieking in fear and outrage. He came back holding a pillow, yes it was that big that he apparently needed a pillowcase to restrain it, and asked me something, I'm not sure what, but it seemed the thing was INSIDE the pillowcase, so I pointed at the bathroom and managed somehow to convey that he must flush it down the toilet immediately, I don't think I was speaking English at this point but he seemed to understand, so he went in the bathroom and closed the doors and somehow wrestled the minion of hell into the toilet and flushed it away. It took a few minutes, it apparently was putting up a good fight, oh god, and then he came back and in the same hysterical language I told him he had to burn the pillow immediately, and possibly the toilet and my bedroom as well, but I don't think he understood that. I managed to mime that he had to put the pillowcase in the washer, the only reason I didn't throw it away immediately is that my mother made it for me, but I may have to wash it a few hundred times before I can use it again, and made him wash his hands a few times. Then I collapsed against him and sobbed in terror and horror for a while.

I was petrified that there may be more of these disgusting creatures, some sort of dark foul legion of them underneath my bed, maybe inside my mattress! Or behind the wallhanging my mom gave me! Or underneath my pillow oh god oh god. I hid in the living room with lots of clear space around me so I could see if any more spawns of satan were trying to sneak up on me and the best Boyfriend in the world took my bed apart and searched it for monsters.

It was clean, but I may be sleeping on the couch for a while. And people wonder why I'm not a morning person.

Beaches, bonfires and butterflies

2008-04-21T00:24:00.008-05:00

What a good weekend! Saturday we loaded up both my and Dave's trunk's full of firewood and went to the beach and had a bonfire! Look at all the wood that fits in my trunk!
It was a beautiful night, the fire burning brightly on the beach, a full moon casting its light onto the rolling waves, just a few clouds obscuring the stars. Sirius is huge now, and Orion was about halfway above the horizon. He's a winter constellation, so I won't be able to see him for much longer. Dave brought his mechanized telescope, and it gave us a tour of the skies. We got a gorgeous view of the moon and Saturn, good enough to see the rings clearly! I brought marshmallows and roasted and ate them with brownies, better than s'mores!

Sunday we went to the Songkran festival, a Thai New Year's festival at a Buddhist temple in Sugarland. We met up with some friends I used to work with, and enjoyed delicious Thai food with them and their family. One of my friend's Aunts, who is Thai, was surprised that I ate all the authentic Thai desserts. I said the key word there was "desserts" lol.

After we ate we lined up to be blessed by the monks for luck in the New Year. We filled golden bowls with water from an urn filled with water and flower petals, then poured the water over a statue of the Buddha and over the hands of monks who held their hands over flower-filled glass vases. They sprinkled us with water in turn, blessing us and wishing us health and luck in the New Year. There was a lot of running around sprinkling water on each other afterwards, it seems like a fun tradition. Then there was a cermony releasing 99 doves for world peace, harmony, and love. It was a beautiful ceremony, I wish more people could see it. Maybe if everyone could spend a sunny afternoon eating good food with their friends, being blessed, and watching doves fly, there would be a lot more peace in the world.
We also released hundreds of Monarch butterflies, to remember lost loved ones. Everyone in the audience got to hold a box with a butterfly in it, and we released them right after the doves were released. I thought about my grandfathers.
It was really a very good weekend. Exhausting, though, we came home and took a 4 hour nap. Back to work tomorrow, and homemade pasta and roasted tomato sauce for dinner tomorrow night.

I took all the pictures here on my phone, they came out pretty nice, I think. There were a lot of people taking pictures, and the whole ceremony was filmed, so I didn't worry about offending anyone there.

Bah, politics

2008-04-10T10:27:00.003-05:00

The reason why I may be voting Republican this year, if the primary doesn't turn out well for Clinton: Obama wants me to lose my job. He's obviously timed this announcement well, most of the states with large space programs have already had their primaries, and many of the remaining states aren't doing so hot in the education department.

Some numbers provided by Ben:
States remaining to be decided in democratic primaries: Oregon, Montana, South Dakota, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina
Discredited States: Florida, Michigan

States with NASA Centers: California, Virginia, Ohio, New York, Maryland, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico

Rank of expenditures per student for states left in democratic
primaries:
Oregon: #28
Montana: #26
South Dakota: #35
Indiana: #22
Pennsylvania: #21
West Virginia: #15
Kentucky: #30
North Carolina: #41

School Teacher Salary Rank:
Oregon: #14
Montana: #46
South Dakota: #51
Indiana: #17
Pennsylvania: #10
West Virginia: #42
Kentucky: #34
North Carolina: #24

Only one of the states remaining has a NASA Center. The majority of the remaining states are in the bottom half of salary and expenditures per student.

It is very rare for NASA to compete with education for money, because they're separate issues, both of which deserve a lot more money than they ever get. But his plan would put us without human spaceflight capability for almost 10 years! Not to mention how many thousands of NASA employees and contractors will be laid off in the states that had their primaries before he came out with this plan, and it's not like there's that much commercial spaceflight going on yet to pick up the slack.

People, we will never have colonies on the moon if all of our engineers die of old age before we get around to going back, and everyone knows it won't be the future until we have moon colonies. Apparently Obama just doesn't want it to be the future. I guess we shouldn't even bother asking him for funding for flying cars or hoverboards.

Libraries

2008-04-08T16:10:00.006-05:00

I greatly approve of the idea of libraries, in principle. Everyone should have access to a wide variety of books, and they have entire teams of people who seem to find great satisfaction in helping you find something to read. Libraries are places to collect knowledge and distribute it to anyone who asks for it. Their function seems to epitomize the concepts of freedom and equality, where anyone can read any book they choose, freely, and then pass it on to someone else, sharing knowledge.

But they have one flaw, in my eyes. They want their books back.

This is necessary for the whole "sharing" part of the sharing knowledge thing, I know, but somehow it feels like every book I read becomes a part of me, and I don't want to let that part go. I was never so happy and comfortable in my apartment as when I got more bookcases and could finally look at all of my books at the same time. This fulfills some deep-seated need inside me, for which I have no explanation. My mother and sister are perfectly happy to read a book once and release it back into the wild, never to be seen or heard from again, here one day and then gone, like the wind. (Possibly with,..)
I am perfectly happy to lend books out for extended periods of time, like foreign exchange children, sending them out to see the world, knowing they will come back one day enriched and wise from their travels, eager to share their journeys with the stay-at-home books still on the shelves. But I might want to read them again! Or lend a particular book to someone who absolutely has to read it, in my opinion. (There are a lot of books a lot of people absolutely have to read, usually starting with the last one I just finished.) Plus I feel like I've just won something when I find some old, out of print SF book I-just-realized-I've-been-looking-for-my-whole-life in a back corner of a used-book store, how could I let it go afterward? SF readers tend to be hoarders, it's not just me. I've heard from used-book store owners that the only way they get large collections of SF is when the owners die and can't complain about people giving away their books anymore.

Maybe my problem with libraries is I don't own them. Maybe I should have been a librarian. Maybe if I continue accumulating books, I can just open my own library,..

At any rate, I now have a library card for the Harris Country Public Library and have requested about 50 things from their online catalog. They actually have a very good selection of movies and TV show seasons on DVD, which are much easier to return after watching. And I finally requested Your Money or Your Life, a personal finance book I couldn't bring myself to spend money on but have been wanting to read.

So hopefully I will be able to overcome my squirrel-like hoarding instinct and Charlton Heston-like resistance-to-having-things-pried-from-my-warm-and-living-hand instinct and give them their books back when I'm done reading them.

Crazy Ferret People

2008-03-17T10:04:00.002-05:00

So on the plan this week was goulash and corned beef and cabbage. I made the goulash yesterday in the crockpot but it didn't turn out very well, for some reason. I had made some creative alterations to the recipe, which may have had something to with it. I also made Irish soda bread which came out much better, I love soda bread. I'm making corned beef and cabbage today, for St. Patrick's Day. I'm not Catholic so I'm celebrating it today lol. Hopefully it will come out better than the goulash.

We saw the craziest show ever last night, it was so ridiculous. It was called Ferrets: In Pursuit of Excellence, (no, really!) and it was about these people who are completely obsessed with their ferrets. It was so funny! One lady made up songs to her ferrets, and sang to them regularly, and another said her family knew that when she came home from work, she had to play with her ferrets for a minimum of three hours before they could talk to her. She had a entire floor of her house devoted to them, that no one else was allowed in! And I'm not talked a few ferrets here, she had like 20! And they'd all scamper all over the place, which was very cute, but these people were seriously crazy. When the ferrets died, a lot of people said they had them cremated and kept them in little boxes around their houses, with the ferrets' names engraved on the lids. I was like, where do you get ferrets cremated? Then it cuts to a lady standing in front of a chest-type freezer, and I was like, oh, no, you can't be serious, and she started talking about how it was cheaper to get ferrets cremated in bulk so she kept all her friends' dead ferrets in her freezer until they had 25 lb worth! She said she sometimes had more dead ferrets in her freezer than food! This lady had children! And was married! And these were not attractive people, in case you were wondering. It was the craziest show ever. The whole thing lead up to this ferret show in Ohio, which some of these people drove 500 miles for, and they were all acting like winning was a life-or-death thing. People cried, there were some people who said they got into fights with judges, they were way into it. After the judging, while they were waiting on results, the camera panned over the crowd and it was more strange people clutching ferrets to their chests than I thought existed. And at the very end, after all the drama about winning a ribbon, it said: 327 ferrets were in the show. 400 ribbons were awarded.
These were some lonely, lonely crazy ferret people. Just when i thought the world was weird enough, people who sing songs about ferrets come on tv.

Kittens and Nieces and Cooking

2008-03-10T21:04:00.007-05:00

I was looking for my Kitten, I could not find her, so I called her name and she meeped at me from her hiding spot, somewhat annoyed to be disturbed:
I keep telling her, but she is the cutest thing ever!!

Well, maybe an extremely close second to my niece, Julianna:
Yay pictures!

So Boyfriend and I are trying to eat at home more often, because it is healthier and will hopefully be cheaper. He is saving to put a down payment on a house, at some point, I'm saving in case someone unfriendly to the space program gets elected and I get laid off. Not really, but it seems like a good idea to have a nice emergency fund anyway. We've been sharing the grocery shopping, but since he is in class every night until 7, I have been doing most of the actual cooking. (It doesn't hurt that I can reliably boil water, also.) We've been planning out a week's meals, dinners and leftovers for lunch, on Sunday and then going grocery shopping to get everything. It was surprisingly nice not to have to worry about what's for dinner every night! And awesome not to have to stop at the grocery store after work before I can go home. I do most of the prep work Sunday, and throw things together when I get home from work.

Last week we had my mom's chicken enchiladas, which I think Boyfriend could cheerfully live on for months, shrimp pil-pil, a Spanish dish I got from Rachel Ray's magazine, chicken casserole (which I narrowly avoided burning the house down making) and pizza with as many vegetables as will fit on top of it. We're also having the frozen veggies you can microwave in the bag with every meal, which has to be the best invention since sliced bread, I swear. We went the entire week without eating out! I don't think I've done that in years!

This week we are having chicken enchiladas, the rest of the shrimp over angel hair with tomato sauce, chicken creole from a Zataran's box, and pizza. I made the shrimp tonight, along with garlic bread the way I like it, i.e. strong enough to knock out a vampire at 20 paces. It was a bit strong for Boyfriend, I think, he is apparently more used to garlic bread that has maybe been introduced to a clove of garlic, maybe just waved at one in passing. Kind of like I like my steak to just wave at a fire in passing, maybe say hi, but definitely not get to know it well enough to ask after it's health, or it's children, or anything.

It is surprising fun to be able to put together a complete meal from ingredients you have in your house. And it doesn't hurt that Boyfriend is very obviously delighted to come home after a very long day to a "restaurant-quality meal, with lovely company and a charming ambiance," as he tells me. He's very sweet, and smart enough to know that the more he praises them, the more dinners he'll get :)

Scary

2008-03-06T15:36:00.002-06:00

Get Rich Slowly had a very good article yesterday about how a woman taught her children about advertising by asking them if they thought the product really did what the commercial claimed it did. It was very interesting, and the comments to the article had a link to an paper about the subject, which, among many other interesting and scary things said:

In 1978, the FTC formally proposed a rule that would ban or severely restrict all television advertising to children. [31,78] The FTC presented a comprehensive review of the scientific literature and argued that all advertising directed to young children was inherently unfair and deceptive. [31] The proposal provoked intense opposition from the food, toy, broadcasting and advertising industries, who initiated an aggressive campaign to oppose the ban. A key argument was First Amendment protection for the right to provide information about products to consumers. [31] Responding to corporate pressure, Congress refused to approve the FTC's operating budget and passed legislation titled the FTC Improvements Act of 1980 that removed the agency's authority to restrict television advertising. The act specifically prohibited any further action to adopt the proposed children's advertising rules. [31]

That's our government at work, protecting our children by "improving" the FTC out of authority to change things. It concludes with

Children, especially young children, are more susceptible to the effects of marketing than adults. Numerous studies have documented that children under 8 years of age are developmentally unable to understand the intent of advertisements and accept advertising claims as factual. [22] The intense marketing of high fat, high sugar foods to young children can be viewed as exploitation because they do not understand that commercials are designed to sell products and do not have the ability to comprehend or evaluate advertising. The purpose of advertising is to persuade, and young children have few defenses against such advertising. [...] [24] It can be argued that children, especially young children, are a vulnerable group that should be protected from commercial influences that may adversely impact their health, and that as a society that values children, there should be greater social responsibility for their present and future health.

Ok, end rant.

Sweet Tea

2008-02-20T15:06:00.004-06:00

My sister is back from Canada! She survived! (narrowly). The pics from her trip are insanely beautiful, all crystal clear blue sky, white snow-topped mountains, and perfectly symmetrical conifers. I really miss snow, I haven't seen it in years. Every time I go home it gets too warm for it. I'm really more of a lounging-on-a-tropical-island type of person, but I love the hush that falls over the world with a fresh snowfall, and watching big fat snowflakes drift down from a dark sky into the light before disappearing again into a blanket of snow is a pretty good definition of peacefulness.

Maybe that's one reason Texans seem so foreign to me, they don't really understand, at their deepest levels, the ebb and flow of seasons. Where I grew up, there are 4 distinct, individual seasons, which balance each other and share time equally. I've always claimed summer as my favorite, but living in it year round just isn't right. It needs to be balanced by a winter, and separated from it by a spring and a fall, each in their own time and each with their own personality.

On the other hand, man do I hate the cold! I've considered moving to the equator, Texas is too cold for me sometimes. Like today, I think it got below 60! In February!

Although today was a good day, I got a free cookie! I went to pick up lunch with friends at McAlister's, they have sweet tea! We were getting it to go so I gave them my name and then we hung out for a bit. A few minutes later, a guy called my name and I started to walk over but this lady got there first, grabbed the bag, and like booked it out of there. So I was like, that's weird, maybe another me?, but my friend was like, we should check that out. So we went up and asked, and they didn't have another me, so one of the guys who worked there ran outside and almost threw himself in front of the lady's car to stop her, and talked to her, and got the bag back. Her name was like Lauren, she just really wanted my lunch I guess. But I go there so often (they have sweet tea!) most of the guys there recognize me, and the manager felt bad and gave me a free cookie. And more sweet tea!

Strawberry Perl

2008-02-05T21:33:00.000-06:00

Are you tired of plain old vanilla Perl? Try new strawberry Perl! Garenteeded to make your day a little sweeter ;) Have I mentioned lately that I love Perl? That it is the coolest language ever? And that I have admin rights on my computer at work?

So this is my new workout schedule:
Monday - Stretch class, lots of yoga poses
Tuesday - Belly Dancing class, followed by Kickboxing if I have any feeling left in my legs (not today)
Wednesday - Step class, since I do need remedial lessons in it
Thursday - Ballroom dancing class with boyfriend!

I will be so active! I miss how good I used to feel when I was kickboxing, so now this gives me lots of stuff to do. I'm not focused on losing weight per se, it'd be nice but I just want to move around after sitting in a chair for 8 hours every day.

My little sister's new house. Yes, that's her name over the door. Because she is actually an incarnation of Strawberry Shortcake. (She should really like strawberry Perl then!)

Links

2008-02-01T16:43:00.000-06:00

This is an awesome idea: a playground for septuagenarians. That's the cutest thing I've seen all day.

This is also an awesome idea: Don't shoot wolves, President F*ckhead. Can it be clearer that he wants to destroy the world? Seriously.

In better news, my mom is doing great. She was shocked with a defibrillator this afternoon, which put her heart back into its normal rhythm right away. She'll be in the hospital until Sunday or Monday, so they can make sure it stays that way and get all her meds straight, but she should be fine. My sisters said when they went to see her, she proudly proclaimed, "Look! I've got rhythm!" and sit-danced to prove it, so she must be feeling better lol.

In other good news, my sister found a great house in North Carolina! It's huge, beautiful house, 4 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 2 stories plus a basement, on 4 acres, on a mountain, across the street from a lake, close to places they can work, and 10 minutes from an Applebees. Many of the other houses they had looked at were right across from trailer parks, or 30 miles from a gas station, so when they saw lights on the way to see this house they were very excited to be back in civilization. They will be moving as soon as they can sell their current house, which is also beautiful so hopefully it will go quickly.

My family reminds me of this fabric. We are very easy-going and loose, until one of us is hurt or threatened. When that happens, we all band together instantly, to protect or support as needed, until peace is regained. But I'm far away, still affected by every major creasing, but unable to lend my support and be supported in turn directly.

Lousy Day

2008-01-23T17:09:00.000-06:00

So my brilliant system of 3 interlocking alarms completely failed to wake me up this morning. I didn't wake up until 9.05, when I had intended to be at work by 9, so I could leave to go to class at 5. So, not going to class today, not a huge deal as I'm still seriously considered dropping it.

At work I was waiting on someone to look at some data, to make sure it's ok, but they couldn't see my directory for some reason (on a unix system.) Yesterday I had played around with the permissions to try to give them access, but managed to completely break everything I was doing. So not only can they not see what I need them to look at, I can't see it anymore. Apparently the admin may be able to fix it, but he's awol, so the only thing I can do is recreate the work I spent most of last week doing. So once I get back to where I was yesterday, I'm still stuck cause he still needs to check this data! So, not the most productive I could be.

And I kind of wanted to go to class today, I remembered I like physics after reading this article about a paper AIAA published on research that connects gravity and electromagnetism.

Summary:

The standard model of physics, … is incapable of predicting a particle's mass. …when researchers ... implemented Heim's mass theorem in a computer program, it predicted masses of fundamental particles that matched the measured values to within the accuracy of experimental error.

….From this, Dröscher claims, you can derive the four forces known in physics: the gravitational and electromagnetic forces, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But there's more to it than that. "If Heim's picture is to make sense," Dröscher says, "we are forced to postulate two more fundamental forces." These are, Dröscher claims, related to the familiar gravitational force: one is a repulsive anti-gravity similar to the dark energy that appears to be causing the universe's expansion to accelerate. And the other might be used to accelerate a spacecraft without any rocket fuel.

… if this happens, it would be possible to reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in only 80 days, Dröscher and Häuser say.

That would be so incredibly, ridiculously awesome. It will probably not happen, but the future has to come sometime, right? Maybe I read too much, but I spend so much time in worlds that are much better than ours, it really sucks sometimes to come back to reality and realize that no, the world is not that amazing yet. I wish it would hurry up.

Learned Something Today

2008-01-10T13:25:00.000-06:00

My car's turn signal clicks in time with Nine Inch Nails' "Closer". I thought that was cool. That song is 14 years old now, which isn't as bad as I was afraid of, at least.

Memories of Christmas

2008-01-08T14:53:00.001-06:00

Heather telling us a story about my 4 year old nephew Eddie: He came into the kitchen and asked for a cookie without saying "please", so she asked him, "Have you lost your manners?" He said, "I've lost them! I've lost my manners! I need to go to the store and get more!" and proceeded to run in circles around the dining room table shouting, "Manners! Where are you manners? I need to catch you! I need to put you in my mouth and eat you! Manners!" until finally coming back to her and saying, "I've found them! May I have a cookie please?"

Playing Hullabaloo with Eddie, my sister Stephie and our friend Jay. The game has 16 plastic tiles which are different colors and shapes, with different pictures on them, and a speaker. When turned on, the speaker gives directions such as, "Swim to a circle!" or "Hop to a triangle!" After so many tile-swappings, the game says, "Freeze! If you're on a blue triangle, you're a winner! Winner, do a funky dance!" The winner got a hug from Eddie and then everyone danced, and if you've never seen a 4 year old do a funky dance, you have not lived.

Holding my 10 month old, little fat doll of a niece Julianna, in her adorable Christmas dress, and posing for pictures with every combination of my family we could think of. I even managed to keep my eyes open in some of the pictures! Not many though lol.

Coming home from Target with my Mom and Dad and Heather and the 2 kids, and when it was time for them to leave, I asked Eddie for a hug. I had been holding the baby, Julianna, so he said, "You've had enough hugs!" So my Mom asked for one, and he said, "Ok, but I only have 3 left after that!" After he gave my Mom one, he deigned to give me one, but then "I only have 2 hugs left!" He very graciously gave them to my Dad and my sister.

Walking around New Hope with Stephanie, I love that place! It's in PA, a very cute little town. It's almost a tradition now for us to go and have lunch someplace nice there, then walk around to all the shops. It's funny, we fought like cats and dogs when we lived together, but since I've moved out she's my best friend.

Heather's excitement when my dad and I opened one of her gifts to us, personalized doormats with our latitude and longitude printed on them! She made us open them at the same time, so the surprise wouldn't be spoiled, and we both loved them!

My mother lying to my face when I asked her if she had had time to finish the wallhanging she'd promised me! She said "Oh no, it's on the list somewhere" when I asked about it before Christmas. I was so surprised when I unwrapped and opened a box to see the gorgeous wallhanging completed on Christmas I almost fell over!

I love my family! I wish I got to see them more often. The kids grow up so fast! Luckily Steph is planning come visit me in March, so I just have to wait til then to see her!

RAH Quotes

2007-12-12T17:32:00.000-06:00

Apparently I read a lot of Heinlein growing up. Here are quotes from some of his that I think are nifty (from his wiki article)

An armed society is a polite society.

Beyond This Horizon (1942)

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: Please pass this so that I won't be able to so something I know I should stop. Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them for their own good.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

A zygote is a gamete's way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe.

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.

If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I've never heard of it.

It is better to copulate than never.

Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy"is the most amazing — with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place.

There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it?
Time Enough for Love (1973)

Women seem to have almost unlimited capacity for forgiveness. (Since it is usually a man who needs forgiveness, this must be a racial survival trait.)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)

Voyager 2

2007-12-11T09:53:00.000-06:00

With all the budget cuts and general bureaucracy involved in working for the government, it constantly amazes me that people manage to get anything done. But they do amazing things! We're still getting fascinating new information from Voyagers 1 and 2 , spacecraft we launched 30 years ago! Voyager 1 is now over 14 light-hours from us, that's 9.6 billion miles. Humans created something that now exists at a distance which we could not have conceived of 200 years ago.

Everything we've ever known, all the animals, the plants, all the people you've ever met, all of history, every idea any human has ever had has happened here, on or within a few light-seconds of this tiny little blue speck whirling around a tiny little glowing dot. But somehow we managed to work together to create something that exists impossibly far away! And still works! Still sends back data, still changes our views of the universe.

Someone told me recently that they felt there are very few real surprises in life. I can't agree with that. I'm surprised every time I wake up, every time I walk out my front door, that I exist, that the universe exists and that we as part of it can observe it, and have the courage to think that maybe we can understand it, that we are capable of understanding it.

We are capable of wonders matched only by our capability for atrocities. That surprises me every day.

Weekends are fun

2007-12-08T23:44:00.000-06:00

Yay for fun weekends! Hung out with friends, got almost-drunk, played Rock Band much better as bassist than as lead guitarist, had inaugural fight with boyfriend, watched nifty sad-happy movie, got roughly a million books for less than 25 dollas at the used book shelter, went to fun times Christmas party while it's 82 degrees out, snuggled with Kitten.

My weekends are now only 1 day long, since I'm working Sundays, but I managed to pack a lot into it, huh?

I'm not studying La la la la la

2007-12-04T23:02:00.000-06:00

That is my theme song for today. There's a dance that goes with it, but it's harder than you'd think to type in dance.

So, in the interest of putting life in order, (and avoiding studying) I've decided to start a list of Things I Have Not Yet Done That I Would Be Sad If I Died Without Doing.

Go to a strip club. The women are all about going, it's the men you have to drag along! Seems like it may happen, but not for at least a month or so. In work, at any rate.
Get a MS in physics. Also in work, as you may be able to tell by the lack of studying. As soon as I finish this damned final I will have all of my core classes complete and can start taking the fun classes :) Next up, Stellar Structure and Evolution! That's right, I get to take a class in how stars shine, how cool is that?! Man, there is nothing else that fills my stomach with this pull for knowledge, this pure amazement that we know anything about it, and this burning desire to learn more, than astrophysics. How can anything we worry about here matter when there are stars exploding into huge clouds of raw elements, and those clouds of elements are coalescing into more stars, brilliant beautiful new stars, out there? Ok, sorry, I'll calm down now.
See icebergs on an Alaskan cruise. In work by my mama. Seems like it will happen sometime in 2009 now?
Travel! Everywhere! Italy, land of half my forefathers! England (tea!), Ireland (countryside), Switzerland (chocolate!), Austria, Australia (reefs! kangaroos! koalas!), Egypt (pyramids!!), Norway (fjords!), Japan (sushi!), the Arctic,.. I want to see everything! No concrete plans for any of these places in work at the moment, unfortunately. I am going to New Jersey for Christmas though, which has the benefit of, for now at least, containing mea familia!
Bear and raise children. This is actually a fairly new addition to the list, and I'm still getting used to thinking about it. Very shortly after I turned 26, I woke up one day and my body said, I would like to be pregnant now, ok? My mind said, "No! Stop that!" Sigh. It's very difficult to fight with yourself. Plus my niece and nephew are insanely adorable. So I think, maybe in a few years, I might give in. Which kind of turns my world upside down, I'll have you know! It means I should probably
Get married. Which I was not particularly planning on! And I am unsure if it will help or hurt my goal of
Having more sex. Lots of it. It is even better than astrophysics most days. This is more of a general lifetime theme than a specific goal, I guess. People seem to take it too seriously, a lot of times. It's fun, relaxing, and good for you. It's like a walk on a beach, but with a happier ending! Several happier endings, if you're lucky ;)
Ride in a hot air balloon. Looks like fun, only slight risk of fiery death!
Scuba dive in Australia. Giant reefs! Higher risk of death. (Poor Steve, he was funny.)
Live in space. When I was younger I wrote a poem called, "When I am an old woman I will live in space." It went something like, "When I am an old woman I will live in space. I will have a window overlooking Earth, but I won't visit because I think the gravity is too strong. I will never worry about falling down. I will never sleep on my arms funny and wake up with pins and needles. I will be happy there." Ok I made that last half up, I don't remember how it went.
Sleep. This is more of a specific, right-now goal, but also a lifetime one. I do like to sleep, especially with the kitten keeping me company and sitting on me to make sure I don't float away.

Everyone else has a blog,..

2007-12-02T22:32:00.000-06:00

I was starting to feel left out. I had nowhere to post my thoughts on Rock Band and random things I find on the internet and strip games. Problem solved!

So:

Rock Band - Coolest game ever. I sang! And the microphone didn't explode and I still have friends! It was awesome. Apparently if you play on easy it doesn't care if you're not actually certain what a "note" is. I got 100% on an STP song!

Random things from the internet - Sloth! Graph.

Strip games - I hate to accidentally offend people with sudden nudity, but keeping your clothes on gets so difficult after a few hours. Strip games are the perfect solution! Plus others get naked too, if you play correctly, so you don't have that awkward, "Oh drat, am I the only one whose clothes fell off again?" feeling.

There is detailed analysis available on the manner of game to strip to, with many options presented. Alcohol is also a common driver for strip games, as nothing says "Let's get naked!" like "I'm drunk!" But the main goal is, as it should be for most of life, to have fun, and everyone knows you have the most fun with your clothes off :)