Back from Music City

We're back! I'm sitting on our couch writing this instead of getting ready for work because the baggage handlers in Philadelphia forgot to put 90% of the luggage on the flight, so all of it is being driven around and dropped off this morning. A slight inconvenience, but in this day and age of terrible air travel stories, it's really not that bad.

But let that be a reminder to you - never put your car keys in your checked bag, always carry them or give them to your wife to put in her purse! We were counting our blessings over and over that we had our keys and were at least able to get home.

Our trip to the great state of Tennessee was wonderful. And for those who haven't met them, or haven't seen them in a while, let me assure you that the Dickson babies are adorable! I don't have any pictures, but I will once Ouiser and Feather Nester get a chance to send them to me. Baby L has cheeks and smiles for days and is just like a little china doll, and little S is so happy and loving and sweet natured. The very best is when S walks up to L and says "Be-by!" in her little excited high-pitched voice - SO cute!!

Our days were spent relaxing with babies and golf, and in the evenings we got together for some drinks. And maybe if you're really nice to Ouiser, one day she'll post the hysterical videos of people playing Nintendo Wii boxing in her living room!

Then yesterday, our last day, Ouiser gave B and I an amazing tour of Nashville. What a beautiful city! So clean and well laid out - plenty of culture and things to do. It really is an up-and-coming city like they say it is. We saw the Parthenon, the Ryman, went to the Farmer's Market, and ate pulled pork - it was great.

Gonna go look out the window and check on our bags now...

See ya!

A quick hello and goodbye today! We leave tonight to spend the night in Binghamton with my relatives - tomorrow at 5:45am we board a plane to the land of happiness and babies known as Nashville, TN!! And I can FINALLY meet my sweet baby L and snuggle her little cheeks. Oh! I'm so excited! And I'm pretty sure that B is even more excited since his 3 favorites things in life are babies, dogs, and golf and all three will be large parts of the trip. In fact, I may not see him at all while we're down there, come to think of it...

As for this past weekend, I tried on my wedding dress and it was HEAVEN. Really and truly... HEAVEN! It is THE prettiest, most lovely, elegant, dress I've ever seen. I'm head over heels in love. The dress I tired on originally was in a different color (gold/champagne) than the color I ordered it in (ivory), so it was really hard to picture it when I ordered it. But when I walked in the dressing room I gasped, and then pretty much refused to take it off for the next half an hour.

And to top it off, I even bought some jewelry to go with it. B's mom generously bought the necklace and my mom bought the earrings. I really need to find some events I can wear this get-up to after June 21st, because it's just too darn good to only wear once.

On a side note, do you know how close June 21st is???! Ah! Have a great weekend, I'll be back around this way next week.


PS - I ordered the black and white rain boots today, the first ones pictured.

Kitty Happiness

We're back from a lovely weekend in Albany, but I'm far too tired to write about it, so I'll leave you with some funny cat mischief. This is a picture of what either Dizzy or Miles did in the few minutes after I stepped out of the bathroom on Saturday morning.


And this is a funny video that B's cousin showed us this weekend of two cats just havin' a little conversation.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter folks! We're off to Albany to do the first fitting for the wedding dress, meet with the pastor who is marrying us, and see B's family for Easter. This is the Easter basket cake I made to bring home - everything is edible except the bow. Let's hope it survives the drive! Have a great weekend.

Barack Obama Rally

AH!! Look at that picture!! Do you know where that's from?? That's a cell phone picture taken 10 minutes ago by my brother who is standing about 4 inches from Barack Obama's podium in Portland, OR. The arena sold out in about 20 minutes, but he managed to get one ticket off of Craigslist two nights ago. He'll hopefully be sending more pictures, so I'll keep you updated.

In addition to Barack, Bill Richardson (who endorsed him last night) is set to speak as well. If you threw in Keith Olberman, this would be like B's and my super nerdy version of seeing the Beatles! :)




Just got more pictures! One from outside the event waiting to get in and two from inside.


Update: My brother just called me and held his phone up so I could hear the speech! I had absolutely no idea what he was saying, but was freaking out and hollering just the same!! It was just so crazy to hear him "live!"

Update: Just got another picture! This is Bill Richardson endorsing Obama. The rally is over and my brother is sending me more pictures soon. Stay tuned!




Update: Just got the last three pictures. M said the event was absolutely amazing. Look how great!

Voice your Choice!

No, not about politics (though I want you to do that too), this is about far more important things... my rain boots. There are not words for the situation at our house right now. After all of the construction on the yard a few months ago, plus the slightly warmer temperatures (and by "warmer" I mean "not freezing"), we have a huge problem. The problem is the driveway that we can barely get out of in the mornings because of the alien mud that consists of half super glue and half animal waste - just a guess based on it's properties, we haven't done lab testing. Even walking on all the planks that B set out for us isn't working. Tomorrow is pay day and rain boots are at the top of the list. Help me out and pick your favorite!

Wait... what???

That's what you're going to say to yourself when you read this sentence: I went to bed at 7:30pm last night. No, I'm not sick. No, I didn't stay up until some ungodly hour the night before. But when I tell you all that I need my sleep to function, I'm not kidding!!

We ate dinner, then I ate Tums because I ate too much of dinner, then I laid down on B's chest and was a goner for the rest of the night. Total goner until about 5am this morning.

I'll leave you with two quotes that appeared on my Google homepage today, which I thought were great:

Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
-Sidney J. Harris

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

Whoosh!

Where do the weekends go? Another one has come and gone and somehow very little got accomplished. I did workout both days, which is completely unheard of for me, but I was really starting to feel concerned about all the aforementioned Easter candy I've been inhaling :) Not concerned enough to stop, mind you, just concerned enough to sweat a little more.

We went to pick up our wedding rings, but B's was in the wrong size, so we have to wait another 4 weeks. Good thing we didn't procrastinate on this. So that errand, grocery shopping, and a sushi date night are pretty much all that comprised the weekend.

On to the world of politics... if you've been following the analysts, articles, and commentators, you may be concerned about the same thing that I've been very concerned about - that this long, drawn-out debate between Barack and Hillary is strengthening McCain's campaign significantly. He's begun his national campaign for the presidency and our side is still dueling it out. What a crushing loss it would be for Barack to finally win the nomination and then lose to McCain. So depressing... I can't even think about it.

On a related note, check out this great article in the NY Times about the grueling life of a campaign staffer. It's very interesting - it'll make you appreciate your day job!

Peep-tastic!

If you've ever lived with me for any period of time (B, M in VT, Feather Nester) you know that I have a raging sugar addiction. Raging. The more pure, the better. I can rationalize this because I read once on a hypoglycemic support website that one of the main symptoms that hypoglycemics deal with is a craving for pure, unadulterated sugar. I have about a million other symptoms too, but that one is the one that people seem to notice.

When we were all in high school, my unadulterated sugar cravings took the form of eating Jello mix at Feather Nester's track meets, sitting in front of the TV with M from VT while we ate ice tea mix out of the can, or eating inhuman amounts of Peeps at Easter. I have since dropped the Jello habit, mostly dropped the ice tea habit (though not totally), but my addition to Peeps and all other Easter candy is Fierce, as Christian would say. (I even have a super cute Peep shirt that M sent me last year!)

Yellow peeps, regular jelly beans, Cadbury creme eggs, Cadbury caramel eggs.... Heaven!! Pure, delicious heaven. I'm sorry to tell you that when it comes to Easter candy I have absolutely no off switch. My workouts lately are doing nothing to advance the "wedding body" I'm going for and are simply staving off the "Easter Fat" that would inevitably ensue. I'm not kidding... it's a little disgusting. Every night before dinner I have one emergency Peep, just to hold me over. Then after dinner I have a minimum of four additional peeps, lots of jelly beans, and if I can sneak past B to get to the kitchen, a Cadbury egg.

This is from the girl who is famous for portion control! So anyway, on that note I'll leave you with a hysterical Peep-picture my friend sent me today called "Peep Show"...

Huh?

Several times a day for the past week now I've thought to myself "Oh, I should write about that when I do my next post" and then I completely forget everything I was going to say. So, I'm sorry to tell you... I don't have much to tell you.

The wedding rings are in and the dress arrives in 2 weeks, so all is moving forward there. But we honestly haven't done that much wedding stuff lately - the break has been nice, but it also makes me suspicious, like I should run home and check my list.

We had a little mini ice storm this weekend, so we didn't go out much at all. We did make it to the grocery store, which allowed B to cook a very unexpected gourmet meal last night. One of the many, many things I love about B is his constant effort to make even the smallest part of life special whenever he can. So when he said "let's have steak" I was presented with a full meal of sirloin, a salad with homemade dressing, a baked potato, and a full "baked potato toppings bar" complete with home made bacon bits, and a bottle of Merlot. It was THE best way to end the weekend, and not at all surprising - this is what living with him is like.

If we had our camera - which has been at Cannon for months now getting repaired - I would have taken a picture for you. Oh how I miss being able to post pictures! :( Three helpful links that I'll leave you with.

• "Hillary's New Math Problem". After the losses in Ohio and Texas, I was feeling very very down about Obama and his chances and this article totally lifted my spirits. It's not projections, but a straight-up math analysis as it relates to the delegates and the 2 candidates. And if you're a huge super-nerd like B, you can link to the Delegate Calculator on Slate that B plays with every single night!
• Recycling Guide - This is a great article that Feather Nester put on her blog a few days ago and it's so interesting I want to make sure everyone reads it. Basically, by recycling things improperly (with caps still on, with food residue still in the jar) you are contaminating entire batches of recycling and as a result, they get thrown out instead. Very interesting - go read it!
• CPSC Recalls - This is something my coworker (who has a toddler) just told me about. You sign up to be on the Consumer Product Safety Commission recall list and you'll get an email whenever there is a recall. He said it was extremely helpful with the toddler toys, but has also been helpful with everyday items like small appliances and such. They don't spam you, they only send out an email when there is a recall

OK, I think that's all for now! I'm off to pilates.

Coming back

So... I'm back. I haven't felt like writing in so long because it just felt wrong to be writing about the little daily parts of life when I knew so many people in so much pain. I just couldn't bring myself to do it because it all seemed a little irrelevant. My brother flew home for Brian's funeral, which was yesterday morning, and has been spending a lot of good quality time with Adam and their group of friends. I'm so glad he decided to come home, even if it was brief. I think it's important to go through these things together, and I feel like he never could have dealt with such a tragedy by being so far away. It's only too bad that I won't get to see him, as he flies back early tomorrow morning.

Things have been rolling forward, as always, here in central NY. We're still tackling the great weed-out of '08, which has been very effective. Ever since we moved in together a few years ago, B and I had never really weeded out our old clothes, crafts, sports equipment, etc. So we've been hitting the task pretty hard the last two weekends, but there is still a ways to go.

My mom gave me the wise advice to catalog everything we're donating to the Salvation Army so that we can get the tax write-off. If you go here, it brings you to the Salvation Army Valuation Guide where they give you a list of items and tell you how much you can count as a donation per item. I took that info and made a whole spreadsheet in Excel with built-in calculations so it does all of the work for you. If anyone out there has a clean-out ahead of them and wants me to send it to them, let me know. Right now we're up to 7 boxes of items totally $2010! Once you have your list they'll stamp it for you when you donate the items, which legitimizes your write-off.

Have a good weekend, especially to B's dad who celebrates a birthday today! Another year wiser.

Complexities

I think we usually assume that life and it's parts occur in a bubble. The protagonist is pure and the antagonist is evil - cut and dry. Although I knew that those simplicities were never true, I felt the depth of that yesterday. All day I felt so sad about Brian, and yet work went on. My whole family was frantically trying to talk to my brother yesterday to see how he was doing and when he finally called me back, his empty voice just broke me heart. I just wanted to beg him to move back to the East Coast so we wouldn't all be so far away. And the thing is - there is nothing anyone can say. Nothing. Both of my parents called me to say that they wished that we could be together just to sit in the same room and appreciate each other and laugh and give hugs. (To see Brian's obituary, which includes a photo and the place to give donations, click here.)

But as sad as I was, and continue to be, joy over the littlest thing still has a way of sliding in. As we were cooking our dinner of sesame coated salmon and Thai noodles with peanut sauce, we got a knock on the door. "Maybe it's a package." The delivery people often confuse the two doors to our house and when there is a package of ours at the other door, our neighbors knock on the front door as a little signal.

I knew what it was since a charge recently showed up on our credit card statement - the wedding invitations. Now, the relevance here is that I LOVE paper. I love it. If I could be paid to make cards and wrap presents, I would be in blissful heaven. I get this catalog called Bags & Bows which is nothing but present-wrapping material and I tear it open when it arrives. So anyway, to me, this package was a big deal.

So I tore it open, put together one of our photo invitations, tied the specially colored ribbon that B suggested we buy aaannndddd... Perfection! Perfect! It's so beautiful that I can't stop looking at it. I love it. Love!

So I'm blissfully happy over something as simple as our invitations and similarly sad and depressed at the tragedy that is effecting people I love. I have the same urge that my parents were talking about - I just want to get in the car and drive to Plattsburgh to give my sweet Adam a hug. But truth be told, I take comfort in the fact that life is not segmented in bubbles of good and evil. I think that's what keeps us grounded and allows us to keep moving forward.

* A very big happy birthday to my brother who turns a quarter century today and also to B's sister who turned 27 yesterday *

You will be missed

Brian Mehan died today at 4pm. The family had stopped receiving visitors 2 days ago so we knew it was close. Please say prayers and send love to the wonderful family and hundreds of friends he left behind. I can only hope that the tragic loss of such a vibrant 20 year old has positive life-changing effects on those he knew. Click here for pictures I posted a few days ago.