From this moment on

I’ve spent two days working on a gift for Seymour.  Little else has been done around the house, but at least I’ve gotten his gift finished.  Cricket and Thumper helped, too much at times.  Cricket was so funny – he kept hearing our song (you know, the old, “They’re playing our song!” thing) and looking for my cell phone, thinking that Daddy was calling because the beginning of it is Seymour’s ringtone.

Tonight we’re going out to celebrate, but since we couldn’t find a sitter, we’re not going to celebrate the way we originally planned.  Maybe it’s better this way, though.  We can come home, put the kids in bed, pop in Fool’s Gold and have a little popcorn, maybe an adult beverage or two, and since there’s no ice outside, I don’t have to worry about falling on my butt like I did when we first saw it. 😉

Since I’ve abandoned everything else, I’ve gotten no writing done, either.  Luckily, tomorrow promises to be a very lazy day spent at home.  Of course, by lazy, I mean I’ll be doing mountains of laundry and piles of dishes and squeezing in some writing here and there if I’m lucky.  Now that I think about it, that doesn’t sound lazy at all, does it?  Maybe I ought to stop into Casey’s and buy myself a lottery ticket on my way out of town tonight…

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Lost in a moment

So I’m a little late with my Photo Friday post today.  But hey – it’s still Friday, and look, I’ve even got a photo!

Photograph by Minson Photography

This is one of my favorite wedding pictures and in honor of my third wedding anniversary Wednesday, I thought I’d share it.  It’s not quite candid, not quite posed.  We took pictures both before and after the ceremony because we didn’t want to see each other beforehand and also because that way we wouldn’t keep our guests waiting at the reception hall quite as long.  This shot was captured between posed photos, when Seymour and I clearly weren’t paying attention to anyone or anything but each other.

I’ve got the song “Lost in This Moment” by Big and Rich stuck in my head right now and I think it fits this photo perfectly.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, a great big hunk of man is calling my name.  ¡Hasta luego, mis amigos! 🙂

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

Photo Friday on a Tuesday!

English: This is the logo of the Wartburg Coll...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So today’s photo post is all about the weekend!  I went to my cousin’s wedding this weekend and it was beautiful.  The church was gorgeous, everyone was dressed to the nines, and the reception was lovely.  My uncle (the groom’s father) is a beekeeper and made the unity candles that were used during the service in addition to providing the party favors for the reception – miniature jars of honey!  Yum yum. 🙂  The wedding featured three officiants: Rev. Ramona Bouzard from Wartburg College, David and Laura’s alma mater (I also went there for a year – go Knights!); the minister from the church they got married in whose name escapes me at the moment; and Laura’s father, Randy.  Randy performed the vows portion of the ceremony and when Laura’s voice broke after the first line, he said, “You don’t have to cry just because I am!”  That was my favorite part of the whole service because it was so sweet.

However, I’m so tired that I can’t seem to type (and I’ve been trying to since I sat down to write this post yesterday).  So instead of me blathering on about how hard it was to watch my cousin marry the woman of his dreams because he’s really more like my kid brother than my cousin, I think I’ll just let you all have a look-see at some of the pretty, pretty pictures captured by Heather Rissler Botine.

Hope everyone has a happy Fourth of July tomorrow!  Stay safe, wherever you are!

(c) 2012.  All rights reserved.

It finally happened…

…I finally found a book that, upon rereading, disappointed me.  I just finished Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn, which I probably read sometime in late elementary school or early middle school (I don’t remember exactly, because it was a long time ago, so give me a break).  At any rate, I think I must have read it when I was at an age to identify with some of the characters.  There’s Molly, who is 12; her younger brother, Michael, who is 10; her mother, Jean; her stepfather, Dave; and her step-sister, Heather, who is 7.  They move from Baltimore to this little country church, complete with graveyard, where Heather happens to befriend the ghost of a little girl who was just her age and even had the same initials.  Both their mothers had died in fires and they became fast friends.  Heather was not overly accepting of her father moving on with another woman, let alone of the woman herself (or Michael or Molly).  Half the book involved Molly, Michael, and Heather fighting and then their parents ended up fighting.  Molly felt like no one believed her because Dave and Jean (especially Dave) always took Heather’s side and after a while, this kind of got on my nerves, but not nearly as much as Dave himself did.  He was always making excuses for Heather’s bad behavior, saying things like, “Well, she’s just an unusually sensitive little girl,” or, “She’s suffered a loss and just needs love and understanding.”  Well, yes, but that only takes you so far in life.  I guess that’s the part that bothered me: no matter what she did that was wrong (and plenty of it was horrible), he was always making excuses for her and he seemed completely blind to the fact that he was being played, that she wasn’t nearly as innocent as he thought.  Now yes, she is just a little girl and yes, this is just a story, but it reminded me of one too many people I know in real life who have that same attitude of, “Well, I’ve suffered a loss, so you all should feel sorry for me and let me have my way” and blah blah blah…Apparently I couldn’t identify with anyone in the story this time around and I actually found myself growing mildly offended.  Isn’t it funny how our perceptions of things change over time?

In other news, we’re off to the courthouse this afternoon to get our marriage license.  Yay!  My aunt is going to meet us there and be our witness and then we’re all going out for supper afterwards.  Her mother-in-law is in town visiting and I’m really looking forward to having supper with her.  She and her husband were like second grandparents to me growing up and I haven’t seen her in a long time, so I hope we’ll have a good visit.  Evidently she was under the  mistaken impression, though, that supper tonight was supposed to be in celebration of my engagement and she didn’t want to intrude, so my aunt had to convince her that she was invited and that she wasn’t intruding on anything.  Besides, anything to celebrate our engagement would have been done a long time ago, like right after we got engaged.  I don’t want her to feel like she’s not welcome because she was the reason I suggested going out for supper in the first place, so I hope she’ll have fun.

Oh, I need some more medicine!  I woke up with a killer headache this morning and it just won’t go away.  I need a pop.  For the headache.  Yes, that’s it, for the headache…

Sixty days till September 26…

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Okay, so I’m going to hell…

So I started this post Monday afternoon.  Apparently I have a small problem with procrastination.

Anyway, I went to one of my best friends’ sister’s wedding Saturday.  I had an awesome time; I had a lot more fun than I expected to have.  I got together with three great ladies and I think the last time that happened, we were still in high school.  It’s been a while!  So naturally, we put off ending the evening as long as possible and went out for supper after the wedding.  Jenni drove in her parents’ Tahoe and we had the music cranked; everyone was singing and laughing and it was a wonderful trip down memory lane.  Ah, good times, great oldies!  Well, actually, it was the latest Gaelic Storm album, but we all rather had a hankering for some “Ice, Ice Baby!”  Yeah!  I loves me some Vanilla Ice when I’m cruisin’.

It’s too bad we don’t live closer to each other so we could do things like that more often.  On the other hand, I suppose it’s the rarity of those type of get-togethers that makes them so special.  Jenny, Jenni, and I agreed we should all get together in Iowa City sometime and go out on the town.  That would seriously rock…if we ever get around to actually following through on it.  I hope we will.  Although if Saturday night is any indication, I can’t wait for my bachelorette party (I was promised a much better wedding experience this time around).

*raises a glass*  To good times with great friends!

And now I think I’m going to go prowl the kitchen in search of food since I haven’t had supper yet and I might be a tad bit hungry.  Ciao!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Virtual smoothies

Mmm, smoothies…yummy!

Today is such a lovely day.  It’s a perfect day for an ice cream cone.  I may just buy one on my way home from work.  A lovely strawberry one, in a sugar cone…Mmm, it doesn’t get any better than that!

How I wish I didn’t have to be cooped up in the office, strapped to my desk.  It’s such an inviting day out there and I long to be part of it.  The sun is shining, there’s not a cloud in the sky, the temperature is soaring (along with the humidity in anticipation of the impending storm)…Must I stay here in this artificial, climate-controlled edifice?  I think not.  But there are no errands for me to run, so boo.  Oh, if only there were errands to run, then I could go for a walk.  And who knows?  I might forget to come back. 🙂

Ooo, ooo!  We got our pictures back!  Apparently they came in quite a while ago, but the photographer never called us to let us know we could pick them up.  Jerk.  But they were worth the wait, so I’m super-excited.  As soon as I get the software for my lovely printer/scanner/copier loaded on my laptop, I intend to get them scanned and then you know I’ll post them.  This means I have to get to work on the announcement so that I can get it sent in to the paper for pretty publication.  *so much squeeing, you don’t even want to know*

Okay, I think I’m done now.  But it’s just so pretty and loverly that I can’t help but be in a good mood!  Also, I cruised the loop in Reinbeck last night with the windows down and Eminem up.  Totally felt 17 again.  The only thing missing was someone else over the age of 6.  Actually, after I picked Rachael up, I changed the song to a more family-friendly Barenaked Ladies song.  You can’t go wrong with a song named after Brian Wilson.

Alas, I suppose I should quit procrastinating and daydreaming and such and get back to doing actual work.  Happy weekend!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

So…

So basically, I’ve been atrocious about posting this month.  Sorry.  As I just finished telling my bridesmaids, the procrastination bug has bitten quite hard lately.  There are a million things I should be doing and yet…none of them are getting done.  I can’t even blame Facebook this time!  I’ve been playing Bloodlines on MySpace and have become rather addicted.  It’s pure boredom, I think, that’s stimulating my fascination with the game.  So much for having outgrown my interest in vampires…

I really can’t say that there’s much going on around here because really, there isn’t.  My hands have finally recovered from raking leaves last week; I got off work early Friday and spent the rest of the afternoon raking the yard.  Yecchh.  We have a pretty big yard and lots of leaf-bearing trees, so raking is a huge chore.  Plus, Greg and the kids raked all the leaves up last fall and pushed them out to the curb for the City to pick up and then they never came, so when the snow began to fly and the plows began to plow, they pushed all those leaves right back into the yard.  Jerks.  Their leaf-collecting machine broke, so rather than reschedule the leaf pick-up, they just didn’t do it.  Raking wet leaves really, really sucks.  You might say it sucks brass monkey balls.

*sigh*  Have had it with working.  Am more than ready to go home for the day.  Really looking forward to the RCIA potluck tonight and the yummy, yummy deviled eggs that will be going with us.  Have decided to channel Bridget Jones with my writing style for this paragraph.  Am super excited that tax season is officially over.  Must now lose weight.

In other news, Twitter is being irritating.  While it is rather awesome, it’s also rather a pain.  The jury is out on this, too.  I suppose now it’s cooperating, I don’t dislike it quite as much as I did a few minutes ago, but that may change.  I suppose I alternately love/hate it, much like the Twitter widget in my sidebar that doesn’t update in real time.

I think that’s it for the day.

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

No news

Sorry.  There’s just not much to tell lately.  I really haven’t felt like writing all that much, which is rather odd for me.

So to update, we’ve finally settled on the bridesmaid dresses.  Yay!  One thing down, 970 million more to go.  Um, I’m being confirmed at church Saturday night.  And my tummy hurts.  Apparently all the antacid I took after lunch hasn’t kicked in yet.  It really needs to, though, cuz I’ve had awful heartburn since yesterday and it needs to go away.

I actually made some progress on my type-up-all-my-old-stories project.  I got one all typed up and I started on another one.  Oh my God.  Seriously.  I knew they were bad, but holy crap, I didn’t realize the exact extent of the horror.  Yikes!  I should be shot for writing such utter drivel.  Aside from the fact that every time someone asks my character to tell them about herself, she gives them her life story in one paragraph, well, there are really no words to describe just how bad it was.  I kept making remarks like, “It’s a good thing I never got knocked up at fifteen like some people do because I’d have stuck my kid with a truly heinous name,” or, “You have got to be kidding me.  What the hell was I thinking?!”  And I thought these were good once upon a time?  I was out of my freaking mind!  Greg asked me why I was typing them all up if they were so bad.  I told him it was so that I had a record of what I used to write.  “Oh, so you’re not going to have them published?” he asked.  “Oh, HELL no!”  I replied.  “I’d die of embarrassment!”

And I would.  They are true horrors.  *shudders*  And yet, I keep on going…

We got 8 inches of swearing Sunday.  This is April, dammit.  That’s not supposed to happen.  When they said April showers bring May flowers, they meant rain!  Not white crap!  NO MORE WHITE CRAP!!

Okay, I think I’m done now.

But on the subject of crap, my long-awaited piece of BSB-inspired fluff is nearing completion.  Yay!  Because everyone loves a good bit of fluff, right?  Right?  You know I’m right.

*sigh*  I hope this afternoon goes by as quickly as this morning did because I just want to go home and curl up in bed.  I seem to be feeling rather averse to productivity today.  So with that, I think I’ll go back to doing quizzes on Facebook and hope that this time, stupid WordPress will post my entry when I tell it to instead of saving 90% of it as a draft and losing the rest of what I typed.  I hate when things of that sort happen.  Stupid computer glitches.  If I could remember everything that I typed, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, I guess, but my memory sucks, so there ya go.  Apparently my computer sucks, too, but I already had suspicions of that.

Friday needs to hurry up and get here.

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.

Modern torture devices

I have discovered that torture devices are alive and well in the 21st century.  I had a particularly close call with one this morning.  It taunted me with its promises of better health and weight loss and for thirty agonizing moments, I succumbed to glorious images of a new and improved me.  Then, hot, sweaty, tired, and in pain, I wondered incredulously what the hell I had been thinking.  Obviously it had some sort of mind control powers that it failed to mention or it would probably not have succeeded in keeping me in its clutches for as long as it did.  In future, I will know better than to heed its siren song and fully intend to steer clear of it and any and all like devices.  What is the device of which I speak, you may be asking yourselves, so that I, too, can avoid them?  The answer, friends, is simple: the elliptical machine.

Yes, I have begun in earnest the workout regimen that I’ve been promising to start for at least the last two years.  I somehow managed to break free from the lovely warmth and comfort of my cozy bed at 5:45 a.m. this morning and engage in an arduous workout.  By arduous, of course, I mean that I set the thing to level 2 and spent thirty minutes whining about being bored, thirsty, hot, cold, tired, and sick while struggling to breathe through my nose for the first time in days.  That’s right, folks, I’m a pansy and a whiner.

But of course you already knew that.

My goal is to get into better shape and lose all the weight that I’ve gained over the last year.  Ideally, this will happen prior to September 26, but I suppose that’s too much to hope for.  Maybe I can just lose most of it by then.

I still hate mornings, though, and getting up at the ass-crack of dawn is sooooooooooo not my idea of a good time.  In fact, working out in general is not exactly my idea of a good time, in case you couldn’t tell.  I love riding my bike and going swimming and taking walks, but those are all rather difficult to do in the middle of winter.  Oh, sure, I could join a gym and do all of those things inside, but then there would be no mosquitoes to swat away, no sunburns to deal with, no bratty kids to shoo out of my way in the pool, no excess of heat and humidity…Why haven’t I joined a gym again yet?  Oh, right, because then I would miss out on enjoying nature.  Because I’m such the avid naturalist and all-around outdoorsy type.  Right.

Maybe in my dreams.

Rachael cracked me up this morning.  She came downstairs as I was about halfway through my half-hour of torture and sat down at the table to watch me, positively enthralled by what she saw.  Whether it was the idea of me working out or the fact that she had no idea what it was I was doing that kept her attention riveted on my ever-reddening face, I’m not sure.  “You look tired,” she said.  I gasped my agreement.  “I would be done now if that were me,” she continued.  I stared at her for a moment, not sure whether to laugh or cry, then told her to go play.  Greg told her that people don’t like to be observed while working out, which is true for me because I’m always afraid I’ll look like an idiot, even when I’m the only person around.  I asked him if he heard what she’d said and he replied that he hadn’t, so I told him.  He laughed.  Then he came out and said that I didn’t look as bad as he thought I would.  Apparently that’s supposed to mean that I’m in better shape than originally thought, despite the fact that I get winded running up the steps to the clerk’s office at the courthouse every day (I’ve been doing it for three years now, so you’d think I’d be used to it, but you would be wrong; and lest I make it seem like that’s a small amount of stairs, there are somewhere around two dozen steps just to get into the courthouse, then three more flights up to the clerk’s office).  I could probably have phrased all that better, but my brain seems to have fallen asleep from all that exercising I did this morning.

In other news, the sinus infection that’s been threatening for so long finally hit with a vengeance on Friday and I spent Saturday on the couch.  I spent most of Saturday morning asleep.  Yay sleep!  We went to Ankeny this weekend and did lots of wedding planningy type things, such as picking up my wedding dress.  YAY!!!!!!  Then I (accidentally) got super-drugged-up on cold medicine and Excedrin and felt like a space cadet all of Sunday.  A word to the wise: Don’t mix two NyQuil liqui-gels with three Excedrin and a muscle relaxer.  Bad things will happen.  It was much less fun to go shopping and try on pretty dresses in my drug-induced fog than I had originally anticipated.  But I still have to have it bustled and there are still other dresses to pick out, so I suppose I can deal with it.

Yay wedding dress! 🙂

I finally got around to sending my cell phone in to be fixed.  I guess I procrastinated a bit with that.  You would think I would have gotten it taken care of right away and I did try to do just that, but then I got lazy.  Now I have to wait four to six weeks for my pretty pink phone to be usable again.  Stupid phone breakage.

And in laptop news, we finally gave up on waiting for Dell to send the cds they promised to send.  They kept pushing back the ship date and when Greg called to find out why, they told him they had the cds in stock (and they weren’t on back-order like he’d been told before) and they didn’t know why they hadn’t been sent out.  *looking very earnest*  They promised to send them out right away, overnight even.  They still never arrived.  So we finally managed to get them to send us prepaid shipping labels and we shipped it back to them.  Once they’re satisfied, they’re supposed to send me a new one with the right operating system on it.  It will probably be another month at least before that happens.  Stupid Dell.  Their computers are great, but their customer service really sucks.

My God I’m tired!  I blame the early rising this morning, the muscle relaxer I took after my lovely warm shower, and the stupid sinus infection that won’t go away.  And by won’t go away, I mean that the two doses of antibiotic I’ve taken haven’t managed to banish it yet.  WORK FASTER, MEDICINE!  I WANT TO BREATHE!

*sigh*  In the meantime, I suppose I had better get back to work, although I’m really not sure what it is that I’ll do to pass the time and keep from falling asleep.  I felt rotten enough yesterday that I toyed with the idea of calling in sick today so that I could stay home and rest up from the weekend, but I’m a goody-goody, so here I am.  At work.  Where I’m supposed to be working but am blogging as a way to put off doing anything even remotely productive instead.

Happy Tuesday!

(c) 2009.  All rights reserved.