Monday, October 29, 2007

Happy Happy Joy Joy!

When I got home this evening I checked the weather...the temp is going down to 29!!!! FINALLY! The 1st freeze. The freeze that kills the pollen! No more pollen until March when the trees get going!!!!! YIPPPEEEE!!!!! :)

We now do the dance of joy!

Alex and Evan

Over the weekend I went to my friend Rachel's wedding! It was so much fun! A beatuful setting and great friends to see! I have a few other pictures but let's get started with a few of my favorite "little people" - Drew and Brenna's kids Alex and Evan.....



Alex - age 2 1/2 - grinning in the sun on the deck after Rachel and John's wedding.



Evan - age 7 months - contemplating life.



Alex and Evan with their Daddy.



Alex exploring the water glass.



Alex enjoying the ice cream - he also enjoyed the cheese, grapes, bluberries, tomatoes, cucumber, chicken, french fries (or are they just fries?), and cake - the boy can eat!

Friday, October 26, 2007

I'm the only me!


HowManyOfMe.com
LogoThere is
1
person with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Pushing Daisies

A few weeks ago my friend Susan posted about a new show on ABC Pushing Daisies so I decided I'd TiVo it and see for myself.

I just watched it and oh my gosh it's hysterical! It's a totally psychedelic crime show - it's the love child of Scooby Doo and CSI. There is a whole pie motif as well that makes me think of Twin Peaks...remember that one?

Basically the gist is that this guy - the Pie Man - has a gift - he can touch dead people and they come alive, if he touches them again they die forever. If he keeps them alive for more than one minute something else must die. He uses his gift to solve crimes, he wakes the dead asks who killed them and instantly solves the crime bringing justice to the dead. He has brought back his childhood sweetheart...only catch is that he can't touch her, b/c it would kill her.

It's a totally hysterical show and I encourage everyone who is reading this, although Susan I think is the only one and she already watches it, to watch it so it doesn't get cancled! :)

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Blind Doggie

My doggie, Daisy Mae, has been having some issues. She's old - at least 10, maybe even older and lately she's been wetting the bed everytime she lays down. She had peed on all her beds and herself. That was my big concern that lead us to the vet today. It stinks. It makes a mess. And I had no idea why it was happening. I'd noticed that she was having trouble on the stairs in the mornings and so I figured her arthritis was getting bad and she was stiff in the morning. I'd also noticed, fairly recently, like in the last week - week and a half that she was bumping into things. Mostly in the morning when I let her out she'd miss the sliding glass door and walk head on into my antique-painted-by-my-great-grandmother coal hod by the fireplace. One morning she got stuck behind my desk attempting to go out the wrong side of the sliding glass door. I'd sorta chalked this up to the fact that she's not a morning dog and maybe wasn't quite awake yet. This morning when I fed her she walked over to her dish and walked right into the wall before before bending down to eat.

I took her to the vet early so she could get a bath before the appointment. The whole staff at the vet's office noticed that she was running into things. The vet was quite concerned, esp since this was so sudden. Turns out Daisy is blind. I'm not sure if it's total blindness at this point or rapidly deteriorating but she def can't see well at all. My vet has referred us to a Veterinary Opthomologist to investigate and fully diagnose the problem.

This is why she has a problem with stairs. Suddenly she can't see them. Maybe this is why she is incontinent all the sudden - she can't see to get downstairs when she has to go.

The dr gave us some pills for the incontinence, but the sudden blindness was a much bigger concern.

I have surfed the net a bit and there's actually a lot out there. It's sounding like this is a permanent situation, but I don't think it will be that bad - of course it's likely the beginning of a downward spiral for my senior doggie. :(

Friday, October 12, 2007

Calling all Deadlist Catch Fans!!!!! The final Armchair Traveler Reviews!




If you love Deadlist Catch then you need to read these 2 books:

Lucy The Giant by Sherri Smith - I don't normally go for young adult novels, however I enjoyed this one! Lucy is a teenager growing up in Sitka, AK, who deals with much of the usual teenage angst - excaerbated by the fact that Lucy is overly tall, her father is a drunk, her mom ran away when Lucy was little and she doesn't think she has any real friends. Opportunity presents itself and Lucy runs away to Kodiak and joins the crew of a crab boat where she discovers community and friendship and life on a crab boat is much better than life at home. Lucy's utopia unfortuently is shattered by the secrets she was keeping. But the book has a happy ending!

Dead in the Water by Dana Stabenow - Dana Stabenow is "the Alaskan Mystery Writer" she has written lots and lots of books all set in Alaska any many starting Kate Shugak. Kate used to work in DA office in Anchorage, now she's unoffical, but she still helps out. In this book she is under cover on a crab boat to determine what happened to 2 crew members who met untimely and unexplained deaths the previous season. Kate quickly uncovered the true identity of the skipper and quickly figured out how the crew members died..it seemed as if every lead she followed turned into something important...which kept the book moving, but left me feeling that the story was very contrived. There were some surprises at the end of the story, however since this is one many stories starring Kate Shugak so you know that she survives no matter what and that took away some of the suspense.

The thing I found most interesting about both of these books was that it is considred bad luck to have a woman on a crab boat...yet both of these books have women main characters!

Both books made for good Deadlist Catch fixes and were decent reads about AK!
Not only that but I have now completed the Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge!!! :) Go me! :)
I really enjoyed the challenge...it was fun to read books around a theme and have a reason to blog about them....I'll be on the lookout for the next challenge....

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

2 hours...

That's how long it took me to get home tonight. Susan has blogged a lot about the horrors of traffic here in the DC suburbs but today took the cake. I left school at 5:50. I walked into my house at 8:00. That's more than 2 hours. It's less than 20 miles from my school to my house. The reason: A truck accident on I-95 south right at "my" exit. Apparently the accident happened BEFORE rush hour so that must have been like 10am - there's not much day that would classify as "before" rush hour. And apparently 95 south was shut down for awhile. Traffic was backed up everywhere! I know about 12 different ways to get home from school and I tried all of them. Every route I took I was greeted with lines of backed up cars. Many times I just broke down into tears I was so frustrated and feeling so clausterphobic about being literally being stuck with no way out. Kinda made me wish I was driving my little RV again...then I could have pulled off and watched TV or something! :)

Do you realize how far I could get in 2 hours driving the speed limit? Almost the whole way to my friend in Central PA's house. Williamsburg - which is like a whole other era so I could practically go back in time in 2 hours. The Mountains - Shenandoah National Park is less than 2 hours away. And it took me 2 hours to drive 20 miles today.

There are only 2 other times that I remember traffic being this bad...one was Sept 18, 2001, exactly one week after 9/11 - they re-opened some of the military bases and with the heightend security traffic backed up very quickly. I was interning in Southeast DC at the time and it took me 3 hours to get to work. I didn't have a cell phone either. There was a silver lining then though...I was at the top of a hill on I-275 in Washington DC with an amazing view of the Capitol, The Monument, and The Pentagon when they played the National Anthem in conmemortation of the one week aniversary. That was an amazing moment.

The other time traffic was this bad was the day a fertilizer truck over turned on I-95 and they had to shut down the road for the whole day and re-pave the road b/c the fertilizer ate through the asphalt! That was a big mess because there was no way to get south of DC and 95 was backed up from the Beltway to Fredericksburg. The silver lining there....I wasn't sitting in the traffic.

Today, no silver lining.
Drive safe out there folks...you wouldn't want the biggest back up in DC history to be your fault! :)

Friday, October 05, 2007

Book Quiz.....




You're Watership Down!

by Richard Adams

Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you're
actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their
assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they
build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You'd
be recognized as such if you weren't always talking about talking rabbits.



Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.






You're West Virginia!

You are a true coal miner's daughter, or maybe even son. You probably
smoke, and your lungs are paying for it every day. While you're definitely willing to
separate yourself from the crowd for what you believe in, this policy has put you into
a state of unending obscurity and poverty. As a result, people only come to visit you
on foot, and usually they're just trying to prove that they can do it. Keep a canary on
your shoulder whenever possible.



Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.