prices went down

The prices went down on tickets to orlando, but only a little bit. There are some at $525...I think that will be the best option. I think we can get at least part of one of the tickets with credit card rewards, so that should help.

On another note, is anyone dressing up for halloween? If you do, I would love to see pictures and I think it would be fun to post a bunch of dress-up pictures of friends and family (assuming you consent to my posting your image). We don't really have any dress-up halloween parties that would require a costume. We are attending an octoberfest party this weekend, but as far as I know, no costume is required.

I've heard of people dressing up as the following so far:

• Holly Go Lightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's
• The Morton salt girl
• a kangaroo
• Danny Zuco (spelling is wrong I'm sure--from Grease)
• Nicole Richie
  

What costumes have you heard of this Halloween season?

airfares suck

I don't know if I am just not looking at the right time, but everyday I check to see how much fares to Orlando for christmas cost. Jodi already bought her tickets, but the prices for our flights have been hovering around 600 per person. I'm not ready to accept that they are going to be that high forever. I think at this point that if they got to $500 per person, I'd buy them...but even that seems ridiculously high. Arghh! It makes me mad and frustrated.

great website

As many of you know, I'm a feminist. But that really has nothing to do with what I am going to tell you. Because what I am going to tell you about is interesting to everyone- man, woman, feminist, non-feminist.

When I was at the women in computing conference I heard a talk by a woman entrepreneur named Paula Goldman who came up with the idea for a project with a friend and then made it happen.

Imagining Ourselves is a project based out of the International Museum of Women. In the creator's words, this project's goal is to showcase the vitality of our generation (read: younger generation) as a way of inspiring young women to action. The original project began with one question sent to women aged 20-40: What defines your generation of women? The answers came from women in 105 countries.

In the top header line of the website is a link that says "view previous themes". After the first exhibit about what defines your generation, they have done shows on image and identity, motherhood, young men, war and dialogue, culture and conflict, money, love and the future. The site is kind of addicting once you start seeing and reading other women's stories, so don't start to look at it if you only have 2 minutes. The current exhibit for October is "a film a day". everything I've seen on this website is extremely well done and should be shared with all.

the other great thing about this website is that for each piece in an exhibit there is a discussion board where people across the world can talk about issues brought up by the piece. Amazing. I highly recommend it.

no men allowed

I'm at a conference that is a celebration of women in computing, called the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

There are about 1400 attendees, and probably 100 of them (if that) are men. Thus, in multiple places around the conference hotel, the men's bathrooms have been "converted" to women's bathrooms. They put signs all over the bathroom doors and entries that say "Only women allowed"/ no men allowed. The signs also tell the men where they can go to use the bathroom. It seems like an obvious thing to do, but it doesn't always happen. I think it is great. Even with converting some of the men's bathrooms, there are still occasionally waiting lines.

blue ford mustang

I don't know how I got so lucky, but I paid to rent a hyundai accent type car and they gave me a blue ford mustang. Even the guy at the gate to my mom's neighborhood told me I looked pretty good in it. I think he was admiring the car more than me with that statement. I've never been a real car person, and I certainly never really understood the fascination of many people who just love mustangs. Maybe I never really looked at them closely before. It really is a beautiful car. Don't get me wrong, I would never trade my japanese import for an american car- but I did really enjoy driving this car. It had a good ride, and certainly looked pretty sporty. Only thing that would have been better if it was a convertible. Alas...that was not to be.

I am no longer nuts

I have decided not to do the half-marathon run/walk. It is just too close to the day of the race, and I can't seem to motivate to want to do it, so I'm taking that as a sign that I don't want to do it that much. As my friend C said today- better safe than sorry. Training that quickly could cause some injuries that would be avoided if I had longer to train.

Happy Birthday Dad!

Happy Birthday Dad!
I hope you have a great day- and don't eat too much cake!
Who am I kidding?...have as much cake as you want.

long morning

We are dog-sitting for our neighbor again this weekend. We got her last night after we got home from work. We weren't sure how much exercise she got yesterday, so we took her for about a 20 minute walk total. First mistake. She woke us up about 5:10 am with whining and walking around. Afraid that she needed to go to the bathroom, David took her outside. Second mistake. It seemed all she wanted to do was play. She wouldn't come in the house at all--this Playing lasted for about 30 minutes. Our backyard isn't exactly secure, although I don't feel worried about letting her run around as long as someone is out there with her. But who wants to sit outside in the misting rain at 5:30 in the morning? Luckily our neighbor has a secure dog-run where we leave her when we go out. So, David decided that if all she wanted to do was play, we would let her play in her own yard. So we put the leash on her (that was an ordeal), and David left to take her to her house. About 30 seconds later, he came back inside with leash AND collar in hand (no dog). Her collar is pretty loose, so she just pulled right out of it. I eventually got her inside with some treat bribery, and put her collar back on. I thought maybe at that point she would settle back down and go back to sleep. No luck. 5:50 am and both David and I had been awake for 40 minutes. I decided I would "trick" her into thinking we were going for a walk. We went out the front door so she didn't get excited in the back yard, and we walked around the block to her house, and I was able to get her in her dog run. By the time I got back to the house David was sound asleep. And I'm pretty sure I was back asleep within 5 minutes. I hated to put her over there, but that was the only solution that would result in all of us being relatively happy.

Training Mileage today: 4.25 miles (run/walk--mostly walking)

am I nuts?

Maybe I shouldn't ask that question if I don't want to know the answer. This isn't a general question, but one more specific: am I nuts to be considering run/walking a half-marathon in late november? It gives me 8 weeks to train- which isn't much time, but if I am planning on walking a good bit of it, I'm thinking that I may be okay.

I think I just need something to get excited about and get me motivated. A couple of my co-workers are planning to do the half-marathon walk, but I kind of wanted to challenge myself a bit more.

I've been out of the blog loop for the week b/c I've had my friend Jen in town. We've done all sorts of fun stuff, but as a consequence I haven't really had the time or energy to blog. We went to a cool Korean day spa called Olympus, where you pay $30 to spend time in different temperature rooms with themes, and in the 4-5 baths (hot tubs really) which are all at different temperatures. You can pay extra for all the typical spa treatments, but we just did some relaxing. I hear the body scrub is fabulous, so maybe someday I'll try that.
We then went to a pumpkin patch and I went a little pumpkin crazy (bought 5 pumpkins!).
We made butternut squash soup, tried to make a homemade pumpkin pie (didn't quite turn out-but that was probably mostly due to the fact that we substituted some ingredients)
Visited friends, ate sushi, had cupcakes from Cupcake Royale. It was wonderful.