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.

Happy Birthday Suzanne!

It is amazing how many people I know who have birthdays around this time of year! Happy Birthday Suzanne! It sounded like you had a great day and a great weekend. I Hope you have many more happy birthdays.

I also wanted to update with a quick picture of the houses under construction next door. They have the stem walls up, and on friday they started filling in some of the dirt around the houses.

icicles

While there weren't any actual icicles--last night it felt like my nose was one big icicle. Those of you who know me well know that I get cold easily. My hands, feet and nose are the first to show signs of cold. Well, it is getting cold here, and I have so far refused to turn on the furnace. Last night when I came home from work it was about 65 degrees inside the house. By 8pm when I was starting to watch one of my guilty pleasure shows, the house temperature was about 60 degrees. I had on my coat, and was underneath a blanket on the couch. My feet amazingly were warm and I tried to keep my hands under the blanket or between my legs to warm them up, but I couldn't keep my nose warm. It was so cold! David heated up my Herbie (Thank you thank you thank you mom for making that for me!) and I put my nose in that until it warmed up.

I know it is kind of lame to be writing about my cold nose, but you have to understand how much this affects my crankiness factor. I should probably give in and turn on the heat so I am less cranky but it is still September for goodness sakes! I really don't want to burn through oil this winter.

anyway- long story short--I've got a cold nose. Pretty much all the time I am at home I have a cold nose. It makes me cranky. But I'm trying to tough it out.

Happy Birthday Mom (yesterday)

Happy Birthday MOM!

Sorry this is one day late, but you got my paper card in the mail on time, so hopefully I'll get credit for that ;-)

I think beautiful Black Eyed Susans would be perfect for your birthday...so here they are!

Subscribe?

I wonder if anyone subscribes to my blog... I totally forgot about that little option on the blog. At the very bottom of the page is a thing that says "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)". I've never subscribed to a blog, but I hear it is really helpful for folks who don't like to go and visit certain pages all the time to check and see if there is new content. I guess this feature alerts you when there is new content. I also gather it is different from RSS ( but I don't understand the difference). I should subscribe to someone's blog and see how it works. I can't believe I'm writing about this tool that I don't really even know how it works...I bet J.N.A. in St. Louis could explain it to me...

Here is some copied text from blogger explaining it (although even this uses some more technical language than I am used to)
"Atom is one name for two things: It's both a new standard for developers, as well as a syndication format or "feed" for your blog. When a regularly updated site such as a blog has a feed, people can subscribe to it using software for reading syndicated content called a "newsreader." People like using readers for blogs because it allows them to catch up on all their favorites at once. Like checking email—without the SPAM."

someone knows my secret

I think it was last week that David came to me in the morning and told me that he knew my secret. For a moment I got very scared because I couldn't think of any secret that I had.

He said, "I hear the secrets that you keep, when you are talking in your sleep". Oh crap...what did I say this time? Apparently I said, clear as day, "Can we go to the dog shelter after work?". That sounds about right, I've had doggies on my brain for awhile. So- it wasn't really a secret-and I had no reason to be scared...but he still scared me when he said he knew my secret.

Sidenote of explanation: I talk in my sleep. Often. So it is possible that I could say things that I don't mean or that mean nothing or that I don't necessarily want anyone to hear. I haven't had any real problems with my nighttime talking other than waking David up, so I shouldn't be too worried about saying something that would get me in trouble.

nervous

I'll remain deliberately vague about all this because I'm about to blog about work which is a patented no-no. It is not like I'll be saying bad things about work..just talking about a neutral topic.

I have a conference call tomorrow which I am supposed to lead that is supposed to have people representing 25 different universities around the country. This is for a project I am the lead on here at work. I'm nervous. I have never done anything like this before, and I always worry that my style of meeting (get to the point, move through the items, be done early) isn't conducive to certain things. When I'm on calls with other leaders sometimes I just want to move on from a topic, but people keep beating a dead horse. So, I certainly will not change my style completely, but maybe when I ask if anyone has questions or comments I'll make sure I count to 10 before I move on. I'm still nervous. It isn't like I don't know this stuff inside and out-but new stuff is scary.

update on construction next door

I took this picture on saturday, and what it currently looks like is dramatically different. They poured concrete into these molds on monday and yesterday they started putting up the form work for the walls. You can see in this photo that the house furthest from us is set back from the one by us. They were spraying what David said was a release compound on the plywood sheets and it stunk. Of course it seemed like the smell was drifting directly into our house. So we went for a walk last night after work in the hopes that the smell would dissipate by the time we got back.

Happy Birthday Emily!

Happy Birthday Emily!

If I were there, I'd bring you flowers like these

I hope you have a wonderful birthday and enjoy your birthday weekend, whatever you do.

taking a break and Happy Anniversary

You may have been wondering where I've been. Well, we've been taking a break from doing work on the house. We haven't even gotten around to caulking yet. It has been nice to come home and actually be able to decide what to do or not do. Last night I finished reading a book I had started a month or so ago. However, I think all this relaxing is making me lax about other things as well (like writing here).

In other very important news, it is our 4th Wedding Anniversary today. We are going out to dinner at a cute little Italian place near our house where the server knows us and has even invited us to a showing of his art.

But no dinner or card or flowers could express how happy I am to be with David in this relationship, making a life for ourselves. (Am I trying to make an excuse for not buying David a card..well not really, but if it helps...). A toast to my sweetie--who makes me smile and laugh more than anyone else ever has!

kitchen is really really almost finished

Plumbing is installed (David rocked!) and I used the dishwasher twice already. I did lots of handwashing and threw all kinds of stuff in there so that I could start putting things away in our cabinets. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

one more step into the 21st century

I am excited to report that David and I have finally taken one more small leap into the 21st century. We are no longer connected to the internet at home by dial-up. We finally have a high speed connection! This is the second such move we have made (cellphones were #1). All we have left is to get more than two or three channels on our TV. I think we'll stay without cable a little longer until we get used to the amazing speed of our internet.

It seems that in order to stay in the information age you have to be willing to spend almost $200 a month to stay connected. I would guess that quite a few people pay more than that per month because they have the fancy souped up plans. I'm not that old (really!), but to have gone from landline phones to "crackberry's" seems like a big leap. I'm sure that by the time I'm ready to retire there will be something even more suited to staying connected. Well, at least I can say that because we are slow adopters, we get the benefit of lower prices and fewer buggy machines ;-)

Today is sink and garbage disposal install day. We went to look for plumbing supplies last night and it was quite overwhelming. The number of little brass couplings/unions/T's/elbows with different types and sizes of connectors was amazing. Hard to find what you need. I could only stand in front of them at the store for too long before I started getting a little cranky. I know David will do a good job and I'm glad that I'm just a helper on this.