Little Raindrops

Posts Tagged ‘movies’

Today you are two years old! You are having a great day so far! We are having a family celebration right now and next week you will have a small party with some of your good friends. Last night you went to a party while Daddy and I went to our church Valentine’s Day Banquet, so you were out late and playing hard! You got to color, listen to music, play games, hit a pinata, and have lots of snacks! So you wanted to sleep in this morning. As soon as you woke up, we went to the Weasels’ Den for the Pajama Jam, where you played on the playground and bounce house, had a big breakfast buffet, saw some friends, and watched some Ice Age on a big screen. When we came home, you opened presents from us, from Grandma and Grandpa, and from Grammy and Uncle Ron. You were given some fantastic toys, snazzy shoes, and a Blue’s Clues DVD and CD! We talked to Grammy on Skype while you opened gifts from her, then we traced your hand and you painted a picture. We have more fun lined up for you, but right now you’re enjoying playing with Heron and your new Blue doll.

I thought it would be nice to keep track of some of your favorite things and see how they change from year to year. Love you!

Favorites
Fruit: mandarin oranges; apples
Vegetable: carrots
Snacks: cheese; tuna salad; scrambled eggs; peanut butter
Meal: breakfast
Drink: apple juice
Songs: the Itsy Bitsy Spider; Skinamarinky Dinky Dink
Movies: Aliens vs. Monsters; Potty Power
TV Show: Blue’s Clues
Cartoon Character: Elmo
Book: I Love You Through and Through
Friend: Carson
Toy: Duplo blocks
Stuffed Animal: Yellow Bear you got from Uncle Matt your first Christmas
Playtime Activity: blowing bubbles
chores: sweeping; unloading dishwasher
Place: the Thursday Playgroup room at EDIS

I see that my last post date is in October. I’ve been stopping by to write something for weeks, but really, I’ve just been intimidated. So much has happened in the past three months, I’ll never find the time to write about it all! Well, now that I’ve gotten down to it, I’m giving you the extremely abridged version!

I’m really not remembering much about November! A few things stick out, though. Rhino started crawling around, we got our first Misawa snow (and Rhino’s first snow ever!), we had two nice Thanksgivings (one with the church, then a second in our home with our friends), and we discovered we’re going to have another baby in July ‘09! This of course is very exciting and just the age spacing we were hoping for. Thanksgiving was nice, too, and not very hectic at all. Liz, Nicole, and I split up the responsibilities. Really, all I had to do was make up some cranberry sauce and veggies and provide a clean home. The food was all wonderful and we had a terrific first Thanksgiving in Japan!

December will take a while to describe. I had my first prenatal appointment and we saw the ultrasound of our 8 week-old little bean! Heart’s beating, there’s only one in there, everything’s looks fine, that was about it! Two days later we began our trip back to the States to visit with family for Christmas. This was wonderful, but tiring! I’m so glad we got to see all our family (though not as many friends as I had initially hoped. Everything was getting too hectic!) and have Rhino meet the rest of the folks that didn’t get to come out when he was born.

Matt wrote up a big post about the horrible details of the travel itself. He pretty much covered it all, though he didn’t mention how uncomfortable a 9 or 12 hour flight is for a pregnant woman with morning sickness. Airplanes definitely were not my friends. I won’t take this space to complain further about travel and how we never want to step foot on an airplane again (we can stick out Matt’s career here and retire in Japan!) All our destinations made the flights more than worthwhile.

We flew into LA, so we decided to rent a car and drive up to Lompoc to see our friends and recuperate for the weekend. We left at 10pm on a Friday evening and it’s an overnight flight across the international dateline to California. When I booked this flight, I just assumed: leave Friday evening, overnight flight, land Saturday morning. I know, now that I think about it, it doesn’t make any sense. When we landed in CA and the captain said that it was 2pm on Friday, I was so confused! I hadn’t planned to arrive on Friday! So, it was my first time going back in time! We picked up our car and, 3 seconds off the lot, Matt almost gets into an accident! We’ve gotten quite used to driving on the left side and very slowly in Japan. When we got on the freeway, Matt felt all nervous that he was going so fast! Well, “so fast” is 45mph and he definitely needed to kick it up a bit, as everyone else was going 80! It was scary interesting watching him get used to driving in the US again. We arrived in Lompoc, called everyone we knew, didn’t get through to anyone, so we stayed in a hotel. It was nice to just relax and decompress from the long trip by ourselves. On Saturday (the real Saturday, not the Saturday in my confused head) we met up with Wayne and Rena, the wonderful couple from church that took us in as their “kids” (theirs had all moved out) and led the Bible study we attended for 2 years. It was nice to spend the weekend with them, have a little group reunion with some other church people, and show Rhino off. We also met up with our friends Denna, Adam & Ty. We went out to for an Italian dinner to catch up and gab. They ordered a plate of pasta for Tyler (2), but we discovered Rhino is nuts for pasta, and pretty much ate Ty’s whole plate! That was the first we saw of Rhino vehemently demanding table food and it was quite amusing, though slightly embarrassing to be out in a restaurant with a baby who yelled for food as if we hadn’t given him any for months! After church on Sunday we went over to Jody and Roy’s to see their sweet baby girls, have some lunch, and catch up. The weekend was so short and we were fighting to stay awake during the day, so we didn’t end up doing all that I had planned. I couldn’t get a hold of Danielle and would have loved to stop by work (it was drill weekend), but it just didn’t happen. We drove back down to LA on Sunday night, got another hotel (oh my, another whole big terrible story, too!) and caught a flight to Dallas the next morning.

These descriptions will probably get shorter, now, as there’s still plenty more. Texas was nice. Papa was the only one to have met Rhino, back in March, so it was wonderful that all my uncles, aunt, grandparents, etc. got to meet him! Unfortunately, Rhino hadn’t gotten used to the time zones yet and had just started teething again, so he was pretty grumpy a lot of the week. We kept busy, though. We had a nice Mexican lunch out at the Tupinamba, a restaurant that my family always goes to when I come to visit! We got to see my brother, Matthew, who also lives in Dallas and finally meet his girlfriend, Adria. The five of us went to Ripley’s Believe it or Not, had lunch at Chili’s, and went over to their apartment for dinner and board games. Over the week we got plenty of gaming in — Sequence, Clue, Phase 10, Scattergories — and watched a couple of movies (Eagle Eye, The Other Boleyn Girl, As Good As It Gets). I also went with Grandmother and Aunt Pattie to a quarterly ladies’ luncheon at their church, which was really great! We had a delicious lunch, browsed through second-hand goodies to buy to support their Friendship House, and listened to a wonderful pianist and singer perform Christmas songs. Then on Friday, Papa took us out to the Granada, sort of his second home, with Matthew and Adria to see Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis. It wasn’t exactly our style of music, but it was nice to get out and see the theater and hang out with my dad and brother. We couldn’t bring Rhino, so it was his first time with a babysitter, Papa’s friend Kay. I was really worried that I’d get him to sleep at her house, leave, then he’d wake up and cry and never go back down for her. He did wake up a couple hours after we had left, and he cried for a little bit, then fell back asleep — I was quite impressed! Rhino got a few cute gifts from the Texas family. Papa got him some clothes, including a cute Dallas Cowboys onesie. Rhino also got a Bible stories book and a 2008 coin set. It was a nice time visiting with all the family and I’m glad they finally got to meet Rhino! We left Sunday morning for the next leg of our trip: New York!

Okay, so these aren’t getting much shorter! Well, not to New York. We flew into Buffalo and Matt’s parent’s were there to take us down to Obi. Matt’s sister, Jen, was waiting at home for us and everyone was so excited to see Rhino (and us, I guess!) We got in pretty late, so we pretty much went straight to bed. The rest of the week was filled with a lot of family (Matt has a lot of family close by!) visiting and staring at, taking pictures of Rhino! We went over to Mom-mom and Pop-pop’s one night to meet up with lots of aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.! Rhino got to meet Mitchell, a little boy just 3 weeks older than him. They were so cute together! Another night the church pastor and his family came over one night for dinner and games. Jen and I got a “sisters only” afternoon one day to go get lunch and tea and browse Jo-Ann’s. Jen, Mom and I had a cookie-decorating day! Matt’s brother Jason and his fiancée came over so they could meet Rhino and we could meet her! Later that week, they were married!! I got really sick the night before and couldn’t go to their wedding, though! It was tough, I spent about 36 hours curled up on the sofa or huddled in the bathroom. Rhino pretty much had a full day without Mommy, but he did really well with Grandma and Aunt substitutes! I was bummed to not be able to attend the wedding, but at least I recovered before our flight out. We also watched some movies (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Wall-E, and lots of MST3K.) We also had an early Christmas on the 17th. Matt got more MST3K, some anime, books, cross-stitching stuff; I got some great knitting books and some others; and Rhino received so many cute clothes and toys! They’re all wonderful, but the thing he definitely loved the most was Jen’s gift: a very cute little baby piano! Rhino had recently started really enjoying music and dancing anytime any song started: a commercial jingle, someone singing, 3 notes on a piano, someone whistling, etc.! So he would stand up at the piano, bang out a few notes, dance to his music, play a few more, dance, and on and on! Everyone loved watching him play! It was a fun early Christmas! We did it again a few days later at Aunt Ginny’s with Aunt Connie & Grandpa, too. Rhino got more wonderful outfits, toys, and books. Thankfully, Mom and Dad shipped everything to our home so we didn’t have to pack all the gifts out! We left for the airport Saturday afternoon, but our flight out of Buffalo had been canceled. We made the long drive back home to sleep, and got on an early flight Sunday morning for Colorado.

Originally we had planned to arrive in Colorado two days early, rent a car, stay in Mama’s condo in Denver, and visit with friends in Fort Collins and Denver. By the time we got to Colorado, we were running out of money, car rentals were really high, I was lazy and hadn’t recently been in touch with any friends, we’d lost a day due to our canceled flight, and we were feeling pretty run down. Mama and Ron just picked us up from the airport and took us down to the Springs. I feel like a terrible friend, but it was nice to just relax at “home.” Plus, my sister, her husband and daughter were flying in just a few hours later so I’m glad that we were around to spend more time with them. We had planned to spend time with our friends Carol and Derik, who live in Omaha (and we used to work together. Matt went to tech school with both of them.) They drove down to the Springs for the weekend to see us, but it only turned into an hour that they came over and chatted after dinner on Monday. It was so nice to see them and of course I would have liked more time, things just didn’t quite work out. I’m so glad we at least got to visit for a little bit. Hopefully we’ll have another opportunity before too long! So with my sister in town, I finally got to meet my niece, Amelia! She’s 8 days younger than Rhino and I was so excited to see the two of them together. It was so interesting, they are such different babies! Rhino is a lot more vocal, interested in music and crazy about food. Amelia is all ready running around!! She likes to do her own thing a lot. They both play so differently, sleep differently, eat differently, cry differently — it was quite an experience! She is so beautiful and such a sweetheart. At 10 months, the babies weren’t really interested in playing with each other, but they did play next to each other! We joke that Amelia is sort of a “bully” — they would both be playing with toys, but she would always want to take whatever Rhino had instead! Rhino was very laid back about the whole thing and never really seemed to mind, haha! I wish we could have spent more time with Andrea and her family, but hopefully we will get to see them next year (when the babies won’t be babies anymore — waah!) Aside from watching babies in Colorado, we did actually spend time with Mama and Ron, too! Their dogs, Jack and Tilley, are very high-strung little wild dogs (but so sweet!) and we were nervous about how they’d act around the babies. We were all very surprised though, they were SO good! Whenever a dog would come up to Rhino, we’d say “dog” a lot and eventually Rhino would look at the dog and say “dauh” — he just wouldn’t say the ‘g’. I’m not counting it as a first word, but it was really close and he would do it everytime he’d see a dog! One night we were there, we went out to the Golden Bee, an English pub at the Broadmoor hotel. It’s sort of a Christmastime tradition that my Grandpa started years ago. The babies were really well behaved and loved eating crackers. We drove around afterward and looked at the light displays. We spent a lot of time at home, just relaxing, chatting, hanging out in the kitchen, watching TV, etc. Mama made some great meals that Andrea and I tried to help out with! Andrea made a delicious spinach tofu lasagna one night and Mama and I made a copy of the Olive Garden’s Zuppa Tuscana soup (my favorite!) Andrea and I made multiple visits to the Whole Foods — it was like Grocery Heaven for us! I wish we had more than our crummy commissary selection and expensive Japanese produce out here. Andrea found a Buddha’s Hand and was so excited, she bought it as decoration (I thought it was more appropriate as a Halloween decoration!) We never did use it for anything, but in the future she wants to make candied peels out of one. I found a kiwano that I had wanted to try since I found this sorbet recipe on one of my favorite foodie blogs. Well, we didn’t make a sorbet, just ate spoonfuls from it — and it was less than enjoyable! Matthew and Adria flew in on the 23rd, so now all us siblings were together with our significant others! It was quite a full house, but tons of fun. We had a great, salmon Christmas Eve dinner and filled up on Christmas cookies (Mama went overboard with the date rolls, oatmeal chocolate chip, pinwheels, hazelnut cookies, ricotta cheese sugar cookies, etc, etc.!!) before heading off to the candlelight service at First Pres. It was a beautiful service and I was so glad Matthew and Adria joined us as well. When we got home we opened all of the “grown-up presents”. Mama and Ron got each couple an awesome digital frame, which I love! We did stockings and “baby presents” Christmas morning, which was lots of fun! The babies got some adorable clothes, wonderful books, and some very cute Little People toys! Andrea, Michael and Amelia flew out the next day, so we got some time with Matthew and Adria. We all went to Cave of the Winds, which was amazing! With all the time we lived in Colorado, none of us had ever been and it’s just a few minutes from home. We left from Denver early Sunday morning for our long flight back to Japan.

The whole month was filled with such nice visits with family. I’m still getting all the photos from each location together, then I will post them to the gallery and include links in this post. I didn’t really take many pictures at all, though! I guess I was too busy with Rhino and visiting that I just didn’t think much about photos. Thankfully, other people got a few! The whole trip was very tiring and expensive (see Matt’s post!), but was definitely worthwhile! Unfortunately, it very well may be our only trip back to the States while we’re stationed in Japan. Mama and Ron, Jen, and Matt’s parents are all planning trips out to see us within the next 18 months, though!! I can’t wait to show them all the wonderful things out here!

Edit: Here are links to the vacation photos from California, Texas, New York, and Colorado!

We were talking about camping over the weekend, but leaving as soon as Matt got home from work on Friday didn’t seem so appealing at the time. So we decided to see more of Misawa, since there’s still so much we haven’t! We dropped our bikes off at a bike shop for some needed repairs so we can take Rhino out for a ride soon! Then we stopped in at the Aviation and Science Museum.

There were all sorts of neat hands-on exhibits about physics and aviation. There was a humongous pinpressions thingy at which we spent way too much time!

I controlled this big gravity wheel thing, we played with pulleys, Matt’s sprint speed was clocked at 17.4 kph, and we got to play with all sorts of other fun things!

The main focus of the aviation museum is Miss Veedol, the plane that made the first non-stop trans-pacific flight. She flew in 1931 from Misawa to Wenatchee, Washington. There are tons of tributes to Miss Veedol all over the base and the city.

There was also a special dinosaur exhibit that we saw. There wasn’t really much to it, but it was fun! The museum theater showed an episode of Prehistoric Park, which was had never seen before. It was all dubbed in Japanese and it was pretty amusing!

Rhino really enjoyed the whole museum and was awake and looking around the whole time we were there. He was in such a good mood and was really enthralled by the dinosaur movie, too (he’s never seen such a big screen!) The museum is definitely somewhere we want to return to at least every year. I look forward to when Rhino can interact more with the exhibits.

It’s our wedding anniversary and we had a really great one! Matt went into work this morning and asked if he could get off a little early. They sent him home for the whole day because he can have either his birthday or his anniversary off each year. He’s also getting Thursday and Friday off because our household goods are arriving. I love Matt, but sometimes he’s not the best at remembering dates and events or doing anything for them. So I had been a little prematurely disappointed these past few days that he wouldn’t remember anything. Well, I was surprised to see him when he came home and woke me up with the news! We exchanged gifts (he brought me flowers and hazelnut chocolate and the Sims2 Kitchen and Bath expansion — I make the best bathrooms! And I got him a movie and a game.) and had a nice day just relaxing together with Rhino. I made one of his favorite dinners, chicken and corn chowder, and baked an anniversary cake. It is kind of strange thinking about last year’s anniversary. This time last year, we were at Cool Hand Luke’s, waiting on a table, and just seeing two pink lines appear as a missile soared overhead. So we’ve known Rhino was with us for a year now, too. It’s been a wonderful 3 years with Matt (he says it feels like 30 years, which I took as a compliment, though I wonder ….) and I am happier than ever with him. Every year has just gotten better and he is such a great husband! Happy Anniversary, Matt sweetie!

I had to go to the dentist this morning, so Matt and I went out this morning and combined that trip with another one to Solvang. We left Rhino with Mom and Dad, went to the dentist (I had to have a filling repaired), then drove out to Paula’s Pancake House. We had breakfast there about 6 months ago and thought it was fantastic and have been talking about going back ever since. I think we hyped it up in our minds a little bit too much, but it was still a wonderful breakfast! It was nice to have another little break from babycare — and no, we didn’t just talk about Rhino the whole time — and I know Matt’s parents were more than happy to hang out with him for a couple hours. And I left more milk for him this time.

Jen came back up this afternoon to take Mom and Dad back down to LA in the evening. They had planned an early birthday party for me, since my birthday’s in a little over a week and they won’t be out here to celebrate. Mom baked me a cake and they sang to me. Jen got me a wood carving set because one time when she was out and we visited Michael’s craft store, we saw it and thought how neat it would be to learn to whittle! I’ll have to carve something cute for Rhino! Mom and Dad got me Ratatouille (actually, they gave it to me the other day so we could all watch it together!) and Alice in Wonderland.

Last night we got together with some people from our WoW guild, Caprini Domineri. We went out to Cool Hand Luke’s for dinner (also where we went in June for our 2nd anniversary and found out we are pregnant), which was all right. We are less impressed with the food than before, but it was good to visit with people (Dave & Clarissa (who we haven’t spent time with in a year and a half!) and met Joe and Kyle). A few photos were snapped with Joe’s iPhone, so if I get a hold of those, I’ll put some up here.

We planned on going out to a movie after dinner, but Matt and I live under a rock when it comes to movies and have no idea what’s out or what anything is. Dave and Clarissa recommended Juno, and we had never heard of it. They way they described it, I didn’t really have very high expectations. I was very surprised and really enjoyed the movie. Afterwards, we all went to Dave and Clarissa’s for a game of Atmosfear, a goofy horror DVD board game that we had played with them ages ago. Good times were had by all. Then we headed home around midnight to finish up our WoW daily quests.

Since my last post, of course more has happened. Here are plenty of pictures to show you all about it.

D and I went to the La Purisima Mission and took a lot of photos. We had just missed the guided tour, so we went around and made up our own stories about the olive presses and the hospital and the snazzy roof. We hiked around the sandy hills overlooking the mission and took more photos, mostly of plants. This was my first hike with Danielle and it was much like a botany field trip. Being that she has a degree in horticulture, she is chocked full of interesting plant information.

The following week, Danielle took Matt and I hiking up Madonna Mountain in San Luis Obispo. It was a nice, short hike right in the city. More plant information and a tasty lunch at the top with a hiking dog. And of course, Matt is a goof with the pretty cacti.

The next week, Matt and I took a nice hike by ourselves in Los Padres National Forest from Red Rocks up to Gibralter Dam. We hung out with a friendly snake, took more plant photos, attempted to cross the river and I fell in, and hope to return soon.

Danielle and I hung out a few more times. We went back up to SLO to go camping-supply shopping, to meet some of her plant-nerd friends, and to watch the movie Miss Potter. I heard this movie wasn’t well-received, but I really enjoyed it. We went to the Lompoc Fine Arts Festival where we fell in love with so many cute, knitted, animal finger puppets. We met up with her friend who was doing some plant research in Los Osos and walked around a lovely grove of oaks, where she believes we contracted some icky poison oak. I think it was from a later adventure on base.

I took a last-minute trip out to Colorado to see Mama for Mother’s Day. Matt didn’t come, but it was only less than 5 days away from home. I just recently went on active duty status at my guard unit and will be working full-time for quite a while, so I saw it as my last opportunity for quite some time to just pick up and take a trip. And it’s Mother’s Day and I wanted to see her new puppies. It was a relaxing few days gabbing with Mama and spending a lot of time at the dog parks. I cooked a little bit for her and Ron every night, which I feel very privileged to be able to do. After all, before I moved out I had been permanently banned from the kitchen for my incompetency. It’s nice to prove myself! I made desserts, of course, including the scrumptious baked pear pastries that turned out fabulously! We did a bit of gardening, which was wonderful, and I took plenty more flower photos. I’m obviously getting fond of taking pictures of plants — thanks, Danielle! Since Delilah, the dog I received for my 11th birthday, passed away in the winter, Mama had her cremated and held on to the ashes until I could return. We played the Grateful Dead’s “Samson and Delilah”, said a few words, and scattered her from the balcony, her favorite lounging spot.

Little Melissa and I are still spending time together as well. Next week she’ll finish her first year of high school! All ready! This month is our 3-year anniversary and things just keep getting more fun! We went to a BBBSA bowling day, ate a lot of pizza, (re)met another great match of girls, and took home certificates for our most amazing bowling forms (under the legs, backwards, lying down, etc. etc!) We also visited the Santa Maria Strawberry Festival, where we spent too much on sugar and dizziness. I also bribed Little Mel into getting on a ride that goes upside-down for the first time. Ohh, it was a blast! We have done a little hiking of our own, as well. We planned on taking this loop trail in Gaviota State Park. I guess we missed something very early on in our hike because we traveled far from the loop. It was still a nice, 2-hour hike through tall weeds, drenched in sun.

During the May guard weekend, I got to talking to an ex-I-Labber who had extensively explored the abandoned missile sites all around base. He drew me a crude map marking all the great spots to crawl through tunnels and down silo ladders. Matt, Danielle and I set out one day to find all these amazing sites. We all ready knew about the Titan site that exploded in the 70’s. I learned the real story of how that happened, dispelling all the more interesting rumors I had been told over the years. I think we hit every road and dead end on this huge base, but we didn’t find any of these great old missile sites. I blame the map, of course. So we went back to the Titan site to crawl around it a bit more and see if there’s anything interesting we’d missed. We saw a badger, a wonderful spiky lizard of some sort, lots of pretty bees on ice-plant blooms, and I think this may be where we got our case of poison oak. Just like last time, but not as bad. I got medicated early on. I learn.

Since then I’ve been at work filling in for a bunch of people. I was almost on my own, but it went pretty well. I like my unit and I think the work is interesting. It’s fairly quiet and not too stressful. They’re unsure exactly how long I’ll be on orders, but I’m told they’re hoping until at least the end of September. The paycheck really will be nice. It’s been too long since I’ve really contributed financially! Danielle and I go to the gym whenever we work at the same time and get a little exercising in. I’m starting to stress out about that a little more, as my annual fitness test is this Thursday. I’m not as lazy as I had been last year, but I think I’m still not up to where I’d like to be for this test. We’ll see how it goes on Thursday, I guess. Friday Danielle and I went to a great Total Body Conditioning class on base with her friend, Stephanie. Boy, did that surprise us! The instructor had absolutely no mercy! It was a great time, but hard work. Stephanie seems like such a great gal and she and her husband live here in town (and he is a World of Warcraft junkie … I’m sure the men will get along fabulously once they meet!) The there of us and Matt went out that evening to see the local grandpas pickin’ country tunes on their guitars upstairs in the Lilly building. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but it was a good time! We didn’t know too many of the songs and I think the old men got a kick out of us. I took some horrible videos of Danielle and Stephanie singing along to some songs. It inspired Matt and I to actually pick up the guitar we bought last year. Hopefully we’ll be strumming out something soon. Danielle had told me this get-together would be bluegrassy, but it wasn’t exactly. What I love most about bluegrass music is the mandolin. I struggle with forming chords on a guitar, which I know is my own fault which I can overcome, but I’ve convinced myself that I’d have a much better time with a cute little mandolin. I’m watching eBay for them this week. Danielle has a fiddle, though wants to learn the upright bass. Maybe someday we’ll have a little band of our own!

That’s all for tonight. Matt will be on nights this week, so he will be coming home from work right as I wake up, then I’ll take the car and get home just in time for him to leave for work. It will be a long week, but that’s just what we have to do. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to myself to blab to this blog. Be expecting it!

It’s Christmas time and I haven’t journaled on paper in ages. Matt and I are in New York visiting with his family for the week. We flew from Santa Barbara late Friday night, caught a little sleep over the middle of the country and found ourselves in Matt’s childhood home by noon. Tired but excited, we spent the day visiting with Mom & Dad, Aunt Connie & Uncle Mark, Grandpa & Aunt Ginny and Jen. It’s really nice to be back here after two years and everyone is so great to us.

This morning we got up before six and woke up Mom and Dad. We read Luke 2 on the bed, then waited on the landing. We received way too much from the Conklins. It was such a great gift that they flew us out here. They also got us a spa pedicure tub, a blender/chopper, this book, a book of Santa Barbara county hikes, this pen, crochet books, a great green wallet, an X-box game, a Camelbak for hiking, cross-stitch kits, a bamboo crochet hook, Bartleby on DVD … too much! We also got a cute kitten-a-day calendar from Aunt Ginny, a super cool emergency radio/TV/weather station with a crank generator, lights and sirens, cell phone charger, etc. from Aunt Connie & Uncle Mark. Mom-mom & Pop-pop gave us a gift card and two nice ornaments. We also got belated wedding gifts from Uncle Brian & Aunt Barb and from Aunt Sharon & Uncle Tom. It was all so sweet.

Last night we all went over to Mom-mom and Pop-pop’s after a nice church service. There were about twenty of us there for a great meal, buffet-style. (I tried “beef on weck”? for the first time and loved it!) We watched the Denver-Cincinnati game which Mama and Ron attended in the snow last night. Matt’s never been interested in football, but something happened last night and he really got into it. He was hooting and shouting with the rest of the guys tonight at the Philadelphia-Dallas game. One of Matt’s cousins, Rachael, has a two-year old daughter that was at Mom-mom and Pop-pop’s. Caitlyn is the most adorable girl I’ve ever seen! She brought a make-up kit and Jen and I let her paint glitter on our foreheads and lipstick on our cheeks. It was a nice evening, but we left earlier than expected to get some sleep. Every Christmas Eve the tradition is to run barefoot around the house in the snow. It’s been pretty warm here since we arrived and no trace of snow. It’s a bummer because I really wanted to be a part of the family tradition. We saw a few seconds of flakes tonight before it turned to rain.

Matt and I are sitting up watching “Say Anything” while he cross-stitches his wolf. We’re trying to stay on California time so Matt’s work schedule isn’t so screwed up next week. The rest of this week should be pretty relaxing. It’s so nice to be on vacation together. That’s all for tonight.

Wow, it’s been a while. Well here’s the scoop …

Matt’s parent’s were out last weekend from New York. They flew in to San Diego to hang out with Matt’s uncle for a day then took the train up to meet us in Santa Barbara Friday night. We went out for Hawaiian BBQ at L&L for dinner then headed home. We pretty much just sat up and chatted before crashing. Saturday we split up: Matt and Dad went golfing while Mom and I toured around Solvang. She and I had lunch at the Solvang Restaurant, of course (I had to introduce her to the delicious Aebleskiver!) We stopped by my favorite local yarn shop, hung out in a windmill, and took plenty of photos (on her camera … they’ll be posted as soon as I receive them.) Saturday evening I cooked my “famous” chicken parmesan and we played Star Wars monopoly. Sunday morning was church. It’s about time we attended. A mixture of my TDY, Matt’s wacky weekend work schedules, and super-laziness have kept us away from church for months. Although we can still only attend every other Sunday, it’s still very nice to be back. After church made the winding drive out to Jalama Beach to bottle some sand, wade in the frigid water, have a terrific hamburger lunch, and pick up a really cute coconut windchime. We made sloppy joe turnovers again to enjoy over a game of Mad Gab. Over the weekend we watched a few movies (our #1 must-share, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, provided us with much shrieking laughter) and spent a lot of time just relaxing and chatting. Matt and Jason both had to go to work early Monday morning, but we stopped by Matt’s work for a picnic lunch before heading down to Santa Barbara. I dropped them off after getting lost around the town so they could enjoy a few days of 25th anniversary celebration. It was a great visit!

Other than that … nothing else terribly interesting has happened. Matt’s on his Panama schedule now, so he works all of this week (but had Wednesday-Thursday as a “weekend”), but has all of next week (minus Wednesday-Thursday) to hang out at home. It’s a little wacky, but once we get used to it I think we’re really going to like this new schedule.

Matt’s computer has been on the fritz lately. We’ve taken it in to get checked out twice now and they can’t find anything wrong with it. It reboots after 5-10 minutes consistently when it’s at home. Gaming is impossible. Whenever it tries to boot, there’s a very high chance it won’t POST and will just beep every three seconds. Of course, Best Buy can’t reproduce this and has run through all their stress tests and it’s been behaving excellently all week. It must be our room. It’s been a nice break from gaming, though. We spend more time doing crafts, reading, and, well, sitting in front of the screen still I guess. Matt’s been cross stitching this cool wolf scene (only his second attempt at the craft) and it’s really coming together. He still has a lot to do, but it’s a big project. Here’s what he has finished so far (about two weeks of on-and-off work):

Math is going all right. I have a test next week and, of course, we’ve all ready started into new material that won’t be covered on the upcoming exam. I hate doing learning and doing homework for new material when I want to focus all my attention on studying old material. We still haven’t gotten our first exams graded and returned, but I hope we will on Monday. My teacher is always so excitable about problems that we do. He’ll write a problem up on the board and tell us to take five minutes to do it. He will get so antsy that he can’t contain his excitement and will just do it for us within the first two minutes, telling us all the time how we will be think it’s so cool. I like math. I’m pretty good at math. I’ve just never felt really excited about it or found anything to be particularly beautiful. Until last Wednesday. I had checked out a book from the library last week about cool tricks and neat things in math. It had introduced Euler’s formula, e^it = cos(t) + isin(t), which is really neat, as well as the awesome relationship between five fundamentals of math: e^i(pi) + 1 = 0. I thought this was all very cool, but the book didn’t say too much about them. I was psyched on Wednesday, though, because we ran into these while discussing homogeneous linear differential equations and got to prove them! It suppose part of the excitement came from not being mostly lost in class and that I actually recognized something that we hadn’t yet talked about. I’m sure non-math people can look at the two equations and not care at all, but really, they are very beautiful and amazing. I think it was the first time I really appreciated an equation as elegant and realized what a genius Euler was.

Yes, it certainly is. Matt was a sweetheart and picked me up at the airport last Wednesday looking all handsome in his nice suit, and greeting me with chocolate and a rose. It’s been a nice, relaxing week for me to adjust to being back home. It’s cool hanging out with Jason and having him around. We play a lot of games together and whatnot. It’s also nice having a third seat at dinner; we don’t have leftovers that will never truly be eaten. Last night the three of us went over to my buddy Brian’s house (joined by my other school pals Missy and Evin) for some food and Office Space and [if we had not been tired and stayed a little longer] Halo 2. It was a good time and it’s nice to introduce Jason to some new people. We went to a new church that Jason picked out last Sunday and stayed later for a great potluck. It was a good time and a nice, small church and it suits Jason really well. Matt and I are going to return to Calvary, though. There is a lot about that particular church that we like, we just have to find a way to be more socially comfortable. That’s up to us, though, and not really any fault of Calvary’s. We also went to Jalama Beach last weekend, which is a very pretty, tucked-away beach right in our backyard.

We had a good time walking up and down the beach and sunbathing. The water was nearly freezing, but Matt and Jason jumped in anyway. They got a tad sunburned and Matt has been suffering all week, but we plan on going back hopefully every weekend. Good times.

I also finally got a chance to upload the photos I took while TDY. I have an album up of visiting with Andrea. I said earlier that we did some origami and crocheting while I was there, here are a few of our finished products.

I also got a chance to do a bit of crocheting while I was hanging out by myself in the hotel room. I started working on a baby afghan and worked on a bunch of squares for Mama’s afghan. These are the squares I completed:

So there’s that. Jason and I played a bunch of pool today. I never really learned how to play, so today was sort of instructional. Of course, I’ve played plenty of games before, but I learned today that I’ve been doing everything incorrectly. We practiced for almost two hours and had a grand ol’ time.

I got an email from Andy yesterday saying that he had been sailing from San Diego to Santa Barbara as part of some crew, proving his seaworthiness in order to be part of some large Mexico –> New Zealand trip. I was so excited to hear he was in Santa Barbara and sent off an email immediately making plans for today. Alas, he called today from Colorado as soon as he received my message. I was a little bummed that he was in California and didn’t even think to get together. He’s a world-traveler now and I’m not sure when our paths will cross again. I’m sure they will. I think sometimes I just get nostalgic for times in my past. College in Colorado was fun most of the time and I do miss the friends I had then. Being that they’re all males, I often feel it’s inappropriate to keep in touch or be as close as I’d like to. They’re good guys and I think of them often. It’s always good to see someone or get an email hearing about all the great adventures.

Matt and I are planning a quick trip next month. Neil Gaiman will be up near San Francisco, about 4 hours away from us, for a book signing. He’s cutting back a lot on his appearances and I don’t want to miss an opportunity. I’ve never been to a signing before, but I think it sounds like a good time. And of all the famous people I know of, I think he is the one I’d like to meet the most. Matt will take a day or two of leave and we’ll probably stay the night up in the bay area. We had only been once, for a Switchfoot concert, and didn’t get to explore the city at all. So maybe we’ll make a big event of it. Anyhow, I’m excited to pick up Neil’s Fragile Things and get to say hello.

Wednesday was my first day of math class. I was really nervous about the whole thing and ready to drop the class that day. I received a text message from Erick earlier reporting that they just started chapter 5. I had just finished chapter 2 and started freaking out about how I’d never catch up. It really bummed me out a bit because I’ve been struggling on my own with the coursework. Then I received another text informing me that they had skipped chapters 3 and 4, renewing my confidence. I went to class and found I wasn’t really that far behind. I just have to do some super-studying for our first exam two weeks from now. I’m not working (though I am researching some exciting jobs) and this is the only class I’m taking, so I shouldn’t have any excuses not to do well enough.

I went to the dentist today for a first exam and cleaning. It went well enough at first and I really like my dentist. Before going to Georgia I had toothaches and learned I needed a root canal due to decay around some poorly installed Air Force filling. Bummed about that, got over it though. I still need to get a crown on my tooth-stub. Today they found another filling that had improperly bonded and didn’t do it’s job. So I have some deep decay in that tooth as well and will go in to look at it again next week and see if we can avoid another root canal. And another Air Force filling cracked and will need to be redone. And my gums are receding around the implant I got when I was sixteen, exposing the metal. It could get worse and become a bad thing, so I need to go to someone else to see about some bone grafting. Fun … and cheap, I’m sure. Ughh. So it was somewhat of a disheartening day at the dentist, but that’s life I guess. I’m just wondering how our wallet is going to take to all this work.

Well, that’s my overly wordy update for the week. Jason starts work on Tuesday, then I’ll be home alone during the week. I have class at night on Mondays and Wednesdays, but during the day I’ll be alone … studying, crocheting, and most likely blogging. So ta ta ’til then.