estacey
we could try tomorrow night again, but that's pushing it... if something happened with that flight, we'd be screwed trying to get from guayaquil to galapagos.
so instead we're flying to lima, peru tonight. staying in the airport for 6 hours, then flying out to guayaquil to arrive at noon.
what a wonderful, wonderful development. (please note sarcasm.) ¶ 3:29 PM 0 comments
Yay! A housing for the point & shoot!
I have one for my old camera, too, but that camera is pretty much out of commission. Gotta get it fixed someday if the cost isn't ridiculous.
So anyway, yay for this! Now I'll hopefully be able to get SOME pictures underwater. Baby sea lions! YAY!!!
and we're leaving for galapagos tomorrow! :( poor guy.
also, this probably means that i'll be getting sick too. my throat felt a bit funny today. eeeh. i'm sucking on cold-eez. let's hope it does SOMETHING. ¶ 8:35 PM 1 comments
First, here are the contents of Chris's wallet out to dry. On the recount of the disastrous dinghy ride, I forgot to mention that Chris forgot his wallet in his back pocket when we got in the dinghy. With the amount of water we took on, it's no surprise the wallet got soaked. Chris's wallet that evening was a ziploc bag. Classy! :)
Ellie sniffing the purse I take to these formal events. He's inside all the time now! Sadly, if he's not under the bed, he's typically on this spot... ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER! Ah well...
At the black tie, I tried like five times to get a nice picture of us, but every time it came out blurry. They would've been nice pictures, too...
This is the only one that wasn't blurry. Good thing it's a keeper! Seriously, how cute is Chris?
A lady at our table (who was bidding $25,000 for a dinner!) saw me struggling so took our picture for us. :)
The one pic I have left to take is of the program/auction paddle. It says "STACIE C***" (Chris's last name) on it. They got both my names wrong!
Oh! We won something! In the silent auction... A group of three toys. One I'm keeping here for whoever (and Idalia's kid; the lady who cleans brings her 3-year-old) to play with; one I'm giving to Kyle, and one I'm giving to Macy for her birthday. Macy's toy was the big draw - a huge lego-type playset with DORA AND DIEGO!
Unrelated: The dogs ripped apart the cats' toy, so I stitched it up (this happens all the time). But before I did that, I stuffed it full of catnip. LOTS of catnip. The cats very much approve. You can tell by the way they try to disembowel it, as demonstrated here by Kitten.
¶ 12:11 PM 0 comments
we'll have to try to repeat this scene at some point :)
hopefully the water will be calm at least one of the weekends that they are here and we can take the boat over to the bahamas. failing that, we can tow the boat down to key west and visit some of the islands off of there. should be cool. :)
i'm really glad to be living somewhere that i can comfortably have guests.
and then on top of this news, today i get an email from my sister saying my niece does want to come visit. it won't be during my have-nothing-to-do time since she would like to come after her birthday, but my one-class schedule for the summer won't be so bad. i am trying to find prices for her now, and if i can am going to arrange it so amanda can fly back with chris & i when we go to visit. yaaaaay! :)
look! a real smile! i think her mom took this picture last year on her birthday.
so anyway, good news all-around.
AND, these folks who are going to rent the condo don't want the furniture in it... so i'm getting a new bedroom set! chris bought a new one when he moved out of there, for whoever was renting it, and it's nice. i've been wanting a new one - the one in there now is very uhh.. well, his friend got rid of it because his girlfriend didn't like it, if that tells you anything. we started looking at new ones online, but this solves that problem. AND, we get a whole big-empty-room full of furniture (couch, loveseat, chair, rug, TV, etc.) so now we'll have TWO living rooms, which is kinda funny. i'll have to take before & afters, because the place is going to look a lot different. we're switching out the dining room furniture, since chris likes the condo stuff better, etc.
whee! :) ¶ 11:10 AM 5 comments
And this is an account of a trip aboard, by photographer Stephen Frink -- link. Seems to be the same stops, although not in the same order; I don't think we're waiting until the end to do Wolf & Darwin. I could look at the intinerary, but then I'd have to reach over and turn on the light, and that's just too much trouble.
Wheeeeee! :) :) :) ¶ 11:28 PM 4 comments
after i left today, i was thinking how weird the ring felt on my left-hand finger. i don't even notice it on my right, but it was uncomfortable over on the other hand. and i realized why -- my whole life, i have never worn a ring on that finger. i hadn't yet switched it back over, and i was thinking, "well, what's the big deal? it's just a ring," and thought i'd switch it back over at my leisure. mind you, one of my unmarried teachers would wear different rings, on different fingers, all the time -- including her "wedding" finger.
that mindset lasted about 10 seconds, at which point it felt really wrong to be wearing a ring on that finger, considering i'm not married, and while driving i switched it back over.
i guess it's not all that surprising that the idea of a wedding ring is a powerful one. i guess i'm just a little surprised at how powerful. ¶ 10:39 PM 0 comments
So yesterday we tried to go diving for the first time since the Caymans. Chris has this dinghy and we wanted to see if we could dive off it, so yesterday was our first try.
It was a disaster.
It took FOREVER to get our stuff together. Of course there were no parking spots, which we expected, so after we brought everything down to the beach, Chris drove home to drop the truck off and ride back on his bike.
While at home, he got sidetracked by the guy keeping his sailboat in the back, since he needed help with HIS dinghy. Then he finally got on the road to come back to the beach and partway there, he got a flat tire on his bike. So then he walked home and got MY bike and rode back. I passed the time quite nicely, watching the pelicans fish and talking to people that were approaching me about what we were doing with this dinghy on the beach.
We finally got out in the water. The dive gear took up the whole dinghy, so we had to ride basically sitting ON TOP OF IT, legs off to the side. Water splashed in the dinghy every time a wave hit us, and we had no space to move to bail it out. We got to where we decided we would go down, we spent five frustrating minutes trying to find our masks under all that stuff, then finally were ready so threw our inflated BCs overboard, and then Chris said, "Oh my God, I don't have my weights." I had loaded everything from the trunk we keep our dive gear in, and taken everything we needed, but apparently his weights were on the boat, not in the trunk.
We talked about what we could do - I could share my weights with him and we could probably both stay down, although it may be a little hard. Someone had taken my weights out of my BC in Costa Rica after our first dive, so on the second I was just diving with the 6 lbs on my tank weight. I didn't know why it was so damn hard to stay down, but eventually I just grabbed a rock and carried it around and it worked out fine. We decided that would be our game plan, but then around this time that we realized that one side of the dinghy was getting very smooshy - it was deflating. Obviously, at this point we called the dive and motored back to shore.
As we loaded the stuff back onto the truck, Chris declared: "Stacey, today we lost. There is no way we can declare this one a win, in any way." It had, by that time, become so bad that it was actually funny. I think had we just not had weights, it would've remained just frustrating and bad. But once we started to sink? Then it became laughable. A good four-hour time investment with no return. Chris said we could just shore dive, without the boat, but by that point, I was just ready to go home and start getting ready for our evening.
Oh, also, Chris got a big gash on his thumb from putting the engine back on the truck. Disaster.
Chris figured out later that thankfully we had not RUINED the dinghy, but knocked into the valve with our stuff - with the dinghy so full, we had no way to determine that out there. From now on, I think maybe we'll just use the dinghy for sight-seeing and snorkeling. :D
Tomorrow night we got a black tie to go to. Wheeee. I should think that I would enjoy going out and buying a pretty new dress, but dress shopping has become, like, my absolute least favorite thing to do. So I crossed my fingers and hoped that the dress I wore last year to a different one would still fit and look fit for public consumption. It zipped, I didn't look too horrible, so I am excusing myself from the dress shopping. Now I just gotta go buy some shoes since I left one-half of my most fabulous dressy shoes in our San Francisco hotel room. Grr.
Most chicks like to shop, don't they? :) I will still enjoy finding a sparkly pair of earrings, I hope. ¶ 2:58 PM 3 comments
grades - they came in! A, A, A-, B+, B. not bad, eh? it ain't the straight A's that i became accustomed to at bcc, but i'll take it. :)
drugs - i ran out of topamax. long story, involving insurance company f-ups and the fact that will cost me over $300 to fill it. i shouldn't have stopped taking it, but now that i did... i haven't had any headaches anyhow. i even took the dogs for a run today, a long one, and it was HOT, and i'm fine. even on topamax, that used to give me a headache sometimes. so now... do i get a refill? or just hope this continues? after i forgot my topamax last year when we went to the bahamas, i was able to figure out that it stays in your system for about a week, so by now it should be out... i like the idea of staying off it, but i also don't want headaches in the galapagos, so it's a gamble. what to do?
elliot cat - this is the cat i adopted when he was 6 months old. he was a feral until they caught him at 2 months old. he's a real love, but has a tendency to regress into his semi-feral state when i move him. for months here, i would have to CATCH ellie to get him to come in. he was fine after i started petting him, but getting that first pet in was always a challenge. now, for the past month or so, he's been coming in A LOT. in the past couple of weeks, he's hardly gone out at all. once in a while, when he did, i just have to wait a little whole then open the garage door and there he is, waiting to come back in. he hasn't left the house today or yesterday at all. he's just happy to sleep under the bed all day and then come sit out on the kitchen countertop at night. he's sitting on the bed right now with me and gretchen. it's a relief, but it's funny that he has become such an inside cat, just like kitten. and he's better with the dogs already! :)
poop - my niece macy got the bucket o' goodies. i know this because i got a message the other evening on my voicemail that said: "I POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPED!" then a pause, then a, "I GOING TO TAKE OUT OF THE BOX!" alrighty then! enjoy, girly. :)
movies - i've actually watched 2 this week! i usually go months in between movies... i saw baby mama and thought it was adorable. i LOVE tina fey. she's smart, funny, cute, and inspirational - i saw her acting an extra on an old episode of SNL, before she lost something like 40 lbs. big difference, and now she's hot! and last night, on PPV, that dan in real life movie with steve carell. it was sweet! the weirdest thing was that most of the cast members had been on law & order episodes. i kept recognizing them. "hey, that was that dude who played the bad actor with the bad english accent on criminal intent! ... hey, that was the rich lady who killed her mom!" i think i watch too much law & order. and dian weist was actually a regular cast member! it's really weird.
o-kay, enough babbling for now. :) ¶ 10:50 PM 0 comments
But the times when there is no Gretchey and no Sebastian at Patty's house, Buddy is the only dog in the house. And since Patty doesn't yet have the place doggy-friendly, like our place is, and Buddy is totally not trustworthy in the house alone, he has to be crated all day.
I stop by when I can to bust Buddy out of his little jail, and when I do, Buddy goes APESHIT. Seriously. He barks and howls and always gets a little doggy hard-on. Every time. Even after I let him out of the crate, he keeps howling and barking at me. I have to bring the PowerShot sometime so I can get a little video of it.
At around 3 today, I picked Buddy up to bring him home for the night. He went CRAZY. Even after I PICKED HIM UP, he kept howling and barking. He was flailing around in my arms, arching his back, howling... I reported the scene to Chris as, "He looked like he was having a seizure." Seriously.
Now tonight, for whatever reason, Gretchey keeps barking at him when he comes in the crate from outside, so he turns right around and goes back outside and stares at me. When I realized what happened, I ran over and opened the door and discovered he had been crying. Big ol' wet tears all over his face. So now he's sleeping on my lap.
Poor. Thing.
I hope Patty gets him a friend soon. ¶ 11:55 PM 0 comments
