estacey
yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay
while driving to the airport, we received word that our flight was cancelled. not delayed, cancelled.
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.)
Look what came in the mail yesterday.
ruh roh
chris is sick. quite sick. when he talks, you can't really hear him.
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.
Fotos del black tie
I didn't get many, but here are a few.
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.
well, i'll be...
i got the good news that my friend bethy and her husband are coming to south florida in july - and they'll be staying here! i haven't seen bethy since they were here in 2005, and that was just briefly, so this will be awesome.
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! :)
Getting a little excited now...
Here is the boat we are going off of --
link.
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! :) :) :)
who knew?
i've had to stop by chris's condo a number of times in the past week. i have the security swipe and i have the PIN code to give to the security guard so they'll let me through the gate and all, but i am so shell-shocked from my old condo building -- they are such militants, i tell you -- that i am nervous they're going to question and hassle me. so, before i go driving through the gate, i switch a little band i wear around my right-hand ring finger over to my left. chris suggested it before -- "just tell 'em you're my wife." so if they give me a hard time and question why i am going in, i would just say, "i'm dr. XXXX's wife" and they would let me through.
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.
We tried to go diving off the dinghy on Saturday
Whee, the fun of the black tie
I think there's something wrong with this picture.
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.
blah blah blah blah
school - i'm frustrated. i have a whole bunch of classes left to take, but for summer i can only get 1 class in. for fall, i would like to take 5, but only 3 work out with a schedule. i tried to get into a 4th and it restricted me from signing up. an advisor lifted the restriction for me, but by that time that class had filled up. VERY FRUSTRATING. going to meet with an advisor next week to see if they can get me into 1-2 closed classes.
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. :)
Poor Buddy
We let Patty take Gretchen or Sebastian home with her for a week, every other week. That means, we have both dogs for 2 weeks of the month, and the other 2 we just have one or the other.
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.