Getting close to another year older...

And hopefully another year wiser.

There is currently less than a month left until my birthday. I am, as usual, not looking forward to the aging part, but I am looking forward to the cake and dinner out and movie part. (Yes, I am one of those annoying people that has a "birthday month" and then a "birthday week". I exploit my birthday as much as possible as to get in as much spoiling of myself as I can.)

The plans are: Dinner at PF Changs (the one time of year I get to eat there with my husband because he doesn't like it and will only acquiesce for my birthday), new Harry Potter movie on IMAX (also another concession from my husband due to it being my birthday) and an ice cream cake (YUM!).

I was reflecting yesterday on the things that have happened since my birthday last year. I got married, I graduated from grad school, I became a true professional (I don't count my crappy, less-than-a-year employment pre-grad school) and I moved. It's been a big year, and I'm looking forward to the new year starting.

In other, non-birthday related news, I called the auto body shop today and my car is fixable! I'm excited about this because I wasn't looking forward to having to finance a new car if it wasn't fixable. Also, this car was my first car that was truly mine and I'm sort of in love with it. It's cute, fast and has all the features I wanted. I would never convince my husband to let me buy something like it now. It was a true splurge and I'm not looking forward to the day I have to get something different.

Fun with Flu Season

I think I’m getting a cold. A bunch of people I work with are sick and so of course I’m getting it. Blah.

I’ve had a sore throat the past two evenings and one girl here said that is how she felt last Friday and Saturday. So I definitely think I’m getting a cold. I am, however, trying to get over it by getting plenty of rest (read: skipping my workouts this week) so that I can go to a Halloween party on Saturday night.

I’m always sick for fun things.

Last Christmas? Sick.
Two days after Christmas? Fine.
On the way to New Year’s Eve Party? Iffy.
At New Year’s Eve Party? Kill me now! My throat is on fire!
Fourth of July? Sick.
Labor Day Weekend? Puke-ish.

So why would I expect this weekend to be any better?

Want to know what makes it worse? My best friend here in town has mono. She’s the one who picked me up and took me home and sat with me after my car accident last Friday. If I get mono? That will really suck.

I’m hoping I don’t get mono. Luckily mono usually spreads through things like sharing drinks and kissing. We didn’t do either, so that’s working for me.

I think I’m going to go home and take some vitamin C with an orange juice chaser.

Then I’m going to lay on the couch and claim “resting to help fight off sickness” instead of “lazy”.

Hopefully This Weekend Will Be Better

Today I get to go find out if I have to buy a new car.

That thing that I was talking about? The one that usurped my intended birthday present? Was an accident. A pretty bad one.

I'm okay. Physically at least.

I started sleeping again on Sunday night, and actually made it through most of last night. It was a long weekend, and this week is not turning out much better. I'm still in a little pain, mostly from where the seatbelt held me in.

Thank you God for whoever invented seatbelts.

My car is missing about 1 to 2 feet off the front. Well, it's not missing, really, just pushed back. My husband was mad at me for the accident until he saw the damage. He was expecting much less than what it actually was. Now, he's just happy that I'm still here and that I wasn't injured.

The car has now made its way to the body shop and they should have information for me this afternoon. I'm hoping it can be fixed so that we can avoid having to give me a down payment for Christmas.

Updating for the Sake of Not Thinking about Other Things

Well, I'm not gettting the birthday present this weekend. It has now turned into a Christmas present that I won't be getting until then. Forces mostly beyond my control led to the necessity of a different "gift" which I'll write about later when I can talk about it without getting too upset.

In other (much happier news) I finally got some of my negatives from our wedding scanned so that I can make my album. I also added them to flickr if you'd like to take a glance at them. Here's one of my favorites:

Coldness

It was 34 degrees outside this morning when I went out to may car. 34 DEGREES! At least it's gotten into the 50s today. Tomorrow and Sunday are predicted to be in the 40s and rainy.

Yuck.

In other non-weather-related news, I'm getting something new and exciting this weekend. It's an early birthday present (very early - my birthday is a little over a month away) but it's on sale currently and I want it for next weekend.

I'm not going to tell you what it is yet, but it is Very Exciting, and I will probably show you all tomorrow or Sunday.

And....that's about how exciting my life currently is. Somewhat, but not incredibly. I'm ready for some down-time though. Being out of town for 3 weekends in a row has worn me out a little bit and I'm still playing catch-up on house and work things.

The thing I'm most looking forward to this weekend, besides the birthday present thing of course, is snuggling with my husband on the couch and watching football games and scary movies.

Vacation Picture Journal

Friday morning at 7 am, we started our long trek up to Marquette, MI to visit my brother. Midland, where we started from is at the blue arrow. Marquette, our destination is at the red arrow near the top of the picture. So in other words, we went really freaking far north for the weekend.

At about 1 pm we finally reached Lake Superior. That's us by the shore, feeling to check the temperature of the water. It was really freaking cold.

Our next stop along the way was Sable Falls, which was absolutely beautiful. It was about 200 steps down to the falls and then 200 steps back to the car, so my calves were a little sore the next day. The view, however, was totally worth it.

Pictured Rocks National Lake Shore was the final stop before we got to Marquette.

Once we got to Marquette, the majority of our time was spent playing with my brother's new kitten. Her name is Skye and she is adorable, but possessed. She would be playing and then fall asleep in the middle of playing and then wake up 10 minutes later and promptly bite you and jump away. Completely adorable of course.

We also did a little hiking around Presque Isle on Saturday. It was a gorgeous if not windy day. There were big waves on the lake and we even saw some brave souls out surfing. My mom didn't send me those pictures yet, but I will upload them when she does.

We also ate a lot of good food (including a yummy U.P. Pastie - if you've never had one, find one and try it. They're awesome!), visited a lot with my brother and his fiance, hiked some more, and played our favorite game a few times. We finally left on Sunday at about one and Aaron and I made it home at about 9:30 Sunday night. It was a good and beautiful, but exhausting, weekend. Feel free to look at the complete set of vacation photos I have at Flickr (click the Flickr banner on the right side of the page).

I'll leave you with one of my favorite fall things in Michigan. The beautiful fall colors.

P.S. Sorry if the formatting is all messed up on this post. I'm fighting with Blogger right now and it's winning. Looks like I'll have to start looking into Typepad or something soon.

UPDATE: I think I finally got the formatting fixed. Thank Goodness. That only took me like 2 hours of fighting with the formating to finally fix it.

Intermission

I'm waiting on my mom to email me some vacation pictures before I write a post about my vacation, so I thought I'd steal an idea from Bethiclaus, and do this post.

So, what you do is google "(your name) needs" and see what the first 10 results are. It can be pretty funny. For example, I did it for my husband and my favorite result for him was "Aaron needs to know that he is not 'dumb'".

I laughed pretty hard at that one.

So here are the things that I, apparently, need:

1. Jessie needs a little guidance. I sure do. With what, however, I'm not sure.

2. Jessica needs a whole lot of timeout. Even Google assumes that my name is Jessica (it's not). Gah!

3. Jessie needs an experienced dog owner that will be able to build up her confidence level. I wasn't aware that Jessie was a popular dog name. Either it is, or there's a lot of entries about this one dog name Jessie.

4. Jessie needs re-homing Not sure what this means, but it could be fun. I guess.

5. Today, Step-by-step is helping Jessie by giving her the support she needs through youth leadership and other programs at the Big Ugly Community Center. Cool! It sounds like I made it on a tv reality show or something. I just wish we could hold it at the Little Pretty Community Center.

6. Jessie needs a little guidance (Jessie is housetrained and will walk to the back door when she needs to go out). See what I mean about the dog thing?

7. Jessie needs some help. This is actually pretty appropriate for today. Have a hard work project that I cannot seem to figure out. Wish me luck!

8. Jessie needs another scene. Cool - a tv show and a reality show. I'm going to be a celebrity soon. Just hope I don't get snarked.

9. Jessie needs a hot story to propel her career into overdrive. Really - sounds like I'm going to be a star.

10. Jessie needs someone to love her. Actually? I've got this one covered.

See why I laughed at the Google result for him? It just seems to fit this picture so well. :)

Gah! I So Need a Vacation!

Good thing I'm leaving for one tonight. Not anything too exciting, just going up north with my husband and my parents (pretty far up north - the Upper Penninsula of Michigan) to see my brother. Should be a good time, although, it's been a long time since I went on a trip with my parents in the same car. That could be interesting.

Looking forward to it though, especially seeing all the fall colors up north. They're just starting to change here, so it should be really good further north. Hopefully I'll have some pictures to share when I get back on Monday.

Jury Duty

Okay, so let me tell you how much I hate jury duty.

I know that it's my duty as a citizen of my city/state/country to serve as needed. However, I am also quite absent-minded at times (my husband calls me a dingbat - he's sweet, no?). So the system they have here in my lovely county doesn't work for me. See, you have to call in every night, Sunday through Thursday, to see if you have to go in the following day.

This should be quite easy to remember, unless you're like me, the first time I got called for duty. At the time I was in my last semester of grad school and project leader for our final (thesis-like) project, which we did in groups. My group had all the commuters so dealing with them all, all of the time, was annoying to say the least. I was also working near-full-time. So, I forgot to call in the Wednesday night I was supposed to, and so therefore missed that I was supposed to go in the next day.

Oops.

So at around noon, when I remember that "shit, I was supposed to call in, and double shit, I got called to come in today", I drive (crying hysterically thinking I was going to get fined and/or put in jail because I'm always the one that gets made an example of) to the courthouse and plead my case.

The clerk was out for lunch.

So there I sat, trying not to cry in public, for 30 minutes waiting for her to come back. When she does, she says, "You could get in major trouble for this. You should have called in." I tell her I was in class until 10 pm the night before and so I forgot to call, she says "Well, you could have gotten out of jury duty for that if you had called before this week". Here's where I slap my forehead and plead ignorance.

She decided to be nice to me and give me a continuance until the week of July 4th (since I had to serve another whole week, she gave me a short one).

Guess what I did. I forgot to call Wednesday night. AGAIN. Luckily this time I didn't have to go in, and I made it through the whole week without getting called.

At this point, let me tell you that my husband has never so much as gotten a potential juror questionnaire.

So, after a lovely weekend this past weekend at my parents' house, we got home Sunday evening, and sat down to read the mail that had accumulated in our box while we were gone. I hear my husband say "Hmmm...this one's for you and it looks important".

You guessed it - a questionnaire for jury duty. Only this time it's for the Federal Circuit Court.

I am so screwed.

A New Love in my Life

I have a new love in my life: Wikipedia.

Okay, I'd known of it before, but I'd never really used it much before today. I was looking for some information on some bands. I was wondering where all of the members of Coldplay were from (found it), how many different members there have been in Foo Fighters (found it) and who is that random guy that keeps showing up with Green Day (found it too).

Since then I've been playing around and have found a lot of information about all sorts of things. I'm really having fun with this, finding out things I've been wondering about for a long time.

Just when I thought there was nothing more to look at on the internet, I discover this.

I should be entertained for at least one more day. ;)

Book Worm

I need a good book to read. The last one I read was "The Devil Wears Prada" and that was a couple of months back. I want a quick read, and a mystery or something kind of spooky would be preferred. Does anyone have any suggestions?

The Concert Report

Well, I'm back and actually awake which is surprising because I was up WAY past my bedtime last night. The concert was AMAZING and a ton of fun. I can't hear today because my ears are ringing loudly, but it was totally worth it.

When we first got to the venue we looked around and realized we were in the "older" crowd for this concert. We joked about how we were there with a bunch of 10-year-olds. Then we sat down and a bunch of girls who were literally 10 years old sat down in front of us. Then we got to talking about how these girls may not have been born or were at the very most still in diapers when these bands first came onto the scene. But, we were far from the oldest in the crowd, so it wasn't too bad.

The Kaiser Chiefs opened and they were not bad. The music was good, the singer was right on key and he was fun, but the rest of the band kind of stood there. It was a good performance music-wise, but otherwise it was kind of boring.

Weezer, was, in a word, SPECTACULAR. They were so good and so fun and they played about 4 songs from their first album along with a ton of other songs. Only about 2 that were probably from their newest album, but I've only heard the one song so that was fine with me. They also did a cover of the Foo Fighters' "Big Me" which was really good. It was just a great show. Their performance alone made this the best concert I've ever seen.

The Foo Fighters were also awesome. I'm a huge Dave Grohl fan, so I was thrilled to be in the same place as he was. He was funny, and a complete rock star, and LOUD. He's the reason I can no longer hear. He announced at the beginning of the concert that he loves to scream. Um, yeah. He does. But he's Dave Grohl, so I still love him. I even still love him after he told us that he had spent half the day on the toilet because of some mini tacos and jager-bombs he'd had the night before (he was much more graphic than that, but my tender sensibilities prevent me from retyping what he actually said). He has an awesome voice, is an awesome guitar player, and funny. It was a true rock concert from he and the rest of the guys in the band. Taylor also sang a song, and he was pretty good too.

All in all it was a great night, and I had a lot of fun. Even my husband, who is not a big fan of going to concerts had a great time. There was only one truly weird person in the whole crowd that I saw (very different from my experience at the Bryan Adams/Def Leppard concert). I just hope that I can hear in time for the wedding we're going to tomorrow.

Fighting the Foo with Weezer

Not too much to report today. It is a very unexciting work day. Just meetings and writing. Woohoo!

But? I get to leave at 3 today because my husband and I are going to go see Weezer and the Foo Fighters tonight, and I am very excited about this. Which makes it even harder to concentrate on work.

The Convo

Well, honestly, we really didn't have the conversation last night. We had something like it, but not exactly how I had planned. Here's the evening, in two acts.

Act One: The Restaurant

We went to a restaurant we've been wanting to try for a while. It was fabulous! So fabulous, in fact, that the conversation when mostly like this:

Me: How's your salmon?
Him: It's awesome!
M: Great.
H: How's your soup?
M: It's awesome!
H: Awesome.
M: This pie is sooooo good.
H: This beer is the best I've ever had.
M: Argh...it was so good I ate too much.
H: Me too.
Waiter: Did you save room for a 2nd dessert? (he really thought he was being funny)
M & H: Definitely not. Check please!

Act Two: Home, in bed.

We got home and were too full to move much, so we figured we'd cut out the step of moving from the couch to the bed and went directly to bed.

Him: I'm so glad everything's all set with your job. It's nice not to have to worry about money too much.
Me: Yeah, it really is nice. Now we don't have to decide between beer and food. We can get both!
H: And now we can work toward the things we really want. Here are my priorities in order (yes, he really did say that): One, get the credit cards paid off, two, buy a house, three, have a baby.
M: (turning slightly red and embarrassed to look at him for some reason) So we have to have a house before we have a baby?
H: Well, that's open for discussion, I guess.
M: Do you know what would be perfect? If we get pregnant less than 9 months before we buy a house so that I can't lift anything and therefore can't help with the moving process. (I HATE MOVING! And, I don't care if that makes me lazy. I'll unpack. I'll even pack. It's just the carrying things to the car and from the car that makes me crazy. Especially since it always seems to be 90 degrees outside when we move.)
H: Then we better get on it.
M: We're going to be able to buy a house in 9 months?
H: I think so.

The End

That really was the end of the conversation. Because the commercial break ended at that point. I think I may be addicted to tv, which is not good. So yes, the results of the conversation are that we are going to have to start looking for houses and we'll start trying to have a baby within the next nine months. So nothing definite, but definitely more information than I had earlier. I'm going to have to start taking my pre-natal vitamins just in case.

Yay!

Baby FEVER!

My husband and I have this theory about babies. God made babies cute so that you want one. If they were ugly little troll-like things no one would ever want one. Same thing for puppies and kittens. If you knew you had to clean up after something that was not cute you'd be less likely to want one.

Well, unfortunately there are a lot of cute babies out there right now (such as Amalah's and Sundry's), and other people, (like Miss Zoot and Bethiclaus), are on their way to having their own very cute babies. So now, I want one. Well, okay, not RIGHT now, but soon. Probably sooner than my husband thinks.

So, now I'm trying to figure out how to approach the subject of a baby with my husband.

I could lay it on pretty thick with the hints - you know, wear a shirt like Britney's "MILF in Training", get a subscription to Parenting, start knitting baby booties, etc. I'm sure he'd really enjoy that one. He'd probably get the hint if I actually went all crazy like that.

(And then he'd slowly back away until he was out of my line of sight and then run for the hills, because he'd wonder what happened to his normally totally sane wife.)

However, I'm not one for getting all crazy like that (although I did point out wedding magazines at the store frequently when I was trying to get him to propose). When I want something I'm usually much more direct in my approach.

So I think I may just flat-out tell him that I'm thinking that I might want a baby and that I think we should set a time for when we get to start trying to make one instead of just practicing to try.

(Although, if he just wants to keep practicing for a while, I guess that's fine. I do like the practicing.)

I think I'll do it over drinks tonight, and of course, I will post later to tell you how it went.

This should be an interesting evening.

Black Saturday

(Apologies to all of you non-fans-of-football out there ahead of time. This will most likely be a boring post for you.)

Saturday, the day I was looking forward to all last week, turned out to be a very sad day.

You see, the Spartans lost to the Wolverines, and in my household that's a big deal. MSU (the Spartans) is my alma mater, while my husband grew up in Ann Arbor (home to U of M - the Wolverines). So MSU/U of M game day is a big day in the Ca household. Bragging rights are won that day (usually by him) but this year I thought I had a chance.

MSU had a perfect record going into this game, and U of M had seen a very disappointing loss to a team we later beat. So all was hopeful going into this game day.

The topic of the game is now forbidden in my house due to much bragging on my husband's part. He's grounded from mentioning it, because he really over-did it. He keeps telling me it was a good game, and that I should be proud. But what he's really saying is, it doesn't matter anyway because YOU LOST!

At least MSU practically owns basketball here. At least we have that.