Where have all the dinosaurs gone??

There are things in life that I love and things that I most certainly do NOT love.
And the list changes quite frequently.
Here are today's:

Thing that I love:
1. Cheetos
2. Busy, but not stressful, work days
3. New restaurants
4. When things work out
5. Salty foods, in general.

Things that I most certainly do NOT love:
1. Random senseless chatter
2. Airlines that are not helpful and won't let me use my miles
3. Bi-polar landlords
4. General stress about stupid things
5. Messy, cluttery work-space


Anyway........
Todd and I have somehow managed to work our vacations and holidays out so that we're only working a full week every other week until after July 4th. How that happened, I have no idea. It wasn't planned, but man is it nice!

Next week is a full work week and then we'll be off to SLC for a few days. Always nice to get out of town...especially on a summer road trip. I hate road trips (this will never change from week to week. I hate them), but with Todd the trips are more exciting and frankly, far funnier. We laugh a whole bunch and take the most ridiculous pictures...my favorites on the trip from Denver to SLC always happen when we stop for ice cream at Little American in Wyoming. Except now there's not the Sinclair dinosaur there, which is really stupid and I have no idea why it's gone missing. But we'll take funny pictures anyway.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Educational Perfection

The summer semester is upon me.

Eight weeks of school, one more time.

Thankfully, I'm only taking 3 credits this semester (which, in a summer semester, is more like 9)...this time last year, I was taking 5 credits. Do the math, kids...that's like taking 15 credits. Oh the pain! So instead of going to school Mon/Tues/Wed/Thurs from 530pm until almost 9pm, I'll be going only Mon/Wed from 530pm until 800pm, which isn't bad at all. I just got done doing that and did it with relative ease. So there's that.

The Art & Craft of Writing, whatever that means, is my one and only class for the semester. Good times. I have the sneaking suspicion that it will be remarkably easy for me. Looking forward to that.

In other news, my final grades for the spring semester were posted last Friday. I am not happy. Got a "B" in both Intro to Lit and Spanish level 2. What the frick?!?! I expected the B in Spanish...I struggled with it all semester, for no good reason. But c'mon. I definitely expected an A in Literature. It was a totally brainless class (for me). I have some ideas as to why I wound up with a B and I blame it almost entirely on my weird disorganization during the latter part of the semester. But still.

I'm a perfectionist when it comes to my grades. I will rarely (if ever) accept less than the best. Because I put into it only the best. Okay, sometimes I slack, but not often and not much. Todd could tell you oodles of stories about my insane pursuit of educational perfection. It would spin your head.

All I really want to do is graduate with honors. It will not be that hard for me.

My overall GPA is sitting pretty at a lame 3.43, which is down from the last few semesters. Ergh.

I mean, what are we gonna do if we get kicked out???

Long weekends are probably my favorite.
We were both still fighting off the tail end of the nasty bug we caught in Vegas, but other than that, it was a good weekend.
Friday, Todd made my ultimate favorite dinner...Fettuccine with Chicken & Red Pepper Cream Sauce...nice and SPICY! Then we went to the movies and saw Prince Caspian, where we "reached our weekly quota of thinly veiled Christian propaganda" (according to a funny ecard Chandra sent me hahaha!)...we even bought popcorn and a Slurpee, making it a very official date night. It was gads of fun!

Saturday, I bought a new dress for the Sex & The City opening on Friday...I'm going with Karla and Laura and then meeting up with a bunch of other girl friends after the show for cosmos (of course!)...the dress perfectly matches my pink jacket from the wedding, which was totally unintentional but works out famously as I'll now look very "Charlotte" at the opening and that makes me giggle! :o)
We also bought new patio furniture and spent the better portion of the afternoon putting that together and grilling on Todd's new grill (which was also an adventure to put together, but fun nonetheless).
Then it was off to the symphony! It's probably one of our very favorite things to do in Denver. We should, at some point, really consider getting season tix. Anyway, this was a long-awaited show...I bought tickets back in February or something (maybe earlier). It was CSO presents The Music of Abbey Road. It was fricking fantastic! Topped off the evening with Blizzards from the ol' DQ where we saw one of the funniest marquis I'VE ever seen (wish I'd have had the camera with me...)

Sunday was a l-o-n-g day at church, but only because I had to be there at 8am for a rehearsal so that I could be ready to sing at the 1030am service. But it was a good (albeit long) service and I got to sing a wicked awesome version of the Battle Hymn with two of my fave ladies, Glo and Terri. We spent most of the afternoon planting new plants in the yard, trimming back the insane weeds that have cropped up around our rose bushes and along the fence, took the puppies to Baker Street for some drinks in the afternoon and then got the house cleaned up to have some peeps over to watch some good old fashioned executive transvestite comedy! Eddie Izzard, that is. It was a rocking good time that included grilling and chocolate cake as well, so there's that. Nothing bad can come of this combination, really.

Monday, we headed up the hill to play with Megan, Paul, Lotsie and Flanders (the last two being M&Ps crazy town puppies) Our little guys enjoyed themselves and even managed to bark Lotsie and Flanders off the porch a couple of times. This is most amusing if you know how small our dogs are and that Lotsie is a 70lb black lab-pit bull mix and that Flanders is a 50lb (??) terrier mix mutt thing. So it's miraculous to me that Suki told Lotsie who was boss at LOTSIE'S house! It was HILARIOUS! Did some grilling and watched a couple movies before packing up the weirdos and heading back down the mountain in the weirdest rain storm ever. Aaaahhhh....Memorial Day. Wouldn't quite be right without rain and 45F degree weather, right?

So this week, now that I'm healthy again, I'll be able to start my education again. That's right. I'm still in school. It's kind of weird because a bunch of my friends graduated this spring. I'm pretty far behind, but whatever.

Only 8 weeks of school and then off to Boston we go!!!!!!!

The long awaited "Vegas Blog"

Many many photos of our time in Vegas with our friends, Chandra & Heather...enjoy!

Silly traditions that actually work.

While I was in the midst of planning the wedding about a year ago now (gasp!), I was fighting with my mom and Todd about doing the garter and bouquet toss. I think they're slightly antiquated traditions and I've almost come to hate them. I know this will come as shock to most of you that know how much I abide by the terms of tradition. But I really do hate these traditions. I have no idea why.

Mostly because it's all myth and fancy, I suppose. It never actually works.

Until now.

Wouldn't you know it, but the girl that caught the bouquet at our wedding is actually the next one of my family's group of friends (and friends' kids) that will be getting married!



Her name is Jenae and I used to be her baby-sitter. It's kind of weird to see her all growed up like this now...




I couldn't have been happier that she was the one that caught the bouquet...and at the time, I didn't even know she'd been dating someone for the last umpteen years! She told me their story and it's very sweet....young love is so perfect, so innocent.



I don't know the story (and I stole this picture from her Facebook), but it's pretty obvious he proposed to her at Disney World (which really is the most magical place on Earth, even if you don't get engaged there)...

She deserves this....

much loves to Jenae!

Brought to you by "Focus on [your own damn] Family"

Really, what business is it of theirs?

I used to be a big fan of FOTF...but lately, they've just gotten on my nerves, what with their over-critical analysis of various movies (The Golden Compass being the biggest one in recent history) and their mis-interpretation of music lyrics (specifically "Switch" by Will Smith...grossly mis-interpreted a line which is rather difficult to mis-interpret if you're actually reading the lyrics which they pretty blatantly did not...but I've already blogged about this)...

And now this...

Give me a break. Really.

Leland Marlowe Read

My grandpa (on my dad's side) died a year ago this past weekend. Puts a bit of an interesting spin on Mother's Day for the family.

I'm apparently being forced to do some serious introspection regarding loss. Not necessarily just death (though that seems to be the big theme the last few months)....all kinds of loss.

Damn I love my family. The whole kit and kaboodle, man. Quirks and oddities. All of it. All of them. There's nothing I can't learn from anyone in my family.

I miss my grandpa. I miss his laugh, his cologne, his turkey gravy, his initial irritation when I didn't know how to use a steak knife. I miss his stories and his music. He played the organ. Every evening, he'd jam out to some of the most amazing music you could possibly imagine. Visiting my grandparents house was always an adventure.

Grandpa loved to grill. I loved seeing him sitting on the back porch/patio/whatever, drinking a beer and grilling up something amazing (I'm pretty sure it's where my dad learned to do all the awesome grilling he does). Except for the occasional dousing of MSG, everything grandpa cooked was delicious and wonderful.

He always had some new-fangled technological something-or-other in the house. One year, it was a thingy that you could edit home videos on, which my dad, grandpa and uncle Mike spent the entirety of Christmas afternoon trying to figure out.

And oh how he haaaaaaaaaaaaaated noise! Especially screaming little girls (me, my sister, my two cousins). He abhorred it and we knew it...and learned really quickly to be ever so quite while having our fun!

He loved the lake in Pennsylvania, loved to tinker in the garage, loved that old old Toyota truck of his.

But most of all he loved my grandma.

My very favorite memory of my grandpa is from when he was out in Denver for my brother's high school graduation. He had fallen and broken his hip while he was here so their stay got extended (you could say). My grandma and I went one day to visit him in the home he was doing his initial rehab at in Denver...the dymensia had long since started setting in along with the Alzheimer's which sucked all up and down the place (he's such a great story teller...it made me sad when the stories started getting out of whack). Anyway, that particular day was when Reagan died. I was the one to break the news to him. He was pretty sad about it...he has tons of stories about Reagan. So he started telling me one of them. Grandma had to fill in a lot of holes, but grandpa did most of the story-telling...he finished the story with a great deal of flair, but missed what I think must have been a major point of the whole thing so grandma filled that part in too....and as soon as she finished, he squeezed her hand, looked at me and said "And that's why she's my girl!"

I want that kind of love...