5

Today is our fifth anniversary! It's hard to believe that we've been married a whole five years already. The time has flown by, and I'm so lucky that it's been spent with such a great guy. Today I decided I'd look up what the traditional anniversary gift is, and it turns out it's wood. Ironically, this week I booked us a weekend at a cabin near Beavers Bend Park in Oklahoma. We don't get to go until November, but a quiet weekend at a cabin with a hot tub is worth the wait. Especially when it'll be spent with my favorite husband. You can tell I'm excited because I made a Pinterest board dedicated just to our trip. We plan on spending plenty of time in that hot tub I mentioned, but there will also be marshmallow roasting, star gazing, domino playing, french toast eating, and champagne drinking. Not to mention cold beer, hot stew, and lots of hand holding. I can't wait. I love you, Josh!

Source: google.com via Jessica on Pinterest

Slowly, But Surely

I feel like all I ever get to do on this blog is run in, rattle off a list of stuff I've done since I last updated, and then run back out only to repeat the process. Which, is basically what this post is. the title of this post is in reference both to my current state of health and school. I am currently about halfway through a cold, and am slowly crawling my way to recovery. And this week I took my history midterm, so I'm at the halfway point in my first semester. So far everything is going along swimmingly. It's stressful, but half of that is self-induced, because I haven't had any real reason to worry so far. The lowest grade I've made in my history class is a 100, and I've got an A for my first MathMod, and also got that A on my first English paper. I turned in my second one today, and I'm hoping for a B. My lowered expectations can be chocked up to the fact that I finished it in a nyquil haze. I'm pretty sure it was coherent. Well, at least to me!

I'm super excited though, despite my current poor health, because today I booked us for a cruise for my 30th birthday! We decided just a quick, 4 day shoot to Cozumel and back would be the best way to go. If I can get a Tuesday/Thursday schedule again next semester then I'll only miss one day for our trip. It's hard to imagine a nicer way to celebrate my 30th birthday than hanging out on this beach. Wouldn't you agree?

Catching Up

Phew! We had a long, busy trip to NY. A lot of airport frustration and early mornings. When we got back yesterday I took a four hour nap, and then managed to still get about 8 hours of sleep last night. But we had a lot of fun and visited with a lot of Josh's step-family. Plenty of good food and rounds of Banangrams. Also, last Wednesday before we left for the trip, we went out and bought a car. I can't tell you how grown-up that made us feel. We must be adults now, right? We have a mortgage, a retirement account, and we just paid cash for a car. We bought a used 2007 Honda Fit. It only had 39K miles on it though, which is quite low for a 3 year old car and for a Honda, infamous for their long lifespans. It's cute, will allow us to fit a third person in even once it's packed with Josh's drums, and most importantly it's an automatic so I can learn to drive more easily. I haven't gotten to take it for a spin yet, since we took off for NY right after buying it and just got back in yesterday. But I look forward to doing that soon! We feel pretty good about the price we paid, just under 15.5K, after TT&L and a complete warranty through to 100K miles. Not bad, right?



As for the rest of my news, we went to Niagara Falls and the George Eastman House while we were in NY, but due to all that sleep I needed I haven't uploaded any of my pictures yet. Hopefully I'll get around to that this week and I'll have something to share soon!

The Word of the Day...

...is Escape.

San Francisco Leftovers

Just wanted to share a few of the random photos that didn't really fit into a specific category of our visit. San Francisco/California was such a fun place to take pictures, and I can't wait to go back to explore more. If you click on the first pic here you can see the car lights winding down Lombard St. More here. I've got one more set of photos to share from our trip later. Thanks for looking at my excessive vacation photographs!

Cali Vacation Day 4: Golden Gate Park and Film Festival

On our last day in California we all got up plenty early to make sure we got a good start. We stopped for coffee and donuts and then drove in to San Francisco. That day's agenda was Golden Gate Park and then the 9th Scary Cow Film Festival that night at Victoria Theater. We walked around Stow Lake, up to the boat house and then headed over to JFK Dr. to find the Lindy Hoppers. I love all forms of dancing, although I don't really do it myself, so I was super excited to get a chance to see them dancing and snaps some pics. Then we walked around, past the de Young and Academy of Sciences, back over to the boat house. I convinced the boys to get a pedal boat and they pedaled me around Stow Lake, again while I took more pictures. Once we got back to the boat house we hopped in the car and headed off to Victoria Theater to pick up Diggy's friend and former teach, Carl. Carl has lived in the Bay Area all his life and he took us on a whirlwind driving tour of the city, pointing out interesting sites and sharing some historical and note so historical anecdotes- like areas that had suffered severe earthquake damage, pirate/indian/spanish mission stories, and where his first dope dealer lived, ha. We drove up to Twin Peaks where I got a good row of shots I stitched into a half-panoramic view, past the Palace of the Legion of Honor, stopped for dinner at a decent Italian place, and then headed back to the theater. The film festival was interesting. Diggy's film was definitely the best in my opinion. You can see for yourself here. His film ended the showing to loud, long applause and won first place along with a slew of other awards, announced days later, such as best directing, best acting, and best original score (by our other friend, Cory). We stopped by Tommy's for a celebratory root beer and then it was back to Palo Alto to try and pack for our flight in the morning. Here are some pics from our day in the park. Rest are here.

Cali Vacation Day 3: Shopping, Shooting and the Golden Gate Bridge

Back to vacation re-cap! Day 3 of our vacation we drove in to the city to do a little shopping. Josh and I love H&M, but we don't have one here in Texas. Emily directed me to the H&M on Powell, so after a brief viewing of the Love Parade, that's where we headed. I bought a cute gray sweater dress, gray cardigan and cream & black striped tee. Josh got a few tees, a peachy/pink button down shirt, and a nice striped sweater. And Diggy was a good sport through our long shopping trip and bought Josh a brightly colored plaid bow tie- on the condition that Josh had to wear it to the film festival the next day. We followed the shopping up with a late afternoon meal at Sears diner where Josh had 18 tiny pancakes, and I enjoyed some of the best sausage I've ever had. Then we walked down to the Ferry Building for some picture taking, took a street car back up towards where we parked and then headed over to Chrissy Field. Walked down Chrissy Field to Fort Point for more picture taking. After we headed over to the Cliff House for a couple of glasses of wine and some truly scrumptious fried calamari. Then it was time for the boys to suffer for my art so I could take some night shots of the Golden Gate. We drove over to the Sausalito side to several look out spots. It was pretty cold, and soooo windy. The boys danced and serenaded me with their renditions of Spoon songs while I shot. I had lost feeling in my right middle finger by the time I was done for the evening. We packed up and went back into the city for some Chinese food. A variety of fried rices were ordered and we had a nice meal before we headed back to Palo Alto. I was exhausted when we got back and we were planning to get up early the next day so I uploaded my pics and hit the hay. Here are some of my Golden Gate Bridge photos. The rest can be seen here.

Cali Vacation Day 2: Muir Woods, Overlook, Beach and Sausalito

Second day of our vacation started out with Muir Woods where we had a lovely hike, saw a chipmunk, some deer and teeny tiny birds amongst the giant redwoods. Very beautiful and peaceful. From there we went to Muir Overlook, where we had a great view of the Pacific and saw ravens the size of a cat! Oh, and some sort of groundhog or similar hole dwelling vermin. Then we drove down to Muir Beach where, despite Josh's complaints about getting sand in his shoes, we saw starfish and anemones. Then we drove back in to Sausalito and had dinner on the bay at Scoma's. We split a dungeness crab and I had fish and chips with some truly amazing tartar sauce. Capped the meal off with some tiramisu and a boozey coffee. We drove back across the bay to San Francisco and drove around the city at night, stopping up at Coit Tower so I could take some night shots of the city. I had fun taking some pics out of the moving car window too, which I'll share later. Here are some pics from our outdoorsy day in the bay area. The rest can be seen here.

Cali Vacation Day 1: Winchester Mystery House

We tried to make an early start on Thursday, our first morning of vacation. We stopped by Keeble & Schucat so I could get some 120 film, Philz Coffee for a cup of joe and pumpkin muffin, and then we were on our way to San Jose. I was super excited to visit the Winchester Mystery House and it didn't disappoint. Beautiful and strange, the house tour was great and the behind-the-scenes tour was really interesting. After leaving Winchester we went back to Palo Alto and grabbed lunch at a deli that is owned by Diggy's friends. We stopped by the apartment to put up some of the snacks we'd bought and then walked over to the Stanford Theater to see The Trouble With Harry. This is one of my favorite Hitchcock films and it was so fun to see it in the theater. On our way back to the apartment we saw a guy get hit by a car (but he was okay), and two guys arguing in front of an Apple store. Weird. We went by Trader Joe's to grab a few more snacking supplies. Back at Diggy's place we started our project- I had talked him into alphabetizing his DVDs, ha. We put The Birds in about halfway through our work and finished the movie while snacking on our fancy cheese, crackers, olives, salami and a little wine for Josh and I. Fun day! Here are some photos from Winchester Mystery House, you can see them all here.

Back

We're finally back from vacation. We had a wonderful time, although things got a little rough Sunday night, and have sort of trended that way ever since. The film festival was great, but my purse was ruined by a spilled drink in the theater. Then upon getting back to Diggy's I realized that I'd had tomato sauce on my shirt since dinner and no one had noticed or thought to inform me of this. We had to get up super early yesterday to get to the airport for our flight and that all went smoothly, or so we thought. For while things seemed fine on our end, little did we know that our luggage was having some problems of it's own. It decided to take another flight, so wasn't there to meet us at the airport. The agent said it'd be delivered around 7:00 PM, and if it hadn't shown up by 9 to call them back. When we got to Stephanie's house to pick up our car the battery was dead, so we munched on Twizzlers while we waited for AAA to come give us a charge. 9:00 rolls around and no luggage, so I call and the agent on the phone says the flight wasn't getting in until 10:30, so they won't know anything until then. Call it a day and go to bed, only to oversleep this morning when Josh hits the off button instead of snooze.

So, yeah. I know everybody says this, but I could really use another vacation to recover from our vacation. On the plus side they claim that our luggage did arrive and that it should be delivered today. Perhaps that's a sign things are on their way up.