atlanta update

So Atlanta life is going well. We're still not settled yet, of course. Won't be til mid-August. So I still don't think it's sunk in that we LIVE here. It feels like an extended vacation in some ways. Weird. But obviously it's not a vacation because you don't go to work every day on vacation. But even that has been fun, so no complaints. So here's the extended update of what we've been up to:

Work: I've got a "real" job for the State of Georgia, doing web design and development. Our main portal is georgia.gov, but we do lots of stuff. I work in downtown ATL, right by the capitol building. In a sea of cubicles. Right now I drive 30 minutes to a MARTA rail station, then ride MARTA for about 30 minutes, then walk for another 10 minutes to get to work. When we move, I'll walk 20 minutes to MARTA instead of driving. I'm strangely happy with any length of commute as long as it's not in a car though. So it's all good. And the governor is a big fan of teleworking (working from home) to cut down on commutes, so I get to be productive in my own home once a week or so, which is even better. I'm also still teaching online for Southeastern Tech, and I've got a few freelance projects happening, so I'm keeping busy.

Play:: so I think we actually have more friends in Atlanta than we did in Savannah, which is weird. Or at least we know more people who actually make time to hang out here. Some are friends from Gainesville (we've been psyched to get to hang out with Brooke a lot, and we finally caught up with Melody yesterday, and one of these days I'll get to hang out with my friend Beth who was in art school with me), and then we've also got some friends that we made at the Atlanta Film Festival that we've gotten to hang out with as well. They are also awesome. And on top of just normal hanging out type stuff, there's all sorts of fun random things that happen in Atlanta, such as special Harry Potter screenings (yes, I saw it before you), a Soap Box Derby, and The Decemberists playing with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (this Friday night). I think we might heart Atlanta.

And it should only get better after Sam & Nicole get back, and we move to our apartment, and it no longer takes 45 minutes to get to Atlanta. I'm really super excited about our apartment. And settling in. And then it won't be long before everyone starts coming to visit us... Emily has already claimed the first weekend of September, and my parents will probably come up before that. And lots of other people keep promising to come see us too. So I think one of our first orders of business will be to get our guest room in order. I love having guests! I figure we'll finally make it to the aquarium sometime when people come to visit.

Okay, that's the update. I think that's everything. Now I gotta get working on some of those work things I mentioned.

more crochet

So I've gotten a couple more little crochet animals made, and I think I'm getting better at it... but I'm still not thrilled about em yet. But I'm getting there. My second project was this bunny. He doesn't have a name yet, so I'm taking suggestions. I've also made something else I can't post photos of yet cuz I'm giving them away and I don't want to ruin the surprise. So this is all you get for now. I have a whole bunch more patterns now, and I think it won't be TOO much longer before I'm ready to try things on my own instead of going off a pattern. We'll see.

Name my bunny!

Give the Gift of Sheep... or Cows... or...

I'm very excited about Oxfam America Unwrapped, where you can buy gifts of sustainability for third world villages. It's pretty freaking awesome, and right now I'm trying to figure out which one(s) to ask for for Christmas. I can't just get these gifts for others because I risk pissing them off that I got someone else something cool for THEIR gift, so I just hafta ask for myself. Some options are to get someone a Sheep for $45, or maybe Support an indigenous craftwoman for $90. Other gifts include buying a crocodile, a cow, or a camel, or irrigating a farmer's land, supporting a fair trade co-op... even building a coffee mill. Prices range from under $20 to over $5,000. Pretty freaking awesome. Interested? Start shopping now!

hardware

Yesterday I got a new piercing. It's something I wanted for about 5 years, but I was waiting for a good reason to do it... it needed to be a celebration of something big. And with everything the Lord has been doing in our lives lately... sending us to Atlanta, providing me with a great job (I start Monday!), and then giving us a fantastic apartment (move in August 11), I thought this would be a good time. And it helps that Atlanta has this really great piercing place that is really obsessive about the quality of their hardware, and proper piercing care so that it heals well. It's called Piercing Experience, and although their website is butt-ugly, that just means they're too busy being concerned with their piercing rules to worry about anything else. Although my ear still smarts a bit today, I'm pretty hopeful that the healing time on this cartilage piercing will be significantly shorter than on the last ones I got 5 years ago (which, by the way, took more than a year to heal). Anyways. I like it, and I especially like that it's pretty understated... I don't think it's too noticeable, especially since my hair half covers it up.

experimental Amigurumi

I found a free pattern online for an amigurumi Panda bear (scroll down for it), so I decided to give it a shot. I made it while at the PEZ Convention this weekend, so I didn't really have access to stuffing, so I used toilet paper... I don't know if that's to blame for how dumb he looks, or if I should blame his eyes (I also didn't go out and buy eyes to go on him, so I just made them out of yarn) or if I am just bad at this... nonetheless, I'm not too pleased with him. Chris named him Milton. I was gonna give him to Emily since she loves purple, but Milton is too ugly to give away.

Now I'm working on a rabbit to see if I have any better luck on my second try, with different (more forgiving) yarn. And eyes. Gotta get real eyes.

Team Skeene

I keep forgetting to point you all to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's new blog, Team Skeene. I know what you're all thinking. "But Kendra, you and Chris have been married for four years, and Sam and Nicole have only been married for a month. How is it that THEY get to call themselves Team Skeene?" Well, the simple answer is because they DO call themselves Team Skeene, and... we don't. So there. We have decided, however, that whenever the FOUR of us are together (which will be often since we will be living close now!) we are called Team Skeene Supreme. That's right, Chris and I are the Supreme part.

Photos

A couple months ago we went down to Orlando/Lakeland for a Mother's Day / Chris's Birthday / Cornerstone Florida weekend. Chris was borrowing a rockin' digital camera from a friend (for shooting the festival) and so the evening of his birthday party, he ran around taking pictures with it. A lot of them were really good (considering he was taking "snapshots") ... I love this photo of Emily (Chris's sister) and her dog Duncan... and I always hate the pictures he takes of me, but I actually like this one. So here ya go!

Waste of money?

So a couple of weeks ago, I paid to get a Spot Test, which was to test for food allergies. I know some of my food allergies, but I still get a rash sometimes when I've been good at avoiding the things I'm allergic to, so I was hoping to figure out what else I may have overlooked. I finally got the test back today, and was pretty disappointed with the results. According to this spot test, I'm not allergic to ANY foods, not even sulfites. Here's the thing. I KNOW I'm allergic to sulfites... how do I know this? Well, whenever I eat something with sulfites in it, my faces breaks out in a horrible itchy rash. When I avoid sulfites, no horrible itchy rash. So either they messed up my blood sample, or their test is bogus? I dunno... but I'm pretty disappointed.

sweet sleep

chris and i rewarded ourselves for our last few days of excessive busy-ness by sleeping for 12 hours. ahhh, i feel so refreshed! (although, admittedly, I would feel more refreshed if i wasn't allergic to peachtree city. my sinuses are killing me!)

farewell savannah!

we're outta savannah and into HOTlanta! the move went GREAT, we have very great friends. Angela was especially amazing, she basically single-handedly cleaned our entire apartment, and helped me out with packing and stuff, for two and a half days. I don't think we would've gotten it done without her.

So now we're at Sam & Nicole's place just south of Atlanta, our stuff is in a POD for the month, and starting Monday, Chris and I start figuring out what our lives are going to look like in the ATL.

We're tired.

packing, and... break from packing

So we've been hard at work packing up the apartment... we have a lot of stuff, so it's taking a LOT of time. I'm pretty exhausted. So I took a break from it the other night to do something equally important - customize my computer's desktop image and icons. Since I got a new hard drive, I had to re-customize. This is extremely important for my mental stability. So here's what I decided on this time:

I'm especially happy about my new hard drive icon. Hooray for R2!
I found all these at Pixel Girl Presents, in case you wanna check 'em out.

missing: 9 months of emails

Note: this blog post contains some whining and some computer-talk. If you don't care about that, please jump to the important part below.

First I want to start by saying that I DO back up my computer. Not nightly, not weekly, but about every 2 or 3 weeks I force myself to run a backup, which requires digging my backup drive out of the fireproof box, plugging it in, and letting it run overnight. I have software that checks for new and updated files, and copies those over to the portable hard drive. So when my hard drive went kaput, I was unhappy, but not panicked because I knew that I was only missing about 10 days of info, not my entire lifetime of info (plus I was hopeful that the repair company would be able to salvage some of my files). Well, I finally got my computer back yesterday, with a fresh new hard drive, and they told me they were NOT able to save anything from the old one. This sucks, but again, I have a backup. No problem.

So yesterday I started the task of plugging in the backup drive, and copying files back over to the new drive. Pretty much everything is intact, minus those 10 days of work that will take me a little while to figure out what's missing and what I lost. UNTIL I got to the part where I was trying to open my email. I used to have all my saved emails on webmail, but a couple months ago I finally ditched my crappy web host in favor of a better web host, and when I did that, I had to copy ALL my saved email to my computer. It took a long time. I had to re-organize everything in Entourage (Outlook for the Mac), and from then just started using Entourage exclusively for email (whereas I used to go back and forth between webmail and Entourage). Long story short, I ran into two problems. The first problem is that Entourage decided that it couldn't open its own database of emails from the backup. Why? I don't know, but apparently when Microsoft wrote this software, they didn't bother with making the email database robust enough to be easily backed up. But when I finally got Entourage to open a backup version of my email, it turns out that my backup software hadn't been updating up this particular file! It's been doing great with EVERYTHING ELSE, but my EMAIL database hasn't been backed up since September of 2006!!!!

For those of you who are already bored with this blog post, let me get to the point: If you have emailed me with anything of importance since September of last year, I don't have it. That means email addresses, business info, ANYTHING emailed to ANY account with ANY importance is no longer in my possession. If you are waiting for me to reply to an email, or handle something important, or anything, you will need to send it again, because it's gone. Even if you haven't sent me anything important, you may just want to shoot me an email to say hi so that I have your email address again, just in case. I don't want to post my email address online because I get enough spam as it is, but I'll write it out for ya... kendra ... at ... idreaminblue ... dot ... com.

Now I've got to finish updating my computer, and then figure out a new piece of software for backing up my data so this doesn't happen again. I also might switch to Mail instead of Entourage since Entourage keeps screwing me up. This is going to take a while. It sure doesn't help that we're MOVING in less than a WEEK and I don't really have time to take care of my computer.

thanks for the understanding.

Mizero

Mizero is the Kirwandan word for "Hope." The Mizero Foundation is a non-profit organization who is bringing hope to orphans from the Rwandan's genocide. They are organizing a tour for a group of orphans to perform traditional Rwandan music and dancing at churches around the United States this fall. They will be raising money to build a cultural arts center for the orphans in Kigali, Rwanda.

The Lord has been moving and growing this organization within the short time since its inception just a couple months ago, and He has been bringing some great people together to make this happen. But we still need a lot of help in a lot of different areas of the ministry. If this is something that the Lord is prompting you to look into, please visit their website at www.mizerochildren.org to learn more, and if you feel you may have resources (time, money, contacts, knowledge, or things we haven't even thought of) that the Lord could use in growing this foundation, please fill out the form on the Partner With Us page.

sleepless night

Well... I don't know the best way to "tell" this story. It probably won't be eloquent. I'm rather sleep-deprived. Last night, just as I was finally dozing off to sleep, around 12:30am, I hear what I thought was a gunshot outside our bedroom window. It freaked me out, but Chris wasn't sure it was actually a gunshot, plus we can't see out our bedroom windows anyways, so we just tried to go back to sleep. Then just as I was falling BACK to sleep, we heard a bunch of gunshots all at once (I think I counted ten) right outside. This time we were sure of what we heard, so Chris called the police, and was told that a call had already been made and police were on their way. The strange thing was that we didn't hear anyone talking outside (back behind our apartment is a seedy bar, and we usually hear people out there until all hours of the night, so you'd think if someone was shot outside, people would be making some noise). Chris said "probably someone shot into the air." Within a couple of minutes, there were cop cars EVERYWHERE, and the whole block by our apartment was blocked off. Chris managed to get enough of a glimpse out the window to see cops running around everywhere, see someone put into an ambulance, and then see a police officer inspecting the ground about 15 feet from our bedroom window. Of course at this time we really couldn't sleep, and we were half expecting a police officer to ring the doorbell to see if we knew anything.

After a while of trying to look out windows to see what was happening, we realized we really need to try and get some sleep. Chris had to be up at 5:30am to open the coffee shop, and I had a 90 minute drive and a 12 hour work day ahead of me the next morning. So, of course, it took us a long time to finally fall back to sleep, and I was just barely falling asleep AGAIN when we heard knocking, at 2:30am. We're used to people ringing the doorbell if they need to get us, because the door to our apartment is inside of another locked door, and if anyone knocks on that door, we can't hear it. So Chris opens our door to investigate the noise, and is surprised to see a cop standing there, asking if we heard anything. Chris told him what we knew (gunshot at 12:30, lotsa shots at 12:50, the end). And the officer left. So needless to say, we didn't exactly get any sleep.

This morning I did a google news search for the incident and found this article, which tells me that a man was murdered outside our apartment. Just a little scary. Needless to say, we're REALLY happy to be leaving ghetto downtown Savannah in under three weeks.

Computer in a Coma, and a Life Update

Yesterday my computer decided to quit working. I think the hard-drive died. It came as quite a shock. For those of you that don't know, basically everything I do requires that machine. I am a freelance designer, which requires the computer. I manage a business for our PEZ documentary, where all the records are kept on that machine. And I am a graphic design & web design teacher, and when I'm not at the school I need to check emails from students and grade assignments for the online class I teach. So I'm going through a bit of withdrawal today.

We still have Chris's computer to check emails and do a LITTLE bit of necessary work, but, well, Chris's computer sucks. It doesn't have all my software on it. And while I actually have a work laptop that I could, in theory, work on, that one started acting funny a week ago and I need to take it in to work to have the tech guys look at it, because right now I can only boot it up in safe mode. So I'm kind of being forced to do less on the computer and more in the real world for a while. It's probably a blessing in disguise, but right now I'm expecting to start displaying symptoms of withdrawal... like the shakes, or nausea.

What this DOES mean is that I have no excuse NOT to start packing up our home while I'm computer-less. Why would I start packing up my home, you ask? Well... we've officially decided to move to Atlanta. In three weeks. It's a really long story with lots of pieces to it, but the short version is that Chris and I really feel this is where the Lord is leading us, and so we have made the decision to step out in faith and follow, trusting that the Lord will put together the pieces in His timing. The middle of June is when my classes end for the quarter, so at that time we're going to move up the the Atlanta area and start looking for apartments, finalize jobs, etc. Chris's brother and our new sister-in-law have offered to let us stay in their apartment for a month while they're out of town, so we're taking them up on it. It's going to be a crazy ride, but we're looking forward to it all. We're just really ready to get out of Savannah, and we feel that now is the time. As things become more finalized, I'll post updates. For now I don't want to start talking about things we haven't confirmed. But that's what we know.

What, no GoLive? What a surprise...

A year or so ago, my husband and one of my best friends were both taking a web design class at SCAD. They were being forced to use Adobe GoLive in this class, although it is TERRIBLE web design software (and this is coming from an Adobe girl). I complained about it and mentioned they should be learning Dreamweaver. They said "Well, Adobe bought out Macromedia, so our teacher said that Dreamweaver will be discontinued, so we have to learn GoLive." I insisted that this was ridiculous, Dreamweaver is the industry standard, and there's no WAY Adobe would trash it. They insisted that their teacher is WAY smart (he has a degree from HARVARD, after all) and WAY cool, and of course since I'm not a Harvard grad, nor do I take pictures of deer antlers covered in icing, I must not know what I'm talking about. In their defense, the Kendra-bashing did not actually happen, but in my mind it may as well have, since they were so enamored with their teacher and his GoLive-loving ways. And don't even get me STARTED on how his OWN website is all images and in no way optimized for search engines to even FIND HIM. Some web teacher.

Well, ladies and gents, you know what's coming. The new Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium comes packaged with none other than Dreamweaver, NOT GoLive. GoLive has, in fact, been discontinued from the Creative Suite. Although this victory matters to no one but myself, I still take great pride in knowing What's Up. I am The Nerdiest.

ego

Sure, I graduated nearly 10 years ago, but it's still kinda cool that my high school (Fort Myers High School) was just ranked in the top 100 in the COUNTRY.

And what's with all the talk of Florida schools being among the worst? I was always surprised because I got a pretty stellar high school education, in Florida. But I guess as a state it's not so hot, but there are some good ones. 22 of the top 100 schools are in Florida, actually. (12 in Texas, 13 in N.Y, only 7 in California, 11 in Va, and after that is seems like no state has more than a handful).

new sister-in-law!

My brother-in-law Sam got married to an awesome girl named Nicole this past weekend, and Chris and I were blessed to be a part of it. It was a crazy-busy weekend, but worth every minute of it. Lots of time with family, making new friends, and celebrating. Good times were had by all.

Favorite Sesame Street Moments

I don't know how I got sidetracked watching old Sesame Street clips this morning, but here are my favorite clips in Sesame Street history.

This time-waster was brought to you by the letter K.

Don't Mess With Our Chocolate!

If there's one thing that really gets me mad, it's when corporations lobby the FDA to drop regulations on food products. I think the worst is when companies want the FDA to loosen standards on organics, but on a more universal topic that people other than me might care about, chocolate companies are trying to get the FDA to cut back their regulations on what's labeled chocolate. CHOCOLATE! They want the FDA to allow them to use vegetable fats instead of cocoa butter, and milk substitutes instead of milk, and still label it "chocolate" ... making the chocolate less tasty and less, well, chocolatey. I don't care of companies want to make fake chocolate to save money, but I don't want them to be able to call it chocolate. It just bugs me that the FDA really is in the business of serving businesses, at the expense of the consumers. Not that this is something new... just something we need to be increasingly aware of when it's becoming more clear that what we eat affects our health, and not just in the "eating fat makes you fat" kind of way.

back, but not for long

We got back from Atlanta late Sunday night. Had all day Monday to catch up on some stuff at home. Off to work Tues/Wed, and the cycle continues again. I finally pulled out my PDA and counted how many days I've actually been home in the past few months.
Here's the tally:

• March: 17 days outta 31


• April: 12 days outta 30


• May: (tentative) 12 days outta 31 (but that might decrease).

Luckily we have an awesome friend to check out mail and hang out in our house when we're gone, water our plants & keep our internet company. But MAN, that air mattress doesn't suit my neck so well.

Anyways, I'm still waiting for the rest of the pieces to be put together to figure out what we're doing with ourselves after June... When I know something I will share.

rock, rock

The Lord is still rocking our world, and we're still in Atlanta for the festival. Brooke and her hospitality has been a huge blessing. Friends calling out of the blue because the Lord put us on their hearts has been a strange an amazing product of the week, as well. I'll post more when there's actually something to post, instead of just lots of confused feelings and nervous tummies. Please pray.

The ATL, and please pray

Chris and I are in the ATL for about a week for the Atlanta Film Festival. We're staying with the always super Brooke Taylor, and going to see films and meet people. It's been good so far, and there are many days left.

In other news, Chris and I would appreciate your prayers as we try to see where the Lord is leading us right now. Much confusion has been ensuing as of late, and long story short, we're pretty confused and uncertain about a LOT of things. So we would appreciate your prayers for discernment and direction.

Why I shouldn't let Chris go out of town without me

So there's a trend that's been developing in my life, that goes "When Chris goes out of town, bad things happen to Kendra." The first time was when we were just dating, and Chris went to Alaska for 6 weeks. Otherwise known as The Hardest 6 Weeks Of My Life, some of the things that happened included a really bad stomach flu, the water pump in my car breaking, and my hot water heater in my apartment exploding (huge spark that woke me up, smell of burning rubber, water spraying all over the place... yeah, I'd call that exploding).

I was afraid to let him go far after all that, but I kind of had to get over it last year when Chris went up north on PEZ business for a week. The trend continued, though, because that's when a wheel was stolen off my car.

Finally, Chris went out of town for this past week. The first day I was home alone without him, I got a mild bout of food poisoning that put me out of commission for the day. I was hoping that was it for my "Bad Things Happen When Chris Is Gone," but on Saturday a flaky girl ran into the back of my car. Not a bad accident, but the back bumper is scratched up.

So now I'm thinking for sure I shouldn't let Chris take off without me again. Things are just easier to deal with when he's here (and less bad things happen).

um... ew.

I'm up way too late and watching Man vs. Wild on the Discovery Channel because that's all that's on (the guy will parachute into random places and then has to survive for a week, and get back to civilization or something... I don't usually pay really close attention to it)... and the guy is in the middle of the Moab desert and it's really hot, so he has this cloth wrapped around his head to cool him down, but it's not doing much good, because apparently it's really hot, and in fact it's so REALLY FRIGGIN HOT that he just took the cloth off his head, PEED ON IT, then wrapped it back around his face (covering all but his eyes, really). All I can think is that I can't imagine being SO MISERABLY HOT that it seems like a good idea to pee on a cloth and put it around my face to cool myself down some. (I mean, fresh pee isn't exactly chilly, either). Gross. Really, I'm just kind of praying that I never have a time in my life where it seems like a practical, useful idea to pee on a cloth and stick it on my head.

Hmm, now he just ate a raw bird eggs, then decided to cook the other one on a rock (he just broke it on the rock and it cooked, because remember, it's REALLY FRIGGIN HOT).

Okay, for all the gross and worst stuff all at once you can check out this page of videos, where the "Keeping Cool" video features that gem of a moment that sparked this blog.

My hubby isn't here to ramble all this to, and it's too late at night to call Angela, so you, dear Internet, are the only person I have to tell. I'm so glad we can talk like this, Internet. I'm so glad you listen to my randomness in the middle of the night. I hope we always stay friends.

Portland rocks!

What I didn't mention before is that Chris and I are beating around moving to Portland. The other options we were thinking about doing with the next couple years of our life all fell through, so now we figure we can go anywhere we find jobs, and we've been really interested in the PDX. Especially after visiting and getting a sense of the area, it seems like a reasonable possibility, provided we can find jobs there. So... there will be lots of prayer in the next couple months, and nothing is for certain, but that's what we're thinking.

So... some things we really loved about Portland... for one thing, people are nice. Friendly, helpful, polite, whatever... they were NICE. People working in stores, at restaurants, wherever. I found myself really surprised by that, and then I realized that I'm used to employees treating me like a nuisance they have to deal with so they can get back to doing nothing. I'm used to people mumbling at me so that I don't even understand what they're asking, or talking to their coworkers instead of helping me (except for the woman at World Market who is always super-excited about the sales, or the owner of Zunzi's who treats every customer like a rockstar). But I didn't experience that in Portland, which was pretty amazing.

Another great thing about Portlanders - they YEILD TO PEDESTRIANS! No kidding... if you're standing at a crosswalk, cards STOP for you. Rarely do they speed past, or slow down and wave at you to run across before they get there, they come to a complete stop. We even had cars stop for us at places that didn't even have a crosswalk. More than once a car would just stop, and we'd be confused about why they were stopping until they motioned to us to cross the street. We were SO CONFUSED. It was like being in a different COUNTRY or something. Pretty fantastic.

And of course there's all the yummy organic and vegetarian food options... all the organic local beers... all the flowers and happy plants, all the yarn stores and crazy hippie stores... so much FUN! And best of all, I didn't have pollen allergies while I was there, despite all the blooming stuff... but the second I got back to Savannah my eyes started watering.

AND along with being very bike-friendly and bus-friendly, Portland has cool things like car shares... which I think is just the greatest idea ever. Chris and I REALLY want to stop being so dependent on our vehicle for everything. For one thing, I would get a lot more exercise if I could bike or walk where I needed to go more often.

Granted, we didn't experience much of rainy Portland. It sprinkled a couple days we were there, but in general it was mild weather and clear skies, great for going to Japanese Gardens and the Columbia River Gorge. I'm not sure how I'd handle 3 months of rain and gray skies, but... at least it doesn't get super cold very often.

Well, this was more rambling than I expected, so I'll stop for now. Off to be productive again.

hosting switcheroo

In case the site disappears or changes briefly at any time, it's cuz I'm finally switching web hosts, trying to escape the hell that has been my current hosting situation. But HOPEFULLY everything will go smoothly.

Update: The transfer went as well as I could have possibly hoped for - yippee! Now I'm working on transfering some other sites, but I've got my site, Chris's, and this one all transferred painlessly, with minimal email downtime. Yippee!

high fives!

Today's Dinosaur Comic makes me think of one of my favorite peoples. You gotta hover over the image to get the alt text for the best part.

back from Portland!

Well, we're back in one piece, and gotta get back into normal life. I may write more rambling about fun in Portland later, but tonight I spent too much time uploading photos to my flickr account, so you can start there. I'm organizing things by tag, so you can see all things portland, or can break it up into more manageable bite-sized pieces, like the Columbia River Gorge, the Japanese Garden, or just general downtown stuff. We also took pictures of some we found around town, like some random public art, like toy horses tied to the side of the street, and the fuzzy poofs on some trees and powerline posts. There's some notable food items. Oh yeah, and flowers.

On an unrelated note, I've got a couple more crochet photos up of some newer projects. For the one or two of you who care.

It seems like some of my photos on flickr are losing their tags or disappearing, and I don't know how.

portland is awesome

so I thought I would be able to post some photos from some awesome places we went today, but we didn't bring the right cord for the camera. So... that will be a while. But I can link some things up and talk about how cool they are.

did I mention I love Portland? Lots of fun shops, places to eat and indy record stores and thrift shops and gardens and pretty trees (magnolias and dogwoods and red buds blooming all over!) And there's a Whole Foods market right in downtown... just lots of yumminess everywhere. I got a tasty organic microbrew at a pizza place (where the server was very excited about the prospect of fresh herbs on our pizza). Much coolness. It's beautiful here. Okay! On to the links!

Today we at at Hot Pot City, where you pick a soup broth flavor, and they bring it to you in a pot with a cooker under it, and then you get whatever meets and veggies and spices and noodles you want at the bar and dump 'em all in and watch it cook up. Pretty cool!

Then we went to the Japanese Garden, which is the most authentic outside of Japan. It was absolutely beautiful, and we took a whole bunch of photos, (which I guess I'll put on flickr when we get home).

Then we went to some shops, including a couple of cool yarn shops. I found some great stuff in Lint... I got a bunch of wool yarn... some to make a felted bag for me (since my first attempt turned out great), some to make Angela a felted bag with, and some that was on sale that I just had to get cuz it's awesome (usually $17 a skein, marked half off, so I got all 3), and I'll figure out what to make later. Let's just say I spent way too many $$ at Lint. But Chris told me I could get it as my anniversary present, so hooray (he got some used CDs at some indy record stores).

Oh, and I forgot to mention that Powell's Books is pretty darn awesome and huge.

We dunno what else we'll do with our next couple of days. We have two days where we only have film festival events in the evening, and then Sat/Sun will be all day, all night film festival stuff. So we have two daytimes to fill with random fun. I guess we've got to figure out what else we want to do. We do know that we want to go to Imago Dei Community Church on Sunday morning. I listen to their podcasts every week, and I really like the pastor. It's a pretty huge church, but I think it is worth checking out.

So that's what we know so far. And now I'm gonna go rest before we head out for some dinner.

not yet

sorry Limani, I haven't gotten around to posting photos of my favorite city yet. but it's pretty awesome. And today - NO RAIN! Off we go!

St. Patrick's Day in Savannah

Saturday was, of course, St. Patrick's Day. And Savannah has a pretty huge parade in the morning, then an even larger drunken party at night. We went to the former. The weather was nice, and the parade was hard to navigate through, but we walked through pretty much the whole parade route. Chris took lots of photos, so I put a few up on my flickr page. Check 'em out.

More Pi

First of all, I am saddened that Google doesn't have a cheesy logo modification for Pi Day (you know, like they do for New Year's and Chinese New Year and stuff)... But Dinosaur Comics made up for it by talking about Pi Day today... and finally, I'm quite pleased to say that I've converted Angela to the greatness of the day. Speaking of Angela, she's one of my favorite people ever, so you should read her new blog. It will undoubtably be fun for all!

Pi Day

Man, I wish I had this shirt for Pi Day. Not that I'm allowed to wear t-shirts when I'm teaching, but, maybe I'd be able to get away with it for a special occassion. Not that it matters since I don't have this shirt.

And speaking of Pi Day, thinkgeek.com tells me that 3.14 is also Albert Einsteins birthday. How cool is that?

Ribbit?

I really think these new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles look more like frogs that like turtles. And why is the movie called "TMNT" instead of the full name anyways? Is this like the rumor that Kentucky Fried Chicken are so genetically modified that they can no longer be classified as chicken, so they changed the name to KFC? Perhaps these turtles have been so mutated by CG that they can no longer be called "turtles" and must just be referred to as TMNT only.

my favorite month of the year? perhaps!

I think this may be my favorite month of every year. March is a great month anyways... in the south it's when everything is blooming and green and the temperature is nice ... and on top of that, THIS week is just filled with random fake holidays - some of my favorite fake holidays at that! Let us start with Wednesday, 3.14, which is Pi Day... the day you eat pie and act like a dork by wishing people a happy Pi Day and no one knows what you're talking about. This is immediately followed by 3.15, the day Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC (you know, "Beware the Ides of March!") ... finally, we have 3.17, Saint Patrick's Day, the day you're suppose to wear green and talk about the "Luck o' the Irish" and eat shamrock cookies. This is especially a fun day in Savannah, because they have a huge St. Patrick's Day parade, everything closes down, and everyone hangs out outside and drinks too much and wears silly green attire. The fountains have all be "greened" with food coloring, there will be much bagpipes and celtic music everywhere... I love Irish stuff, I don't know why. But for some reason I've always loved St. Patricks Day. It's just so random. This year it falls on a Saturday, so there will be more hooplah than usual, because people will come in from all over for the celebration. I'm glad I already live downtown and don't have to fight traffic to go to anything. Chris and I will probably just walk around and check things out. Some people will camp out in the squares to get prime spots for the parade.

And this, dear friends, is why I love mid-march. The End.

Epilogue: did I mention I love the end of March because it's Chris and My anniversary? This year we'll be in PORTLAND, OREGON for our anniversary, which is really stellar. Last year we went to NYC. Much enjoyment, indeed!

organic crochet

I ordered a couple small skeins of organic cotton yarn from etsy.com (which I started browsing after .tif said about a million times "have you checked out etsy? really, you need to check out etsy" so i did) ... I got the yarn in the mail today, and tonight I have myself some new hand warmers! I'm especially excited about these since my skin is so sensitive to everything; these shouldn't irritate my skin at all. huzzah!

the only thing that makes me sad is that the skeins were pretty small (they were only $3 each, after all) so I'm not sure if I have enough left to make anything else. There *might* be enough left for a hat, but I probably won't know until I'm almost done with it. The great thing about this yarn is that it's easy to take apart, so if i get to the end of the yarn and realize it's not enough, I can just take it apart and come up with something else to do with it, only time will be lost.

website issues

this website was down for a couple days... some problem with our hosting company... which if you've noticed, is always having problems lately, and doing a very poor job of communicating this to their customers. I'm looking to switch, and I'm so certain that when i do, everything will be better. But that will take time, so... let's just hope they don't screw things up terribly in the meantime to where i don't get important emails or something.

Spring Forward ... again

So although I'm sure no one learns they have to spring forward from ME, I've done this a few times now so I think it's my duty to remind everyone. Daylight Savings Time is this weekend... and apparently it's early, not that I ever know when it is, but people are reminding each other left and right this year because it's early. That also means computers might be confused, so make sure you've run your computer updates so they can reflect the new time.

Awesome timekiller

This is a pretty fun website... look at user drawings of scenes from movies, and guess the movie. But make sure you follow the directions from the little [?] icons or you probably won't do it right. The Burgg

bands and babies

This wound up to be a pretty crazy weekend. Chris and I went down to Jax to see mewithoutYou... otherwise known as the only band I'll go to because I am getting so sick of shows... then we went further down to Gainesville to stay with the Geary's so I could watch their kids while they went to see mewithoutYou the next night. Lucky for inexperienced me, the kids were in bed before Luisa and Adam left for the show, and I just had to sit around in the house. But that was just the beginning of our weekend, because that night, after the show and after everyone was home and in bed, Adam knocked on the door (3:30 am?) and told us that he was taking Luisa to the hospital... she'd been having contractions all night, but they weren't sure if she was going into labor or not, and finally decided they'd better go in at least and find out (she was, and they got her ready for her third C-section). Luckily, we were there to stay with the kids. The next morning Adam came back to get some sleep, and I got up to get the kids up and dressed and fed, and then when I started to crash after a couple hours (I had a cold, after all, and only had 4 hours sleep tops myself) I woke Chris up and made him trade off with me so I could get a little more rest.

Then later on in the afternoon we all made the trek down to the hospital to see baby Ayden*. He's a tiny cutie. Cyris was pretty excited about his new baby brother, and Izabel was about as excited as an 18 month old can get. Adam talked us into staying one more night, because Luisa and Ayden were staying in the hospital until Tuesday morning, so we left this morning. Anyways, we thought it was cool that God planned it all out for us to be at the house when this all happened, and we got to be the first ones to see the new baby. (And probably the first one to put photos up... I hope Luisa doesn't get mad at me!)

And for all you silly people who are wondering, no, it didn't make me want my own kids. At all. If anything, the whole experience made me feel completely inadequate to take care of kids all the time... I just don't have the energy for it.

*I double-checked on how they spell the names yesterday, so I swear I'm not mispelling them)

crochet mania!

I figured out how to crochet hats recently, so I've been a little insane about crocheting in my free time (in cars, watching TV, when my hands are tired of being on the computer and need to do something different)... I have made 5 hats and 2 pairs of fingerless gloves in the past... oh... 3 weeks. The funny thing is that it's no longer cold enough to need to wear a hat. But now whenever it gets cold again, I have a white hat, a black hat, a dark blue hat, a light blue hat, and a tan & maroon hat. I also have fingerless gloves to go with the dark blue and the tan & maroon. Fingerless gloves are my newest obsession. I will probably actually wear those more than I'll wear hats. (Hats look pretty silly on me, so it's actually been my goal to try and figure out hats that don't look so silly when I need to keep my head and ears warm). Anyways, I took some photos to show some friends, so I figured I'd link to them here as well. But I don't have pictures of the black hat or the white hat... I actually can't find them right now... but they exist, I swear.

Hooray for crochet!

Website / Email problems

As of last night, our web host is having some major issues and we've been unable to get in touch with him, so right now pezheadsthemovie.com website and email is down, as is idreaminblue.com website and email. This is more than a little stressful as I'm waiting for important emails from film festivals, schools, etc. In the meantime, you can find me and chris and pezheads via MySpace... myspace.com/pezmovie, myspace.com/kskeene, and myspace.com/iamtheskeener.

new ride

Well, as you may know from reading Chris's blog, our old Saturn wagon was totalled a couple weeks ago. Everybody was fine, but the car, alas, was sent to Auto Heaven. We were given a small amount of cash with which to get another car, and had a very short window with which to procure said new ride. It was a stressful time car shopping, especially given our budget (which we supplemented with some savings, but still, it wasn't much) ... since we aren't sure where we'll be a year from now, we didn't want to be making payments on something, so we were determined to buy something we could afford outright. Anyways, long story short, our most awesome friend Adam spent a lot of time helping us look for cars, then even went out of his way to meet up with us in Jax last monday to do some serious car shopping. After looking at quite a few lemons, we finally found her... she wasn't what we had in mind, but I think she's just right now that we've had her for a week, so we're pretty happy with our purchase. It's a '99 Acura Integra, dark green, 2-door with leather seats. Very clean, very well maintained, and she drives well, too. Once we got the seats all adjusted it's pretty comfy, and we did a couple little upgrades... added keyless entry and a security system yesterday so we feel safer having it parked out in the ghetto, and since I had a tire stolen once on the old car, when I saw that this car had wheel locks sitting in the trunk just waiting to be used to replace some existing lugnuts, we were quick to swap those out. I just read that this exact vehicle was the most stolen car for 2005, and Savannah's pretty big on the car-jacking so I guess it's probably money well spent.

At first I thought I wouldn't be too thrilled with a sporty car... I mean, this one even has tinted windows, a moon roof, and a spoiler... but now that I've gotten used to driving it, I love it. Not to mention I'm thrilled with the little features of the keyless entry... like the doors automatically lock when you start the car, and unlock when you turn it off, and the cute little "beep" noise it makes when I lock it... very much fun. Not to mention this is the first car I've ever owned that wasn't a tan station wagon with a broken indicator light and a broken lighter port (I've had two different vehicles, different makes, that fit those exact descriptions). It feels like a new era for the Skeenes.

I keep meaning to snap a photo of our new ride, but I keep forgetting, so uh... don't hold your breath.

Zombies

In case you were wondering, this arguement does NOT make me lose my irrational fear of zombies.

::drooling::

It's everything I've ever wanted, and more...

Apple has announced it's iPhone, available in June of this year. But it's not just a phone... it's like a video iPod meshed with a PDA, meshed with a Mac... cuz it uses Mac OS X... and the whole thing is a touch-screen that's supposed to use super-great technology that doesn't require a stylus. OOOoohhh, aaaaahhh....

But the pricetag on all that is pretty steep... they're talking $499 for a 4GB, and $599 for an 8 GB one. And it's only with Cingular. So my wishlist for mid-year is to have enough expendable cash to afford a $600 phone slash Personal Life Assistant AND be able to afford to switch to Cingular... it costs a lot to drop my current cell provider, not to mention I think we currently have the cheapest plan on earth, and it would be at least another $20 or $30 a month for us to switch, PLUS if I got a fancy phone CHRIS would think HE needed a fancy phone, so I'm basically lusting after something that would cost us about $1500 in the long run. The big question is, even if we had $1500 to throw around (if only) are two Personal Life Assistants really worth it?

But i must say, this is definitely topping the techno-lust charts. Especially since I've really been wanting a great PDA/phone lately, knowing full well I'm not gonna get one. It was a lot easier to want one when all the available phones weren't very great.::sigh::

My rambling is over, you may now return to your regularly scheduled life.

2006 : Reflections

While the hubby doesn't really understand my New Year's nostalgia, (he doesn't really get into celebrating New Year's Eve), I can't help but feel the urge to look back on my year and think about all that's happened in 2006. Since tonight is going to be a quiet one (I'm not feeling too great and Chris has to be at work tomorrow morning, so no celebrating for us), I figure now is a good time to do all that reflecting. For brevity's sake, I'll do it in the form of some lists.

The Big Stuff

→ I lost my grandfather (dad's dad) in March. Missed the funeral because the death was sudden and I was in New York City already.

→ I lost my other grandfather (mom's dad) in July. We knew it was going to happen, so I was able to get up to Indiana in time to say goodbye and be there for the funeral.

→ I was able to reconnect with my cousins in Indiana while I was there, which was a real blessing.

→ In November I gained a sister-in-law when my brother got hitched.

Number of weddings attended: 4 (Jean Clark's, Tiffany Crenshaw's, Nahum & Melissa's, and my brother's)

Number of funerals attended: 1

I went to Art Museums or Galleries in:

→ New York City (too many to count in too few days)

→ Philadelphia (Philadephia Museum and a couple galleries)

→ Washington, DC (Hirshorn and National Gallery, mainly)

→ Atlanta (The High Museum, twice)

→ Savannah (the new Telfair, 3 or 4 times)

→ Gainesville (The Harn)

I went to a concert in:

→ New York City (Camera Obscura)

→ Atlanta (Sufjan Stevens)

→ Jacksonville (mewithoutYou, Anathallo)

→ Gainesville (Less Than Jake)

Places I visited WITHOUT going to galleries or concerts:

→ Columbia, SC

→ Indiana

→ West Virginia

→ Lakeland, FL

→ Fort Myers, FL

I went to one film festival (Savannah Film Fest), and took too many road trips to count between movie-related trips, funerals, weddings, concerts, and our vacation in March. I don't even want to THINK about how many miles we put on the car.

2007 : Projections

As for what 2007 has in store, only God knows where we will be at the end of next year and what all will have taken place. So far we know to plan on one wedding in February, and one film festival in February. We are hoping for more film festivals to add to the list (only time will tell). As for travels, again only time will tell, but I'm hoping that 2007 will grant us the opportunity to at least visit the west coast, perhaps making it to Seattle, Portland, and/or San Franscisco. Guess I'll have to start living the year to find out!

Happy 2007 everyone!

Package In The Mail

Today we got a package in the mail from Chris's dad in Texas. If anyone knows anything about my husband Chris, then you know he's a collector. If anyone has ever been in our house, then you know our house is filled with stuff. But you haven't seen anything until you've seen his dad's house in Texas... this is where he gets his collecting bug. To illustrate, I give you Exhibit A, the Box We Got in the Mail Today.

Some of the things in this box include:

• dead Japanese Beatles (2)


• Dead locusts (3 or so)


• a little toy girl without a head


• patch for Handyman Club of America: Life Member


• pencils


• Envelope full of feathers


• boxes of feathers


• a coupon for One Hug


• little labels in french


• Wasp Nests (3)


• two bottle caps for Orange Crush


• one little yellow bullet?


• dried sunflower heads (the note says I used a paint Brush To Remove The Fuzzy stuff on The sunFlower. It's still good Bird Food. Recycle.


• antlers


• part of a skull from an animal with big flat teeth


• part of a turtle skeleton (?) with a "Barrel Full of Monkeys" toy in it (the note said: Behold "Creature Man" alias "Too Face" Looks like he ate a monkey. poor monkey.)


• Thorns from a Texas Thorn Tree


• One of those seeds covered with white stuff that floats around in the summer(very carefully packaged


• One tiny bird egg


• Some pieces of wheat


• Shell from a bullet


• a Clam shell (I think)

Everything was packaged with much care and deliberately delivered... Chris was thrilled, and I documented everything... the notes are my favorite, so I made sure to take pictures of the notes. All very much fun, quite a change to my day. Last time he sent us stuff, it included a few bird eggs and a couple of birds nests that he attached to very small photo frames... very precious but all stuff we have to be very careful with... I'm not really sure where all this stuff is going to go; we don't have a lot of space (as anyone who has come to see us knows very well). Anyways, Chris wants to do some photographs with some of this stuff, but I dunno when he'll get around to that.

Oh, Internet, we love you.

Well I was feeling a bit stressed today (busy day) until I saw this movie, which has brightened my mood considerably. I don't know why a silly news broadcast from the 90s would make me so happy, but, well, it did. You should watch it. I think it's worth the 5 minutes of your life.

crazy life

Well, if you haven't been reading Chris's updates on our week at the Savannah Film Festival, then you should do that now, because I'm not going to bother recapping what he's already done a good job of sharing. I'm to exhausted from my insane (but exciting) week. I will say that we had a great week, we met a lot of awesome people and got some really great feedback on out film, and people seemed to really love it, which has made us very excited and eager to try and get this shown to more people. As of this writing, Chris still has to post the final update from Day 6 with more news of our week, which he will do as soon as he has time.

Also my brother got married this Saturday, so that's made for a fun and busy weekend. The wedding was beautiful and there was a lot of family down for it, and we all had a great time. My only regret is that by the time we got here, we were so exhausted from our film festival week that we were hardly coherent to visit with family and friends.

That's it for now. I need to get some sleeps.

Fall Back!

Well, I decided it was my civic duty last spring to post a Spring Forward reminder, so I figured I should do the same for all you peeps relying on me to remind you when it's time to Fall Back. And Saturday night it is! We get 2am TWICE on Saturday night, and an extra hour of glorious sleeps.

I, for one, will be most greatful for the extra hour of glorious sleeps, because this weekend is the beginning of the busiest 10 days of my year (at least), and the beginning of the Savannah Film Festival, which Chris and I will going to all week. If you haven't been following along and you don't know why we're going to the film festival and why it matters, it's because we've made a movie and it will be playing at the film festival, which means we get fancy all-access passes and can go to all the shows and panel discussions. Rockin fun times. Then my only brother is gettin' hitched during the closing weekend of the festival, so we'll be missing out on the last two days of the festival because we're going down to south Florida for the wedding. It'll be exciting! I'm looking forward to seeing all my family that's making the trek down for the wedding.

Okay, too many things to do, I've done my update and warned you of the time change, so I'm off to be productive.

the sad truth

I think I worked for a place just like this Dilbert comic, especially the part where I was promised for over a year that they were ordering new computers for us (and it was still just in the promise stage when I left the company). It's so funny it makes you cry, but those aren't happy tears.

changes - all fixed

had to make some hosting changes with this site, so there's been a little downtime... but I think we're all set and back to normal now. lemme know if there's any trouble with the site, so I can fix it.

An Amazing Trip

Chris and I took a few days off from normal life recently and went to see a couple of shows and visit friends in Gainesville, FL and Atlanta, GA. The Lord really blessed our time. We caught up with a BUNCH of old friends, some of whom we'd completely lost touch with, and others that we just don't see often enough. We had some amazing time of fellowship with so many old friends, and the Lord used many of them as an encouragement to us.

When we first talked about going down to Gainesville to see Less Than Jake and visit some friends, it was going to be about 2 or 3 days out of town, and I could justify that in my mind as something that we could do. But then when we talked about going from Gainesville up to Atlanta to see Sufjan Stevens as well, and visit friends there, I was torn between really wanting to do this (it was the week I had off from teaching, after all), and feeling guilty about the idea of playing when I have so many things to do, and when money has been tight lately. But in truth, there are always a million things to do, and money always feels a little tight. And there are times when we need to play. We need to fellowship. And the Lord really confirmed that in our trip. We really needed this, and there was nothing to "feel guilty" about.

Anyways, the short recap of what we did... we played with the Geary's in Gainesville, and even went to Paynes Prairie to see some alligatorss (big ones- yippee!). 3 year old Cyris made us laugh a lot, and Baby Izzy is learning to walk. We stopped by the Christian Study Center and caught up with Dr. Horner and Nora Wickam. Later that day we got a call from our friend Amy who was in town from Orlando, and found out from Nora that we were in town. So we go together with her and Heather for dinner. That night we went to see Less Than Jake, had a good time, and got some sleep.

The next day we went up to Atlanta. Got there in time to spend a couple hours at the High Museum before they closed for the day... they had a bunch of photography that Chris wanted to see. Found a hotel, took a nap, then got together with my old art-school friend Beth for dinner. She took us to a most amazing restuarant called R. Thomas, with yummy organic food, and took us to her apartment to see her paintings. We had a great time with her, then went to a most awesome teahouse (11:11 Teahouse) to chill and check some email in their herb garden. I got some great tea, and we were harassed by random cats (real fuzzy cats, not hip slang for people). While we were there, our friend Stefan called... he, too, was in Atlanta! (he lives in Charlotte) HE was hanging out at a restaurant waiting for Brooke's shift to end. He gave us directions to here (including directions like "when you get to the end of this road, men in red coats will take your car away"). We got lost a couple times, but eventually made our way. We had drinks with Stefan and Brooke there until they kicked us out, then Brooke took us to another place where we hung out until THEY kicked us out. Then we went home to sleep.

The next day we met up with Brooke and Stefan again, and we ran around Atlanta all day, went to the Flying Biscuit for lunch, wandered into shops, learned that hanging a bag of water with a penny in it in your doorway wards off flies, and had an encounter with The Granite Curbs of Atlanta, which, we learned, pop tires if you get too close. That evening we got together for dinner with a bunch of friends who were going to the Sufjan concert, including 3 more Savannah people, 2 people who drove in from Gainesville, and a friend from Chattanooga. It was fun to see this concert that brought all of us together from all over the place.

I could also go on and on about how amazing the concert was, and how great Sufjan's music is, and how honest and joyous and beautiful it is, but I'll stop now.

Anyways, now we're back to life and getting work done and it turns out although I have a lot to do, it's manageable. And being out of town for a few days didn't mess anything up. And... it was awesome. The End.

Insomnia

Those of you who know me know that I do my best design work at night. For whatever reason I can be much more productive after 8pm than I can during daylight hours... and although I may spend a whole day trying to get design-type things accomplished, I seem to just be flailing about until evening. It's just the way my body works, and I've always been like this... even in high school I would half-doze through the school day, come home and take a nap (my mom would usually yell at me to wake up because she didn't understand why I was asleep in the middle of the day), eat dinner with the family, then be wide awake and ready to socialize and study until 2 or 3 in the morning, when I'd catch a couple hours of sleep before starting all over again.

Well, I lost out on a lot of productivity time over the weekend with that wretched food poisoning (I think we did settle on it being food poisoning, fever and all, because apparently that comes along with a good dose of bad food), and today I really needed to make up for it. I spent most of the day doing random work that needed to be done, took a nap from 6-7, had some dinner, and have since been staring at this computer screen, zipping away on about a thousand different tasks. I've marked a LOT off my "To Do" list tonight. The problem is, at 3:30 when I was at a good stopping place and wanted to get some sleep, I couldn't. I'm still wide awake, thinking of all the other little things that I need to do.

So here I am, almost 5am, with more little things checked off my list, trying to figure out what else I can get done. I know that tomorrow is going to be pretty miserable now that my sleep schedule is entirely out of whack, but there's not a whole lot I can do about that. So. At least I'm (finally) being productive. Considering the fact that my July was an exhausting behemoth from which I still feel like I'm trying to recover, I feel like this has been the first time I've had some control over my life in about 2 months. I must say I'm a little relieved.

yuck

Chris and I got food poisoning* from our dinner last night and have been basically out of commission all day. Throwing up takes a lot out of a person, and it's worse because we're both sick so we can't really help each other. We had to ask a friend to bring us soup, crackers, and gatorade (which she did immediately, bless her heart)... anyways, not fun. We've been in an out of sleep all day and our whole bodies hurt and we are pretty pathetic. I hope I can get a good night's sleep tonight so that hopefully tomorrow we're feeling better for church, etc.

I know, not the most exciting post, but it's what my day has been, nonetheless.

*(Aug 27 Update) Turns out it may have been a virus and not food poisoning, because we've been sick a couple days now with fevers and whatnot. Definitely not fun.

Why Organic?

God's really put the idea of fair trade it on my heart a lot recently... I know I've blogged about it a couple times in the past, but right now I'm praying about what more I can do locally to spread awareness, specifically within our church and/or local churches in general, to let people know how their dollars can make a real difference in human lives. If you would pray for me in that respect, it would mean a lot.

So today I was looking at the website for a Fair Trade organization that my pastor told me about (he just bought coffee from them for the church the other day) and I ran into something that just amazed me.

This farmer was talking about why he only grows organic coffee.

"There are two main reasons that I now run a completely organic farm. The first has to do with my Dad. I grew up on a coffee farm. My father was a farm hand on a large farm and he used to spray the herbicides. The owners made him wear the tank on his back when it was filled with harmful chemicals. One day they spilled the chemical liquid all over my father’s back. Fifteen days later his skin completely peeled off and he became so sick he could never go back to work again. He has recovered some, but at the age of 65 he still can’t walk properly as a result of the accident.

Fourteen years ago when my son Luis Gonzalo was one year old, I sprayed herbicide on some of my crops. My young son had a cut on the bottom of his foot and he walked barefoot onto the place where I had just sprayed. He started to turn purple. We rushed him to the hospital and he went into a coma for three months. He was sick for seven years and is still somewhat affected by the incident. After that event, I was convinced that I would only grow crops organically."

I've started to be able to pinpoint that a lot of my health problems are related to pesticides, growth hormones, and preservatives in a lot of the food I eat. When I started cutting those things out of my diet by only buying organic and preservative-free foods, I felt a lot better. So I know that it makes a difference. But these stories just floored me. How can farmers even think about putting these things on our food? Why does the FDA approve of this stuff that can hurt us? (but really, don't get me started on the FDA and whether or not they are concerned about our health) ... I really just don't understand. Really, when it comes down to it, you're asking people "If I give you money, will you feed poison to all these people?" and a lot of people say Yes. They say "If I don't have to see them or think about the effects, and if it means I have a more comfortable life, the sure." And that's where we get the majority of our wealthy. And that just breaks my heart to think about.

I'll probably ramble more about this kind of topic as I learn more about it.

Update

Oye. I feel more than a little exhausted. This past weekend Chris, Paul, and I drove up to West Virginia to go to Tiffany's wedding. We had a good time... the wedding was beautiful. Tiffany did a spectacular job of planning a wedding on a shoestring budget, and had everything under control. She even personally stamped about a million napkins so they'd have personalized napkins. They were super-cool. And I finally got to meet her friends Spike and Samantha, both of whom I'd heard about here and there for the past 8 years, but neither of whom I'd ever met, since one lives in Pennsylvania and the other in Portland. So that was cool. But still... driving 20 hours round-trip within a 40 hour timespan is a little tiring. Just a little.

Now I'm back to normal life, and working on a bunch of freelance projects along with my jobs, and of course, maintaining stuff for the movie. There's still alot we have to do with that this month. I predict very little sleep for this girl in the month of August... hopefully September will fare a little better. And if not September, maybe October will prove restful. I know I'm looking forward to NOT going out of town for the whole month of August.

Anyways, if you're one of the large number of people who haven't really heard from me in a coon's age* then I must apologize and give you the following explanation - I'm exhausted, and I still don't have daytime cellphone minutes until August 3rd. And I haven't made nighttime phonecalls because... well... I'm exhausted. Plus my past two weeks have been spent either out of town or with company before going out of town or recovering from being out of town. Do we see a pattern here?

* (can you tell I've been to see my grandma lately? I mean really... "a coon's age?" who says that?)

recovering

So it's been a long time since I posted anything... because life has been a little too hectic to remember to take the time to post anything. So I figured I'd give a brief (as brief as I can) update on what's going on.

My grandfather has been pretty sick, and so last weekend my dad and I traveled up to Indiana farmland to say our goodbyes to him. My mom had already flown up a few days before, and my brother also flew up briefly to see him. In the one week I was there, we said our last words to my Pappy, spent the first 2 days watching my grandfather's health fail him until he finally passed on (died in the same home he was born in, 75 years earlier), spent another 3 days dealing with all that comes with that, then 2 days for the calling and the funeral, and I left the next evening to get back home. It was a pretty intense week... since I live so far away I don't get to see my family up there very often, and there's a LOT of family up there... many of whom I don't know or hardly know. With so many friends and family coming to visit with my grandfather's death, though, we spent a lot of time visiting and getting reacquainted with people... for the first few days there was almost ALWAYS company over from the time I woke up until just a couple hours before going to bed.

It was a really important week. I was really greatful to be able to see my Pappy one last time, and to be there for all that followed. He was a strong believer and in his last week did not seem to have any fear of what was to come... he knew that it was time for him to go to heaven, and he had no doubt that's where he was going. Just hours before he died we believe he started seeing Jesus sitting with him, because he kept pointing and my mom and my aunt at one point heard him say "Jesus" as he pointed. He also gave a thumb's up as he gave his very last breath.

I guess because I knew he was weary of this world, and knew he was going Home, I didn't have such a hard time with his death as I would have if we weren't prepared for it. So I was able to enjoy and treasure the other important thing that happened on this trip - getting reacquainted with my family there. Great Aunts and Uncles, grandma, aunts and uncles, cousins, second-cousins and our "honorary-cousin." We played cards and laughed and joked and ate lots of meals together. I shared music with my 17-year-old cousin and talked to the boys about what to think about for college in the next couple years. We played with kittens and laughed at dogs and watered plants and planted a tree and pulled corn stalks where they didn't belong and plotted how to catch a rouge chipmunk and ate cookies as fast as my mom could bake them.

While all this was going on, Chris was scrambling back at home to get everything ready for the premiere of our movie in Cleveland, and Wednesday night he and our good friend Angela drove up to Cleveland for the World's Largest PEZ Convention. They spent the weekend selling shirts and other merch and pre-selling DVDs, screening the movie, and hanging out with PEZheads. They'd call me with questions when necessary, and kept me updated. Then Saturday evening they made their way 4 hours south-east to where I was at my grandmother's house, had dinner and hung out for a couple of hours, and then the three of us drove all night and into the next day to get home.

One day later, the apartment is trashed and I'm doing my best to get things cleaned up and organized and back to normal, I go back to Vidalia tomorrow for work, but I still feel exausted from the long drive and just the jolt of everything that's been going on... I could have slept all day, but that wasn't an option. Just trying to get back in the groove of things.

This next weekend is Tiffany's wedding in West Virginia... that will be another 9 hours up and 9 hours back in 2 days time. This time with new company... my old friends Amy and Paul are both carpooling with me, so that will be fun. I just hope I'm well rested for another weekend out of town.

bread update

Right. So my sprouted bread project? Big disaster. We're talking cooked top, but with uncooked liquid bubbling out of holes in the top, apple-crisp style disaster. Pretty nasty. Big waste of time. I don't think I'm cut out for intense baking. I'll stick to buying Ezekiel bread at the store.

On an exciting note, since I've started my organic food diet/detox, I haven't felt as hungry, and have a lot more energy, and feel like a better person in general. Very exciting. And I've even lost a little weight in the past week... a couple pairs of pants that haven't fit in a year or so can be zipped up, and I'm hopeful that if I give it another week, I'll be able to actually wear them comfortably. Good stuff.

busy bee

Well, I have a couple of weeks off of teaching, just working for GTA for the next couple of weeks. It's nice to have a couple weeks where I don't have to go out of town, either for work or for anything else (now that Wedding Season is taking a pause). Don't get me wrong, I had a blast going down to Gainesville for weddings and getting to see friends, but I am happy to have some time at home without rushing off. I get to recoup a little before our two consecutive weekends in Cleveland this July.

I have been keeping busy at home, though. With the movie premiere coming up, we've been doing some filming to fill in some gaps, and I've been working on some animation segments, as well as some DVD menu designs. It's going pretty well, and I'm having fun doing it, but it means I've been staring at the computer screen way too much.

I've also been reading about food issues, since my food allergies have been getting really bad, and am trying to get myself on a low-chemical diet... ya know, eating food not filled with hormones and pesticides and preservatives. For one thing, I'm allergic to at least one preservative, and for another, the growth hormones in the meat we eat doesn't stop acting like a growth hormone when it transfers from the cow's body to ours. So for the next two weeks, along with trying to eat mostly organic, I have to abstain from alcohol and caffeine... I figured a time when I'll be home for a couple weeks is the best time to go through that. Excitement.

So as an experiment, I'm trying to make my own sprouted bread. I have a feeling I'm in for disaster, but I got a recipe and I'm sprouting a bunch of seeds and beans, and then I have to grind them up into flour and make bread outta them in a couple days. I'll let you know how that goes.

Lazy

Well, last Thursday was the end of Chris's spring quarter at SCAD. A couple weeks from now he begins his final quarter, and by September he'll be done with SCAD. This past quarter was especially wearing on him, so we took this liberty this past weekend of being completely lazy bums, watching 22 saved episodes of the TV show 24 in just 3 days. We can never handle watching this particular show one week at a time, so we've been saving them up all season to have a marathon, and this weekend was the time. Now, before you go crazy thinking that we watched 22 hours of TV, I do want to remind you that without commercials and the "Previously on" that begins each episode, they're actually only 40 minutes long, so we only watched about 15 hours of TV over 3 days... not really that unreasonable, considering it was our lazy rest-up weekend. And boy, did we need it.

Now I'm back to work and everything is back to normal for me, and Chris gets to spend the next couple of weeks cleaning, organizing, and doing the millions of things he's been putting off since he's been too busy with school. I love this time because the apartment actually starts looking neater (I'm not allowed to touch his piles of stuff because I won't know where they go, so I have to be patient until these times when he's ready to clean them up).

So life has been pretty uneventful, although busy with work and other normal life stuff. Nothing much else to tell.

church

Many of you may know that for the two years we've lived in Savannah, we've had a really hard time finding a church home. There are a few placed we've tried to settle into, but to no avail... we never really felt at home anywhere, and that meant we skipped church more often than we went - it was just too hard to drag ourselves out of bed to go someplace where we didn't fit, and didn't even seem like we were really worshipping. Recently we decided to start looking again, and started with an internet search for different churches in the area, broadening our scope past reformed/PCA and more towards non-denominational. The first church we visited with our new gusto was an awkward disaster - no one spoke to us even though we looked totally lost and couldn't find the worship room, and the pastor spoke to us via a videotape. Alas.

The second church we checked out was the Vineyard Church in Savannah. I had gone to a Vineyard for a couple years in Gainesville before Chris and I started dating, so I kind of knew what to expect, but also knew that Vineyards can vary from one another enough that it wasn't necessarily the same as my old church. Long story short, we've gone back every week, and we've really enjoyed it. The pastor is really engaging AND actually teaches AND isn't afraid to tackle the touchy subjects. It's a young church overall, so we've met a lot of younger married couples as well (hooray for married couples!)

We were invited to a homegroup the second week we were there, and have had the opportunity to get to know the pastor a bit more through that, too. After knowing us for all of three weeks he came by our house to lend Chris a book yesterday, and knowing that our car was in the shop (just making sure the brakes they fixed were really fixed, because we had been hearing weird noises) he asked if we wanted to borrow one of theirs for a couple days. Thankfully we didn't need to take him up on it, but I was more than a little surprised at the offer.

So that's our exciting news. Hooray for a church home! And it couldn't have happened at a better time - right after my schedule changed so that we can't go to RUF on Wednesday nights anymore. For every season....

Showers

This weekend is Bridal Shower Weekend. Tomorrow night I'm helping to throw a shower for Tiffany in South Carolina, and Saturday night I'm helping throw a shower for my friend Greta Lyn in Savannah. So this should be a fun, if not slightly hectic, weekend. I'm looking forward to it. I am a bit worried about the shower in SC though, because the girls helping out that live there are being very uncommunicative (I asked on Monday what time they wanted me to get there, and they still haven't told me a time. They even scheduled the shower for earlier than Tiffany's fiance can be there, so the guests of honor will be late to their own shower, all because these girls don't actually talk to anyone). So pray that I will be patient and make the best of the situation and not let any of this mess up Tiffany's party in any way... I really just want her to have fun.

Now the Savannah shower, no worries. Should be smooth sailing.

TV execs are starting to get it

A while back I rambled about how TV execs aren't taking advantage of the internet as another means to get their shows (and advertisements) seen, and instead are prosecuting people who pirate TV shows, treating them as a threat. Well, it seems like they're finally starting to get it - making TV shows available for download the day after they air (with commercials) or letting you purchase them on iTunes (without commercials). Gold star!

Goose Chase

This past weekend we were in Atlanta doing some PEZ filming, and stayed the night with Chris's brother, Sam. We had a great time, and since Sam lives on a farm, had some interesting "animal encounters" that definitely aren't the norm for two downtown Savannah residents. So I took a lot of pictures of the area where he lives. Along with just enjoying some peacocks, we held baby kittens (they haven't openned their eyes yet), some baby ducks, and I was chased by a (very viscious) goose. Here are some photos of our trip:

Sam lives is the little cottage in front of that horse stable.

The peacocks were right outside Sam's house and woke me up in the morning. The male was showing off for all the females and wasn't at all concerned that I was standing right next to him

These are the ducks we got to play with

This is the only photo I managed to take while I was actually being chased by the evil goose

This is the photo I tried to take when the evil goose was flapping his wings and yelling at me and trying to bite me and I was running away.

This is Sam with the magical power to chase the goose away with some secret goose-chasing-power that I certainly cannot harness. Sam had to keep him away so I could leave.

Chris on the farm

Aside from being attacked by an evil goose, we had a good time. It's always fun to hang out with Sam. And I love animals when they're not attacking me, so that was cool.

Rodents, rodents, everywhere!

We've got something (mice, rats, possums?) living under our tub and now in one of the walls of our apartment. We've put rat poison under the house, but I dunno how much good it will do. But they wake me up at night gnawing on the wall by my head, and make all sorts of weird noises in the space inside the tub molding.That's annoying enough (I keep waiting for them to finish a hole in the wall and run into my bedroom), but I'm in Vidalia this week, and last night at the house I stay in I heard something running around above my head. Maybe it's just some noisy bugs... but it didn't quite sound like it. But wait! There's more! I get to work this morning and I hear something scampering above my head in my office at work! At first I thought I MUST either be imagining something, or a bug was really loud in the flourescent lights, but it moved around too much and scampered too much to be a bug. Our super-cool maintenance guy Lucky came by with a ladder and stuck his head up there but he didn't see anything... so I'm just hoping he scared my critter away. Man, Georgia and their rodents.

We didn't have these problems in Florida. Pro'lly because of all the snakes. I miss reptiles.

please explain

I've recently (this week) been obsessed with the absurd popularity of myspace. Notice I didn't say I was obsessed with myspace, but rather I am struggling to understand why it is so darned popular that it is listed as the second-most-trafficked website, and generates a ridiculous amount of revenue.

So far all I've figured out from it is that I can talk to people that I already talk to on the phone, or via email. I mean sure, there's the potential to "reconnect with old friends" but frankly, all I see that as is a means to find them, message them, then move on to emailing or calling them. So why do people hang out on myspace all day and talk about how they're addicted to it, and tell people that a myspace account is about as important to life as an email address or a phone number? Why, why why?

I am most perplexed because I used get why certain things were popular online, being a child of the interet and an early adopter of email (before people knew what email was, I was running up bills on Prodigy when they had a 30-email-a-month limit that I didn't realize existed). So I feel a little out of touch that I can't figure out why it's so darned popular.

Explain, please.

Last NYC post - yummy food

So I think this is the last thing I promised to rave about from our trip to New York... the food. I think I will just have to say that I don't think I can ever enjoy Olive Garden again after eating Italian in Little Italy. I honestly didn't know that olive oil could taste so amazing... and their pasta tasted homemade (another thing I'd never had)... it was just so fresh and amazing, I couldn't believe it. And we found a great sushi place in the East Village that had 50% off all their sushi all the time, so we got to get fancier sushi than usual and still pay less than we would have getting boring sushi back home. Yum! We had a crazy experience at a chinese restaurant in Chinatown (no one spoke english, even our table-mates, and they gave us forks because we're white). And we had most fantastic Thai food in Soho. OOh! And bagels! The only place to get bagels in Savannah are Atlanta Bread Company and Panera... and they're $1 for a plain bagel... so we were excited to be able to walk a block or so in any direction and get bagels every morning... real bagels, not Sam's Club or Atlanta Bread bagels.

Really, pretty much every meal was yummy and fun and all we had to do any time we were hungry was pick a random part of town, ride a subway if necessary, then walk a couple blocks looking at all the available options until we picked one that looked yummy and affordable. The only time this failed us is when we were in Tribeca later at night and our only option was a mexican restaurant that served hamburgers and didn't speak english and closed at 9pm... we just barely got there in time.

So we're kind of sad to be back in Savannah where there's no such thing as good bread or good bagels. But we do have cheap japanese and good pizza within walking distance of our house, to at least we have that to console us. (I actually decided that I preferred pizza-by-the-slice at Vinnie Van Go-Gos in Savannah over the Official New York Pizza at Ray's Pizza and Bagels in the East Village... that surprised me). And we can get reasonably priced Thai downtown, too. And burgers. But I will forever miss the italian and the bagels, which are pointless to look for in Savannah (unless Angela is cooking for us... she makes some killer italian food. it's in her blood).

Fear in America

So there's a website out there where someone wrote instructions for how to make your own real-life Super Mario Blocks (you know, from Super Mario Brothers) and suggestions to hang them up around town in public spaces to bring smiles to people's faces. Being a child of the 80s I think it's great... I loved Super Mario Brothers! And a lot of people have made them and hung them up around their towns, as evidenced on the website that started it all.

Recently some high school girls created their own and placed them around their town in Ohio. And... people called the cops because they were afraid of the suspicious packages they saw. And the girls "turned themselves in" explaining that it was just for fun and meant no harm. But they still may face criminal charges because "The potential is always present when dealing with a suspicious package that it could be deadly," McCoy said. "In today’s day and age, you just cannot do this kind of stuff."

I don't know if I'm outraged at the ridiculousness of this situation and these police officers who think that pressing charges on teenages who didn't do anything wrong is the right thing to do, or if I'm just sad at the state of our nation that people are scared by powder residue left by doughnuts and shiny gift-wrapped boxes.

Andrea Zittel - Critical Spaces

One art show Chris and I saw while we were in NYC was Andrea Zittel's Critical Spaces show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. I'd learned about her in art school and thought she was pretty cool, but I just really fell in love with her work when I got to see a lot of it ... then I saw a HUGE book of her stuff at an art museum in town, and had a lot of fun looking at it, so I just wanted to share and point you in the direction of her website to learn about some new art going on. My best description of her work is that she is all about conserving space and minimalism... and considering my apartment is crammed full of my husband's stuff that he can't bear to part with, I tend to gravitate more and more towards the idea of minimalist living (considering it's something I'll never experience). She started her artwork while living in a 200 sq ft apartment in Boston, which I think is an understandable start to this kind of work. :)

Anyways, she's basically all about interior design and conservation and establishing order and organization... and she totally lives out all of these things that she creates as art... and I think it's pretty awesome... and that's about it.

Spring Forward!

If you're like me, and you don't pay attention to these kinds of things, and last fall you learned that the world had set their clocks back an hour when you looked at your cell phone and it said 10am instead of 11am and you realized you could have slept in, and no one at work sends out mass emails to remind you and your church newsletter ALSO doesn't remind you about this, then you definitely need me to tell you to SPRING FORWARD tonight... that's right, there will be no 2am on April 2nd, the world will automagically shift to 3am ... and your clocks should do the same, or else you will miss church or work or Sunday Morning Shootout on AMC... or whatever you do with your Sunday... until you check a computer or a cell phone and realize the time is different.

Of course, I learn almost every daylight savings day that EVERYONE but me and Chris inherently knows when these things happen, but NO ONE thinks it's necessary to remind anyone because they think everyone else inherently knows, as well (something about everyone but me watching the news or reading the newspaper?). So since this year I thought to check and set my calendar to remind me, I thought I would remind all of you, too, just in case it slipped past your magic radar.