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.

Vacation Photo

So after going through the 500 pictures Chris took over out vacation, I realized that we're not really good at taking "vacation photos" ... not a whole lot of touristy pictures of places we go, and no pictures of the two of us anywhere... except for this one Chris took of us looking at a Robert Smithson sculpture at the MOMA. Aaaand... that's about it.

Click for the rest of the picture.

NYC - Hooray for Subways!

So one of my favorite things about New York City (other than the museums and galleries which, as you know, I burned myself out on despite my love for them all) is the public transportation. I really love to walk, and that's the whole reason we live where we do in Savannah, is that we can walk to a good number of places in Downtown. Our favorite coffee, restaurants, health food store, and Chris's classes are all in walking distances from our home. But when we need something from a big store or real groceries, or if we have jobs outside of downtown, the public transportation in this town is ridiculous at best, so we have to get in the car and drive. Especially with gas prices what they are, and the fact that our economy eats up oil like we're not fighting a war over it, I would really prefer not to have to rely on gas as much as I do. Not to mention cars just feed into our ability to lose ourselves in our own little worlds and pretend that no one else really exists and that nothing is as important as ourselves. (and that car that just cut me off isn't another human being with his own issues and things on his mind, it's this big machine that just upped my blood pressure unreasonably). So I love subways and buses (when they actually go places at reasonable times) because not only do I get some exercise walking to and from the subway, but I'm actually interacting with society. Sure, I don't really feel like talking to random people on the subway, but at least I have to acknowledge them... and it's kind of fun to watch people on subways, anyhow. Not to mention it's not wasting extra fuel.

The only thing I haven't figured out is how people buy lots of groceries if you're riding on subways. My guess is either 1) You don't get much at a time, or 2) you order it and have it delivered. Maybe there's another magical way this works, but that's all I've figured out.

So now I'm all about wanting to live somewhere with subways. And walking. Lots of subways and walking (or biking, but that's not really a possibility in Manhattan if you're not a fan of being run down by psycho drivers).

That's all I have to say about this.

Back from vacation - thoughts on Art.

Well, Chris has been doing a fantastic job of talking about our trip on his side of this website. He was a lot more diligent about taking time to do things online, whereas I barely got on the computer the whole trip... I was usually too tired once I had the opportunity, and was much more concerned with showering and sleeping.

So what I will add to Chris's accounts are a lot of extra little tidbits. Like my pedometer tells me that we walked, on average, 10 miles a day. I typically (if I'm lucky) manage to walk about 3 miles a day, and the recommended is 5 miles a day. So this was a lot more walking than we were used to... my feet and legs were killing me all the time, but we never wanted to stop because there was so much we wanted to see each day. We went to every museum we wanted to go to, plus PS1 (a division of the MOMA, which was awesome) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art that weren't on our planned list. We also went to every gallery we knew we wanted to see, plus a bunch that we just wandered into that had some awesome stuff (like a Nan Goldin exhibit, and one with some Matthew Barney prints). And we saw so much artwork that I started to get sick of artwork.

Really, I enjoyed everywhere we went. But I am more interested in modern art than I am in the older stuff... basically, I care most about anything from Dada onward than from anything before, and I have the most knowledge of art from Dada onward. And I love Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art... really, I LOVE this stuff... but I got really tired of art museums that seem to think that people stopped creating art after Pop Art. It got to the point that by the 4th or 5th museum, when I rounded a corner and saw another room full of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and Barnet Newman, I would inwardly groan. I really got tired of seeing the same stuff... I wanted something newer! Give me some Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, or George Segal! I know you own some of their stuff! So where is it? And those are three artists we never saw work from... very disappointing. We did see a few things from Joseph Beuys, Rachel Whiteread, and Chuck Close. But overall, the post-pop-art representation was scarce. Very disappointing to me.

I ended up enjoying the small galleries more than the large museums in a lot of ways, because it was newer work, even though most the time it was people I'd never heard of and would probably never hear of again.

I must say that I was very pleased with the amount of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Marcel Duchamp work that we saw, though. Their work never gets tiring to me... the Rauchenberg Combines show at The Met was amazing... and I was well pleased with the Jasper Johns room at the Philly Museum, not to mention the Duchamp room there.

Our RUF pastor has said on multiple occasions that he things beauty, and therefore art, is objective, and that Marcel Duchamp's work is not beautiful and is therefore not art. I will have to disagree with that until the day I die, because I think the work he's done is conceptually beautiful and meaningful in ways that a lot of other "beautiful" art cannot be.

Although I will say that the more I run into Monet's work, the more it grows on me.

Anyways, this has turned into a long rambling art post... I'll talk more about the trip later... next episode will most likely be raving about the food in NYC... and there's a lot to rave about!

Tshirts!

Finally! We have t-shirts to sell to you all for our PEZ movie! Go check them out and buy them!

Donald Miller Audio Chat

So this is kind of cool. Donald Miller and Derek Webb are going to do an audio chat next Tuesday night online, and answer questions that people pose to them about social issues and such. I'm a big fan of Donald Miller, and really respect his honesty and his outlook on Christianity, so I'm really excited about it (and hoping it's available to download after the live chat, because I will be in Vidalia and unable to listen to it when it happens).

Anyways, lately I've been talking to a few people about how to bring about social change in society, and so I posted a question in hopes that they will answer it on the audio chat (or at least email me back if they can't get to it during the chat). So I figured I'd post it below since it pretty much sums up what I've been thinking about lately....

It seems to me that in today's money-driven society, our only real way to "vote" on any issue is through our spending habits. Specifically considering that large corporations seem capable of buying their way out of anything, the only thing that would speak to them would be if people stopped purchasing their products.

For example, Starbucks won't stop taking advantage of their coffee farmers unless a huge percentage of their customer base stops buying their coffee there in favor of fair trade coffee at other coffee shops (or only orders fair trade coffee options at Starbucks, when available, and otherwise doesn't purchase coffee there at all). This is because what matters to Starbucks, ultimately, is their bottom line. If it's financially in their best interest to switch entirely to fair trade coffee beans, they'll do it, but only then.

What do you think about this theory, and do you think it's a viable option for socially concerned Christians to use selective boycotting to make a difference?

That's all I have to say today.

More NYC thoughts

Well, I spent a lot of this weekend figuring out what all we wanted to do while in the Big Apple, and when we could do it all, and buying tickets for things that are best pre-ordered. And it's become abundantly clear where Chris and my priorities lie when it comes to these things, because our trip is very much a Museum Tour of New England. Our trip consists of stops in 3 places: 1 day in Washington, DC, 4 days in NYC, and 1 1/2 days in Philly (and a lot of driving). Our itenerary is basically made up of the following stops:

• Washington DC: Hirshorn Museum, and the National Gallery of Art


• New York City: MoMA, the Neue Gallery, the Whitney Biennial (!!!) and the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, The Met, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and as many galleries in Chelsea as we can manage (which has about 250 galleries in about a square mile area)... specifically including the Sara Tecchia Roma Contemporary, because that one has some work from Makoto Fujimura, who is an elder in the PCA church.


• Philly: visit with the Clarks, and Chris has a list of 3 galleries he wants to go to while we're there

I mean sure, when all the galleries have closed for the night, which is about 6pm each night, we've got other places to visit as well, like the Empire State Building, Ground Zero, Central Park, the East Village, Chinatown, and as much else as we can handle before I pass out from sheer exhaustion and Chris has to carry me back to the hotel. But now that Chris has all this art history learnin' in his brain, he's just as excited to hit all these museums and galleries as I am.

This is especially exciting for me, because I tend to be really influenced by the art that I see, and I rarely have been able to actually share those experiences with anyone else. I've been able to see some amazing artwork in some amazing museums, but most of them have been by myself (or at least, once I was there, I was on my own). Museums I've experienced alone include: The Louvre and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hirshorn Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in DC, and a bunch of smaller places that I can't remember. And I went to the SFMoMA in San Francisco with my friend Stephen, but although he was interested in it all (or at least pretended to be) he didn't really know what he was looking at, so didn't really understand my excitement. And most specifically when I was wandering through all the art museums in DC alone a few years back, I was really aware of how much I wished there was someone I could share that experience with. So I think that's what I'm most excited about with this trip, is being able to do all of this with my husband, and knowing that he'll be just as excited about these things as I am, and we can actually talk about that experience.

So yes, I'm really psyched. And getting very anxious.