in the meantime, enjoy these prickly pix of my cousin‘s ferocious hedgehog, pinelope.

i think i can i think i can i think i can

a little help here?

you’d think that i’d be posting more since we’ve had all kinds of fun and socializing here.  what can i say, i’m really just not that interesting.  so what are some of the highlights of our visit since the halloween parties?  my husband got to have a boys night out at the ucf game sunday night.  i had a girls night out that was slightly less thrilling but the niece had a blast so that’s what mattered.  we had dinner with my dad and his wife last night.  i’ve gotten to spend a lot of quality time with my cousin and i’ve gotten to do plenty of weddinging with my best friend.  tonight is the rehearsal dinner and tomorrow is her big, big day.  she is very excited and i’m thrilled for her. 

note to self: 

• get video tape, dvd, and gift
• charge camcorder batteries
• make room on camera cards
• gather all primping supplies to take to salon/house tomorrow
• lose ten pounds by tomorrow so that my dress zips all the way – dangit!

we had two, that’s right, two halloween parties this year.  my cousin’s anniversary bash was friday night and an old friend invited us to another on saturday night.  color us popular!  i managed to find a fun costume for $8 thursday night and, i’ve got to say, i really had a great time with it.

candy corn and convict

more pix below the fold*. Read the rest of this entry »

i have much to write about my weekend but no time in which to write.  there will be recaps.  and pix (mostly stolen from my cousin‘s blog.  just no time now.

you’ll recall that we’ve had two unsuccessful ventures in our search for good mexican cuisine to replace our old favorite, la parrilla.  they say the third time is the charm.

folks, we found it!!! Read the rest of this entry »

I talked about having a tiring day yesterday but I never even mentioned sleep. Here’s one of the many things I will me we understand about me: how I can be flat out exhausted and unable to sleep. Really, how is that possible? For some reason, I was tired all day Friday. While I was working, I wanted a nap; while I was packing, I wanted a nap; while hubby drove six hours to Atlanta, I struggled to stay awake to keep him company (I am so much better a passenger than he is). The point is, by the time we got to the hotel late Friday night, I was TIRED! So the fact that at 05:00 Saturday morning I was still not even close to being asleep just boggles my mind (no doubt contributing to the sleeplessness). I did manage to doze a bit on and off after that but not much. It sucked, folks. The only good thing about a night like that is that you are ready and willing to get up as soon as the alarm goes off. So, considering all that, I’m very pleased with all the work I did yesterday because I was dragging tail a bit. And last night, after a long day of hard work on practically no sleep, I was so ready to go to bed. I think we were showered and in bed by 21:30. Thankfully, I was asleep within ten minutes. Of course, at 01:00 I was apparently done sleeping. Arrrgh! Once again I tossed and turned and drove myself nuts until close to 05:00. And then I dozed on and off again until hubby was awake and I was able to suggest an earler breakfast. Which was a great idea because we ate, went back to the room, and managed to get a solid nap for about an hour. I’m not feeling near as rough today. Although I’m not feeling nearly as helpful either. I did some sanding first thing again and helped hubby cut some baseboards but now I’m just watching him cut tile. Better get up and see if anyone’s got anything for me to do yet.

what a tiring day! I don’t know if I have ever worked that hard on our own home projects. But I think our help was appreciated and there was a lot accomplished. HS and his friends had already put a ramp in the garage and enlargened all of the downstairs doorways. We were the first crew members on the job today so we got started right away on sanding the sheetrock seems. Next, hubby started on the third and final coat of mud while the rest of us started clearing downstairs furntiure and tearing out carpet. By the time we left tonight, all of the downstairs carpeting was taken out other than the bedroom and the floors were cleaned, stripped of nails and staples, and prepped to be hardwooded. The Sheetrock should all be done other than the final light sanding. There was tile laid in the bathroom, and I believe my job tomorrow will be painting it so that they can put in the roll-in shower, roll-under sink, and commode next weekend. It was really hard work today but I feel good about helping out a friend.

there’s nothing going on around here.  other than the fact that i feel like hubby brought back some biological warfare from his trip last week.  i’ve been headachy, snuffly, and coughy since he got home.  the throbbing of my cranium prevented me from doing any form of activity yesterday which is a big disappointment to me after doing so well last week.  i HAVE TO drag myself today to do something.  since my head is still displeased, i doubt it will be stairs.  so that’s it, just feeling blah and whiny. 

i’m pleased to report that the little birdy survived the night and seemed to have gained his strength by this morning.  i felt terrible about leaving him out there when we went out last night.  he had started trying to fly back into the closed door again and it was just so sad.  so hubby went out there and caught him again and we put him in a box with some water and tiny bread crumbs.  we left him in it all night and i was relieved to hear him chirping loudly when hubby went to check on him this morning.  he took him out to the front of the building and placed him on the ledge.  he said the birdy looked at him and then flew up to the next floor, looked back down at him and started flying all around.  yay for the birdy being okay!  hopefully he won’t try to crash in someone’s home again!  meanwhile, i guess i need to do some cleaning because there are feathers all over the ceiling, presumably stuck with blood.

my sissy and i were talking the other day about some of the superstitions that our mother held.  the conversation came up because i was telling her about a few days back when we had the doors open one night and had several giant grasshoppers intrude on us.  hubby got one of the little fish nets out of the beach-toy-box and chased them around, scooping them up and throwing back off the balcony.  what the heck they were doing twenty-three stories up is beyond me but we had a good laugh at our house being “plagued” by locusts.  sissy proceeded to tell me about having a dove fly into and get stuck in their screened pool deck recently and how it reminded her of mom telling us that a bird flying into the house meant someone was going to die.  i remember hearing those sort of sentiments growing up as well.  funny how you think of those things, even if you never bought into them.  i laughed and told sissy that she must be the lucky one because she had a dove, which is a blessing, and i had locusts, which are a plague.  clearly mom was mistaken.  we then talked about our mother’s new year’s superstition which involved the necessity of having a dark-haired man enter the house first after midnight of the new year.  i’m surprised our neighbor didn’t kill her the year that she woke him up asking him to come across the street and walk through the front door so that she could go in and go to bed.  sissy said that she recently came across the origins of that tradition on the internet.  anyhow, it seems i’ve gotten a bit off topic here.  the reason i brought all of this up is because we just had some cute little bird fly into our home.  and immediately i thought, “someone’s going to die.”  not because i believe that, but because that’s the association that was burned into me growing up.  i just found it funny after having that conversation with my sissy not three days ago.  we chased the poor, scared, little birdy all over the house.  he was resting on whatever light fixture or a/c vent he could land on.  hubby finally managed to catch him in the fish net and his itty-bitty head was all bloodied from crashing into the ceiling so much.  we gently set him on one of the chairs on the balcony with the hopes that he would catch his breath and be okay.  although i’m a bit dubious since that was thirty minutes ago and i just went out to check on things; he must have been in the chair still because opening the door back up spooked him and made him start flying into the window again.  i really hope he regains his strength and is able to fly himself to safety before we get back home tonight.

or at least to have hubby home with me!  it was a mostly lazy, snuggly day.  we did manage to get out a bit this morning.  we walked a little piece up the road to a condo auction.  we went in and looked at a few units before we went on the cruise so we knew we wouldn’t want to do any bidding.  the building and units were seriously bottom-of-the-line.  but it was really interesting to see the auction process in action (other than the ten minutes that the auctioneer spent reading the five pages of terms and conditions).  i think a total of twenty-five units were auctioned.  the first one, a four bedroom, worked up a little bit of a buying frenzy and was sold to an internet bidder for $233 per square foot.  i hope that they knew what they were buying because these units are so not worth that in this market.  the next bid for the four bedrooms was $209/sqft and eight of them sold at that price before they were taken off the the auction block.  they then moved on to the two bedrooms.  there was no frenzy on these at all.  the bid was $196/sqft and sixteen were sold at that price before the auction was closed down.  there was another building a couple months ago that went through an auction and we had talked about going to it but something came up.  it was a much nicer building with very nice units (although not at all liveable) but the pool was truly pitiful.  i think those went for somewhere around $240/sqft at auction.  i would have paid that for those before i would have bought one of the ones today.  it was interesting though to go to our first conod auction.  i didn’t realize that when it got down to the rock-bottom bid, they would just let anyone who wanted to pay that price have them (i’m assuming that it depends on how many the contractor wants to let go at that price).  we went through a few of the little beach shops on the walk home and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening resting.  in a little while, we’re going to go down to our favorite club and listen to one of our favorite bands that play there.

i do.  which is why i have no clue why i felt like it was a good idea to stay up until after 01:00 watching tv.  then, of course, i couldn’t get to sleep for the longest time.  and, to top it all off, i fought being awake long before the alarm went off this morning.  at least it was my last night alone for a while.  i’m so excited that i get to pick hubby up in 13.5 hours.  i’ve missed him so much this week!

stolen from richmond but since it’s a very long meme, i’m folding it: Read the rest of this entry »

forty-five minutes on the exercise bike and nineteen flights of stairs.  for some reason, biking in the gym bores me to tears so i don’t do it often but i wasn’t in the mood for the treadmill or weights.  the non-padded seat kills my (non-shrinking) butt.  i’m not sure whether my glutes actually got a workout or if they were just numb from the seat but they were not tremendously cooperative in climbing the stairs back up.