From the Archives...

the archives being a random jump drive...

Fall of 2006

I was touring with Sesame Street Live and we were in San Jose, Costa Rica for two weeks - one week of shows and one week off...  During the week off I was part of two planned excursions, the first was bungee jumping in the rainforest and the second was a trip to a coffee plantation, butterfly reserve, and a volcano.  I'll post photos from those later today, but first...

One interesting thing that Costa Ricans do is that whenever there is a fatal car crash they paint a heart with a halo over it on the road at the spot of the crash, some hearts have several halos over them and some stretches of road seem to be endlessly covered in these hearts.  It was touching and disturbing to drive past these...

366 Days Ago

Last year on the 4th of July, a wonderful person I was lucky enough to know was called home.  I can't believe a year has passed since we lost Timmonte, but he (as well as all the others lost along the way) will always have a spot in my heart.

Timmonte Hood, you haven't been forgotten...

I'm sure you're off flying with the angels...

Happy 4th of July!

What better way to celebrate the 4th than with a 5K and a parade with friends?  What?  The Muppets would make it even better?  Ok, but only since you asked...

Happy 4th!

Poor Miss Ellie...

I wrote this at the beginning of last week... but every time I tried to edit it, the internet would turn off... I think we're past that now, so just keep in mind this was written last Monday...

It was a rough weekend for this puppy momma... My darling Ellie girl had a horrible allergic reaction to something, but we don't know what to.  I should not be allowed do Google searches late at night... Sometime around midnight I had determined through the aid of WedMD (did you know they had a pet section?!?) that it was definitely some type of parasite and that they were now crawling all over my house and we'd have to fumigate and destroy things and just overall not have a good time...  I was thinking fleas originally but then there are so many other horrible varieties of parasites it was hard to pick just one, and of course they show you the magnified pictures of the little monsters which does not help one rest easy after seeing them late at night...  After waking up my dad with my concerns (he was quite grumpy about it - I don't know why...), I remembered that there is a 24 hour vet nearby!  Ok, I wasn't sooo crazy as to take her to the vet at 1 in the morning, but I did call then to get her the first available appointment.

Fast forward to today (July 2nd)....

Ellie is much better, the steroids are doing her tummy good (haha, made me laugh...) but she doesn't like the fact that I only let her out to do her business and then make her come inside.  Although I'm sure she would love to bask in the sun, I am still concerned about what caused the rash, so her trips outside are limited.  But she should be completely done with her steroids in time for Slobberfest!  That will be the biggest test to if she's all better or not, since that's outside, in a woody area, in the hot sun, with lots of other bassets around (I think last year there were somewhere around 100!).  For those of you that don't know, Slobberfest is the annual fundraiser event that is hosted by Droopy Basset Rescue (where Ellie came from), it's fun and there are basset games and different booths for them to visit and a huge raffle (last year Ellie won 5 prizes - yes, 5!).

Uke - an Update

Jonnie's going to give me her Ukulele when she moves!  Yea!  Ask and ye shall receive, huh?

Uke

I want to learn how to play the ukulele...  Thoughts?  How much fun would that be?  Hanging out with friends around a campfire, strumming on a ukulele?  I'm slightly obsessed right now...

Andddd.... I'm Back

Let's see, where did we leave off? 

Eh, who cares, let's just go forward.

I only have one more session left in my Organizational Behaviour class - so far I have an A, but that's not including the final I took last week and the presentation I have this week - the combination of which accounts for almost half my grade - so that A I currently have can drop really fast if I screwed up either of the remaining grades.

Alyssa and I have started training again... and we have planned out 12 races between now and March... well that's if we actually get registered for them all :o)

Let's see: a 4th of July 5K, a evening 5K in Wheeling in August, a local 5K in August, a Steelers 5K over Labor Day, the Great Race 10K, the Hershey 1/2 marathon, a Halloween 5K, a turkey trot 5K, a jingle bell 5K, the Charleston 1/2 marathon, the Shamrock 8K, and the Shamrock 1/2 marathon.

Oh, yeah, we were going to do the Disney marathon, but after looking closer at finances it was decided that Charleston was the more economical option.  Alyssa is going to run the full marathon, I however have decided that I want to do a strong 1/2 and in addition to that I'm going to do the 30 mile bike ride the following day too.  We'll see how that goes...  Oh yeah and Bob wants to run too, which I'll believe when I see it.

I start accounting in a week for tomorrow.  I have a headache forming already.

The garden is planted, and growing quite nicely.  And by quite nicely I mean taking up so much more space than I ever thought possible.  3 cucumber plants, 3 tomato plants, a row of green beans, a few radishes, a few beets, a few carrots, a zucchini plant, and 2 watermelon plants.  That's a lot.

Today I'm going to be making 2 batches of chocolate peanut butter pretzel brownies for a bake sale at work. 

That's about all I've got right now... I promise this time to be back shortly.