"Whatever happens, let's be professional..."

Brion's watching Ghostbusters. I love that movie. I just put brownies in the oven and emailed a woman I met on the Ireland day trip in the summer of 2001. I hope she even remembers me... I lost her address until just the other day. I wonder if she ever heard from Rihab, the woman from Lebanon we hung out with. That trip (even just the day trip) was such a great experience.

I hope she emails me back.

I'm also hoping to get some work done on a cross-stitch project tonight. It's a wedding present for some friends of mine. Unfortunately, we don't know if the wedding will go on at this point - the groom is getting deployed to Afghanistan, possibly March 4th, and the wedding was supposed to be in May. I will get the project done just in case. It's a lovely design (and appropriate advice for any marriage):

Ugghhhh... I just took a nap for like two hours. I WANT to be productive, I'm just no good at it. :p

Happy Leap Year!

It's Leap Year Day... whee. Unfortunately we're not celebrating in good ways over here. My mom is very ill with a stomach bug since this morning. Last night, we lost the cable for a while, then soon after, lost power for a few hours. It kept coming back on and going out again, but I think we finally got it officially back around 11 or so. We lit lots of candles, used the fantastic little Inova lights Bryon got me (one of them can just about light up a whole room by itself), and we played cards - Uno, whist, and Hello Kitty Uno. Brion was the Uno Master until I dethroned him in the final game. I thought whist was kind of fun, another variation on euchre... but I think mom and Brion didn't enjoy it as much.

Still no word from Bryon. I know he'll call when he can. They've told us the lines for the phone are horrendous.

Easily amused.

"Belletrist Beskudnikov." Sounds like someone out of Harry Potter, but in fact, it is garbage text from a spam email's subject line. Another good one was "diatomic djamatic."

Morning view.

I had another nice dream about Bryon last night. I seem to be having a lot of them, I just can't remember them when I wake up. I just wake up with this pleasant feeling that I got to see him again. :D

I think today I shall write a few letters. I haven't written to Linda, or Sara, or D in a while... or Andrea... and I have so much cute stationery! I can't wait until I can write thank you cards to someone... because I have The Cutest Thank You Cards In All Creation. I think they're the cutest ones I've ever had!

Also might work on some website stuff today. There's some cleaning up and reorganizing of sites that could be done, and some decisions to be made. I'm a little frustrated with my Inuyasha site right now. I guess I should have realized when I started the site that the series would be incredibly long with a huge cast of characters, just like Ranma 1/2. I don't even buy the books at this point, and I'll never catch up to where they are in Japan. There are so many other sites out there that are much more informative than mine, much more detailed, and much more up-to-date. Maybe I will turn it into "Dog-boy: The Inuyasha Cafe" and just make it more of a hangout, like the people who live on my TagBoard seem to think it is. Then I could keep the articles people have written, the fanart, the fanclub, and have a small section for information and manga summaries. That would save my hard work but allow me to feel like I'd downsized it a bit. Hmm..

A couple of pics from the past couple of weeks...


My cute soldier. Probably shouldn't call him cute... sorry dear.


My boyfriend is cool.
Valentine's Day flowers - roses and star lilies.


Sweet.

Well, a new layout for a new chapter in my life, I guess. Bryon flew out yesterday. He'll be in Kuwait for 16 days, then they'll move up into Iraq. He called me right before he got on the plane, which I appreciated. Now I don't know when I'll hear from him again, but I'm already writing letters like crazy. I can't wait to start baking cookies from the recipe book he bought me (I agreed to send him every kind of cookie in the book by the time he gets back).

It's been difficult - the most difficult part is not being able to contact him at any given moment. Instead of picking up the phone and calling, or at least leaving him a message, I sit here realizing that his phone is sitting right next to me. There's so much I want to tell him, every day, and I'm having to write it out in letters instead of having our nightly phone conversation. The physical absence isn't so bad yet - we're sort of used to that. It's the emotional absence... does that make sense? It's hard not knowing when I will hear from him at all.

Oh well, I'm trying to stay positive, and I'm writing emails that will probably pile up for a while before he actually reads them. I'm just glad to have that outlet, and also this blog, which I swear I will try to update more often. I've been out of town (visiting Bryon) so often that I haven't even been thinking about it.

Huh. Baby shower this weekend... and Kim and I are supposed to go see Sara's play at Oswego. I can't wait to see the dresses she designed. I'm so proud of her - she does beautiful work. Now if only Kim would get back to me so I can find out what night we're going....

Ahh yes, forgot to mention that we ended up on the local news up there because of the ceremony. :D They interviewed Bryon and his parents, and I'm there in the crowd. Even got it on tape. :D

Wheeeeee. These last couple of weeks have been ridiculously busy. But in a good way. I've been working (and getting to do website stuff, and get paid for it, woohoo!) and driving back and forth to visit Bryon. We don't know when he's getting deployed, not exactly, and it's possible it won't be for another month yet. In the meantime, his parents and I drove up for the official send-off ceremony. It was nice, but the speeches were all BS except the last one by the battalion commander. His speech made me cry. ;_;

Bryon and I are both feeling like... "let's get ON with it already!" so we can start counting down instead of waiting to count down. *sigh* He gets a 4-day pass this weekend, though, so we will certainly be enjoying that.

Quick recap of the weekend's visit:
Thursday - I drove up that night, thankfully in perfect weather. Got to see Bryon.

Friday - Picked Bryon up on post but unfortunately, for the first time, they wouldn't let me in the gate. It's so frustrating when every one of the gate personnel tells you something different. One will write a pass and say you're good to go, and then the next day someone else will tell you the first guy screwed up. Very frustrating. Anyway... picked up Bryon's parents at his cousin's house, and then we went to Pizza Hut for dinner. It was nice. I think it was this night that we watched Die Hard With a Vengeance back at the hotel room. Very entertaining movie.

Saturday - Met up with Bryon's parents at 10, and drove to the base so we could get checked in for the ceremony. We JUST beat the big crowd. We went to the Burger King on post, then to the gym where the ceremony was being held, and got to see Bry for a few minutes before we found a place to sit in the bleachers. Very odd format for the ceremony - all the 700 soldiers were in formation in the last 3rd of the gym. I wonder why they didn't move them forward? Bryon couldn't see the big empty space in front of him, let alone seeing us or seeing the speakers. Sadly, once you give all the guys brush cuts and identical uniforms/caps, you can't tell them apart... so we had no idea where he was standing (except, of course, that was with C Company). The ceremony was long, and I felt bad for the guys having to stand there the whole time. The bleachers were very uncomfortable as well. Afterwards, we all crowded the floor and hung out for a brief meeting with C Company's leaders, which I thought was very good of them to arrange. That night, we went to dinner with Bryon's parents, his cousin Laura, Bryon's buddy Castor and his wife Sharon. The restaurant, Pete's was directly across from our hotel, and the food was fantastic. After that we went to Laura's house and met her wonderful dogs (chocolate lab named Newman and a hyper 1-year-old golden lab/greyhound mix named Millie) and played Cranium. It was REALLY fun. The girls royally stomped the guys, but I think if Bryon and I were to play that as a team we would kick butt! :D

Sunday - We met up with Laura and Bryon's parents at this really marvelous diner called the Crystal Restaurant. The place hasn't changed that much since the early 1900s - gorgeous wood interior, original tile floor and coffered ceiling, and many of the fixtures are original. Again, the food was really good. I'm so glad we had Laura to recommend these places! After brunch Bryon and I went to the mall in Syracuse, where we proceeded to run into most of the guys from his unit. We made plans to meet people at the Dinosaur Barbecue at 9:30, and went to see Big Fish beforehand (which was SO good). However, once we got to the Dinosaur we found out they stop serving food at 9 on Sunday... so the search began for someplace that WAS serving food. We ended up at the Colorado Mine Company, which was kinda cool. There was a really neat fake fire pit that was VERY warm and looked very real... but uh... they played country music and our waitress was dressed like a sheriff. -_- Still, I had a baked sweet potato which was DELICIOUS.

Monday - *whew* We were exhausted by this point, and Bryon's parents had gone home. So, we ended up sleeping in late and watching TV most of the day. There was a brief trip to Michael's, and we got food from KFC. It felt SO good to just relax and bum around. Then Tuesday, I drove him back to base and drove home, directly to work. It was a long, long weekend, but well worth it.

Ugh! I am so dried out this morning. My throat is just ragged. I really want nothing more than to go back to bed, to the point where I can feel myself almost falling asleep in this chair.

Read more of the Fool book last night. It's very good - sucked me in right away, unlike the book before it which I still don't think I like nearly as well as the first two trilogies. Fitz is so frigging gullible. Then again, I guess that's part of his charm.

*snore* *zzzzzzz* Wow, I really need to go take a shower to wake myself up.

Oh wow. It pays to check out other people's blogs... I just found an online version of Duck Hunt, complete with the dog laughing at my patheticness.

Subjecting my brother to some of my favorite obscure-but-fun music (probably more obscure to some than others):

Sloan - Chester the Molester
Sloan - Money City Maniacs
The Refreshments - Banditos (any song that mentions Captain Picard has to be good XD)
Reverend Horton Heat - Galaxy 500
Geggy Tah - All I Want To Do Is To Thank You
Aqua - Happy Boys and Girls

He's actually enjoying it for the most part.

No success in the sewing basket department. I did find a small sewing box, round, about 6" across. It's covered in cream fabric with pretty blue flowers - almost a toile pattern but not quite - with dark blue piping around the edges. Inside it has little pockets all the way around, and the top is a big pincushion. I bought myself a few basic sewing supplies; black and white all-purpose thread, a package of pins with the nice plastic heads on them, and one of those flexible tape measures. I looked through some of the pattern books... but it was really depressing looking at pattern prices so I will probably just use the skirt pattern I have already - find fabric that actually would work for it. Then I can check on patterns when they have their big yearly sale and all the patterns are 99 cents or 1.99.

In the meantime... I still haven't tried the One-Stroke painting kit my mom bought us on QVC, and she's getting miffed. She's got 30 days to be able to send it back. I don't know what to tell her. I want to try it but I just haven't completely felt like it, not enough to get all the paints out and make paint-mess with it. Hmm.

Good news: I have finally killed all the popup thingies on my computer. When I run Ad-Aware now, nothing comes up, and best of all I don't get popup windows or little messages randomly showing up, even when I am not using the browser. I also downloaded the new Winamp and new CD-burning software. My CD drive has decided to start burning CDs again. Now if only my battery would charge.

ROFL... conversation with my brother Brion:

Me: You're lucky you can use parenthetical references... the whole history department has to use Chicago Style rather than MLA format.

Brion: Chicago Style? Like the pizza?

Me: Yeah, deep dish paper referencing.

Ahhh... it's so good not to have to write any more papers.

Quick post... work today at the tax office... had another snow day from the Museum yesterday although I didn't find that out til my dad drove me all the way up there after we dropped off my car at the garage. Ugh. Anyway, we hung out all day, going to Staples to get me a USB mouse to use with my laptop (got sick of the touchpad, for certain tasks anyway)... and Walmart. It was fun.

Tonight I'm going to JoAnn Fabrics to see if I can find a sewing basket and use my 40% off coupon. Wheee!

Lalala... back from visiting Bryon for the weekend. Despite some snow along the way, I had a great trip and I'm really, really glad I went. We mostly just hung out and watched TV, but even that was really nice. I got my new haircut while he was working on Sunday (rather Meg Ryan-ish, which should amuse Kim) and then we went out to dinner at Applebee's with a couple of other Guard guys. We missed the beginning of the Super Bowl, thinking it started later than it did, but neither of us cared too much. All the ridiculous drama over the Janet Jackson Flashing Incident and the Second Half Streaker was more interesting to me than the game anyway... at least it was a close game, right down to the end. The commercials were nothing particularly impressive.

What WAS impressive: later that night I was all set to go to bed, and I wanted to tell Bryon about that car ad with the five guys... with the one guy singing "I Feel Like A Woman..." well, I was just about to give up on them playing it, and I started to describe it to him, when BAM, it came on! Saved him from getting my verbal, butchered version of it. He was amused.

My brother found a fun site, one which entertains me probably more than it should entertain the average 24-year-old... My personal favorite:

Q: Where did the king keep his armies?
A: Up his sleevies.

Zounds, I am easily amused.