happy birthday Lindsay!

First, I want to say happy birthday to Lindsay! I've been intending to email her for months, but she beat me to it the other day with a super cute picture of her daughter. I think the only picture I have of her is the one I posted last year, so I guess I won't post it again. Happy birthday though! :)

Next, I want to say hi to Meghan! Meghan lives in Kapolei, Hawaii, and apparently just found out about my blog from Mike. I met Meghan when I went out to visit Mike a couple of years ago when he first got back from Iraq. In fact, you can see Mike sitting with his leg propped up in the reflection in the glass door at the right side of this picture. I bet Meghan loves that I'm posting this picture. Hi Meghan!

I considered posting a picture of Mike's bullet wound here, just for fun, but decided against it. Maybe later. Instead, here are some pictures of another wound of sorts. Mama Kitty is still living at the old museum (we're going to try to bring her over to the new place this coming week) and apparently had an accident of some kind. I think her tail is broken. She isn't moving it at all, but doesn't seem to be in much pain. It had some fur on the end of it last week, but now it's gone from about the halfway point down. It looks like a rat's tail. See?

Gross, huh? In person you can see the individual vertebrae that make up her tail. It's kind of cool in a gross way.

Friday was Kara's last day, so I also took a picture of the cake I made for her. Unfortunately the cake was baked over a fault line, and an earthquake struck before we could eat or photograph it.

Really, I frosted it that morning and it didn't have enough time in the fridge for the frosting to set, so it slid in the car. I did all the piping myself. Not bad, huh? Katie taught me all I know. Which isn't much, but it's more than I knew before. It tasted damn good, that's all that matters. And I have a little tupperware container of frosting left in the fridge that I've been sampling over the past couple of days. Mmm, butter and sugar.

All right, I'm going to go back to watching Alf now. I mean, go make granola. One of the two.

Merry Christmas! and happy birthday Emily

Emily and Jesus share a birthday. Also, I don't seem to have any recent pictures of her (or of Jesus, actually) probably because she's away at school most of the time and not around when we are. Well, happy birthday to her anyway!

We (Alfred, Katie and I) were up until about 2:30 last night getting things ready. We got home from Christmas Eve dinner (hosted by Alfred's parents) at about midnight and then had to get the pork into the smoker, the beans into the oven, and the cinnamon rolls for this morning made and into a pan to rise in the fridge overnight. And yet here I am, blogging at 8:19am. I'm a champ.

I wanted to take a picture of our tree with all the gifts underneath, but our camera is upstairs in my purse and I don't want to go back in our room and wake Alfred up, so I used our old camera. Now I remember why we got a new one, this one kind of takes crappy pictures.

The funniest part was when I went to upload the pictures onto the computer. There's a whole bunch of other pictures I never took off of the camera! Such as this gem, which I assume was from my birthday last year.

I'm guessing my birthday because the other pictures on it were from when I went to visit Mike after he got shot.

I've got some nice close ups of his wound too, but that's not very Christmassy.

So I hope everyone has a great day, I know we will! Merry Christmas!

we're going to MN!

The big news of the day is: we bought tickets to go to Minnesota! Yay! It's about damn time! Last year we went up over Memorial Day weekend to visit when Mike was on leave and had a great time. We drank a lot. Played lots of Uno. So a couple months ago I emailed my siblings trying to figure out a weekend this spring that would work for all of us. Between Mike and Tony both having military things all the time, and us having such a lively social life (I think we had 2 whole weekends we were busy, we're in pretty high demand) it was really, really hard to pin down a weekend. I think there were 3 between February and May that worked. Eventually I had to admit defeat. So Alfred and Katie and I are flying up to visit in a couple weeks, and Mike is going another weekend. 3 out of 4 is better than nothing, I guess. And, bonus - since Katie will be there, we have a built in DD! Score! Plus, we're still planning on going to visit Mike in Hawaii this summer, so I guess that will have to do. This picture is from my last trip to Hawaii. Maybe this time we'll see more than the base, the hospital, and the ABC stores within a 2 block radius of our hotel. :)