house meeting #2

We met with the guy from the Army Corp this morning. The meeting went.... well, I think. We were there for about 1 1/2 hours, and the first hour or so was all negative. He's holding all the cards, we have to prove why we need to build on this lot, he doesn't have to say yes, we can't do it for reasons 1 2 3 and 4, blah blah, negative negative, he hates Florida. Didn't want to hear a thing we had to say. I was feeling very discouraged and was totally ready to just give it up. Then in the last 20-30 minutes he slowly starts to turn around. He goes through all these different types of information we would need to give to him, all these things we need to do and document, and then maybe he can give us a permit. Then he talks to our consultant about how much of an area will be impacted, we talk about some of the things we're doing to minimize how much will be impacted, and all of a sudden he says "well we could do a type x permit then." Our consultant just nodded and said "that's what we initially applied for." I guess it just took some time and a bunch of listening to himself talk for this guy to realize we weren't terrible people. Exactly what our consultant said he would do. He also said that once we do have all the things together that he needs, we can have a permit in as little as 3-4 weeks, provided everything is there and he can legally give us one. So we're tentatively optimistic. It was just very strange, we spend over an hour hearing how it can never be done, all doom and gloom, and then suddenly maybe we can do it after all.

Anyway, this would be the view as you come down the driveway, if we are in fact able to build this house:


Please note all the water. This is why there is such concern. However, this is only one little corner of the house site. Well, we're surrounded by swamp on three sides, but where the house will actually sit looks like this:


Some of it is technically wetlands, but not "nice" wetlands. We're hoping that between conserving all the surrounding swamp, and doing some things to minimize the amount of land we'd have to fill, they'll let us build this damn house. That would be nice. Cause driving 2-2.5+ hours a day sucks. And I want to have a baby. Have I mentioned that?

Embarrassing Photo Day

I was all set to whine about the crappy weather and other random whine-worthy items, but then I remembered that I brought my work laptop home this weekend and copied a bunch of pictures onto it. Yay for old embarrassing pictures! Unfortunately I didn't get started until 10 last night, which is my bedtime, so I didn't get too many. Anyway, today shall be Embarrassing Photo Day, Installment 1, Subject: Friends. I found this one from a 704 party.


It was the party in December 2001. Maybe you remember that party. Yes, this is the best picture of us from that night. There are definitely many pictures that I would not consider posting here. So I will post this one of myself looking stupid as a sign of goodwill.


What on earth was I thinking. Who knows where that thing had been. Good thing I didn't have any boobs, or I'd be popping out in this picture. (As a side note, it annoys me that whenever I lose some weight, my boobs are the first thing to go. Seriously, every ounce I lose is from my boobs. Why can't my ass shrink first and leave me a little something up top? I'm sure my brothers are enjoying this.)


Here we are enjoying some delicious hot dogs while looking like bums in NYC. This was New Years 2006. This picture cracks me up.

Alfred's graduation. Somehow we don't have any pictures of just the two of us from my graduation. Also, this could have been taken this morning and it would look about the same. Except my hair is a little longer right now. And I think Alfred has different glasses. There's a bunch of paint chipped off the ones he has now, so they could be the same and just look different, who knows. He's my friend, that why he's involved in Embarrassing Photo Day, Installment 1, Subject: Friends. He's going to fit into a lot of categories, I think. Lucky Alfred!

I seem to have run out of this variety of pictures. No more embarrassing ones, anyway. Stay tuned for later installments. For now I will leave you with some photoshop wizardry of another picture from New Years in NYC.

being productive

We woke up at 8 this morning (insanity) and proceeded to have a very productive morning/early afternoon. First we went to the farmer's market about 10 miles from us. We've never been there, and it's not as big as some other ones we've been to, but it was pretty nice. It was apparently Turtle Day so they had a bunch of stuff going on for that, some kids' activities, some guy singing, and a couple of tortoises that were apparently going to race. (Pokey kept hauling ass around his little area, trying to bust out. He found a gap in the fence, but alas, he couldn't fit through. Nona was just eating the grass like it was going out of style. Pokey also stuck his head in Nona's butt, causing the guy behind me to wonder aloud if that's how he got his name. What were tortoises doing at Turtle Day, anyway? But I digress.) There were lots of nice fresh veggies, and cheap too! Check out this haul, only $9.35 for all this. We're going to make stuffed peppers.
We got home by about 11, and for some reason I decided I was in the mood to do some yard work. I wasn't about to argue with myself, so out I went. Since we have so many trees in and around our yard, we have tons of branches and leaves and pine needles around all the time. So I blew off the roof, picked up the branches from the ground, and raked. Doesn't sound like that much now that I'm writing it out, but it took me a couple of hours. This is a vast improvement, believe it or not. You can see our neighbor's perfect yard in this picture, can you imagine how much he hates us? He's going to shit himself when he sees that we actually did some work out there.

house meeting #1

So when we met with the environmental consultant last night, he told us that he had heard from DEP (that's who we were waiting to hear from, not the county) and we ended up meeting them at the house site this morning. It went really well, I think. They seemed to think it wouldn't be a problem at all to approve building at the site, and that there's plenty of wetlands being preserved to make up for the little that we'd be filling. So that's good news. Let's hope the Army Corp guy agrees with them. Our consultant said he's never seen a response from the Army Corp like the one we got, it was a 4 page letter for filling 1/10th of an acre. Until the rules got changed last summer, that would have been automatically approved. Figures. We went over a bunch of stuff last night to talk about at our meeting with him though, so hopefully that will go well too. I should have taken a picture of the lot when we were there this morning so I'd have a picture to add to this post, but I didn't think of it. Alfred gets bored with picture-less posts. Sorry, Alfred.

In other news, I'm really enjoying the new tracking software I put on this page. The only problem is that it shows every time I look at my own page. (I'm apparently in East Palatka, by the way.) So now everyone can see how often I come see if anyone new has been here. Ah well, you all knew I was a dork anyway, right?

(Listen to this - in looking at our tax stuff, it turns out we paid more in interest on our mortgage than I earned all last year. Sad.)

new house

I know I've mentioned it briefly to some of you, but we have a meeting about it today so I figure I'll write about it. Several years ago, my in laws bought a chunk of land, sold off pieces of it to a builder, and built their own house on part of it. They still own several acres (I don't know exactly how much) but most of it is swamp, and hard to get to. There is one little piece that they have an easement to get to, but again, it's mostly swamp and not right on a road. Well several months ago Max or Alfred or someone decided to try to separate that piece and make it its own lot so that it could be sold and built on. Then that changed into us building on it. So that's what we're attempting to do. It's going to be a bit of a process, because before we can do anything we have to get permission to even build there. It's been legally separated from the rest of their property, and we had to apply to 2 different agencies to get a permit to build. The county has 30 days before they have to make a decision, so we're still waiting to hear from them. We heard from the Army Corp of Engineers (I think that's who it is, anyway) pretty quickly, and they said no in about 5 different ways. Apparently they think it's just a developer trying to wring every last cent out of the property. We have a meeting set with them next week to convince them that we're real people and will actually be living there. So we have a meeting this afternoon with the company who's helping us file all these applications to discuss the meeting next week. Should be fun. Hopefully it all goes well, because this whole hour commute thing sucks.

In other news, I ate a huge piece of cake and then had a piece of pie last night. Since then I've had an old Nickelodeon commercial for the Yogi Bear cartoon stuck in my head. It goes "Cakes, pies, cakes, pies, chicken thighs!" Then there's some music, and then "weekdays on Nick!" It's driving me crazy. I found this picture on a website for a Jellystone campground in Niagara Falls. I think we went camping there once. I think I talked to Boo Boo on the phone. I wonder if that actually happened.

dinner last night, and my link to terrorism

We got home late last night, after 8, and were unfortunately confronted with the mess we had left from Sunday (we spent the night at my in laws Monday night, which we do once a week to save on gas). Literally all I did last night was wash and put away dishes and eat dinner. But what a dinner it was! We had salmon with strawberry-mango salsa (made from our fresh organic strawberries, of course) with roasted asparagus. Healthy, fast, and yummy! We used to have this meal pretty regularly but I got kind of sick of it. It was really good last night though, I think the fresh salsa made the difference.


And now for the terrorism angle. I spent the summer after my junior year of college in DC with Alfred, he had graduated that year and was looking for a job there. I had been in Sweden the previous semester and hadn't bothered looking for a summer job. Luckily, while working at reunion weekend, I mentioned to one of the alumni whose address was in DC that I would be there for the summer and didn't have a job. Lo and behold, he worked at a law firm there and got me an interview. I ended up getting a job replacing a woman in HR who was out for maternity leave. It turns out that the guy from the reunion was Jamie Baker, aka James Baker IV, the son of James Baker III, aka the Secretary of State for the first George Bush. I did see Secretary Baker once (I was nowhere near important enough to actually meet him, I literally saw him through an open door), he was actually in the office for a couple days out of the eight or so weeks I worked there. Busy guy, apparently. It was a very cool place to work, the building was a block off the mall and had an open roof area with an amazing view.

Anyway, on NPR last night we were listening to an author who had written a book about bin Laden and his family. They invested money in American companies, blah blah, oh and who was the law firm that represented them in the US? Yup, the one I worked for. So I worked for the company who represented bin Laden's family (but not him) less than a year after 9/11. No, that doesn't really make me connected to terrorism in the slightest, but it's pretty neat anyway, I thought. Hell, I was just excited to hear the law firm's name on NPR! I worked somewhere (relatively) famous!

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. :)