Update!

Current status of the sweater:

And of the Kitten:

Cruise!

Last weekend Ben and I went on a cruise for a friend's wedding and it was awesome! We're really excited for them and hope they'll be as happy as we are!

The cruise was from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico and back. We tried to take a picture with Miami in the background, but the window was all reflective and blurry. Oh well!

It took 4 tries to get a pic where neither of us was blinking and my eyebrows weren't doing that thing they do in 75% of pictures of me! But all I have to do to like my smile in pictures is think about how happy I am to be next to my husband, and it works :)

We ended up waiting a little long to book the cruise, we wanted to make sure we weren't going to get laid off before it, so by the time we did all they had left were rooms with balconies. Darn! :) It was really surprisingly inexpensive, I guess because it was kinda late in the season, and we loved it. This is the room with a towel creature I maintain is a sloth, because look at its face! But Ben thinks is a seal or something silly like that :)

The bride was gorgeous!

I wore the same shoes I wore to our wedding, which are these awesome shoes that have a wooden base so they're very sturdy and contoured to the shape of your feet, good arch support, and come with different ribbons you can use to hold them on. I wore them with mint green satin ribbons when I got married, black ribbons to the wedding, and stripy blue ones to the reception. Love them!

We spent most of the first day at sea at the reception and hanging out with everyone. It was cool in that unlike a regular wedding we actually had a lot of time to hang out with the bride and groom, which was nice.

The second day we docked in Cozumel. We actually didn't spend any time there, we went on a excursion to the Yucatan. We took a boat to Playa del Carmen, which like a lot of Mexico alternates gorgeous architecture

right next to empty lots full of rubble. (The rubble was less photogenic.) Also the thing that makes me most aware I'm not in America is when the names of stores lining the street are not in English! It's strange to me for there to be words I can't read!

From Playa del Carmen we took a bus to the Mayan ruins of Tuluum, which was at its height in the 1200-1500s. The tour guide told us Cortez landed there first, and got bored and wandered off when he saw the Mayans didn't have any gold. He went and wintered in Cuba and came back the next year farther south, and found the Aztecs and their small amounts of gold.

Tuluum was gorgeous though! I can't help but love any place with this many palm trees :)

This was their astronomical observatory.

All of their buildings were oriented north-south, with north as defined by Polaris, not magnetic north. Several of the buildings had small holes where the sun would shine through only at solstices or equinoxes.

There were iguanas everywhere, they were like squirrels there!

We even saw some doing push-ups just like the little lizards here, to show off how strong they are! Lizard ladies love that.

The tour guide said that when the ruins were rediscovered in the 1800s, they were easy to excavate because unlike Pompeii, they weren't buried underground, they were just covered in jungle.

You can just see the water through the trees here.

After the tour we had an hour or two to spend there, and it was my favorite part of the trip.

The water was gorgeous and felt just cool after walking around in the sun.

I floated in the water next to my husband, both of us borne up and down as the waves rolled by, and the world was perfect.

After the water, we walked back and had lunch in a little tourist trap place the guide had recommended as clean, quick and good. Chicken and cheese quesadillas with a bright salsa and slices of avocado, rice and beans with salty tortilla chips, perfect after being in the sun for a while. Mexican is perfect summer food.

Unfortunately we had to leave that gorgeous water behind and go back to the boat. I think we ended up sleeping the rest of that day, ha.

We saw some other ships go by and watched birds chase flying fish through the wake.

This is one of my new favorite pics of Ben, he looks so relaxed and content.

This bathing suit cover is my souvenir from the Amalfi Coast in Italy.

The bride and groom decided that they wanted to have a formal water slide event, she wore one of the 4 (!) dresses she brought and the dress code for the gentlemen was ties and swim trunks. It was so funny!

It's hard to water slide gracefully though!

It was a fantastic weekend! We've had a very busy summer this year, though, and it's nice to be home and relax with this creature who thinks she's sneaky.