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.

Weather

Spring sprang a few weeks ago, it's been quite nice. Wildflowers are everywhere, blowsy little 4-petaled pink ones and white clover and of course Bluebonnets covering the mowed areas next to all the roads. The azaleas by the ponds here bloomed last week, huge bushes full of bright pink flowers. Last weekend the weather was perfect, sunny and 70 with a nice breeze. I spent most of Sunday afternoon sitting on the couch with the porch door open, letting the breeze ruffle my gauzy curtains, with the Kitten and a smoothie and a book. Perfect.

The smoothie was good too, vanilla frozen yogurt, frozen red raspberries, milk and just a bit of almond extract all blended together. I made a version with half a block of bittersweet chocolate chopped fine tossed in there too, which was also yummy.

I'd thought about going down to the pool here, but Boyfriend was busy, and pools are no fun by yourself. So the Kitten and I enjoyed the weather.

I planted seeds in the planters on my porch, thyme and forget-me-nots and catnip for the Kitten's garden. She likes to sit outside and stare intently at it, it's her hobby.

But unfortunately we only get weather this nice for a short time. The azaleas have already fallen. It rained most of this week, which washed the air clean and kept the temperature under 80, but it won't be much longer til I have to run the AC 24/7 like my neighbors. There is no break between having the heat on in the winter and the AC on in the summer here, you have to switch from one to other immediately.

Summer was always my favorite season growing up, but I think Spring has edged it out, in Texas at least. I really enjoy our 2 weeks of it.

My cat likes watching TV about cats

So this evening I took a nap with the Kitten and Ben played on the computer and watched TV. He recorded a show called Cats: In the Womb because he thought I would like it. I thought I would too, so we decided to watch it. The Kitten was fascinated by it.


I don't watch a whole lot of TV, but it's definitely been on before, and I've never seen her react like this to it. She watched the whole show with us!


She especially liked hearing the narrator say her name and talk about house cats. She wasn't as interested in the lions and would stop watching at each commercial.


She also liked hearing the mother cat purring and meeping. (It's a lot easier to see her perking up when the mother cat purrs on the original video; unfortunately, it lost some quality when I uploaded it.)

My cat is the funniest thing I have ever seen. Endless hours of amusement.

Travel

We had a very nice trip to Nebraska. The car ride is long, but I've always liked roadtrips. We switched off driving and sleeping. We left Thursday at about 7, stopped for dinner at Cracker Barrel so I could eat macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes, and arrived in Omaha about 12:15 pm on Friday.

We visited with Boyfriend's family and friends, it was very nice to see them. On Saturday we went to Des Moines for his cousin's wedding. The actual ceremony was nice, and since we had about an hour and a half until the reception we visited Iowa State University, half an hour away in Ames, where Boyfriend went to school. He had kind of mentioned it, but I hadn't really realized it: his campus is huge! Riddle was about a mile across, and then connected to the airport, but it could have fit inside ISU's campus several times. I don't know how he walked across it to go to class. We drove around it for about an hour or so, and I don't think we saw all of it. We did get to go inside his major building, and passed the dorms and apartments where he lived. It's always strange to me to see places that I personally have no connection to, that someone I am so close to has such strong ties to, so many memories of. It's odd the other way also, showing places where I have walked hundreds of times and experienced so much to someone who is seeing it for the first time.

It was a beautiful campus, full of old brick buildings and parkland. It seemed to be focused on the football stadium the way Embry focused on the airfield.

Then we went back to the reception, and I gummed some more potatoes and we danced the night away. I forgot my camera so I'll have to hope someone sends me some pictures to post. Apparently everyone liked my purple dress. Boyfriend said they don't give compliments directly in the Midwest, they give them to other people who then give them to you, which seems odd, but you know.

It is definitely a different world out there. I read an editorial in the paper on Sunday complaining that leftist college professors were leading kids into Communism, and that they should be watched more closely. Communism? Really? There are still people worried about that?

Speaking of being in a different world, on our drive back to Houston we decided that Italian would be nice for dinner, since I could definitely handle pasta by then. We were going to stop when we saw the lights in Wichita, which I still have a hard time thinking of as an actual place, but we missed it. There were no lights. I didn't have enough cell phone signal to search for a restaurant with it, so we asked for the closest place we could get pasta at the next gas station. The attendant looked confused and said, "Pasta? Oklahoma City, I guess." We had just passed a sign for Oklahoma City. It was 136 miles away! 136! I never in my life thought I would be over a hundred miles from an Italian restaurant! It was terrifying.

We ended up stopping at a very strange looking diner type place because we were hungry. There was a man wearing a huge cowboy hat sitting at a table with a straight face. I'm not sure how they do that. The food was actually ok though, I got roast beef which would have been really good on a hoagie roll with provolone but was still good over white bread.

We ended up coming through Houston at 6:30 am on a Monday, which was as much fun as it sounds. I had no idea traffic would be that bad that early, and I would never commute there.

The Kitten was extremely happy to see me, she meeped until I put down everything and picked her up and let her knead and roll around and purr on me to her heart's content. I hadn't thought to turn the heat on before I left, so it was 63 degrees when I got home, and she was a cold Kitten, poor thing. She was so cold she crept under the blankets with me and curled up against my stomach when I went to bed. She poked her little nose out so she could breathe and we slept the rest of the day. It was very nice to be home.

Kittens and Nieces and Cooking

I was looking for my Kitten, I could not find her, so I called her name and she meeped at me from her hiding spot, somewhat annoyed to be disturbed:
I keep telling her, but she is the cutest thing ever!!

Well, maybe an extremely close second to my niece, Julianna:
Yay pictures!

So Boyfriend and I are trying to eat at home more often, because it is healthier and will hopefully be cheaper. He is saving to put a down payment on a house, at some point, I'm saving in case someone unfriendly to the space program gets elected and I get laid off. Not really, but it seems like a good idea to have a nice emergency fund anyway. We've been sharing the grocery shopping, but since he is in class every night until 7, I have been doing most of the actual cooking. (It doesn't hurt that I can reliably boil water, also.) We've been planning out a week's meals, dinners and leftovers for lunch, on Sunday and then going grocery shopping to get everything. It was surprisingly nice not to have to worry about what's for dinner every night! And awesome not to have to stop at the grocery store after work before I can go home. I do most of the prep work Sunday, and throw things together when I get home from work.

Last week we had my mom's chicken enchiladas, which I think Boyfriend could cheerfully live on for months, shrimp pil-pil, a Spanish dish I got from Rachel Ray's magazine, chicken casserole (which I narrowly avoided burning the house down making) and pizza with as many vegetables as will fit on top of it. We're also having the frozen veggies you can microwave in the bag with every meal, which has to be the best invention since sliced bread, I swear. We went the entire week without eating out! I don't think I've done that in years!

This week we are having chicken enchiladas, the rest of the shrimp over angel hair with tomato sauce, chicken creole from a Zataran's box, and pizza. I made the shrimp tonight, along with garlic bread the way I like it, i.e. strong enough to knock out a vampire at 20 paces. It was a bit strong for Boyfriend, I think, he is apparently more used to garlic bread that has maybe been introduced to a clove of garlic, maybe just waved at one in passing. Kind of like I like my steak to just wave at a fire in passing, maybe say hi, but definitely not get to know it well enough to ask after it's health, or it's children, or anything.

It is surprising fun to be able to put together a complete meal from ingredients you have in your house. And it doesn't hurt that Boyfriend is very obviously delighted to come home after a very long day to a "restaurant-quality meal, with lovely company and a charming ambiance," as he tells me. He's very sweet, and smart enough to know that the more he praises them, the more dinners he'll get :)