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.

Oh yeah, I have a blog-thingy

I had almost forgotten.

Highlights of the last month or so:

• We went to Austin for our 1.5 year anniversary! It was really nice, we ate at a very cute restaurant downtown on Friday night. Saturday we went to the flagship Whole Foods, which is so big it has a parking garage, got lunch stuff and had a picnic in Zilker Park on the banks of the Colorado River. It was a bit chilly, so we sat very close and he kept my feet warm. It was a beautiful day, lots of people walking dogs, and all the dogs were extremely interested in the idea of food in their park. I took a very bad picture of us on my cell phone.

• My dad came down to see me! He took a 30 hour bus ride after visiting my sister in NC to get here. It was a very nice visit. I took him to see some things we'd missed the last time he was here, and he entertained the Kitten while I was at work. He brought me rocks from NC! It was awesome, 3 of them are covered in rusty-red dirt, and 3 are nice quartz ones. Not only did he know I would love them, he literally rode a bus for 30 hours with a suitcase full of rocks for me! Best dad ever, seriously.

• We met our friends' new baby girl! She is very tiny and cute. My mom had made her some very soft and fuzzy receiving blankets, and I had made some casseroles for the new parents, so we brought them and dinner over. Before she was born, someone lied through their teeth to the new father and told him that newborns sleep for 18-20 hours a day! I was very amused. She enjoyed watching us play Rock Band, though, so it was a fun night.

• I've used my crockpot more the last two weeks than the past 6 months! I made chili verde last week, for which I tossed a chopped onion, chopped lean pork, a can of white beans, and 2 cans of green (tomatillo) salsa into the crockpot and cooked it all day. It was very good, we ate it in burritos with cheese and sour cream. I'm making kielbasa and saurkraut as we speak, because I had a craving for it the other day. Tonight I'm going to make irish soda bread and irish potatoes, and tomorrow make corned beef and cabbage!

It's very odd, you'd never know tomorrow was St. Patrick's Day down here. Apparently irish potates are a Philly thing, Boyfriend had never even heard of them. He's not a big coconut fan though, so I'll probably send all the ones I don't eat into work with him along with the other half of the soda bread, because my recipe makes such a big loaf. But mmm, irish soda bread for breakfast tomorrow!

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.