News Archive - January, 2007

We've done a lot since the last update:

• found a new venue for our wedding (the old one is closing)
• got a new mattress (thanks mom and dad)
• burned all the branches that fell down/we cut down from the trees in our backyard (and used the fire to make s'mores)
• celebrated Christmas with our families
• painted the guest room
• setup the guest room
• decorated the guest bathroom
• opened our first joint savings account
• installed an in-ground fence for Chester
• uploaded a bunch of old photo albums

Now that the guest room is setup, we're able to finish unpacking. That translates into a week or two of sorting through what to keep, what to put in storage (read "Kristin's grandmother's attic), and what to get rid of/donate. While we're getting rid of "junk," I'm going to try to convince Kristin to get rid of some of her clothes (I'll be getting rid of some too).

That leaves us with organizing and decorating. We mostly know what we want to do, but since we're on a tight budget it takes a while to get the stuff we want. Hopefully we're done soon since we really need to concentrate on the wedding now.

I finally got around to uploading the huge backlog of photos I had of Chester. We've had Chester for about a year and a half and have taken lots of pictures, but I had only posted the ones from the day we adopted him. The truth is I had gone through all of his photos and organized them months ago, but the idea of figuring out what order they were taken in and actually posting them was overwhelming. I thought if I started by posting the adoption day pictures, I'd be motivated to post the rest — apparently I was wrong. This morning I took some amusing pictures of Chester and decided it was finally time to sit down and get all of his photos uploaded. Enjoy!

I woke up this morning about 30 seconds before my alarm went off, with what I thought was a runny nose. I sniffled and laid my head back down on my pillow just to hear my alarm go off. As I got up and reached for my alarm, I felt a rush of fluid run out of my nose. I pinched my nose, turned off my alarm and went to the bathroom to see what I knew was going to be a bloody nose.

As I looked in the mirror I saw a stream of blood flowing from my nose. There was so much blood that every time it would clot, the clot would be so thick and so long that it would just slip down my throat and I would end up coughing it out. This would of course lead to another river of blood flowing from my nose.

After 28 minutes the bleeding became reasonable; it took another 19 before it was down to an extremely slow drip — slow enough that it seemed like it wasn't bleeding. By 11:00a I had swallowed so much blood that I was starting to feel a little ill (I'm sure the amount of blood I lost didn't help).

Around 11:20a I started bugging Doug about going to lunch so my body could start digesting something other than my own blood. As we walked toward our cars in the parking lot, I noticed that I had a flat tire. Oh, and did I mention that I just had to replace my battery earlier this week?

Hopefully next week is a little better...

We finally had a productive week for wedding planning. We got most of the design done for our invitations, we met with a travel agent for our honeymoon, we found rings and we booked a DJ. We also may have found a harpist and justice of the peace, but we don't know if either of them will be available. Hopefully we find out about the justice of the peace, harpist and some honeymoon options this week. By the end of the month We hope to have the invitations done, our rings ordered, and the justice of the peace and the harpist booked.

Wednesday night I made the trip up to Ithaca for Chinese food. This 220 mile trip ranks pretty high on the distance driven for food scale, coming in a close second just behind the 230 mile trip for Taco Bell.

I got to Evan's apartment around 10:30p, at which point we headed over to the KDR house for a 16 team beer pong tournament. We did decent and I was able to get a successful bounce in every game we played. On the main floor of the house they have a pool table, foosball, a souped up arcade machine and a big screen tv.

Thursday morning we went paintballing. It was my first time playing indoors; I enjoyed it, but definitely liked playing outside better. One thing I didn't anticipate at all was how slimy we would get playing indoors; by the time we left our clothes were covered in a film of paint, sweat and whatever else hits the floor in there.

Thursday night was the much anticipated Chinese Buffet! They rented out the party room (which is about the size of the entire Chinese buffet in Carlisle) and rolled in a keg. It was awesome to see the waiters pumping the keg and filling pitchers. The food was accompanied by various drinking games: fuck the dealer; up the river, down the river; pong; flip cup; etc. The trip was definitely worth it!

Friday afternoon Evan and I went to Turning Stone to play poker. We played No Limit Hold 'Em with $1/$2 blinds. It was pretty tough to play since there were 10 people at the table, we weren't getting anything decent and the pots were pretty big for the blinds; but all in all it was a fun time. I'd like to go back to a casino at some point when I have some more money to play with.

Friday night Evan had Contacts (meeting with the pledges and talking to them about KDR), but luckily Amy's brother had two tickets to the hockey game that he was trying to get rid of. The game was a lot more exciting than I thought it would be. The fans and pep band are really intense and do everything they can to distract the other team. Apparently Cornell was voted as having the most intimidating hockey rink to play in and it's pretty clear why when you see a game there.

The rest of the weekend was filled with hanging out, drinking and playing Guitar Hero II. I also learned how to play Mexicali, a drinking dice game that I had been wondering about since I saw it being played in Havoc. This trip was a really nice mini-vacation, I just wish I could do stuff like this more often.