Wishes....

We had a wonderful, restful time at Disney World a few weekends ago. I'm still learning the ins and outs of the new camera. Have a magical day!

Magic Kingdom

Donald Duck that I drew in the Animation Academy.

Teacups.

Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow

Blue Sky

Our neighbor's "pond" where the boys were boogie boarding

We're here, we're dry and we never lost power but for a few blinks. I think a total of 20 inches of rain fell around here and I believe it. It rained for 24 hours straight. Heavy rain. We watched the tops of the trees blow around. We watched the water flow down our street (AWAY from our house - thankfully). We watched our neighbor's kids boogie board on the puddle/lake that had formed in front of their house. I washed my hair in rainwater after I worked out yesterday. It was cold but VERY refreshing. Besides a few small twigs and leaves down, we are no worse for wear.

The rain let up last night so we thought we'd trek into town to go to Old Navy. Yesterday was their $12 jeans sale. As soon as we got into Tallahassee the rain came down in sheets. It was awful. We started to turn around and then just decided to keep the craziness going. I don't know what we were thinking...we didn't even bring rain coats with us. And to add even more to the madness...Old Navy closes at 9, we left our house at 8:23. That's not enough time to get there by 9 on a regular, sunny, clear day. When we arrived at 8:57 at Old Navy to find the doors locked we dejectedly went to Target. Of course, while we're in there it begins to pour again so we have to run to the car, unsucessfully dodging raindrops. I guess we were pretty desparate to get out of the house.

This morning there is blue skies and hopefully the rain is gone for a while. On the bright side, we won't have to water the lawn or plants for a while. I also looked at the radar and saw that Florence was getting TONS of rain this morning. Now everyone (our families) that worried for us can get a taste of Fay. Stay dry!

Matt's Video on Fay:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=855736077968192692&hl=en

Update on Fay

We're home from work, we have sandbags for the doors and we're just riding out the rain and wind right now. Please pray that our new house does not get any water inside of it unless it's coming through a pipe. :-) We haven't lost power yet, but they're reporting downed trees in our county so it's probably only a matter of time. Especially since the worst of the storm has yet to make it to us. It's been raining steadily since this morning. The winds are gusty and our dirt road it a mud pit. I expect "Swamp Thing" to rise out of it any minute now. Please keep us and everyone down here in your prayers. I'll update later as the power allows.

Rain, Fay, Rain

Fay wasn’t the storm everyone expected it to be. I’m thankful for that. I admit I looked forward to the possibility of a day off. It looks like we’ll have a wet weekend, though. The storm is turning left at Jacksonville and curving back toward us. At that point it will be a tropical depression.

More rain is wonderful news for the dirt roads in our rural southern neighborhood. Muddy roads are not really a problem by themselves, it’s the ruts created by the ½ ton pick-up trucks which seem to be the car of choice by most of the men in the county. Our poor cavalier just can’t make it over the huge bumps and ruts their tires create. We’ve contemplated parking on the main road and walking home, but that would get mud EVERYWHERE. I guess I should just prepare for a weekend at home. It’s almost like we are riding out a hurricane, but with less wind. I wrote this blog earlier, and before I could publish it, Matt showed me how Fay was expected to hit the Atlantic and turn into a hurricane and bear left toward Tallahassee. It will be a small hurricane, but crazy nonetheless. Any volunteers to come and hunker down with us?? I promise we're entertaining.

We went to Orlando this past weekend since it was the first chance for us to use our passes at Disney. It was nice to have them because we were able to do really low-key stuff and discover things we hadn’t done before. We had supper in one park and lunch in another. It was really cool. We went to an animation academy in Hollywood Studios (I still want to call it MGM.) where we learned how to draw Donald Duck and we could keep the drawing. We’ll probably go back to that all the time and have a collection of characters. We also went to a really fun show at Epcot, Turtle Talk with Crush. Epcot has redone the seas pavilion and now it’s basically all Finding Nemo. Crush the cartoon interacts with kids in the audience and answers questions and makes jokes. It’s really fun.


I was glad we had the tickets where we could come and go because I was super tired this weekend. Friday nights have become our stay at home nights. We don’t even go out to eat because we’re both so tired. It’s great to go to bed knowing I can sleep in on Saturday. (If you call 8 or 8:30 “sleeping in”.) We traveled to Orlando and went to Ikea and 2 parks on Friday so we didn’t get the early night we were used to and I felt it. I feel so old as I write this. It’s not like I run marathons all week, but, the stress of work was rough last week.

Of course, I shouldn’t feel too old. In high school I napped all the time – Sunday afternoons were nap time. I don’t need those anymore so perhaps I’ve matured a little, but not too much. J Matt would say I need to reinstitute the Sunday nap, but I hate to waste Sundays and make them go by faster because the sooner they’re over the sooner Monday morning comes. Ugh.

Video killed the radio star.

Click here to check out the video we made of Martin and Maggie's recent visit.



I hope this works! It was too large to download into Blogger.

An Ode To Andrea - My sister

I was recently informed (by Andrea) that I never blogged about her. She is my one and only little sister. It's just the two of us in our family and I'm thankful for that. We've always liked it that way. She is 4 years younger than me, taller than me, has browner hair than me, and browner eyes than me, but is no where near as cool as me...(just kidding).

She is one of the funniest people I know. She likes to sleep, the color purple, turtle cheesecake, spaghetti, chick flicks, and horn rimmed glasses. She is not very neat, but, always seems to know where something is. She likes products like moisturizer, shampoos and body sprays. She always has the latest greatest products and I love to shower at her place and try them.

She likes to dress casually, but, has good tastes in clothes. She always surprises me when I'm home for a visit. We see family, go shopping, hang around the house and she wears nothing but a t shirt and pajama pants. Sometimes she might put on jeans. And then on Sunday morning she is decked out with an awesome dress that she just bought or my mom made for her last week with jewelry, nice hair and high heels. She gets to wear blue scrubs to work so that is really good for her. She also buys a new pair of running shoes every Christmas with her Christmas money but I have yet to see her run in them.

She has Crohn's disease and was really sick for a while when she was in high school. Luckily she was in the hospital in B'ham. This is lucky because I was in Tuscaloosa at the time and I could come cheer her up. She's the only person I know who has gone over a week without eating. (not her idea of course) She doesn't like for me to boss her, go to Hobby Lobby or Micheal's, or being near camel crickets (Matt or daddy has to kill them for her.

When she was little she had a doll with old-lady hair named Laura. She liked to play house and pretend she was a cheerleader. She twirled with Muscle Shoals city twirlers and marched in a few parades (even though there was no chance Mars Hill would ever have majorettes). She still impresses me with her twirling abilities. She was a bit of a tattle tale, but I admit to going as far as I could to aggravate her, like a good big sister should.

Besides Matt, she is my best friend. She always gets my jokes and laughs at them. She knows about me practically better than anyone and still likes me. She always can make me laugh and she doesn't take unimportant things too seriously. She was also really great when we changed our Christmas schedule to help out me and Matt. That meant a lot. She is a great sister and I feel bad she thought she was left out of these blogs. Matt has so many siblings and for me there's just her so I certainly don't want her to feel left out. Even if we weren't sisters, if we met we'd still like each other. Love you, Andrea!!!

Andrea and Rebecca

She also does NOT like birds. (unless she is taking pictures of them)

Snow day.

She loves her niece Scuba Steve.

And Steve loves her.

Martin's Birthday Weekend Adventures

All dressed up before we headed to Downtown Disney.

Matt and Martin after the Summit Plummet at Blizzard Beach

The Summit Plummet at Blizzard Beach

Martin and Maggie.

Matt and I

We had a wonderful visit with Martin and Maggie this weekend. We went to the beach, got some sushi and saw IronMan on Friday. Then we headed down to Orlando early Saturday morning and went to Blizzard Beach and Pleasure Island which is all part of Disney. It was SO much fun. The places were crowded but we got to do all the things we wanted to do. We rode the lazy river, a couple of innertube rides, the Teamboat Springs which is a family raft ride and Matt and Martin braved Summit Plummet, the 12 story super slide. We went to several shows at the Adventurers' Club in Pleasure Island as well as two shows of at the Comedy Warehouse. It was nice to get down there before they close it. We walked through a couple of the dance clubs but we didn't stay. We preferred the comedy. It was nice to have such a fun break and to spend it with such fun people.

A busy time is coming up for us. Matt and I are counting the days until our trip back down to Orlando next weekend. It's the first open date that we'll be able to use our Season Pass tickets. We're splurging and staying at the Coronado Springs resort on Disney property. It's supposed to have a really nice pool so we definitely plan to swim.

On a side note, if you ever want to improve your body image, just go to a touristy water park for the day. There were some impressive displays squeezed into bikinis and speedos. I'm impressed with their self confidence, but I'm also shocked at the sizes of some people. It inspires you to excersise. I want to be able to keep up with my children, not huffing and puffing behind them. Or even worse, there were several kids huffing and puffing behind us! Kids just seem to be getting bigger and bigger. Matt and I discuss how we want to feed our future children and it's almost like they won't get to try a lot of foods that other kids probably eat daily. It's a shame that it's so hard to find a middle ground, but, I guess it's better to be safe than sorry. While it made me feel better about how I look in a swimsuit when I saw the bravery of some of the adults, I did not feel that good when I passed a 12-year-old boy on the way up to a slide while he huffed and puffed up the stairs....