We just got tickets to the April 15 show! I’m excited!

For the last two days I’ve been doing proofreading for a company that makes pocket calanders. At the top of every page there is a different quote.

Here are some of my favorites:

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” -Peter F. Drucker

“The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.”-Denis Waitley

” It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.” -Moliere

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” -e. e. cummings

“Some editors are failed writers,but so are most writers.” -T.S. Eliot

” I am a part of all that I have met.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.” -Mother Teresa

“You can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things.” -Ken Kesey

“Once you have them in the funny bone, their hearts and minds will follow.” Robert Wilder

and my personal motto:

“Nothing makes a person more productive that the last minute.” -Unknown

Back at the begining of the TV season Patrick and I decided to Tivo the new show Lost because the previews made it look sort of interesting. We’ve been Tivoing it all this time and saving the episodes, but we never started watching them. Then one day we realized we’d accidentally deleted the first episode. But apparently over the winter season break, they ran it again. So this past week or so we’ve been sitting down trying to catch up. Every episode gets us more addicted. There are so many mysteries and it seems instead of solving any of them, they keep introducing new ones.

On one of the two episodes we watched last night, I thought they killed one of my favorite characters, it’s the guy who played Merry in the Lord of the Rings movies. The only other actor on the show that I’ve ever seen anywhere before is Matthew Fox from Party of Five. So those two guys and the main girl are my favorite.

The show is about the surviving passengers of a plane that crashed on an island and they are now stranded there because they were a 1000 miles of course, so people are looking for them in the wrong place. The island is a bit wacked out and that combined with the mysteries of all the people, makes for a great show.

Anyway, the reason I’m explaining all this is so that I can share a quote from Patrick as we were watching the show last night. Right when it appeared that Charlie, the character I like, was dead and I was pretending not to like the show any more, Patrick busted out with “This show is going to drive me to drink!” It was great and probably one of the funniest things he’s ever said.

New Erasure cd is out today and thanks to the beauty of Itunes it’s only $9.99! Too bad the 5 nights in a row they are playing in NY in April were already sold out by the time I knew about them.

And yes Jeff, this entry is for you so that I can get a nice eraser comment or two!

For some great pictures of the snow visit the link to Patrick’s site. He had fun taking before and after photos.

Ok, I’ve finally gotten around to getting my pictures from Christmas up. Click here to view them.

I’ve added a link in the links section (on the far right) that will take you to Patrick’s website. That way you can read about the mundane details of our life from both perspectives.

We had a good bit of snow on Wednesday. Patrick liked that it was “powder” worthy of a ski slope. We took some good pictures of the dogs playing and of the frozen river.

Tomorrow, we are supposed to be hit with a blizzard that will leave us with 10 inches of snow. That should be fun, right? I guess all our wondering where winter was has finally caught up with us. But as I pointed out to Patrick, if we are going to have temps below 30, then it ought to be some sort of law that we have snow.

We had a spot on our white shower curtain so I decided to wash it. Leaving me with words of wisdom to impart to everyone:

If you have a cotton shower curtain, you really shouldn’t wash and dry it unless you want it to be fit for a Barbie doll house. You could say it shrunk a bit!

Mom, Rach and Kelli wanted to see a picture.

I just drove down the block to Staples. It was a piece of cake. I’m not sure what I was so nervous about. Of course there are much bigger roads to take (and bridges, yikes) on the way to my interview on Monday.

Today we woke up with ACTUAL snow! But we still didn’t have as much as there was in Texas at Christmas. The dogs enjoyed nosing around in it on their walk. There are supposed to be snow flurries all day.

We saw Rent tonight; Our first broadway play! It took me a couple of minutes to get used to the fact that the entire thing is sung, but once I got passed that I loved it. There were parts that brought me to near tears. I was feeling really stupid about that until afterwards, as we were walking out, I saw that many of the others were saying the same thing. Drew Lachey, Nick’s brother, was the lead. He’s a short little thing, but he was actually pretty good. His singing was a tad nasal at times, but overall I thought he wasn’t bad. The show is a bit raunchier at times than I was aware of, but I think it was a good first choice.

The playbill listed other shows that are out and now we have a whole list of things we want to see. Molly Ringwald and Jason Biggs are in something….Ethan Hawke and Wallace Shawn are in a new show opening soon, and then there is Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays, which sadly isn’t playing even half that many Sundays! Ohhhh, I think I remember reading a while back that Jeremy Piven and Andrew McCarthy are in something together…I wonder if that’s closed yet?

Saturday night we walked the dogs and decided to give them time to play. We have two main spots that we can play in, the big circle (closer to the river with no fence) and the little circle (fence around the river). We decided to play in the big circle because it was less muddy.

Now we know we can trust our dogs off leash as long as they are focused, so we brought a bone to throw so they could go retrieve it. Everything was fine, Bailey was eating Sam’s head and pounding him to the ground in order to get the bone and Sam was busy out manuvering Bail.

And then, out of nowhere, fireworks errupted on the other side of the river between Brooklyn and Manhattan. At the first blast, Bailey rushed into the little roped off street that separates the park from the real road. We got her back quickly and tried to refocus her. We thought everything was fine until there was another blast. Then she headed straight for the real street into oncoming traffic with Sam following at her heels. Sam wasn’t scared, he just didn’t want to be left behind.

They ran straight across the street and Patrick and I were chasing as fast as we could. All I could think of is, “Oh God, I’m going to watch my dogs get killled.” But somehow they made it safely across and all the way down to the front door of our building. By the time Patrick and I finally caught up, they were sitting pressed up against the front door. I let them in while Patrick went back for the leashes and they ran straight to our apartment door.

I guess the good thing is, we know they know where home is!

It is finally out and out snowing here! It’s supposed to snow between 1-2 inches today! But of course by Thursay it will be back up to 60 still leaving this as possibly the mildest NY winter ever. And California and Texas will still have had more snow.

It’s been a long time since I colored my hair last and I had some really bad highlight grow out going on so I decided to cover them. I’d tried that before and they continued to show through the color, but I was still hopeful that I could cover them.

You know how when you have hair that has elements of reddishness about it you are supposed to stay away from anything with golden in the name? Aparently that goes for carmel too. I picked carmel brown and my hair is now a nice shade of auburn. It’s really not bad, just not what I was going for. But at least now the blonde streaks are gone!

Tonight we are going to see Xanadu at the movie theater. I have to say movie theater cause when I told Kelli we were seeing it in the theater she asked if they were really going to roller skate on stage! I’m excited. I will never forget watching it outside on a wall in Commerce at ETSU when I was little!

Yuck. I’m job searching again. The lady I’ve been filling in for at the advertising agency is coming back in a week. They had said when I first started that there may be someone else going on an extended vacation that I could fill in for, but that’s not happening. And they didn’t give me much warning. So after next week I have one day scheduled for the rest of the month. If I only knew quark. Or somebody in publishing.

Patrick and I were both unexpectedly off yesterday, so even though I had a few things I had to do, we decided to quickly go get our drivers licenses since it was the first time we were both off when the DMV was open.

I knew that things like that can end up taking awhile, but I never imagined it be 5 or 6 hours! First we went to the Jersey City DMV and despite long lines and a gruff receptionist, things were moving along quickly. I only had one small complaint– that I had to fill out the exact same form 2 times, with a comment to Patrick about carbon paper being very useful.

We had numbers 77 (Patrick) and 79 (me). And as I said things were moving along quickly. That is until they called number 76 and then it was eons before we ever got to 77. Patrick went up to window number one and I waited a few minutes until it was my turn. And when I was called to window number 6 I proceed to the quickest route there, not being able to see that to continue the way I was going I’d be walking in front of someone getting their photo taken. Hey, I’d never been there before, there was a wall up and I couldn’t see that. So I stopped and was going to wait the two seconds it would have taken for them to finish when the lady who was going to help me barked at me to go around!

So I went around, feeling dumb. And when she asked me to sign here, she pointed at what I thought was a piece of paper I had handed her so I reached for a pen and was about to sign when she informed me that I needed to be signing the little keypad thing. Ok, again I felt dumb, but I did it. And she kept making me start over. It wasn’t until the third time that she finally told me what I was doing wrong, my knuckles where apparently hitting the screen. So by this time I’m feeling about 2 inches tall and it’s time for my picture. Needless to say I’m not smiling very big!

So I go over to the line behind the blue ropes where I’ve been instructed to go and Patrick is coming towards me saying no, we are leaving. He explains to me that because we are doing an out of state transfer, and their computer is broken, they can’t finish ours today. We’ve been there for 2 hours at this point. We’ve gone through many check points and at each one told them exactly what we were doing, and no one had said a word about not being able to help us. You’d think they’d want to post a sign or something.

We were directed to the closest place that was open “late,” meaning after 4:30, that could help us. Patrick tried to explain to the man that if he gave us the physical address of the place our car’s navigation system could get us there, but the man would have none of that and just kept giving Patrick directions.

So we follow the directions, which have no sings of streets or distances and somehow find the spot despite it being much further away than the man had implied. We explain to the people at the front what had happened and we get rushed to a special line, which we somehow took to mean we’d be processed faster. No such luck. We were handed numbers 136 and 137 just as we heard the call for number 80!

We groaningly took our seats and waited our turn. When they finally reached our number we go to another line and sit and wait. But this line moves fast. We come across our first person with any personality whatsoever when we get to the front of this line. But then we are knocked down again when she tells us they sent us to the wrong line, we should have gone to have a vision test first…And we’ve already been through 4 people who neglected to direct us to the right place.

Thankfully she tells us to come directly back to her when we are done. After waiting a short time through the vision test line, we finish and proceed back on our way to purple lady as we dubbed her. The lady at the front of the room didn’t want to let us through but we were having none of that….So we skipped on through to the front of the line and in two seconds had our NJ DL’s two hours after arriving at the second location.

We were going to have to go Clark Griswald at Wally World if they didn’t get us straightened out pretty soon! With travel and wait time it was about 5 hours….and a lot of traffic.

So Kelli has already told me we are lame for not doing anything to celebrate new years. We basically spent new years eve day traveling though, and when we were done, we were too tired for much else. A 4 hour flight will do that to you.

Kelli wants me to publish my new years resolutions, I will humor her with a few I’ve come up with.

1) Wear my glasses when I read
2) exercise more
3) eat less fat
4) get over needle phobia
5) worry less
6) learn to sew

Patrick and I got back Friday evening from a great trip back to Texas. We got to see lots of family and a few friends, though not as many friends as we would have liked.

We had an unexpected funeral to attend when Patrick’s great aunt died at 89. While it was awful that it happened, it was very nice that we were able to be there for the funeral. I think it made Patrick feel much better about things.

I got to see my parents, my sister, and two sets of aunts and uncles as well as several cousins. The funny thing is that it has made me a little more homesick.

My parents are storing some of our extra stuff and had it all set up in the bedroom we stayed in. I just kept going around the room and touching all my stuff. And we got to sit in our huge, wonderful recliner. They also let us drive my old car, which they had bought from us. It was so nice to have the freedom to drive again. Since I don’t drive here, I leave that to Patrick, it had been 6 months since I’d driven. And I love to drive.

We went and saw our house which was nicely decorated for Christmas and looks really well taken care of. They have built tons of shopping around the area. If we ever move back into that house, Old Navy will be way too close to me!

Our dogs stayed at the vets an extra day and after 11 days of only getting out of a pen 2 times a day, they were over joyed to see us again. We had to take them to play and wear off some of that extra energy. I think they thought we weren’t coming back for them.

We had a great time!