Five Years

4 Years Ago???

After all of yesterday's excitement (and yes, I finally did get some sleep - from 8 pm to 8 am), I was quite glad to see that the Monday Photo Shoot for the week wouldn't require much effort.

You may or may not know that today marks the fourth anniversary of By The Way, which was started on this date in 2003 (here's the first entry). To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to have a historical-themed Photo Shoot:

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Find a picture from 2003 and post it. Any picture is fine; it just has to be from the now-oh-so-distant year of two
thousand aught-three. Surely you have pictures from then? Yes?

Gee... 2003... what happened that year that I might have some pictures of?

Actually, 2003 was a big year for "big deals" in my life. Besides getting married, we also got engaged, my dad got married, I got my first job promotion when I went to the Comm Center, etc. However, I was without home internet access for much of the year and therefore many of the big deals were never actually put into the computer. I started blogging the year after, so many of my activities since then have been better documented.

Did Someone Say Hula Girl??

Scalzi's Monday Photo Shoot: Someone in your house you probably have one (or more) bobble-head figurines. Immortalize them in photo. For this, any bobbly toy will do -- bobbly hula girls, toy animals with bobbly tails, it's all good. They just have to be bobbly somewhere along the line.

I just KNEW I should've logged on and checked for the Photo Shoot before Scott and I left the house today! We saw a super-cool Captain Jack bobblehead at one of the gift shops at the Disney-MGM Studios today. And I would've taken a picture of it if I had known it would have a purpose later on!

Alas, we do have some manner of spring-loaded dust collector on the bookshelf: a porcelain hula girl and boy (she hulas... he just sits there), ordered from an actual Hawaiian shop online. This was actually a very cool purchase to get in the mail, because the box was stuffed with crumpled newspapers with Hawaiian news. What can I say? It's the little things that amuse me!

Why did I order a hula girl and have it delivered across the Pacific, and then the Continental U.S.? Well you see, it matched the island theme we were going for with our wedding reception. I loved the fact that the boy and girl were on the same base (not standard for hula girls), and that it wasn't the same old boring bride & groom sitting on top of the cake.

Actually, the cake was probably my favorite part of our wedding reception. Four layers, each decorated with a different type of seashell (real... definitely not edible), with a freakin' HULA GIRL on the top. I bet you've never seen one like it!

I Own A Car!

That's right folks, Frances is all mine! I paid her off earlier this year, but the title has always been in Joanne's name (because the loan was also in her name). So we spent an hour on Friday afternoon going to the tax collector in Brooksville to re-title the car. $60 later, I have a registration and in 7-10 days I'll have a title, both with MY name on it. And then in March I'm going to renew again, and bump Joanne's name completely off. Then the car will be 100% mine. Woot!

When we got back to the hotel, I ran into my mom and some other family in the hall and started yelling, "I OWN A CAR!" I was so loud that Scott came out of our room to yell at me for the noise. He was kidding, of course. But if it hadn't been 5 in the afternoon, I probably would have been yelled at by someone else.

Of course, the reason Joanne and I were in the same place at the same time was for Mom's wedding. I figure everyone who cares about all of the details was there, so here's a short list of my favorite parts:

Pastor Tim speaking during the ceremony about how both Mom and Michael have adult children and grandchildren. For the rest of the afternoon, my aunts and cousins were all asking when I had a kid and why they didn't know. Then Scott got in on the act, looking straight at me and saying "why didn't **I** know?"

Pastor Bob changing the words to Come What May. The real lyrics say "listen to my heart, can you hear it sings, telling me to give you everything." He changed it to "telling you to give me everything." Actually, he was my favorite part of the wedding weekend. If I wasn't committed to the First National Church of People Who Work on Sundays, I could actually see myself driving down there for church every week.

Seeing the family. We don't see nearly enough of eachother.

By the way, can someone please tell me what the appropriate response is to someone saying, "congratulations on marrying your mom off"? My response, "yeah... now she won't be a burden to me in old age" didn't go over so well. I can honestly say it went over less well than a fart in church. I mean, why are you congratulating ME? It's not like I set them up or something. And I WAS kidding.

As always, my camera performed less than ideally. My only two pictures of me and Scott together were too blurry to save. And of the four we took with me and mom, none came out, and I had to crop us out of a picture with other people. And we're still fuzzy. So the only picture I'm going to post here is one taken after the ceremony. I titled it, "Bridesmaids Jockeying for Position." That's me allll the way on the left, and the matron of honor alllll the way on the right, with mom and a bunch of other women in the middle.



I guess they didn't get the memo that it's all about me. Oh well!

Step Away From the eBAY

I have an illness. It's true. And tonight my eBAY obsession took a surprising bad turn:

I discovered the joy of swooping in minutes before the end of an auction and stealing cheap things right out from under other peoples' noses.

I also discovered cheap jewelery.

I bought three things tonight, and paid about $25 including shipping. I bought a pair of fake diamond studs for $2.50, a cheap knock-off of the Tiffany necklace I love for 99 cents(!) and a really nice knock-off of the bracelet that matches my Tiffany necklace for less than $7. Sure, it's junk jewelery. But if just one of the items lives up to my expectations, I'll be happy.

Actually, today wasn't the standard JAMIE monDAY. Scott is having an issue with his foot, and couldn't get in to see the doctor until tomorrow morning, so he called in sick. I, nurturing soul that I am, took him to IHOP for breakfast. I haven't been to IHOP in ages (probably since the summer I spent with Mom and Alicia). It's actually more ghetto than Denny's. But our server was great, and I was happy to look at a menu other than the brown paper one at C.B. I got the stuffed french toast, which turned out to be more of a deep-fried donut. Tasty, but sweet! Now I know why it came with "normal" breakfast food too.

I am also about 3/4 of the way through making the batch of Irish Potatoes I was drafted into. I don't know why I'm bothering -- the whole batch is probably going to be a whopping 50 potatoes. (and I'm making them small!) And does anyone know how well cream cheese travels? My suggestion to anyone reading this: don't eat the tiny brown balls at the wedding.

And Scott washed the 600 TC sheets today, which went immediately back on the bed. I'm curious to see how long a set of sheets will last when not in rotation with another set. Apparently I should have bought another set when I had the chance! See? Sometimes internet bargain shopping pays off!

Speaking of the internet, Karen from the Naked Ovary met her daughter in China yesterday. I dare you to read her first "mommy blog" post and not cry happy tears for a random stranger.

And thus concludes this evening's stream of consciousness. Good night.