Happy Holidays

I set up our Christmas tree today. With four cats, it can't be anything too elaborate or delicate. Elliot's mom gave us this fake tree last year, and it's perfect for our house. As you can see, Yoink is already enamored with it. He keeps waiting for me to leave the room, but I'm increasingly worried about what will happen when I do. Let's see if he can stay on Santa's "nice" list this year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

What am I thankful for this year? That I'm almost done with law school! I have just a little more than one semester left to go.

By this time next year, hopefully I'll have a job and a REAL Thanksgiving vacation. Not a "break" from school that is spent making outlines and PowerPoint presentations and reading case law. Next year, I'll be able to eat my Tofurky in peace.

Of course, I'm thankful that I've had the opportunity to go to law school in the first place. Don't think I'm ungrateful. I'm just really glad that my tour of duty is almost over. And with that said, I must get back to outlining my presentation on the intersection of Native American treaty rights and federal wildlife laws. *sigh*

Happy National Adoption Month!

November is National Adoption Month!

National Adoption Month celebrates family and brings about awareness that there are hundreds of thousands of children in foster homes waiting to be adopted.

Both my family and Elliot's family have been expanded and enriched through adoption. If you would like to learn more about National Adoption Month, click here or here.

My Birthday!

I celebrated (yet another) birthday on Friday, and I was fortunate enough to get to share it with my family. I'd like to thank them for making the road trip to my casa and for tolerating my cats for the weekend. Here are a few pictures:


Laura and (her boyfriend) Spencer at the duck pond on Saturday.


My parents, eagerly awaiting entry to the county fair Saturday night.


Elliot and Mark, apparently pretending to be comedy and tragedy theatre masks.


Sara and me at the fair. It was COLD!


At brunch Sunday morning. L-R: Spencer, Laura, Sara, Dad, Mom, me, Elliot.

Reception Camera #24!!!

What with all of our home repairs and the other fun and exciting things going on in our lives, we completely forgot to get camera #24 developed. Oops!

Here are the pictures:

Reception Camera 24

Update! Our new bedroom looks great all put together!

Bed and bookshelf



Closet Curtain and a chair and bed again.



Yo! He's the fishy, I'm the human!

We have such an adult looking room now(except for the stuffed animals)!
-This is a first for us-

Mary and Kelli

I love this picture of Kelli and me. It was taken at Kelli's wedding reception last year by her cousin, Reagan, who photographed my wedding, too.

I miss Kelli. We live too far apart, in my opinion. :(

And now our room is painted!

Before:


In between:


After:



Finally we can have nice walls!

Two down one to go!

Now that we have Sara's room done there is only ours left to go!

Here is the before of Sara's room...



...and here is one in the middle!



This is the after picture.

A Hawk in our neighbor's front yard!

And it looks like it is eating something.


Pretty cool eh?

We have all sorts of animals around here. Owls, Hawks, um other birds and of course racoons and cats and bunnies and pigs. What a neighborhood!

I Must Get a Job Soon :(

The first year of law school is all about figuring out if you really want to be there, and if you do, how to organize your time and write your exams well. The second year is all about figuring out if you want to concentrate in any one area of law, and about trying to get an internship, externship, or summer job. And the third year is all about finding a job once you graduate. That's MY take on it, anyway.

I'm in my third year now. *Sigh.*

I've been really lucky to get lots of interviews... I just need to figure out once and for all what I want to do with my degree. There are so many things to consider: salary, benefits, the kind of work I'll do, flex time, travel requirements, location. I know that these are things that every person considers when they are looking for a job-- but I feel like I'm setting the tone of my career with this first job out of law school, so it's kind of scary.

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Clotilda Is Sneering At Me

Today is blog about the environment day!

So everybody should consider buying compact florescent bulbs to replace their aging conventional bulbs and try to use less disposable plastic bags and all that stuff! Mary and I have been making a conscious effort to lessen our impact on the enviornment and we may even one day become carbon neutral. We also regularly make sure to make trips to the special hazardous waste disposal site at the dump for electronics, batteries, chemicals, and if we ever manage to burn out a compact fluorescent light that is where we will take it too because it has mercury in it or something.

Good luck everybody!

Never judge a book by its movie. ~J.W. Eagan

Exception: The Princess Bride by William Goldman. Both the book and the movie are excellent.

The Princess Bride is the last book that Elliot and I have finished reading together, and I just want to take the time to recommend this book to our friends and family. It was really fun and Elliot and I both enjoyed it a lot.



I keep a list of the books Elliot and I read together and I also write down when we finish reading them. My records reveal that we average 1 book each month. Not bad, huh? We've been reading together for just over 2 years and we're on our 25th book right now.

New Carpet!!!

At long last, we have replaced the disgusting carpet that was in our house when we bought it. (I'm talking SERIOUSLY gross.) And we're re-painting all of the bedrooms, too. The computer room (our 3rd bedroom) has been freshly painted, but we still need to get the other two bedrooms finished.

Here are some before and after pictures of the computer room:


Look at this nasty carpet! It was at least 15 years old because that's how long the people who owned the house before us had lived here and they said they'd never replaced the carpet.


And here is our new carpet. It's brown and white berber.


The last owners of our home painted AROUND their furniture when they painted their walls. Can you believe that? I hated the color they had painted the computer room anyway. Elliot and I found a match for the old color in the Home Depot paint department and it was called "Salty Tear," which was exactly what I was crying when we finally painted over this terrible color. Salty tears of joy.


Here's our new carpet and new paint job. We picked a darker blue and I LOVE it.


Another before...


...and after.

My Husband

Taken 1/3/04 at Mary's parent's house.

Asian Festival

Last Saturday Elliot, John, Sheila, and I went to the annual Asian Festival held in downtown Tallahassee. It was really cool-- there were lots of booths set up by vendors selling food, clothing, arts, and crafts. There were some informational booths, and there were also two stages exhibiting dance, music, and martial arts performances. We tried samosas and persimmons for the first time and heard Hawaiian music on an instrument we've never seen before.

Here are a few pictures:



A belly dancer.



Elliot and John.



A lady fan-dancing.

Driving on I-75

Here's a picture that Elliot took in December 2003, after he got his first digital camera for Christmas:

We're on the mental_floss magazine website!

Our friend Randy blogs for mental_floss and one of his recent posts, "Your Own Personal Yellow Submarine," features a picture from our honeymoon!

Here's the link: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/8228#more-8228

Yay!

Hey, Vern! Ernest is on my blog...

In honor of Elliot's profound love for Jim Varney and his Ernest character, here are a few funny shorts that I found on youtube.com: