When I was purging like a crazy sane person the other day, I found some pretty funny things. For example, I found a list I made when I was pregnant, documenting some of my symptoms in about a three-week span. I vaguely recall making this list. It was somewhere during my second trimester, which I recall in my memory as being the "good trimester." This list would suggest the contrary. I was obviously having a lot of migraines at the time. So many, in fact, that I took some Tylenol 3 and it seemed to cause me to have contractions. Anyhoo, here is my list. Please don't mind the "D word" (it happens to everyone) or my atrocious spelling. (God bless spell checker.)
It shall be my reminder in case I get any funny ideas about a #2.
I woke up on New Years day feeling super antsy. I started picking up the house, and before I knew it I was knee deep in outdated and ill-fitting clothing in my closet. I packed up 5 garbage bags of clothing, and now I can see my closet floor and finally let go of many things I really don't need. I also de-Christmas-ified the house and purged and organized the bathroom (where I found cold medication that expired in 2001!) and the kitchen. I am not super organized as it is, and with that class I had even less time to keep the house in order. It feels great to reclaim some order, and I am excited to keep working on it before I run out of steam and my lazy Susan goes to crap again. But enough of that talk.
Yesterday was my dad's 60th birthday, and my mom organized a small party for him at his favorite restaurant: Rosalie's Cucina. My parents have been going there almost every Friday since it opened in 1995, and at this point they are very well know there. I, unfortunately for me, haven't been there in 10 or 11 years, and Pat had never been there, but lucky for us we were invited to the party. My mom was able to get a private room upstairs, and we all got to experience some perks simply for being related to my father. It was fantastic to see everyone dote on him, and the very Italian mandolin player even played a personalized version of tura-lura-lura to my very Irish father.
You probably don't have to look too closely to see the ginormous bottle of wine next to my dad. That was a wine the restaurant gave us on the house, and it was delish! Everyone told some great stories (one of my favorites being the time Pat ripped the front off a clothes dryer that took his four quarters and then didn't in fact dry his clothes), told some dirty jokes (no need to elaborate on this one), ate some amazing food, and honored my dad, who is less than thrilled about turning 60.
Here is a picture of our nuclear family.
This is before we got smashed and threw up on ourselves.
A MILLION thank yous to Taryn and Todd for watching Greta while we had some adult fun!
As if that all weren't enough, when we woke up this morning, I figured we'd skedaddle out of there nice and early, but my mom and dad made eggs benedict for us. Best food weekend ever.
Not that most of you care about the minutia of these types of things, but I know at least some of you do, and it seemed worthy of documentation, so I wanted to mention that I gave Greta her first haircut today. For the last few weeks the ends have been pretty tangly, and I was planning to have it professionally done but couldn't wait any longer. I trimmed off as little as possible. We don't plan to grow it so long she looks like a shut-in or anything, but it's definitely hard to make that first cut.
Please, no pictures.
Okay, maybe just one.
I don't think I did too much damage.
But as you can see, I took off as little as possible.
One other thing! You might have noticed that the Picture of the Day since our revamp have been quite lovely. Our friends Alex and Sarah took them, and you can find their portfolios here. They are located in Rochester, and they do a lot of portraiture and wedding photography. We were thrilled with how their portraits of Greta and the whole family turned out. If you are interested in contacting them, let me know and I can put you in touch!
I'm back. Fran forbade me from posting. She wanted all the comment love for herself. She's tried to keep me out of this game, but I can't leave all the Pat Reed fans hangin'. 2009 is my year.
As you can plainly, see we have revamped pnf.com. It was long overdue. We launched the site in November of 2002, and we really hadn't updated the back end or look of the site until now. Ooops. Hope you like it because we are not due to update it again until March of 2016.
If you like the nerdy crap and want to know about the site development, keep reading. If not, skip it. I ditched the old home-grown blog platform in favor of a Drupal-based site. Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is developed and maintained by a community of thousands of developers (and it kicks @$$$$). I started messing with it about a year ago when RIT Libraries was looking for a CMS for our sites. RIT Libraries now has about 12 sites running on the Drupal platform. I am definitely partial, and when I decided to ditch the home-grown system, it was the clear pick for me. Porting the content from the old site to the new one was a bit of a biatch. We had roughly 700 blog posts and almost 6,000 comments. I had to spend several hours understanding the database differences and working on the scripts to massage and port the content. Now that it is done, I am really excited about all the possibilities. I created the custom site template. It is based on the Genesis framework. I'll be prettying it up some more over the next few days/weeks. I wrote most of the JavaScript on the site using the jQuery library. I plan on writing a lot more Ajax-y site functionality soon. I configured Drupal to work with the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. Our home-grown CMS required us to write the HTML for the posts, so this is a welcomed addition. I think that about sums up the majority of the technical aspects of the project. If anyone wants any more information on any of this stuff, please don't hesitate to get a hold of me.
The things that I am excited about:
A stop to the daily hate mail demanding an RSS feed
Relief from the shame and ridicule that I had to endure for the outdated site look
That's right, folks! The web designer portion of the pnf.com duo redesigned the site for the new year (for the first time in six years [six years!]). He will soon be ending his blog-writing strike to introduce you to some of the new features; they should be fairly intuitive, though.
We hope you like the new site. More importantly, we hope you had a great end to 2008 and have a wonderful start to 2009. Here's to good things in the new year!
PS - We hope you enjoyed your extra second and that you used it wisely!
I was recently thinking of what my resolution for 2009 should be, and I thought, I should make my 2009 resolution be that I don't get so stressed out over stuff I can't control (secondarily making me a nicer person), but then I realized that was my resolution last year. And probably the year before too. Damn it. It always works for a while, but why can't I make it stick?
(I love someecards; they always know just the thing to say.)
So what's your resolution? Maybe it will give me an idea for something I might actually be able to attain.
If you don't have a resolution, then just tell me what you're doing for New Years.
And if you don't want me to know what you're doing for New Years, then perhaps you could tell me a entertaining story about an embarrassing thing a friend of yours ever did.
Wow. I just had a hard time remembering the login info for our admin page to post this here update, which means I am a little out of sorts from traveling, lack of sleep, and excessive food and beverage. I will attempt to dust my brain off to recall our Christmas events, and the large number of pictures we took should help.
Wednesday we headed out to the Bing Hamptons. Greta was thrilled to see her Grandma Kathy and Grandpa Dick, and she seemed quite smitten with her Uncle Eric as well. We built a gingerbread tree before dinner.
Here is a level of concentration in a two year old that is rarely seen and even more rarely documented.
After a lasagna dinner, where Greta proclaimed numerous times that "Grandma Kaffey makes the best pasta," we had our traditional gifting of dollar store presents.
Grandpa Dick proudly displays his new bling.
And Grandma Kathy received a new necklace as well: a shot glass that said, "Bachelorette on the loose" and a whistle that said, "Hottie whistle." Classic.
Christmas morning Greta opened presents at the speed of a turtle. She had to play with each toy after she opened a new one. Cinderella was a common theme.
Uncle Eric had to work on Christmas, so we made a visit to the fire station where he was working, and he gave us a nice tour.
The day after Christmas we headed back to the ROC for the night.
The following day we headed to Skaneateles to have our McCarthy family Christmas. The present opening went no faster there, so it took quite a while, but we all got some very nice gifts.
Here is Greta Bean and her Grandma Norma.
One of Greta's favorite gifts was a trunk of dress-up clothes. She tried on almost everything in the trunk.
Even Uncle Phil tried on a fuzzy headband, to join in on the fun.
It was a very musical Christmas. Between us and family members, Greta received the following: a drum set, a keyboard, a toy guitar, a toy organ, and three (count 'em, three) kazoos. Here she is tickling the ivories.
At a few points in the day Greta decided she was a cat.
After all of that opening, Greta needed a nap.
Over the span of the last five days, we've also seen a lot of good friends and we stayed up way past our bedtimes three of those nights. I am very tired and almost looking forward to going back to work tomorrow!
Pat and Greta are off this week, and they will be doing some fun daddy-daughter things.
Oh, and those of you who noticed, we haven't sent our holiday cards out yet. For the first year ever, we decided to have cards professionally made, and even though they ordered them in early December and they shipped on December 15th, we just received them via the good old USPS yesterday. They will be going out in the mail tomorrow. They weren't even sent out on time to kick off Kwanzaa. Sigh.
I am getting less and less believable when I say, “I never win anything,” after I won this in a drawing at Parkleigh, (and this for those of you who remember when I won the title prom queen at a prom-theme party when I was pregnant [it was a drawing, not a popular vote]), and now I’ve we’ve gone and won something else!
Our realtor, Mary Shelsby, just had a contest for anyone who wanted to participate. (All of a sudden I am feeing remiss that I didn’t post about it here because it was open to anyone, but I wanted to win the prize, silly!) Anyway, we sent Mary a photo of our home decorated for the holidays, and she drew a name a random, and I found out last night that we won a $50 gift certificate to our favorite restaurant! She has a really nice write-up and pictures posted here at RochesterScoop.com. I’m so excited!
We’ve been in our house for four and a half years now, and even though the house and I have had our differences, I am fond of it. After winning last night, I started thinking about our home-searching process and how stressful it was but now nice it was to have a person like Mary helping us.
Pat claims my top-five craziest times have been the following (in chronological order):
Pre engagement
Searching for a home
Pre pregnancy
Pregnancy
Postpartum
During one of my top-five craziest times, I was, well, pretty crazy. (I posted this during that time, for example.) Couple that with the fact that, at 6’3”, Pat is practically a giant, and we were looking at homes that were mostly built in the early 1900s. We would go into an otherwise great house, and Pat would be all, “I can’t stand up in the bathroom,” for example. I’m 5’3”, and I think Mary is even shorter than I am, and I would look at Pat like, Can’t you learn to slouch? Didn’t you see the French doors and gumwood trim?? Anyway, Pat and I were probably less than easy for a realtor to deal with, but Mary was so great, and we finally found our house!
I just wanted to share my excitement and reminisce a little. Today is Friday observed for me! I hope everyone has a lovely Christmas, where applicable. Safe travels!
The final is done! I rocked it. I felt so liberated when I was done. When I was driving back from class, I listened to Howard instead of the annoying audio CDs for my class (which are just some narrator reading thousands of definitions from the book) and I felt NO GUILT when I did this. Ahhhhhh.
I would love to celebrate tonight, but I am exhausted and there are bigger fish to fry (holiday cards, wrapping, *ehem* work, a bunch of things I've been putting off). I have been fending off an illness, and now that I've turned in my Scantron sheet and retired my #2 pencil, I know it is going to finally rear its ugly head. Merry Christmas to me.
Dear Santa: All I want for Christmas this year is an Airborne and a nap.
With one and a half days before the final, I can say with utmost certainty that the novelty of studying has worn off. I am embarrassed to admit that at certain points during this class I thought I could actually be a physician if I wanted to be. A mere 14 weeks into a class, I don't think I could possibly want to study less. Boo.
