Whole Fish, and Stuff That Bothers Me.

So.

Jen and I were in Gloucester today, and we thought we would try the new-ish Thai restaurant.
I'm looking at the menu, trying to figure out what mmm mmm dish I'd like to have for lunch. If it were chicken or seafood, I like the battered and fried stuff. I also didn't want noodles, so pad thai was out. I saw some fried rice that looked excellent. It had pineapples, and a choice of shrimp, chicken, pork, or beef. The waiter comes over and starts to take our orders and Jen goes first. She gets her standard for that ethnicity, Chicken Pad Thai. Her mom orders Shrimp Pad Thai.
The waiter looks at me, and I panic. I flip a few pages and say to myself AHA! breaded fish.
I order the flounder. It comes in in this spicy-ish basil sauce (according to the menu) and has green peppers, yellow peppers, red peppers.. and basically sounds pretty delicious.
WIN. The waiter says he has to check to see if they actually have the whole flounder. He comes back happily saying yes, they do have the whole flounder and I say great. I'm thinking, "I don't really know what that means, but whatever."
So we get our appetizers first. The chicken satay was fantastic, and the peanut sauce it came with was fabulous too. We also got battered calamari stuff with sweet and sour sauce, that came with various battered vegetables as well. We polished that off in short order, and they brought our meals out. Chicken Pad-Thai, Shrimp Pad-Thai, and

The Flounder.

I looked at it. And I looked at it...
I wondered how the hell I'm supposed to even START eating this thing.
I thought Jen was going to die laughing so I sought comfort in the fact that its little batter encrusted eye was positioned to be staring at her through the whole meal.
I eventually figured out how to eat it, and it was rather tasty. I would never have expected this to show up and be placed in front of me for consumption, and although I probably should have chosen the Pineapple Fried Rice in my panicked confusion, this was pretty darn good.

And now for the stuff that bothers me.
I was in line at the chick-fil-a drive through a week or two ago, and as I waited in line behind mini-vans and SUV's full of people, it kind of occured to me that they're essentially using an "express lane" when they have more than 10 items.
I'm dubbing this Drive-Thru abuse.
It can't be easy on the person at the window, trying to take 5 or 6 orders over those lousy intercoms. Why WOULDN'T you want to go inside if you've got so many orders? It takes twice as long to place the orders, you have an exponentially increased chance of having them screw something up, than if you just went inside and let everybody place their own orders, and had everybody pay.
THEN. THEN they sit there at the window and check every single bag for every single item to make sure it's there... meanwhile nobody can move forward or get their food.
The same goes for those people that sit at the drive through ordering for an entire office.
They abuse the drive-thru and defeat the speedy service purpose of the thing.
The rule should probably be: If you have more than 3 items on your order, or more than three items, just go INSIDE and place your order.

This one was almost like a two-fer.

Pollen is teh suk.

I've always heard how pollen is in the air and stuff, but never really noticed it.

Sure, I'd get a stuffy head now and again when things started blooming, but I still couldn't physically see the stuff that was bothering my sinuses so much.

Until this week.

It's covering everything.  This thick, yellow, gritty crap that's just about everywhere.

It turned my red car orange, and now that it got a little wet, my it looks like some giant bird dropped a big yellow bomb on my car, and everybody else's while it was on a roll.

I've included some pictures to illustrate the phenomenon.

You can actually see tire tracks in the pollen that's settled on the parking lot

Where the windshield washer fluid made the pollen nasty.

Big bird.  Big giant bomb on my car.

I've built a garden!

Well, I've fixed the crown moulding problem from last post and it's all up and almost ready to be painted.  The only thing left is to get some of the nail problems taken care of, and then get that filled in with some putty/spackle/caulk.

When we're done you won't even be able to see the blood spatters where I beat the $#!% out of my thumb with a hammer.

Today, I built a garden.

Jen has been looking at a lot of blogs lately, and one of them had the plans and instructions for building a "square foot garden."  My garden is not square feets, not because I'm incompetent or anything, but simply because it would have cost a lot more money to get the plywood cut to the specified dimensions, than to take a 2 ft by 4 ft pre-cut board and just make the garden about 8 inches slimmer.

There is nothing really planted in it yet, the tomato fence thing is just there as a serving suggestion.  So far we have Tomatoes, Lettuce, Cucumber and Green Peppers for it, and hopefully some more really soon.

I'm also hoping my strawberries come out this year, they were really really good when they came out last year.

There's nothing like a small project completed successfully to make you believe you could take on the whole carpentry world with just a hammer and some finishing nails...  and maybe a Dremel.  Did you know you can etch glass with a Dremel?  I didn't, but I can tell you that I can't wait to try some creative etching on the windows of the condo.  WHEE!  "Kyle wuz hear."

Saving the bestest and greatest news for last:

My brother and his wife had their baby on Friday, April 4th at 10:03 in the morning.

Her name is Audrey Ann, and since I'm her uncle, she's the cutest little thing ever.

She was 9 lbs 1 oz and apparently had a full head of hair.

Jen and I ended up randomly watching that episode yesterday.  Coincidence?  I think not.

I'm really excited for my brother and his wife, and I can't wait to meet her.

Welcome to the world, Audrey, and congratulations Christy and Eric :)

More Interesting Things

Well, I promised more pictures, so here they are!

This is a parade of servers during one of the special dinners. The guy in the chef hat in the bottom left corner was obnoxious. He announced at the end of the meal "Well I won't be back" or some such, and he never was. Incidently a few of their dinner mates didn't come back either.
(yay cruise drama)

This is the boat. the MS Maasdam.

One night of the cruise for the "Late Night Snack" they had chocolate night. They make just about everything you can think of out of chocolate. I thought of a shoe, and you know what? I didn't see one, but I did see a watermelon with flowers carved out of it. another one of those things that just blows my freakin mind.

The view from the verandah thing outside of our room. It's a little disconcerting to have that be pretty much the only thing you can see from every corner of the ship.

This is the cat.
"O.K. the white one goes to.. speakers. *pop* the black one goes to.... "

Hanging crown moulding and preparing to whack the $#!% out of my thumb.

This is where I messed up.

Where I messed up from another angle.

The cat helping from the ground.

A lilypad from the Fruit and Spice Park.

Dinner-mates Bob and Leigh.

Jen and Me at dinner on the boat.

We took an aerial tram through a rainforest on St. Lucia

This is off the coast of St. Lucia where guys in boats were floating by the boat shouting "HEY POP. THROW US A DOLLA, WE DIVE FOR IT!"
That went on for hours.

Soooo. Where to start?

We're married.

The day was totally awesome and I have to say, is to date the happiest day of my life.

We're four months in now, and since my last post was before the wedding, a lot has happened.

1. The honeymoon.
A *ton* of fun. We spent a day or two here in Williamsburg at Wedmore Place at the Williamsburg Winery, and from there took the auto-train from Lorton to just outside of Orlando.
From there we drove to the keys and spent a few days there while we killed time until we set out on our cruise of the Caribbean!
While we were in Key West we stopped at this awesome pirate museum that had all sorts of artifacts that were recovered from piratical purgatory. I tried to get calamari any chance I got and ate my weight in shrimp.
The cruise started out well, and the first night we basically just sat on the deck and watched Ft. Lauderdale get smaller and smaller, and watched as the bars on my phone got fewer and fewer.
For dinners we requested a table for four much to my chagrin. I can't stand eating with people I don't know, and I was very hesitant to go to dinner that first night in anticipation that we would have the crankiest oldest people as dinner mates. That was so not the case. We had to have had *the* best dinner mates we could have possibly hoped for. I was racing Jen to dinner most nights because it was such a treat.
It was so relaxing and fun, and I won a bit of money at the casino too.
The only thing that was iffy was our first stop that was supposed to be St. Maarten. somewhere along the way we ran into some subtropical storm and that totally put us off track and they ended up cancelling the first port of call. Meanwhile, that meant an extra day at sea when both Jen and I could barely stand up for more than about 5 minutes at a time. Thank goodness they give you little packets of something called "Sea Calm" which is basically just something that keeps you from tossing your cookies.
There were daily sudokus and crossword puzzles, and on top of that with the stateroom we got, they had free movie rentals from their DVD library.
I actually got jen to watch a few movies! (she couldn't stand up, so how could she get away?)
We got home in time for Christmas and that was a really nice holiday.

2. Work.
Ok, so maybe not much has changed here. I'm still there doing the same thing I was doing.
It's good though, and most days I feel like I've helped somebody or accomplished something.
Still hoping for something more and keeping my fingers crossed.

3. Home.
I've actually managed to do husbandy type things. I constructed shelves that have been up in the attic for years. (One wrench-gouged thumb in the process.) I made one faucet stop leaking and tightened the handle on another. I've started putting up crown moulding in Jen's bathroom, and am doing a much better job than I thought I'd do, but not without some typical screw ups :)
Lowes has been our unfriendly go-to place for the moulding, with Home Depot picking up the slack on things like a non-digital normal old run of the mill angle finder. Lowes is out of stock at the moment on the moulding, and since I had to take two pieces down because I mauled one with a hammer, and the other one was cut too short to go up to the angle like it was supposed to, we can't finish the bathroom yet.
My injury list having to do with this project is rather short.
10 smashed thumbs.
1 claw-hammered thumb from where I was trying to pry a nail, the hammer slipped and the claw part got jammed between the nail and the cuticle.
This is impressive because I've been using a miter saw for most of the cuts, and a coping saw where needed since all the corners are inside corners.
We don't have a nail-gun yet, but we have been seriously looking at one because we are now planning on doing crown moulding for the entire condo, and there's no way I'm going to want to stand there and hold up the moulding and tap tap tap all those nails in. (Plus there's that added benefit of me not destroying the moulding as I hammer.)

4. Health.
Back in January I had one of those yearly physical things that I haven't had yearly in say... 10-12 years. One of the things I had a question about seemed to concern him enough to send me to a specialist. I had a mole-type thing on my back that has been there for at least a decade. Since it's in the middle of my back I can't really see it, and even with the use of a mirror I can't see details. Well, apparently the outer edges had gone lighter, and it was large enough that he wanted it seen by somebody who might know more about it. So I went. The dermatologist decided that it's probably benign (99.8% in her words) and it was probably just fine, but to be safe why don't we go ahead and get it off anyway, get it under a microscope and see what's what.
so about 7 weeks later I'm in the dermatologist's office on my stomach while they're slicing a mole off my back and talking about all the gross stuff that gets put into a hot dog.
I go to get my stitches out and they got the pathology from the lab and started to tell me that while yes, it was benign, it was still very abnormal, the cells weren't normal and that the cells were trying to change into something, but they just hadn't done it yet.
She also said the margins were clear, and that I only need to come back once a year to be seen, and that I should keep and eye out for new growths. Since I've had this one, I can expect to get more now.

That pretty well catches us up till the present.
I bowl in a work league once a week. Sunday nights. My team is in third place, and we're slowly rising up. We'd probably be in better shape if I made up some of my games. So I need to get out there and do it, maybe we'll be number 1 soon.
Here are a few pictures I've got. Not too many, I promise.

This is me chilling out in Key West by the pool at the Tropical Inn.

(in)Famous Key West Rooster.

LEEEEZARRRRD

On the way to Ft. Lauderdale we took a little side trip to The Fruit and Spice Park

Where we saw something called "Sausage Trees"
It was mind boggling. I will never be the same.

More pictures to come with the next update, which hopefully won't be so long in coming.
(We'll get to some pictures of the cruise too! :D)

One Month and Counting

So it's been a while since the last one. I know.

Things are going better and are wrapping themselves up. I'm picking up her ring tomorrow, so that's exciting. I'm also probably getting international immunizations, and that's less exciting.

I have a morning off for once, but it doesn't last long. There are still lots of things to do and my time is going to run out before I know what happens. That's how I always forget to make myself lunch.

In other news, I think me and my immediate family, (Mom, Dad, Eric & Christy) are most likely to be voted most likely to have a family member appear on the show "Cops".

Wedding

Things are taking their toll, proving to be pretty frustrating as deadlines loom closer and it feels like we can't get anybody to do anything to make their part move at least a little more smoothly.

We're trying not to be at each other's throats and keep our sanity, and it's working, but not by a large margin.

The first chance we actually get to ourselves, we're going out on a drive or we're going to do something where we can just not think about that stuff for few hours. Get our wits back about us and see if that doesn't refresh us at least for a little bit. Enough to keep us from tearing each other to shreds.

She's putting so much of herself, her energy, and her tears into the process that it's all she can do to keep from screaming when things aren't going smoothly. Especially when the process that's hanging things up is something that should be simple.

I'm trying to do what I can to help. ferrying things from place to place, helping with getting things into the mail, making arrangements with the hotel for blocking rooms, and things like that.
I'm really not sure how anybody does it completely on their own.

Anyway, that's your October 9th update.