WISHLIST

Its Christmastime again, and I am being asked for my wishlist... thinking about what I'd like to get this year, I realize that I'm just very blessed and truly don't need much of anything... (wanting is another thing altogether, LOL!) Then again, giving and receiving gifts is part of the holiday season and I do enjoy it.

So, for those that are asking what I'd like to see under the tree this year, here's some ideas:

• my amazon wishlist: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/1SO6DW6EP90J6 (yes some items have been there a while, they're still a valid part of my wishlist)
• Items that follow themes from my wishlist - gentle parenting books, knitting, etc.
• No cooking things please aside from what's on the wishlist, I don't have much more room to store stuff!
• jewelry- silver is always nice, small earrings, necklaces, pendants, with or without stones and doesn't have to be purple (yes you read that right!).
• scarves (can never have enough for winter!)
• a gift in my name to any organization that helps others would make me very very happy, here's some ideas http://www.heifer.org/, http://www.seva.org, http://www.justgive.org/index.html.

I loved this blog's comments on gifts though I don't think I'll ever be able to be as green with my gift giving/receiving... don't worry Frank, I'm not turning into a tree-hugger! Not yet anyway... ;)
http://www.grizzlybird.net/2006/11/green-socially-responsible-gift-giving.html

Yet another cool link, this one to a crafting website.
http://www.craftster.org/forum/

Now THIS is a hobbit house!
http://www.simondale.net/house/index.htm

I've now seen everything... GiantLavaLamp.com - When we build it they will come!
Certainly gives you a reason to go visit Soap Lake, Washington ! (gotta love the name of the town too!) I dont' know if I have the heart (or stomach?) to listen to the Lava lamp song on the website...

When I'm NOT on a computer I'm mentally writing a ton of stuff for this blog, but when I come over I forget what to write! Sigh…

This weekend I was doing the happy dance - Sofia is starting to eat 'REAL' foods, yippee! She used to push away whenever I offered her things like cheese, pasta, fruit & vegetable slices, etc. This weekend she ate: string cheese, green beans, homemade stew (ok I ran that one thru the food processor but still it was pretty chunky)… She also now wants to drink from whatever cup I'm drinking. Of course if I give it to her she'll just pour it on herself, but she refuses help. So I'll drain most of the water and give it to her with a few drops left. She gets such a kick from drinking like a big girl!

Yesterday when I got home & took my shoes off, she had to put them on. I was wearing heels, she was able to walk with them for a bit! Looked adorable of course.

It occurs to me that there's a big gap between my 2/23/04 blog and the 7/13/05 blog then 2/27/06 blog...

Just to fill in the blanks quickly - Billy is doing great, he is doing physical therapy to help get his leg back to normal. No new cancer (keeping fingers crossed) has been seen though they keep checking to make sure.

Sofia was a dream come true, born on July 27, 2004. You can read about her more here - www.babyhomepages.net/littlebaby

The last gap is just due to being busy with Sofia and being full time back to work! She's 19 months as of today - time sure flies! Running all over the place, and starting to try and talk. Quite the ray of sunshine in our lives!

Ok, gotta get back to work.

Now I've seen everything ... http://www.metronaps.com/ then again some days I wish we DID have one of these at work!

Isn't Sofia the most GORGEOUS baby EVER??? Says the proud mami... ;)

Billy began the whole bone marrow transfer process today, they installed a 'broviac catheter' on him. He's staying at the hospital tonight, going home tomorrow Tuesday, returning on Wednesday to start the radiation treatments. After that, he'll be in the hospital for weeks. Poor honey!! May his guardian angels watch over him and help him get better soon.

Well, waddaya know... my baby brother is engaged to be married! To be honest I'm a bit ambivalent about his bride to be 'cause she barely talks to me, but she does look like a nice girl and she obviously cares for him (& vice versa) so I wish them very happy. I also wish them a lot of endurance... family politics can be such a bitch! Well, Frank and I will do what we can to support them.

Buggers, my tummy is still acting up... here's hoping my visit to the dr's tomorrow helps, I'm tired of having a hurting tummy!

Other than that, due to my cut finger I couldn't play guitar at church so I had to lead everyone a capella. Felt very strange - I didn't realize how much I depended on the guitar for my cues when singing! Although at least I got some sweet compliments about my voice sounding pretty. NO mass next week, so I'm hoping that in two weeks I can try and put pressure again on my finger.

First full work week in two weeks starts tomorrow. Yuck! And with my tummy, its going to be a fun week...

January 1 and having fun...

Had a great time celebrating the new year with the neighbors & catching up - they're really fun people, wish we spent more time together!

So I talked to mom in the morning, and she invited us over for dinner, except she didn't have anything for dessert. So I thought, hey, great opportunity to play with my new Kitchen Aid mixer! I decided to use a recipe from the booklet that came with it, since I'm not quite sure how to adapt recipes yet, its an Applesauce Cake which I thought sounded yummy. I dumped all the ingredients & started mixing - what fun, this thing works great! Then I started to cut up the apple that needed to be added, when my new Wusthof knife decided to christen me, and gave me a nice cut. I sliced a good chunk of my 4th finger on my left hand, a little more than a 1/4" diameter, and it was hanging only by one side, about as thick as a nice deli slice. Nice clean cut, though! After a few frantic calls to family to help us decide if I needed stitches, we ended up just putting a butterfly bandage on since it wasn't bleeding all that much. Bummer! I'm very annoyed, but what can you do. So I never finished baking the cake after all :) maybe we'll finish it today, Frank offered to help finish the cake prep since I'm kinda one handed right now.

Enough excitement for the new year! Hope the rest goes quieter, but we'll see.

Happy 2004!!

I'm SO looking forward to this year... a new niece arrives in February, hopefully Billy will get his health back, and hopefully Frank and I will get a little blessing sometime in the latter part of the year!

Some highlights from December...

* Return of the King was magnificent, of course!
* Quiet Xmas with the in-laws (my parents & brothers were in FL).
* Spent a day in NYC with Frank, and sampled the best pizza & best hot chocolate ever! The hot C was so rich we got a sugar buzz that we had to walk off, from 18th St all the way to 53rd (Rockefeller Center) and even beyond that! But it was a fun day. Here's a link with the pictures:

You've Got Pictures

Hope the new year brings lots of new things for the whole world!

O man, those snowflakes are HUGE!! And here I was hoping we could go get our xmas tree tomorrow morning.... somehow I don't think so!

Have I mentioned lately that SNOW is a *FOUR* letter word?

It just so happens there a millions of *FOUR* letter words floating out there. I can see them thru my office window. Big, Bold, Capital Letter *FOUR* letter words.

YUCK!!

I spent all of last week in Detroit taking an auditing class... class was very good, Detroit wasn't. I drove to downtown one night planning on having dinner down there, but discovered there are casinos (!) in downtown Detroit. I thought Greektown was an area, kinda like saying Chinatown, but it turned out to be a casino. The few Greek restaurants in the area were in a not-well-lit street that didn't look so safe, so I never even bothered getting out of the car, just kept driving back to the hotel. Yeah, Excitement City... NOT!

Last weekend we had dinner with my old friend Lally and we had a Wonderful time at our local french bistro. Nice to catch up with her, we've barely hung together since we all got in touch again a few months ago (or is it a year already?)

This weekend we're having dinner with our friends Mona & Matt, and Mona is going to give me a massage - given that she does this professionally, I'm REALLY looking forward to it!! Just hope I don't get sick like I sometimes do after a massage (from all those toxins getting released, I guess...)

This is our last week of emusic membership - bummer! I've enjoyed doing our marathon downloading of albums as we try to beat the Nov 8 deadline when emusic switches from unlimited downloads to only 4 albums per month. Frank's getting a bit worried about all the space taken up on our hard drive :0 we may decide to get an external hard drive to store all this fun music. I think we've downloaded about 150 albums so far!! Now comes the next fun part - listening and deciding which ones to burn onto a CD.

Fall weather looks so pretty... pretty colors.. but BRRRR !! Next comes the season I dread the most... hope I can handle the cold!

Quiet Saturday Night.

I have to go find the phone # for the local Thai place so Frank can go get us some Pad Thai. Wish we could go, but I have to do my semi annual clothes summer/ winter switch so I can figure out what to pack for my trip to Detroit tomorrow. 5 days of Very Intense quality training - fun...not! But its something I've been wanting for my resume, and it will be a good learning experience. We shall see how it goes...

Saw Juani last night since he's here to visit our parents. Nice to see him if only for a bit. Got him a book for expectant fathers - I think (hope?) he got a kick out of it - I explained everyone fusses over the mother and forgets the father, so I thought he'd enjoy the book.

Kinda quiet day otherwise - been organizing shtuff around the house - mostly papers. And downloading e-music files like crazy before the cutoff date of Nov 8. Downloading is slow but we've done good.. I think we've downloaded like 70 albums since we found out, and there's like 60 more to go. Let's see how many I can get! OK back to 'work'...

Last Friday we got some bad news - apparently one of Billy's chemo drugs can have the side effect of causing MDS, which could be seen as a pre-leukemia condition, and Billy's got it. Poor Honey!! I'm so heartbroken about it - he's gone thru so much, yet there's still more to go thru! And of course his parents are devastated as well. Couple that with insurance problems they are having, and its not a pretty picture. We'll be keeping them in our prayers...

On a lighter note - FINALLY got to go to Ikea, buy they shelves and start building them! Took all weekend to get the big shelf put together and it looks SO pretty, I'm a Very Happy Camper. Frank will build the smaller shelf set in the week, then next weekend I'll take care of doing the final box & basement junk reorg. THEN we can start on my 'dream' project of repacking all of our boxes into pretty white or kraft new boxes that are all the same so it looks all pretty and even like in the magazine pictures.. yeah right but I can dream, can't I?

Well gotta go do some prep for a meeting I'm running tomorrow at work - yuck!

Wow life has been BUSY! Mostly with Portuguese homework... had an exam on Tuesday then a presentation last night (Thursday). I think I did well on both.

Although I'm having fun with the class, I don't think I'll take the continuation class... its too much work and there's so many more things I want to do and I don't have time for it all. Plus next yr (fingers crossed) I may be busy with other preparations... so I'll probably continue studying but on my own... maybe get some advanced language CD's to pop in the car, who knows.

This weekend looks bz too. Tonight we're off to Ikea to buy some shelves for our basement, which we will be assembling tomorrow. Which means a LOT of reorganizing of boxes down there. On top of that I've got tons of Portuguese homework and I really need to do my summer- fall clothing switchover. And maybe sneak in some work-work since I've got way more than I can handle 40 hrs/wk... AND maybe sneak in some relaxation time (ha!).

Why am I feeling tired all of a sudden??
*grin!*

Started doing some web surfing on 'rice to riches' and found this cool link! Check out the video link, it gives a pretty good idea of what the place is like.

New York City - Chic Rice Pudding
and here's a weblog with some neat pictures of the store & its goodies:

Gothamist: Rice to Riches Reviewed

can't you tell I'm addicted??