Hope you have a great birthday, valis2!! You're a wonderful, loving, funny, talented sister-in-law and I am so lucky to have you as mine... though I wish I could see you much more often! Have a lovely day, lady. *hugs* from me & Liam too.

What does it say about me that I am gorging myself on episodes of RuPaul's Drag Race, Big Love, and United States of Tara? Drag queens, Mormon polygamy, and multiple personality disorder, oh my! Bizarre ( Read more... )

I got a tattoo done this weekend. I have two beautiful lightly-blue barn swallows that fly between my shoulder blades. I chose them after I read about what swallow tattoos signified in Navy tattoo lore, about how since swallows migrate, they represent home and returning home. I think a lot about home. My husband is far away, deployed with the Army ( Read more... )

There has been almost no reading of books this week, after my obsession with reading many books a week lately. Dear Diary, I was distracted. Distracted in the form of escaping cats, that ever-present pesky work, travel plans, wedding gifts, a complete inability to do laundry despite an alarmingly empty underwear drawer. But over all this clutter, ( Read more... )

Almost time to pack up and head back to Madison. This week, as all client installations, has flown by in spurts of great productivity and slogs of head-numbing grunt work. Salt Lake is a lovely city to be in. It is clean and beautiful and the Mormons care greatly about the community. It is a pride of place city, surrounded by mountains (some ( Read more... )

I miss fandom. Gone are those lovely days in which I was embroiled in the tidal wave of obsession with pretty boys and devastating women, when I could sink my geek into the Lord Of the Rings movies and fiction. That make me start my LJ and it made it fun to browse my Friends page in every moment I could spare. I had online friends and inside jokes ( Read more... )

Liam just called from Cuba! From his soon-to-be-office. He says it is 95 degrees or hotter, sweaty, with lizards running around. He doesn't have phone or internet yet, but will hopefully in a week or so.

I just can't stop smiling.

I am obsessed. Obsessed with quilting. I don't know why exactly, that this craft is my sole expression of creativity right now. Perhaps it is the sentimentality of doing what I think of as Mom and Grandma's specialty. Perhaps I feel so out of control with Liam off on deployment and out of phone reach that I am offsetting that feeling of ( Read more... )

Liam left this morning for his deployment to Cuba. I stayed with him at the hotel until his 4am call, but chose not to trail him to the airport. One tearful goodbye is bad enough without another one in front of his superior officers, we figured. I came home and fell into bed again but the cats only let me sleep for two hours before making insistent ( Read more... )

I wasn't feeling all that great about 2007 until I realized that I started 2008 off 23 pounds lighter than my highest weight in 2007. It may very well be the first year in my life that I weighed less one year than the last (with the possible exceptions of 1999 and 1990, thinking back). I feel great about that ( Read more... )