I woke up with a start at 7:00 am and ate the most wonderful room service omelet that I'd ever seen or tasted. Aaron had picked out this vegetarian omelet for me and it was absolutely heavenly. Of course, I may very well have just been in a pleasure-coma from actually sleeping for over twelve hours after my deprivation. I probably would have slept for longer, but we had an appointment we just had to keep at 8:00 am with our wedding coordinator, Michele, from Awesome Caribbean Weddings.

The second we stepped out of our cool air-conditioned room into the muggy hotness of St. Lucia for what could be considered the first time, our breath was taken away. A storm was going to roll in, but meanwhile, the island was under what seemed to me to be an oppressive humidity. My camera fogged up immediately and took quite a while to de-fog. All around birds were chirping and singing their songs while vibrant flowers and foilage proved to be a delight for my eyes. I truly was in a different "world."



We met with Michele down in the lobby of Sandals. She was extremely professional and lit up when she discussed our wedding with us. It was evident that this is a job that she enjoys. Her laughter was contaigious and even after the last few days that I'd had, I couldn't help but join in and relax. We explained a little more of what had been going on with Sandals, and she sympathized with us. We discussed a bit of the history of the island and she told us about our wedding location - Pigeon Island. There is an old British Fort on Pigeon Island with old cannons and ruins sprinkled all over. I felt it was a perfect match because of my six years of (American) military service and my love of history. We discussed the specifics of our wedding and exchanged paperwork.



After our three hour meeting with Michele, Aaron and I went to speak with the concierge about our experience with Sandals wedding department thus far. We also set up our tours for the next few days - horseback riding, scuba diving, snorkeling after a half-day catamaran ride, touring a volcano and some botanical gardens, going climbing around in the rainforest, etc. The concierge told us that they'd get back to us with information on what they were going to do about this extra $1,500 charge we never should have had - you see, the wedding department on St. Lucia told us that they absolutely could have done our wedding. It was Unique Vacations that had steered us wrong. They asked us if we would like for Sandals to do the wedding now, but we told them it was too late. We'd already signed a contract and Awesome Caribbean Weddings were working their butts off to make our wedding happen the way we wanted it. That was much better than Unique Vacations response - tough, too bad. We told them that we expected them to do something for us now that we'd had to cough up that extra money in order for us to be happy and to want to come back. But, let's talk about this unpleasantness later...

After we set up all of our tours and lodged our complaint, we went over to Barefoot by the Sea. This restaurant was on the beach, next to the sea, with no floor other than the sand. There was a large wooden structure built to be a roof, but it had open walls. The sea breeze swept into the pavilion and Aaron and I took off our shoes and played in the sand with our toes. We tried not to think about anything disgusting that may be in the sand, and instead just enjoyed ourselves while we sipped water and looked out over the ocean.





The restaurant had fabulous sculpture all over and was very beautiful in all of its decorations.





There were birds swooping down and trying to steal food from plates that people had abandoned, dragging french fries off into the bushes. There were other birds that just sat on the bushes next to us and sang us a beautiful song.





After our wonderful lunch, we went swimming in the ocean and then spent quite a bit of time at the swim-up bar.





We watched the sun go down over Pigeon Island and at least I thought very romantic thoughts. Who couldn't, when it was as beautiful as it was?



We finished up our wonderful day by eating at this wonderful Italian restaurant. Aaron had his favorite - lasagna bolognese. With our bellies sated, we wandered back to our room where we watched 10,000 BC on cable and then went to sleep.

Don't I look happy?

Labels: marriage, traveling

This morning as I sit in my computer chair with a diet coke and an extremely warm bowl of oatmeal topped with brown sugar and fake maple syrup, I remind myself that I get into these funks sometimes. My stress level goes up and up and up until I can't contain it anymore and then I retreat into myself. Lately, the culprit has been school and the escape has been an unhealthy dose of Stargate SG1 and World of Warcraft.

A few months back there was a huge sale on Stargate SG1 thinpaks. I had already owned seasons 5-9, and with a bit of arguing with myself, I went ahead and purchased season 1-4 and 10 for half off. Aaron has not been thanking me for this recently. I went through seasons 1-4 in the past week and a half. I wake up and watch an episode, I change diapers and come back to an episode, I read textbooks for school and work on homework while watching an episode, I actually fall asleep while watching an episode. I've been having insomnia lately.

Even worse - my new guilty pleasure is playing World of Warcraft (I've been playing for over three years now) while watching Stargate SG1. I know what you are thinking. Does she have no life?

Well, see, that's the whole purpose of retreating into myself. I do have no life at that point. And then after awhile I wake up from my self-induced coma of escapism and I become productive again.

At least, so we hope. So, today I am going to do a crapton of schoolwork and go through the pictures from the honeymoon and give you an update. Right now, in fact. I just had to get this out of my system first.

Labels: random

I'm under a huge time crunch here at school. I'll be back some time next week. Thanks for your patience.

I'm heading in to work here in just a little bit. I work in a psychology lab at the University of Iowa where I run experiments on little kids. (Yes, that is supposed to sound sinister - insert an evil cackle.) In reality, I get to play with little kids all day in games that are designed to test something about their cognitive ability. It's extremely fascinating to see how children and parents act and interact.

After I get home from work, I hope to post some more honeymoon pictures and a honeymoon story. We'll see how that goes. I also need to post pictures from Nate's immediate-family-only birthday party and post pictures of his birthday present. Last, I need to post some pictures of firecrackers from the fourth. I didn't get any gorgeous colorful fireworks pictures because a) I forgot the connector for my tripod to my camera and b) I couldn't get my camera to focus. I think I need to figure out where the heck I put my manual and read up.

We went to a wedding on the fifth, and on the way to the reception we drove around downtown Cedar Rapids which has been devastated by the floods (some people are calling them the Floods of 2008). I took some pictures of all the trash (insulation, drywall, wood, belongings, large appliances) that is sitting on the side of the road waiting pick-up. The streetlights still aren't working down there and most of the downtown businesses have water-sucky-up machines hooked via their windows into their building. It's really quite humbling to see all the damage. We are so lucky that we did not buy a house in downtown Cedar Rapids like we were originally thinking - we'd have lost nearly everything.

Okay. I better run before I'm viciously late. I hope you all have wonderful days and please continue to leave me comments so I know that people are reading. I'll write anyway, but it helps justify to Aaron the expense of running this site if he knows that people actually read it. ;)

Our garden started out looking like this. Bare, cold, gray, yet full of promise.



On June 23, it looked like this. Much more full and lush (although not all of the plants have grown as well as the ones on the back right.



These beds furthest to the west contain quite a few different plants. The one furthest back has a variety of lettuces in it that were planted from seed. The closer one has broccoli, cauliflower, anaheim peppers, cayenne peppers, and jalapeno peppers all planted from seed. It also has eggplant plants that my mother-in-law purchased for me. I had put some eggplant seeds in the bed but they did not sprout.



The bed farthest back has peas, beans, and cantaloupe all from seed. The bed closest has red and white onions, scallions, and carrots all from seed (which you can barely see in the picture).



The bed farthest has sugar peas, pumpkins, squash, pole beans, corn, and cucumbers all from seed. The bed closest has ladybug tomatoes and yellow tomatoes. The ladybugs are from seed, but the yellow tomatoes I purchased as a plant because all of my cherries and beefsteaks died in a storm.

Companion planted around the various beds are marigolds, two kinds of parsley, two kinds of basil, oregano, cilantro, and dill. I believe I planted more, but I can't remember and I'm not going out there right now to find out. ;)

Last night, we had our first meal that had ingredients from our garden in it. I picked some sugar snap peas, shelling peas, and two kinds of beans (burgundy and green) to include in our frozen mixed vegetable for our vegan shepherd's pie. I took the vegan recipe from the cookbook Quick-Fix Vegetarian by Robin Robertson. This book has recipes that really take about thirty minutes to cook and prep (sometimes a little more, sometimes a lot less). I absolutely love her Shepherd's Pie with couscous topping, but since the recipe is copywritten, I'm not going to be able to share it with you. Instead, I'll share two pictures.





Instead of plain couscous, I topped it with tri-colored couscous. It looks festive and it tastes wonderful.

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From my house to yours, happy Fourth of July!

Labels: cooking, gardening

I'm in the middle of changing the template of our website to be more personalized to us. Some of the design things such as text color on headings has not been fixed. This will happen as I get a few minutes here and there. Some aspects of the site design may change even more as I play around.

Additionally, I'll be changing the available pages, consolidating and expanding. All of this takes time, but it is an ongoing process. If there are any suggestions you have, or comments, please let us know. This is a work in progress.

If anyone knows how Blogger works and can explain to me how to put "last page, next page" type links on the bottom of each page of blogs, please let me know.

Labels: random

Jen's Long Winded Version of Events

So there we were, laying on the dusty, dirty floor of the Miami airport. It wasn't quite time to get up yet, and Aaron was still snoring away. I was glancing up at the clock every ten minutes as I flipped through a romance novel (hey, you've got to get in the mood for your honeymoon, you know). Finally four o'clock rolled around, which was when security finally opened back up to let us into our terminal. I nudged Aaron awake, grunted, tried not to get a whiff of my clothes, and we headed over to security. Unfortunately, all the other sleepers (including the ones who stole all the good chairs, darn them) were also awake and waiting at security. Luckily it didn't take too long before we were heading down the very long terminal, to our gate at the very end.

We killed more time and then our flight took off at 6:20. By this point I'd almost been awake for 24 hours, excluding a 15 minute cat nap I'd gotten on that disgusting floor. I was a little punch drunk, to put it lightly. You see, I'm the kind of person that prefers to get 10 hours of sleep a night, and I don't sleep very well in public places. I could make myself sound cool and say it is because I don't feel safe in public places because of my military training, but I think it'd be more accurate to say that I prefer a comfortable bed and quiet.

I had the window seat on all of our flights, because Aaron and I decided that he didn't want the benefit of the window seat considering I'd have the cost of vomiting. I don't do well on the interior of planes, for some reason. It was fortunate that I own the camera and had the window seat, because I got some pretty neat shots as the sun was coming up over the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Puerto Rico. (Go here to see more.)



In my sleep-deprived haze, I thought the clouds were so cool with their vertical stretches. Beneath them, you could see their shadow on the ocean and each individual wave. I stared for quite some time.



Our flight landed in Puerto Rico around 8 am - it was a short hop. We wandered around the tiny little Puerto Rican airport and killed even more time (Aaron slept). Our flight was supposed to leave around noon or so, and we all boarded. After everyone had gotten settled, there was a long pregnant pause. Finally, the captain got on the intercom system, "Well, we seem to have an annunciator light on. We're not sure what's going on here, but we're going to try to solve this problem."

I leaned over and whispered in Aaron's ear, "What is an annunciator light?"

He gave a slight smile, "A warning light."

I sighed.

More minutes went by. "Well, folks, it looks like we're going to have to ask you all to deplane. Make sure to take all of your belongings with you, because we may have to change planes."

We all deboarded and wandered back into the dismal Puerto Rican airport. By this point, I was so tired (awake for 29 hours) that I was starting to get a major case of the grumps. Can't we just hop on a life raft and paddle? That was going through my head as I pondered the fact that I was a short hop from St. Lucia, and yet stuck, and I couldn't get to my room.

An hour and a half passed without news while they tried to figure out what was wrong with our plane. Finally they allowed us to board (the same plane!) again, but Aaron and I were relieved to see a mechanic wandering away holding an old part in his hand.

We arrived on St. Lucia around 4:30 and were whisked away to Sandals, which thankfully was only a 15 minute drive. As soon as we arrived, we were escorted to the concierge lounge and handed two full glasses of champagne. I was a little giddy (and a hell of a lot smelly after being in my warm clothes for almost 36 hours). We spoke with the concierge about the amneties offered by Sandals, and then they gave us a short tour and escorted us to our room.

By this time I was so tired that I could barely walk. I think I was mumbling and drool was escaping from my mouth unnoticed, and I certainly smelled foul. I hopped in the bath as soon as we got to our room and tried not to fall asleep. Aaron grabbed some champagne from the minibar in our room and poured me a glass. I was extremely grateful.

He ordered us some roomservice (free!) and I tried to stay awake to eat it. Apparently, though, after being awake for 35 hours I finally succumbed to the drowsiness and crashed on the couch, folded over a pillow like an infant curled in a womb. (Anyone with young children should understand what I'm describing as it is a standard young child curled-up sleeping position.)

Aaron told me later that housekeeping and room service came in, both of them making loud noises, and I never twitched. I guess I was breathing pretty heavily, as well, although I certainly wasn't snoring... I hope.

I woke up and sat straight up around 11 pm. It must have looked pretty silly, like I'd just snapped awake from a hypnotic state. Aaron mentioned that I'd been talking in my sleep. As soon as he noticed my less-blurred eyes, he indicated that room service had left me some pizza.

I had no idea that I'd crashed - it was almost as if I'd blacked out. I glanced down at the tray and was confused as to how long I'd been sleeping and how room service had come and gone without me even noticing.

By that point, however, I was so hungry that I just didn't care. I gulped down my entire medium hawiian pizza (hey, I'm on vacation!). Later Aaron told me that he'd eaten a cheeseburger and was watching TV while I slept. Soon I finished my pizza.

And finally... finally. I crashed here for another eight hours.



Aaron's Short Version of Events (from when I was passed out)

When we arrived, we had been up and about for about 36 hours. We were guided to the conceirge room where we were served champagne while we checked in. At this point, we could have gone swimming or drinking or anything that our hearts desired, but our hearts were very sleepy so we headed to our room. We quickly surveyed the room service menu, ordered, and settled in. Being the geek I am, I set to work checking out the TV placed at the end of our bed while Jen, being the dork she is, hopped on the couch and started reading all the little pamphlets about hotel operations and excursions and such. (Jen's note: Psst, I am not a dork.)

Before long, I noticed that Jen wasn't saying much. She had curled up around a pillow and PASSED OUT. She never takes naps and she's usually a relatively light sleeper so I figured she would wake up when room service knocked on the door. Well, housekeeping showed up first to turn down our sheets and Jen slept straight through it. The maid was not particularly quiet, snapping sheets straight and such, but Jen never even stirred. Then room service showed up and she placed the tray right on the table in front of Jen. Still NOTHING! She was curled up so sweetly and so deeply asleep that we all just thought it was the cutest thing. I didn't wake her for her food. I figured she would rather eat cold food than wake up any time soon.

Other pictures of our room (please click on pictures for additional commentary and to see them larger, and as always, more are available on Flickr):

Labels: marriage, traveling

Aaron and I looked over at each other. He shook his head, "No."

I sighed. "I have that much room on my credit card."

He looked doubtful, but was listening.

"Here's a list of everything they provide." As I read to him, his expression changed. The list of things that was included in the price - a cake, music, a personal consultant, a professional photographer with 40 digital images and the ability to purchase hundreds more, champagne, an extremely scenic location, and most of all... A wedding. No, not just most of all. Best of all.

They told us that they could do it. They could get us married. Sure, we could get married in Iowa via the JOP. But we didn't want that. We wanted a ceremony and something to remember for the rest of our lives. We have no intentions of there ever being another occasion like this one. We want to get married once, and once only. So - a beautiful wedding or a JOP?

We decided.

On the credit card it went. By now it was about 9:30, and we still hadn't finished packing. The kids weren't ready to go. We had to leave at noon for the Chicago airport.

Hustle, hustle. Aaron and I went into overdrive as we tried to get everything together so that we wouldn't miss our plane. Right before noon, we got the kids dropped off, the paperwork faxed to Fenella to charge our credit card, the contract signed for the wedding service (and faxed), and we'd gotten me a diet coke. I needed it. Bad. After the last 18 hours I'd had, I felt like I was about to go out of my mind.

I sipped on my d-coke (ha! Who am I kidding? That sucker was down in 5 minutes flat), and we drove to Chicago. Four hours. Lots of tollways.

We got to the airport in plenty of time (particularly considering our flight was delayed), and sat around. And around. And around. At about this point, I was very thankful for the 8 or so books I'd made Aaron lug around in his carry-on. (Hey, it was a fair trade. I was lugging his tux and all his shirts as "my carry on.")

At 8:20, our flight took off. The flight was rather uneventful - so much so that I don't even remember what I did. They may have showed us the movie "The Bucket List." I do believe that I saw that movie three times on our way to and from St. Lucia.

We arrived in Miami around 2 am. Unfortunately, our flight didn't leave until 6:20, and the airport was closed. The only food was a rundown-looking Burger King, from which we partook (greedily).

We scouted around for a place to sleep, and couldn't find a good one. At one point, we found this nice comfy looking bench with a three inch cushion. All the good chairs around the airport had already been taken, so we settled down. I was reading while Aaron took a snooze, when all of a sudden I heard this loud, "Ahem." I paused. "AHEM." I looked around.

A man holding a broom made a shooing motion at me, "You can't sleep there miss."

I blinked. "Okay, thanks." I woke Aaron up. We moved over to the next place we could find that didn't seem to have watchful eyes. It was a floor. A dirty, dusty floor. And it was freezing.

By this point, I'd been awake for 19 hours and really wanted to sleep. However, there were people all around us: some talking about their trip to South America, some snoring, others just looking shady. I sneezed and tossed and turned. Then I picked up another book and finished it off while Aaron snored lightly.

I figured that maybe I'd catch a nap on the next plane, but little did I know that I'd be awake for around 35 hours.

Labels: marriage, traveling