The cat is away….

I dropped Andrew off at the airport this morning. He’s going to visit his family in Canada, and to renew his visa. So I’ll be alone in the house (well, if by alone you mean alone with three cats) until Tuesday. I’m trying to decide if I’m looking forward to having the house to myself or if I’m just going to be bored and lonely.

Let’s just hope I don’t have a repeat of last year when my back went out while Andrew was in Canada.

Planetarium Visit

We vistited the Arlington Planetarium this evening with our wedding coordinator. We hadn’t seen the planetarium since Andrew and I visited last October to scout it out as a possible wedding site. This time we wanted to see the lighting and layout to figure out what we need to do to make the wedding work.

A few notes:

• For the majority of stars to be visible we will need to have the planetarium quite dark — so dark that we will not be seen. To overcome this, Devri suggested using candles. Jonathan, the planetarium director, actually had a candle, so he lit one for us to see how it looked. It looked good — very romantic — but using too many will drown out the stars just as sure as the dome lights will.
• We thought that maybe we should choreograph the ceremony so that the lights will come up and down at various places. We would then probably save total darkness for a special reading.
• I’m nervous about getting the officiant to go along with this. They tend not to like flash photography, so I’m wondering how they will deal with darkness. We will probably be able to get a lighted lecturn, so maybe he’ll go along with us, but … We meet with one next week, so we’ll have to see if he’s willing to work with us on this point.

Overall the visit went well. I quite liked Jonathan — prior to tonight we had only talked on the phone. He said that he has a background in production and broadcast, which makes sense, but he seemed much like a scientist to me.

Tonight was the first time that the wedding felt real…concrete. We’ve been making plans and writing checks and talking with vendors, but it’s all seemed kind of unreal. Tonight, though, standing in the planetarium, talking about where I would be walking in, it finally hit me that this is real. I’m sooo looking forward to it!

A few pictures:

Grieving Gardens

I saw this article this morning on high schools creating grieving gardens for students who have died.

Such “grieving gardens” are springing up at high schools across the country as students seek closure and administrators grapple with how best to honor dead youths. Born of tragedy, the main force behind the gardens has been students and grieving parents.

The article goes on to say that some schools have chosen not to have such gardens on the grounds that it might spark some kids to consider suicide.

A friend of mine commited suicide in high school. We did not have a grieving garden, but we asked if we could include a memorial to him in the yearbook. The administration refused, saying that they didn’t want to glorify suicide. While now, years later, I can understand their view, at the time it was like a slap in the face. It seemed that his death meant nothing to the school. Counselors were sent to the American Studies class where they announced his death to the school.

He was a couple years younger than me, so I heard about it in my interior design class. When they first read the announcement that a student had died, I though immediately of my friend Jen, who was in the hospital at the time. When they announced a different name, I was elated, because it wasn’t my best friend. Then the name sunk in. It was Mike. Mike who I had tried to ask to the Sadie Hawkins dance, but chickened out at the last moment.

That one day, with counselors in his American Studies class, seemed to be the only acknowledgement that the administration would make of his death. To a high schooler, dealing with the death of someone their own age for the first time, this really served only to make the process more difficult.

A few of us did get poems about Mike in that year’s literary magazine, so there was some evidence that we lost one of our own that year. (Sadly, my poem was really, really bad — read: teen angst in its worst form.)

Rebecca

4/5 stars

A young, naive woman (we never learn her name) marries a widower in a whirlwind romance in Monte Carlo. When he brings her back to the house, the memory of the former Mrs. De Winter, Rebecca, haunts the young woman at every turn, from the off-limits west wing to the creepy head housekeeper.

As with most older movies, the pace is much slower than films made today. There is much build up over the first hour and a half, and almost too much happens in the last 20 minutes. But, overall I enjoyed the movie.

Politics

This is not a political blog — in fact, I’d be hard pressed to say what kind of blog this is, but I never talk about politcal stuff. In general, I feel like I don’t have anything new to add to the discussion. I sometimes wonder if I should bring things up from time to time.

My feelings about the current administration are no secret to my friends and family — I’m jumping on board the I’ll-vote-for-anyone-as-long-as-they-can-get-Bush-out-of-office bandwagon. I’m not voting issues this time around. I’m voting for whichever candidate can defeat Bush.

We all know why — our country’s eroding relations with the rest of the world, the Iraq invasion, the refusal to admit that there was poor-planning for the Iraq aftermath, the continued refusal to acknowledge that we either need to get out or send reinforcements to clean up the mess we created, the prisoner abuse in Iraq, the international gag rule, the continued attacks on pro-choice and other women’s health issues, the asinine moon/Mars plan that’s killing other worthwhile science at NASA, ….need I go on?

Do I have anything new to add to any of these issues? No. Others have said it all better than I could, but I wanted to add my voice to the others raising in protest. We need to continue to be angry. We need to continue to raise our voices. We need to vote out the current administration in November. We need to get our country out of the hands of the bumbling idiots.

Supersize Me

4/5 stars

Morgan Spurlock decided to see what would happen if he ate only McDonald’s food for a month. He decided on a few simple rules: he could neither eat nor drink anything that was not sold at a McDonald’s, he had to eat three meals a day, he had to try everything on the menu at least once, and he would only supersize the meal if asked.

Interspersed with his culinary quest, he interviews various experts on fast food — including the lawyer behind some of the McDonald’s obesity law suits. He spirls into depression and poor health in just a couple weeks. His mood is elevated each time he eats, only to crash again once he finishes his meal — a clear sign of an addiction.

This was an entertaining documentary — on par with Bowling for Columbine. Definitely worth a watch.

Note: I’m vegetarian, and so have not actually eaten McDonald’s food for over a decade. I do, however, occasionally enjoy a veggie burger from Burger King, a vegetarian burrito from Chipotle (which, sigh, is owned by McDonald’s), or a veggie sub from Subway.

Hotel room secured

We’ve been talking with the Sheraton Suites that is just across the street from our reception about getting a block of rooms for guests. Andrew also tried two other hotels nearby, but one took too much time to get back to us, and the other, while they had a somewhat better price than the Sheraton, does not have a pool nor are the rooms suites.

So, I went to the Sheraton today with the contract signed and in hand. The contract doesn’t actually obligate us to anything, but just says that guests will be responsible for their own rooms and any rooms not reserved by August 18 will be released.

After visiting the hotel, I went to the Torpedo Factory to grab a bunch of DC and Alexandria tourist guides. I had contacted the publishers of these guides and asked them to send several so I could send them off to my wedding guests who are travelling to the area, but I haven’t seen them in the mail yet (it’s been over a month).

Now I just need to compose the letter to send with the travel info…

Flat!

I got out to my car this afternoon after work only to find that the front drivers-side tire was flat. Flat, flat. Not just a bit deflated, but rim-against-the-pavement flat.

So, I got out the cheesy jack that came with the car and my spare and started to jack up the car. Some guy stopped to help, which was really nice, even though I sort of knew what I was doing (I didn’t quite have the jack in the right configuration for maximal ease of use, but I was getting the car off the ground). Then I popped back into the office to look up a tire shop nearby so I could get the flat tire taken care of.

Back out the car again, I’m ready to drive the five miles to the tire shop. But the car isn’t happy….something’s weird with the spare. I think that maybe the guy helping didn’t get the nuts on tight enough or something, so I hop out to check on it.

It’s flat. The spare donut is flat. I’m screwed.

Fortunately, I work on a large campus, so I call the motor pool, and they sent someone out with air. Yay! A big thank you to whoever you were (I didn’t get his name) who came out to help a stupid woman who doesn’t regularly check the air in her spare like she should.

Then I was off to the tire shop. The tire had to be replaced because there were two tears in the side of it. I have no idea when that happened — I don’t remember anything happening on the way to work, and I don’t know how long it would have lasted with those two tears. Andrew wondered if it could have been vandalism, but the tears didn’t look clean like a knife-slash might look.

Bad Night

It was a very long night…I started by having a near-migraine around 6:30 PM while warming up for my lesson, so I hopped in bed to try and scare the headache off. Andrew came to check on me around 7:15 PM, and then I slept straight through until 9:45 PM. I woke up then completely disoriented. Pieces of odd dreams were still in my head, indistinguishable from reality. I got up for about an hour, and then went back to bed, but kept waking up from disturbing dreams every couple hours, though I can’t actually remember any of the dreams now. I was a bit thankful when the alarm finally went off…

Lesson 05/05/2004 — Cancelled

While I was warming up tonight, the staff and notes started to go wonky. I’m still not sure if it was migraine-sign or not, but I got myself to bed with a couple Extra-Strength Exedrin in my system. Andrew popped in about half an hour before I’d need to leave for my lesson, and the room was spinning, so I had him call the store to cancel my lesson.

Sigh. It’s too bad, too, because I think I was really starting to nail Tamburin, playing faster than I could last week, and I was also getting the hang of Minuetto, which I wasn’t even prepared to play last week.