Sunday-The Drive and Boardwalk

The first official day of our vacation was Sunday, Nov. 9. We left Loganville pretty early in the morning because we wanted to optimize on our time in Disney. I took the first driving shift mainly because I didn't want to drive in Orlando. We stopped at an outlet mall about 14 miles from Disney because someone Scott works with had told him they had a good Disney outlet. I was not impressed. I was impressed with the outlet mall and could spend a week in that place alone, but we did not even go to one store because there were no parking spaces. Plus, by that time, I really didn't want to shop. What? Yeah, I know. I was pooped. So, we drove on to Disney and checked into our hotel. The package that we had purchased from the travel agent did not include our first night there so, Scott had gotten us one night at the Pop Century Hotel (one of the "value" hotels on Disney property). This place was seriously cool. It had stuff from the 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's. When I say "stuff" I mean they had huge words on the sides of the buildings (one building for each decade) that said stuff like "Totally Radical Dude" and "Far Out". The background for the pool area outside the 70's and 80's building (we stayed in the 80's) was a huge laptop (like the size of the side of a building huge). They had one of those softish play mats close to the pool that was a huge qwerty keyboard. And the best is that they had a huge Roger Rabbit standing on a barrel of turpentine that was as tall, if not taller, than our building. Also, almost every stairwell was topped with a rubix cube, which lit up when it got dark. This place was definitely pointed more towards families with kids, but it was fun. They had a huge gift shop. After we checked in (before we saw all that stuff I just listed), we spent about 45 minutes looking at the gift shop.

After we checked out our room, we headed over to the Boardwalk Hotel. Behind the hotel, they have a real Boardwalk that looks out over the little lake area that connects Epcot to several hotels and Disney Hollywood Studios. They had a bakery, several places that sold hotdogs, and the ESPN Club, which is where we ate dinner. There were a surprisingly large number of Steelers fans there. It was kind of shocking. The food was okay. I guess it was typical sports bar food. But, it was fun to be there on a Sunday night with all these die-hard sports fans. A kid next to us had gone to the bathroom and came back exclaiming about it: both bathrooms had a flat screen tv hanging over the stall (one for every two stalls). We both had to personally check it out because he was so excited about it. Crazy.

Well, our camera is kind of slow to download pictures once the SD card gets full and I am trying to download from a full one. So, I have about 10 minutes left on this one. I'll do a slide show and add it to this post from Sunday soon. I probably gave too much detail, but hey, it's my blog, right?

We're Ba-ack!

Hello all! We are back from Disney! It was a great trip! I am actually glad to be back. While I really loved Disney, I am tired and ready for some good sleep and days where we don't walk around for hours. And, I must say that before we left on our trip, I found out the real reason that Scott tripped up the stairs - he had gotten me a surprise anniversary present and had run upstairs to get wrapping paper to wrap it and then asked our neighbor to put it out so that it would be there when we got home. But, I was in the closet in our office where he had hidden it to get a bag on Saturday night and saw it. He got me a globe, which I have been wanting for a long time. We had agree we would not be buying each other presents though because we are planning on buying a really nice camera soon and we were going on this really nice vacation right around our anniversary (which is today!).

We took a ton of pictures, but there are so many and I haven't really had time to look through them or try to name any of them or anything, so for now, please let this link to the photos that were taken by the PhotoPass people in the park suffice. I have been adding various borders to a lot of the pictures because you can just order the whole CD for one price and I figure the more Disney-ish stuff I add the more bang I get for my buck. So, I have about 25 days to go through and add borders and edit those pictures.

So, keep checking back for a more descriptive story about our trip and tons of pictures!

Disney Surprises Already Starting!

I had a moment and wanted to blog about the first Disney surprise for us before our trip even started. My "online" friend Carrie, who is "real life" friends with my friend Bethany from college won a trip to Disney to stay in the Swan and Dolphin Hotel for three days next week while we will be there!! I have been really wanting to meet Carrie and how funny that we will finally be meeting in real life in FL of all places! And, I have not seen Bethany since her wedding right after we all graduated which was...ahem...7 1/2 years ago. But, whose counting, right?

I am super excited. Please say a prayer for our safety while traveling and an extra little prayer for poor Scott. While I ran up to Kroger today to pick up a prescription, he went up the stairs to our bonus room to get our small suitcase and tripped up the stairs at the top of the first little section of stairs (there's a short section, then a half turn, then another small section if that makes any sense). Anyway, he believes he hit his head on the hand rail. I came home and thought he had gotten into it with one of the cats, but then he told me the story and when I looked at it in the light, he has quite a little gash in his head over his right eye. Yikes! This really makes me nervous because what if he had poked his eye out?! He tends to do things like this though. Shortly after we were married, he turned around too quickly in our apt. and go disoriented and bashed his head on the corner of the door so hard it was gushing blood. And, that was on a church morning, so we went to church with a huge band-aid on his head between his eyes! He said that since our 5th anniversary is so close, he figured he needed to celebrate with a new scar! (Yes, he still has a scar from that incident with the door.) Anyway, Scott has no swelling on his head, but he says he feels light-headed. I am a teensy bit nervous about that. But, we are about to eat so hopefully he'll feel better after that. So, pray for no more accidents!

Disney or Bust

Well, we are leaving tomorrow morning for a fun-filled week at Disney. We are both really excited. I will probably set up a slide show at some point in time during our trip and put it on the side bar, so keep checking back. In the meantime, below are the pictures from the Reformation Day Party that we had at church.

Have a great week! We'll see ya real soon! (hahaha)

October 2008 in Review

Hello all! It has been a crazy month for us and I haven't really blogged much about what we are doing. There have been so many things over the last few months that I have wanted to blog about and haven't because I just didn't have time. But, I don't want that to be the case for October.

First of all, a sweet family at church, the Jordans, had their 7th little blessing, Priscilla. I was able to go visit them at a rare moment when no one was home except Jennifer and Priscilla until just a few moments before I left. It was a nice visit. Here is a sweet picture of Priscilla that I took at church a week or so ago.


Our small group had a bonfire cookout at our friends' Charles and Maggie's house. It was a lot of fun with hotdogs, chili, smores, and fun games like horseshoes and double ladder ball! Here are the pictures in a slide show:

I have done a bunch of planting this month as well. I threw away most of my summer potted plants and did some pots of bulbs (tulips and some daffodils) and pansies, from the Growers' Outlet, of course. I love that place. We got 31 3" pots of pansies and 30 bulbs for less than $30! I had read in my Month-by-Month Gardening in Georgia book by Walter Reeves and some other lady that you can save plants like Geraniums over the winter in your garage in paper bags, so I did that. I really liked the colors of the ones that I had and every bit you can save helps. I don't think I'll do any more planting this year except for the daffodil bulbs I have to plant - and I am going to wait until we get back from vacation for that. I will do a quick slide show of my plants, but here's a picture that I tried to take of myself with my updated hanging baskets - it was already dark, so it's not the best. Hey Daddy - do you recognize that shirt? (I save it from a yard sale several years ago - I think that shirt is as old as I am).

Scott and I (well, mostly Scott) have our Disney vacation almost completely planned out! We are leaving this coming Sunday (YAY!!!). We are staying in the Caribbean Beach Resort and we have 5 days of park-hopper passes. We have made meal reservations (we bought the meal plan thingy) for The Rainforest Cafe, Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater, Coral Reef, Liberty Tree Tavern, and Teppan Edo. We are hoping that we can get a last-minute reservation at Le Cellier because it looks really good. We also plan to go to the ESPN Club and the La Cantina De San Angel at some point in time. We ended up having to make lunch reservations for most days because the dinner slots were all full. So, I guess we will eat our "quick service" meals for dinner. We have been looking at the websites for each park and deciding what things we want to do and saving them on our vacation planner on the Disney website. My friend Carrie told me about a website where we can check out the menus for our restaurants at http://www.allears.net/. I feel like I need to pack my whole wardrobe because I am nervous about what the weather will be like!

Another extremely exciting thing happened this month: our friend Clay came to church. This might seem strange that I am excited about someone coming to church. However, Clay has had Cystic Fibrosis his whole life and received two new lungs through a transplant a couple of months ago. He has been on quite a journey of recovery and infections. I believe that Clay is still recovering, but doing much better. It was such a blessing to see Clay. He is such a witness for everyone.

In less exciting, but still quite humorous, news, I am still #1 in our Pigskin Pickem league that I mentioned in a previous post! Chris, aka Master Jordan, sent out some trash talk this week stating that he thought the girls were going down this week. He also does not believe that I am going into my picks blindly and I have not idea what I am doing (hehehe-yes, he put that in his trash talk email). Well, here is a screen shot of our current standings: I'm #1 (Lady Luck) and Caitlin is #2 (Captain Awesome)! Heeheehee! I am waiting until after the Monday night game to send out any trash talk though! I don't want to jinx myself. I must say that I went into this expecting to be in last place every week and to rarely ever think about it. But, it is fun to be winning. At this point, if I drop in standings, I think I will be disappointed. Whereas at the beginning, I would have been happy to not be last. I doubt I will ever do this good again (if Josh invites me back to the league). So, I am enjoying it while it lasts! P.S. Scott is still in last place, even behind Shana who failed to make picks one week...sad.

Scott and I went to our only Georgia Tech football game this year - homecoming against Virginia. They looked really good for the first 7 minutes or so and it was all downhill from there. I was bummed. I did meet some new people that Scott went to college with and saw some old friends that I have known for almost as long as Scott and I have been together. We had fun even though the team lost. Here are some pics from the day:

Okay, most of you already know this, but I went to the New Kids On The Block concert last week with my friend Lindsey. Our Shorter friends Heather and Allison also went and we had dinner with them before the concert. This concert was awesome! I was totally surprised at what a good show they put on. They had multiple wardrobe changes, ran around, danced. They even sang a couple of songs from a round stage in the middle of the main floor that rotated and had a grand piano in the center of it. The New Kids have aged well is all I am saying. I mean, do you realize that the oldest one is at least 40!?? Crazy. I mean, I really do not think that is old, but it is old for what they are doing. You can tell that they haven't really gotten mixed up in drugs and stuff like that (at least, I don't think they have). I was glad that they sang a lot of their old stuff because their new album really does have some raunchy stuff on it. There are only a handful of songs that I can stand to listen to. Here is a slideshow of pictures Lindsey took at the show.

On Friday night, which was the last day of October, Christ Church celebrated a Reformation Day party. Oct. 31, 1517 is the day that Martin Luther tacked up the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, thus beginning the Protestant Reformation. I have quite a few pictures from this, but I have not looked through them yet to make a slide show. I will do that later and post them. They will also be up on our church website, I am sure.

So, that's it. That's our October in review. I have left out the yucky stuff like me being sick for almost the whole week before homecoming with a fever of over 102 and all the cold weather we have been experiencing in our area, forcing us to wear long sleeve shirts and turn the heat and humidifier on. Also, the fact that for about 2.5 weeks my office was having some upgrades done to our A/C causing parts of our building to be 65-68 degrees, which is what made me get sick, I am fairly certain.

So, happy reading. I hope this wasn't too long. If you have made it to the end, feel free to leave a comment about anything above!

McCain's Insurance Plan

I have been extremely confused about the talks about the two candidates' proposed health care plans lately. Scott found this article and I think it lays it out pretty well. I hope you will read it. Let me know what you think.

Randomness

This will be a random, quick post. I am babysitting the printer while our church financials print and poor Scott is in the kitchen doing the dishes. :0( It has been an ordeal to print these things. First, I thought we weren't going to have enough paper and that Scott was going to need to go out tomorrow to get some. Then, I realized I can print them front and back, so I think I'll be okay. (I have not actually counted the sheets). Then, our ink cartridge ran out of ink, so luckily we were stocked up on ink cartridges, but I still had to find them and change it. But, the good thing was that I found one kind of pushed to the back that I don't think we realized we had. So yay!

We had a lot of rain this week. It rained all day on Wed. and a good bit on Thursday. Scott checked our rain gauge last night and said that we had gotten 3.5 inches this week! Wow! I was afraid that the mums in my front garden weren't blooming because I was overwatering or they didn't like getting morning dew on them or something; but apparently they were thirsty because now they have started blooming. Yay!

I have a house plant called a Croton that I bought to sit in our cut-through window between the kitchen and the living room. I am apparently overwatering it or something. Does anyone know anything about these plants? I put rocks in the bottom of the pot, I think, before I put it in there.

We have carved out the second week of Nov. for a vacation. We are pretty sure we are going to go to Disney World. I have never been and Scott has been, but he doesn't really remember it. Scott has been talking to a guy at work that goes every year getting all the good deals and calling his travel agent. She gets really good deals. He also ordered us an informational DVD off of the Disney website and it came today in the mail with our name printed on the little "CD protector" thing it came in. Impressive.

Anywho, I guess that's about all. I just have a few more to print and I'll be done. Woohoo!

One Word Answers

My friend Erin tagged me in this one-word only meme - I have to answer each question with only one word. Then I pass it along to others to do the same. Here it goes! (Please realize that this is very difficult for me!)

1. Where is your cell phone?
purse

2. Where is your significant other?
chair

3. Your hair color?
brown

4. Your mother?
deceased

5. Your father?
53

6. Your favorite thing?
Church

7. Your dream last night?
strange

8. Your dream/goal?
Mom

9. The room you're in?
office

10. Your hobby?
scrapbooking

11. Your fear?
rejection

12. Where do you want to be in 6 years?
Home

13. Where were you last night?
Shadburns'

14. What you're not?
tall

15. One of your wish-list items?
CDs

16. Where you grew up?
Georgia

17. The last thing you did?
ate

18. What are you wearing?
sweats

19. Your TV?
baseball

20. Your pet?
furry

21. Your computer?
old

22. Your mood?
whatever

23. Missing someone?
Lisa

24. Your car?
Tacoma

25. Something you're not wearing?
hat

26. Favorite store?
Target

27. Your summer?
gardening

28. Love someone?
Much

29. Your favorite color?
red

30. When is the last time you laughed?
earlier

31. Last time you cried?
unsure

I'll tag 5 people to continue the game!

Shana
Maggie
Bethany
Carrie
Allison

Pigskin Pickem

Speaking of polls...

Our friends Josh and Shana have organized a league of Pigskin Pickem through ESPN for us and a bunch of our friends. It is one of those where you just pick who is going to win each NFL game each week. The first week, Scott went through and called out the games and I just randomly picked the winners...based on if I knew anything about the team, which team colors I liked best, or which mascot I like better, etc...you get the picture. Well, I have been 1st, 2nd, or tied for 1st for all 4 weeks so far! Scott is dead last. Actually, overall, the girls in the league are doing better than the guys. I find it quite funny as none of us really knows or cares that much about football. It is even funnier that I probably spend the least amount of time making my picks. All I can say is that there must have been a lot of upsets because Scott knows a LOT about football. He knows a lot about all sports, but especially football.

Did you know that in college he was an intramural flag football official? And, after college, for about 3 years, he was a high school football official.

What's my team name? It started out being "Marcy's Picks". What is it now? "Lady Luck." That's all there is to it!

I figure I should post this now while I am still ahead. Chris predicts that all the girls' luck will turn. He might be right. Andy said that they roped us in by purposefully doing bad the first few weeks so we get into it, then they're going to pound us. Whatever. :o)

Anyway, I love it irony of the whole thing!

I am sure that many of you are asking yourselves: "I wonder if she is actually watching these games to see who the winner is?"

My answer to you: "No!" I mean, it isn't worth all that! They will win or lose whether I watch it or not! And, Scott will inform me anyway.

Please realize that all of the above are merely statements. I am not "bragging" because I have used no skill in reaching the success I have, so I can't really take credit for it. My boss told me that there's a girl at work that won the basketball bracket thingy at work 2 out of three years and that last year, after she won, she said "We were talking about baseball for that thing, right?" Why do I find this so funny? I don't know! But, it does make me laugh every time I think about it...

Follow Up On Poll

I thought it was fun to have that poll over to the right. It looks like 23% of people (at least people who read my blog) clean out their fridge when they go to the store or when they need more room (which for some people can be one and the same) and 17% of people clean it out once a week, when something smells, or once a month.

Thanks to everyone who voted!

My answer was...when we need room! We are terrible about doing it. The worst part is that when we do clean it out, sometimes we stop once we have made enough room!

Heehee...