pictures!!

New baby on the way! Deirdre and Doug are in China right now!


Irma and her sleepy arm



Ramen playing with string at the new apt
Jared and me in Davis at our "country club"

Jared trying out his outfit for the wedding season


Me, Maria, and Virginia getting ready for Maria's wedding


Ramen in the 80's front pack at the garage sale. not happy


Computer time at my mom's house a few months ago


playing wii outside!

So, probably no one is going to read this since I haven't updated since November of last year but now I actually have things to report.

For all who have not heard, Jared and I quit school and are moving to Davis, CA. He is going to work for awhile and I am going to work for a year and get residency before starting the epidemiology phd program at UC Davis. Our program here just wasn't working out the way we thought and there weren't enough people doing research in our interest areas.

Ahhh, the house you ask? Well, we're renting it. Our friend, Chira, is a property manager and is going to take care of everything. We already have people very interested in it even though we aren't moving out until sept and for a somewhat exhorbitant rent. We won't be making any money on it now but hanging on to it for awhile longer seems like a sound financial move. Listen to me...I'll be getting an IRA or a 401K or something next. I do have a TIACREFF account...they stole some money from me and I have no idea how to get it back. Do you think that counts as retirement planning?

We're a little nervous about moving....what with the fact that we have no idea where we're going to live, we don't have jobs, etc...Jared's skills are quite marketable but he's a bit terrified of the the big 40 (40 hours a week). I just really don't want to work for an insurance company. We do sort of like the idea of passing the buck when it comes to plumbing problems. Ahhh renting.

There are cute pictures of our house up at: http://summitpm.biz/801cottonwood.html

At this very moment I am temping at a law office. There are about 2.5 people here and about 1 call per hour. Very boring. I have been meaning to learn SQL so I'm working on that right now, IM-ing all my computer scientists with questions.

Wait! i can be topical

I forgot that I never blogged about halloween....we have some amazing pictures.

Jared and I dressed up like ninjas and i made the kitties manes so they could be lions.



There are more pictures from halloween, including ted in some wigs at: http://web-dev2.cs.umt.edu/~jrapp/

Sometimes the server goes down so be patient and check again.

neglected blog

...so, i haven't posted in like a month....its lost some of its sparkle since i can't find my camera.

Jared and I hosted our first Thanksgiving at our new house this year. I made a turkey (breast). I didn't want to deal with the giblets and neither of us nor his parents like dark meat so i had the butcher dude cut off the wings and the legs so I just had a ribcage. i did all kinds of crazy brining techniques and it was delicious.

we invited some other people but they had other plans...we realized later that this was good since we only have 4 chairs and a non-standard height table. someone would have been eating at the kids table (i.e. kitty mat). that would have made a good picture, actually.

school is a little better lately....mostly just less annoying. i do have a ton of stuff to do in the next 3 weeks. for one thing, i need to research seal distemper...my assigned math project. um...harp seals are effing adorable and i highly recommend that you google-image them. we have to read a book about the communication failures at NASA for our communications class. its not a horrible concept but the writing is so horrible and distracting! this guy is like the james joyce of social science...stream of consciousness with weird parenthetical statements everywhere. we decided we needed chips to be able to read it. so we bought some chips. hopefully now we can make it through.

we just got back from borat. wow. so hilarious, so offensive (but still mostly hilarious). so much naked hairiness. he has an incredible knack for getting people to say all the horrible things they really believe but know better than to say in other company. you feel bad for some of the people in the movie who get made fun of but other times it is just tremendously satisfying. racist cowboys and drunk frat boys.

in other news, we are fat. fat fat fat. and its only november!!! we have to fight off this winter fat for another 5 months!! i'm not sure we'll make it this year. i'm going to have to ask for stretchy pants for christmas.

it snowed here last night for the first real time and snowed more today. jared through snowballs at kids and we ran. i bet they liked it. people are putting up christmas lights and taking down their tacky glowing, inflatable turkeys. i of course, had my christmas lights up 3 weeks ago when target started selling them. last year i got a christmas tree the day after thanksgiving and i loved it but by the time christmas came, it was real crispy and dry and kind of a fire hazard so I am trying to restrain myself this year.

normally i don't get up early for anything except catching planes but for some crazy reason jared and i decided to go shopping on black friday. there were 800 thread count sheets to be had. we made it to target at 6:30am!!!! and it was totally insane. i'm glad i wasn't shopping for toys...you could get your arms ripped off in those aisles. The checkout line went all the way back to the electronics section (i'm assuming most targets have roughly the same layout).

I decided we need some pictures, regardless of the fact that they are neither new nor topical.

list of the day

1. hate school. H-A-T-E it. stupid sampling with all your stupid little formulas and infinite possibilities for mistakes. stupid grant proposal with no basis in reality yet must be presented in toto on thurs. stupid musical lecturers blah blah blahing useless theory that 1/8 of the class cares about/understands. H-A-T-E.

2. the renter's chihuahua appears to be dribbling a miniture basketball above me. there is no other possibility.

3. started to watch mindless tv to keep from getting drunk. already seen all my antique roadshows (sad, i know) and when i tried to watch a without a trace...a woman was clutching her dead dog covered in blood and i couldn't frankly handle that at the moment, alone in the house. i had to hug my cats and make sure the doors were locked

4. jared. drunk. having fun. somewhere else. presentation finished. he better fix the damn sink.

5. mold taking over the entire bathtub. must find some way to fight back before maria comes and learns what disgusting pigs we are.

6. still dizzy. rules out internet shopping. too much scrolling.

miss lizzy

condensed version: i'm dizzy. [insert whining here]

-------------------------------------------------------

i'm so dizzy that i've spent the majority of the day trying to remember to keep my head at exactly the same tilt, forgetting, spinning, feeling like puking, repeating.

i forgot to go to one of my classes until 40 minutes after it started.

i always spend a good deal of time dizzy and nauseous but it seriously escalated yesterday after i went to the gym which just goes to show that going to the gym is bad for me.

pedialyte fixed me up a little last night.....josh called while i was drinking it out of its gross pod to tell me that he had just a) eaten mali kofta and b) seen rufus wainwright. guess who i'd rather be at that moment. i'm trying to find a picture of the gross pod on the internet but apparently it has been rightly stricken from the planet. it is very gelatinous submarine shape with a straw coming out of one side.

oh! and the lab computer is doing something evil. i try to run a script simulating modern man eating neanderthals at a constant rate (i know, i know)...usually something goes wrong and occasionally, the entire screen image turns into a cube and spins around. some kind of sick joke..thanks a lot imac.

ok, something happy....um, ramen is being really good and coming in from outside when we call him. i told jared that we just needed to let him out by himself and he would start being good. i based this on the line from footloose "in order for our children to become trustworthy we have to trust them" or something like that. i think it is essential to make cat-parenting decisions based on 80's movies. hmmm...i wonder what else there is.

your kid will smoke pot in detention, so you might as well excuse them from it.

uhh...thats all i'm coming up with at the moment but my brain is a little fuzzy

cold and shoes

it is 26 degrees at the moment. ramen begged and begged to go outside and jared telling him he was going to end up blind with poo for fur with no ears did nothing to dissuade him. so he is shivering on the porch. smart little irma is watching from the window.

So, some of you have already commented on the shoes but i thought i'd make viewing them easier. They are all roughly the same price (exhorbitant).













Here are the links (in reverse order) if you're the sort of person who wants more information (i.e. my mom)

http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/18829368/c/6.html
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/15370451/c/5860.html%3C/a

http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/17069255/c/30464.html%3C/a
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/16762071/c/537.html%3C/a
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/18094334/c/7339.html%3C/a
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/10751584/c/27671.html%3C/a
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/18575249/c/67833.html%3C/a
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/18094799/c/139.html%3C/a
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/17556973/c/8647.html%3C/a
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/16903262/c/359.html%3C/a
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/18093870/c/6.html%3C/a
http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/16910120/c/1230.html%3C/a

I had the best breakfast ever and I would highly recommend it to anyone (who isn't allergic to nuts). Eggo toaster waffles with peanutbutter and honey. ideal.

butterflies

I'm beginning to realize that I take movies, tv shows, and books VERY seriously. I regularly think of something funny that one of my friends said, only to realize that my "friend" is actualy a character and not a real person.

When something sad happens on t.v. I have trouble shaking it. Jared has to keep reminding me that its not real. But I don't want to succomb to its fakeness. I want it to be true and happening in real time. I think about characters on tv and wonder what they've been doing since the last time I saw them (last episode). I hate endings of books because nothing ends in real life, its an infinite epic and I want to know what happens next, dammit!

This is all stemming from the fact that we have been watching The Office on t.v. and I take the Pam and Jim "situation" very seriously. When Jim kisses her at the end of the first season and all their awkward flirting comes to an awkward head it just kills me. I get practically get butterflies in my stomache like I know these two people and I'm looking on from the closet.

It made me miss being in their position...an uncertain beginning, a first kiss, etc... Being in a long term relationship that you don't intend to break off sort of puts an end to the butterflies. I still sometimes get the feeling in my stomach but it is due to a) a movie or b) something thats not exciting but scary or anxiety producing. I don't think those should even get to be called butterlies...they are more like moths.

I suggested to Jared that we should break up and then get back together so that we could have butterflies again but he didn't think it would work. I guess its sort of a trade off. When I am not in a relationship and I watch a movie and the two people fall in love at the end and its so right and unavoidable and complete, then i just feel like shit because no one loves me like that, i have no one, blah blah blah. Now when i watch one of those movies and I get to the end it reminds me of how much I love Jared and how I am just as happy as the people in the movie. So maybe that makes up for it.

This is not to say that the butterflies lead to something good. Usually not. Would I rather get unending butterflies but never have a "successful relationship" (whatever that is these days). Definitely not. This path is highly correlated with an enending series of disappointments and loneliness. I guess butterflies are the price you pay...