More Florida Vehicular Weirdness

Florida man issued 50 tickets by police in one day.

Inauguration

I'm watching President Obama's swearing-in and speech on a big screen in a meeting room at work. It is so exciting to be a small part of history.

He's probably one of the greatest orators of our generation.

Month by Month Update

I can't figure out a better way to squish several months of updates into one posting, so here we go: a list. Voila.

October: got noise pierced; went to Bozeman, Montana. (Not related, although I needed the week to recover from getting yet another hole in my head.)
November: Drove to St. Louis for Turkey Day to visit family. Brought sweaters. Drove for 16 hours. Stayed over for a work meeting, got to stay in a hotel right across the street from the new Busch Stadium.
December: Had a nice quiet Christmas in Tampa. The Nunezes adopted us for Christmas Day and had us over for some special Dominican Republic plantain lasagne. Nearly blow a gasket because it's so incredibly good.
January: Had a 35-person party squished into our house for New Year's. Bandit was ecstatic the entire night, waiting for food to fall from reveler's hands. Played foosball in the dining room, Rock Band in the living room, and made s'mores by the firepit. All three of us slept for two days afterwards (we're not used to staying up past 10:30 p.m. on the weekends.)
January 8: Got Jane's Christmas card; laughed the entire way through it. (Hello Ciara!)
January 16: Got a promotion at work; I'm now officially a Senior Manager. Whee!
The rest of January 2009 - December 2009: work, commute, hang out with Bandit and Jas, ride motorcycles...

Love, M.

Nice article on the St. Charles Public Library

From the Kane County Chronicle. I was sorry to hear that the building project has been put on hold for now.

Quiet for awhile

Hello folks - the blog was silent for awhile, due to high travel times. My high travel times, that is... been to Montana, Dallas and St. Louis in the past little while. Montana was for fun, Dallas for work, and St. Louis was fun/work. We finally put up a few pictures of Montana, although this is no where near the 4 zillion that we actually took (drat that limitation on the free Flickr site!). Montana was absolutely breathtaking (sometimes literally when we hiked up a mountainside). I got to see the St. Louis office while on break for Thanksgiving...extended my time there with a work meeting the week after Turkey Day. It was absolutely fantastic to be back on our home turf and see family.

Jason's doing well, pretty much business as usual. He's on break from his Tuesday night Bible study for now. In a few weeks, we'll have a Masonite intern (Cami) coming to stay with us for a couple of weeks while she gains knowledge of the business world. We're very excited to meet her!

Otherwise, we finally decided on a new car: a Scion TC. It is silver and extremely cute. I gave myself an unexpected shower yesterday by engaging the windshield wiper fluid while the sunroof was open. Yep, I laughed at myself too.

Love ya'll,
M

O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!

Played hooky from work and went over to the Obama Rally across the street. Here's the photographic evidence.

Only 2 weeks to go!

Library Bliss

Stopped by our local public library to browse for some Montana-themed books for a bit of destination reading. Unfortunately, and perhaps logically, most of the books set in Montana are Westerns, not my favorite genre. So I skipped past those and figured that a visit to the Bozeman Public Library would fulfill my need to intersect place and literature.

The bliss part happened when I was steaming through the books on CD section and noticed "Barr" on a call number label. It was Nevada Barr's new book, Winter Study. Even better, Barbara Rosenblatt continues to narrate the books as the voice of park ranger Anna Pigeon. Barbara is the voice of Anna; when she narrates outside of this series, it's difficult and confusing to hear her voice as another character. I'm finishing up with Bill Bryson's trek through the Appalachian Trail in A Walk in the Woods, and eagerly anticipating Anna's new adventure.

(A huge thanks to SueP for introducing me to the writings of Nevada Barr.)