Overdue Picture

I was going through all the pictures on Kurt's computer and I came across this one and realized that I forgot to share pictures of Bob's birthday present to Micaela last June. I don't have much time right now, but I thought I'd at least share the picture. The kids had fun with it.

Dishes, Dogs, and Snow

Last week I actually had quite a bit to blog about, but I couldn't find the chord that connects my camera to my computer (and blogs are so much better with pictures). We'll start off with the dishes:

This is what our sink looked like after two days of not having a working dishwasher. It didn't help that we invited friends over for dinner and weren't smart enough to buy paper plates ahead of time. I know I won't get too much sympathy from the CA crowd where dishwashers aren't the norm, but it does take a lot of time and Micaela and I just had better stuff to do. Once the lovely aroma of old food started making its way through the house though, we broke down and spent one evening cleaning it all up. The landlord came by yesterday and then called the repair folks, so don't worry, we'll be okay.

Now on to the dogs. After leaving them in their crates for the last few days of last week (after the curtain/loveseat incident), I decided that I should use your suggestions and just start with a smaller area. The downstairs part of our house is a really open layout so there is no where we can really gate them off, so I thought I'd give them a room upstairs. They got the hallway (with no furniture) and our newly designated baby's room that had nothing but a bed, dresser and rocking chair in it. I came home from work on Monday and was pleasantly surprise that nothing was torn up. I could tell they had jumped up on the bed, but no big deal. Awesome. We tried it again the next day, and here is the result:

BEFORE:

AFTER:
The stupid dogs ate the mattress! I would have accepted the bedspread (it was a cheap one from Kosovo), but the mattress is a different story. I think we'll give up on letting them alone for more than an hour or two until we get to CA, and then maybe we'll try again. Now, the dogs aren't the only stupid ones, I didn't make a connection between eating mattress stuffing and getting an upset stomach. I should have made them sleep downstairs, but no, at about two in the morning I woke up to Bear hacking up the mattress, and a few hours later Spot did the same thing, but in his crate. It was a lovely day.

On to better news. Storm Watch 2008. We were watching The Terminal on the TV Friday night while eating dinner and getting ready for poker and every thirty minutes, no kidding, they broke in to tell us the latest on the "horrible winter storm" we were getting. An inch and a half is a lot of snow for here, I admit, but it was warm enough (32-33 degrees) that the snow wasn't even sticking to the roads. Not exactly the emergency that we needed updates every half hour. The dogs and Micaela had fun playing in the backyard where the snow did stick and it was very pretty.

Dogs and Princesses

Holidays are finally over and we are back on a normal schedule now which means that Kurt is working in PA during the week and Micaela and I are running the house. Last week I decided that I was tired of coming home (30 min each way) at lunch to let the dogs out of their crates. Option 1 - hire someone to do it for me, Option 2 - train the dogs to behave in the house while we're gone, Option 3 - just leave them in their crates until I get home at night. We decided to go with Option 2. We had left them home alone before, and for a few hours at a time and they were great, didn't get into any trouble (as long as the trashcans were out of sight). A while ago we left them home all day and they decided they would be bad and eat half our curtain, our loveseat, Micaela's backpack, books and schoolwork, so we didn't let them out after that. Well, some time had passed and Kurt agreed that we should try again. We left them for a few hours and they were great. I left them out when I went to work on Monday, and came home to find two small holes in our newly self-reupholstered loveseat. They got punished, but overall, for a whole day alone, that wasn't too bad. On Tuesday, we left them out again, and when I came home, not only was the loveseat much more torn up, but the one curtain was also ripped in half (funny how they picked the same stuff to chew up). Back to the crates. Any suggestions from you dog experts? I think a lot of it has something to do with having two dogs, they definitely play off each other. Oh well, here are the pictures. Oh, and there are a few pictures of "Queen Micaela" and her friend who spent the night "Princess Jocelyn" (if you look close, they did their own makeup).

Surviving the Holidays

Yeah, we're home! It's taken about a week to recover from all the traveling we did over the holidays, but I think we're back on schedule now. I was so tired, that I didn't even bother to set up my computer until today (very unusual for me). I guess I'll just start at the beginning (this will be a long blog).

-Friday Dec 21st Kurt and I decided we wanted to have our friends over for a small Christmas party and gift exchange. It was a great time, amd the gift exchange was hilarious. Kurt went to dollar store and bought some awesome gag gifts (my favorite was the fake bling), but our friend's Georgia and Todd stole the thunder by giving us Ohio State ornaments and a UCLA sticker. Where they found them out here, I'm not sure. Here some of the pictures of our friends that Micaela took:

- Saturday Morning, being the superstar that I am, I woke up early and cleaned up the house from the party the night before. Our plan was to head up to PA around lunchtime. Of course Micaela was packed and ready to go at 6am, but with a little effort Kurt and I managed to get ourselves ready and we left just after noon. The drive wasn't too bad until we hit D.C. and the world just came to a halt. Traffic sucked. The dogs got sick. Not a great drive. We got to PA around 7pm ate dinner and went straight to bed.

- On Sunday we took Great-Grandma Cowfer to church and then headed to the mall for some last minute shopping. It actually wasn't too crazy. Micaela was off shopping with Grandma so Kurt and I got to spend the day together, it was actually very nice and relaxing. When we got back Kurt set up the Wii and Grandma and Pappy Weaver got to experience Wii sports. They did pretty good, but Micaela still beat them which she loved. Kurt got spanked at baseball by both his dad and his sister, which I enjoyed :)

- Christmas Eve and Christmas day were nice- some shopping, some sleeping, eating, and present opening. Thanks for all the gifts! We spent most of Christmas down at Kurt's sister's house relaxing. After we had visited with all friends and family we decided that we wanted to head back down to Williamsburg so that we wouldn't be rushed getting ready for our Puerto Rico trip on the 27th. We got home, slept, and then took down our tree and decorations and repacked for our trip.

- Kurt hates when I make plane reservations because I tend to make them early. We got up at 4am to make our 6:30am flight to San Juan. No real issues on the way down, until we got off the plane in San Juan wearing jeans and sweatshirts. It must have been 85 degrees that day. I should have checked the weather. I didn't pack and shorts or t-shirts/tanks for me or Micaela, oops (we were forced to go shopping). We rented a FJ Cruiser and headed to our rental house at the Coast Guard Station in Aguadilla. It was awesome, a great three bedroom house on a cliff across from a big pool for only $80 a night. There was even a post exchange nearby where we were able to buy groceries to get us through the week. Highly recommended location.

- On Friday we slept in and took our time getting ready before heading to Grandpa Oscars. Kurt's pretty familiar with that part of Puerto Rico so he took us to a great restaurant on the way that sells my new favorite food - seafood mofongo. Grandpa Oscars house was in a really nice neighborhood which made me feel more comfortable. His house is small, but very neat. It's all wood (which is strange for PR where everything else is concrete) and it's down at the bottom of this big hill with a stream running right next to it. It's pretty secluded and really quiet. It's also very shady so it keeps cool year-round. We're hoping that Micaela inherits it someday. Micaela's favorite part is all the animals. He has three dogs, and lots of wild animals that never leave: cats (that we don't touch), two ducks, about 50 chickens (on the other side of the stream), fish, and turtles. He feeds them all so they all just stick around. It was a very nice first visit and when we started talking about food he offered to cook for us the next day, which we gladly accepted.

- The rest of the vacation was spent sitting on Grandpa Oscars porch eating, and eating more, relaxing and then eating the next meal. It's the culture there that if you don't clean up your plate then you didn't like it or something was wrong, so I ate a LOT more than I normally would have. It was fantastic though. If I lived in Puerto Rico I would weigh at least 50 more pounds than I do now. On one of the days we went back to the CG station early to swim which was fun and it felt good to do something close to exercise. Here are the pictures:

The pool

Grandpa Oscar's House

Micaela, Grandpa Oscar, and the three dogs

Feeding the fish and the chickens

Micaela and "Mr. Duck"

Uncle Hernan's Ranch

- It's a little bit of a trip from Aguadilla to San Juan so we decided to leave on New Year's Eve and get a hotel near the airport for the night before our flight. Dad booked us at a Holiday Inn Express in an area called Condado that's a little away from the main tourist area. We had to go down this alley to get to the hotel, but on the next corner was a Cartier store, Gucci, Louis Vitton, and some other store. What a slummy area :) We walked along the beach and went out to eat a Japanese Steakhouse. It was a nice night but I was asleep well before midnight.

The beach by our hotel in San Juan

- You all probably know about our fun then next day, but just in case, here it is. On New Years Day we were supposed to fly out at 1pm (I thought). We bought tickets through Expedia where our flight down was on United and the flight back was on Delta, but booked through United. Back in early December I called United to check on the return flight and got an itinerary confirmation that was different from Expedia's itinerary. I figured the airline was more correct than Expedia, so we were going off that. So on New Years Day I went to Delta to check and make sure our flights were on time and the flight numbers and times didn't match up to what the itinerary said. I called Delta to see what happened and they said that they couldn't help since they didn't book the flight. I called United and they told me that they only booked the flight on Delta, they don't get updates when there are changes (would have been nice to know earlier). I finally called Expedia and actually got a very helpful person on the phone. It was sort of my fault for trusting the airlines itinerary and not Expedia's itinerary (which was right all along), but she helped us out anyways and gave us a $100 coupon for our troubles. We weren't able to fly out until Jan 2nd and we had to take seperate flights. Kurt offered to fly solo, so that's what we did. It actually worked out okay because we were able to upgrade our hotel and relax and watch all the football games (Fight On 'SC!!!). Somehow the next day Kurt ended up with the shorter flights, exit row seating followed by first class seating, and he arrived early. Micaela and I ended up crammed in coach, delayed at JFK (no, New York is not in between Puerto Rico and Richmond), and we ended up carrying all the luggage. I definitely got the short end of that stick, next time someone has to fly solo, it's going to be ME! But we made it home and I was certainly glad to get here.