Carissa the Vampire Slayer

Yesterday was our annual Trick-or-Beer at work. Cy and I almost didn't dress up this year, but everyone seemed so disappointed that we weren't dressing up that we managed to pull something together. Cy was a vampire with crazy bright red hair and I was a slayer, complete with stakes and giant wooden sledgehammer. Everyone enjoyed our costumes, and we had a really good time, even though we didn't win the costume contest.

The contest was won by a guy dressed as Beaker from the Muppets, and he was absolutely hilarious and definitely deserved to win. Second place went to three of Cy's work friends, who were dressed as the Brawny paper towel guy, the Charmin toilet paper bear, and Mr. Clean. They were pretty funny also.

We had a lot of fun, and after the costume contest, we roamed the halls of the Baud and raked in a bunch of free treats. :)

Rock Band

A couple of days ago, instead of exchanging our Blockbuster movie for another movie, Cy picked up the game Rock Band 2 for the XBox 360. We had been wanting to try a karaoke game, or something that included singing. We've enjoyed Guitar Hero (all of them) a lot, so we thought Rock Band would be pretty fun.

It turns out though, that the whole point of Rock Band must be more of the collective Rock Band experience (with drums, guitar, and vocals), because using it for just singing wasn't that much fun. The songs were obviously geared more toward the instrumental parts. It's kind of hard to just straight up sing songs by the Beastie Boys, Lit, etc. Needless to say, it got old pretty fast. I mean, you can only sing "Eye of the Tiger" so many times, right?

We're thinking that maybe if we're interested in playing a singing game, something like American Idol Karaoke might be more up our alley. So we'll be trying that next. Long story short, we were not too impressed with Rock Band. We'll just stick to Guitar Hero - it has better songs & graphics.

A Great Date

Last week, I mentioned to Cy that it had been a really long time since he and I had been on a date. I guess after two years, we are getting to be old married people now. :) Or possibly it's just that with our hectic schedule of work, school, working on our house, and deacon training, we are just too exhausted do much on the weekends. But anyway, he said he would plan a date for us for Friday night. I expected a pretty typical date, like dinner and a movie, but Cy really surprised me and went all-out. He basically recreated our first real date, but with some new additions.

On Friday, Cy got off work early but said he would be back at four to pick me up. When he picked me up, he announced that our date had 4 phases and we were heading toward Long Point to commence Phase 1. We parked in front of the CVS at Long Point, so I was very confused at first, but he was just trying to keep me guessing. For Phase 1, he took me to Handpicked and told me to pick out any one item in the store. Of course, I was very overwhelmed. After much deliberation, I settled on a set of leopard-print/tiger's eye necklaces.

After that, it was time for Phase 2. For Phase 2, we headed out to Fonduely Yours on Coleman Blvd. This is where we had dinner on our first date, and we hadn't been back since. From the outside, Fonduely Yours looks like a total dive. The building is run-down and practically hidden in the wild vegetation that's all around it. But the fondue is delicious. They sat us in a secluded booth for two in the back, and we enjoyed a cheddar cheese fondue with carrots, apples, bread, and broccoli; a spicy chicken broth fondue with filet and chicken and a variety of dipping sauces; and milk chocolate dessert fondue with pound cake, marshmallows, pineapples, cherries, and pretzels. It was delicious.

After dinner, we drove over to Station 19 (by the lighthouse) at Sullivan's Island and went for a walk on the beach. On our first date, we went to Isle of Palms after dinner and ended up just sitting on the beach talking until about 3 am. Since we are older now, we only stayed on the beach until about 7:00 or 7:30. :)

Then, we drove home for Phase 4. When I walked in the house, a vase of beautiful roses and two of my favorite Cadbury chocolate candy bars were waiting for me. It was an amazing evening. Cy sure knows how to take a girl on a nice date. :)

Amazon Kindle!!!

Last night, I became the proud owner of an Amazon Kindle. It was hard for me to make the decision to go Kindle at first - like so many bibliophiles, reading is so much more than just. . .well, reading. It's a sensory experience - I love the texture and the smell of a new book, and the crisp feel of the pages. When the Kindle first came out, I scoffed at it because I knew I would lose all of those things. Then my friend Paula showed me her Kindle and it was love at first sight. The E-Ink display makes it much more like an actual book page than a computer screen (for obvious reasons, I would not want to be reading a book on a computer screen after staring at one all day long at work), and the mere convenience factor I think is what finally what won me over. (Plus, let's be honest - I'm basically a computer geek these days, and I'm a sucker for a new electronic gadget. I'll probably even give in to the iPhone craze before too long.) Out of box, the Kindle holds approximately 200 books. You can also add additional memory to hold even more books. When we went to Jamaica this summer, I took an entire bookbag filled with books and stashed a couple more in my suitcase. I read all the books from the bookbag and one of the ones from the suitcase. I took up so much space drag books halfway around the world, and running through the airport (when we missed our flight) with that bookbag on my shoulder may have contributed to my frequent trips to the chiropractor these days.

I mentioned the Kindle to Cy, and he had never heard of it, but he was instantly on board. After growing up a military kid, he is the ultimate anti-pack-rat. Having hoards of books taking over our entire house I think drives him a little bit crazy. I was going to just ask for the Kindle for Christmas, but then I was pleasantly surprised to receive a promotion at work, and Cy (anxious to curb the influx of books into our fairly uncluttered house), insisted that I go ahead and buy the Kindle as a promotion present. Of course, I didn't object. :)

Then there was just the torture of waiting for the Kindle to arrive. I thought it might show up as early as Saturday, leaving me some of the weekend to experiment with it, but alas, it didn't show up until the middle of dinner last night. Of course I was able to get nothing done last night. Forget homework, forget the laundry, forget cleaning the bathroom. I was downloading books and reading like a fiend.

The only drawbacks I have found so far are that it doesn't have a backlight (I assumed it would, since it's electronic, but apparently it can't because of the E-Ink technology. But regular old books don't come with backlights either, so it's not like I'm losing anything, right?), and it's not waterproof. Okay, this last part sounds weird, but one important thing to know about me is that I am a bubble-bath-oholic, and my favorite thing to do is read a book in the bathtub. I have never once dropped a book in the bathtub, and I've been reading in the bathtub for. . .well, probably as long as I have been able to read. . .but since the Kindle was a little pricey, I was afraid to risk it. So (I am such a dork) I invented what I like to refer to as my "Redneck Kindle Cover" - meaning I turned the Kindle on and then stuck it inside a Ziploc Freezer Bag and sealed it up. That way, it at least gave the illusion of being waterproof, and I could still click the Next Page button.
I know, I'm a total dork. But all this to say, my Kindle is amazing and I will probably never get anything productive done now that I have it.

Where in the World Do We Live Anyway?

Okay, so this weekend marked the second Saturday night in a row that we got no sleep due to shenanigans on our street that involved the cops coming. Seriously, what kind of neighborhood do we live in anyway?

So this Saturday night, we're in bed and around 11:30 we hear all these cars thumping loud music right outside our window, and there are lights shining into our bedroom, waking us up. So we look outside and there are 2 trucks and a random car parked in our yard. As we look, hoards of teenagers spill out of these cars and just take off running up the street. What in the world?

After events that occurred later (which I will get to), we deduced that these kids were trying to be inconspicuous by parking throughout the neighborhood and they thought our house would be a good spot because they didn't think we were home. All our lights were off, and unlike everyone else in our neighborhood, we actually park our cars in our garage out of sight.

Anyway. . .so these kids keep coming back and forth from their cars, turning them on and blasting music, and other kids are cruising the neighborhood in their cars blasting music, and there are tons of kids just roaming around, so we decide it couldn't hurt to call the police. Cy calls the police and explains to them that we have random cars on our property and random kids roaming the streets, and they not only get our address wrong, but we get the impression they totally don't care. So we think, at least we tried, and we go back to bed to try to ignore the ruckus and get some sleep.

Well, a few minutes later we hear a car go by, and I look out the window to see a police car cruising on by. They had obviously seen the cars and decided everything was okay. And I think that probably would have been the end of it, but for what happened next. One of the kids, out roaming the streets, sees the cop car and freaks out, and takes off running toward his car (parked in our yard of course). Well the cop see this kid running down the street and whips her car around. The kid hops in his truck and tries to take off, but the cop floors it and parks sideways across the front of his truck, blocking him in. Apparently after this (we couldn't actually see from where we were, but our neighbor across the streets filled us in), the kid gets out of the truck and takes off running. He tries to run behind our house, which is a huge mistake, since we and our neighbor have a fence. So the cop gets out of the car, chases the kid down the street, tackles him, and drags him back to her car.

At this point, the kid makes his next big mistake. He tells the cop that he lives/is hanging out at. . .the house where the cops had to come last weekend (I'll get to that in a minute). The cop says, "Then why are you down here?" and he makes something up, so she drags him up the street and starts banging on the door of this house. Well, these people are no strangers to the cops banging on their door, but they are lucky this time and aren't home. In the middle of this, a second cop shows up. I don't know if at this point they realized the kid was lying, or that he was drunk, but the kid starts yelling at the male cop, and the cop just grabs him, whips his hands behind his back, throws him against the cop car, frisks him, cuffs him, and shoves him inside.

After this, three more cop cars show up. They run the license plates on the cars in our yard. We got the impression that one or more of them might have been stolen. But the female cop ran the plates on one car and said, "I know this kid, you don't want this kid in your neighborhood." Which we of course found very reassuring.

After running the plates, the first cop decides to go up the street and see where all the kids have gone. There is of course some huge party with underage drinking, so they haul some of the kids away and the rest take off running. Well of course now the kids whose cars (stolen or not) are parked in our yard are not about to come back for them, with the cops camped out right there, so the cops call a tow truck to have the cars towed and impounded.

The first truck--the one belonging to the kid who got tackled--is taken away by his very unhappy looking parents. The other two are left in the street surrounded by the cops until at 1 am, the tow trucks finally show up and haul them off. We finally got some sleep around 2 am.

This coming on the heels of last weekend's cop-worthy adventure. So last Saturday night we're asleep and at 1:30 am we get awakened by a loud pounding sound. It is so loud it even wakes Cy up (which is near impossible). Cy goes out in the living room to see if he can find out what's going on, then comes running back to the room and says, "You've got to come see this."

It was of course the house across the street and behind our neighbor's. Fortunately, we had our 10 foot ladder in the middle of the living room since we'd been painting. I climb up the ladder where I have a perfect view of two girls fistfighting and screaming at the top of their lungs. Yes, so there are two girls just attacking and clawing at each other and there are two guys trying to pull them apart. A fifth person is banging on the door - apparently there are more people inside and the fighters are locked out. So the guys pull the girls off each other and everything calms down a bit and then they start clawing at each other again and have to be pulled apart again. With the other person banging on the door the whole time. This cycle repeats itself for quite some time, and then finally someone opens the door and they all go back inside.

But that is not the end of it. We go back to bed, only to hear the banging sound again a few minutes later. And it's like deja vu. We go look and they are back outside, fighting again, locked out again. Eventually they all go back in again and then a few minutes later we hear more banging and look out again and this time it's the cops banging on the door.

After that it all settled down.

Seriously. . .where do we live?! I love our house, but I think I might love it better somewhere else. If this keeps up though, we may just have to move.