Well it is that time of year again. Time for pumpkin guts and crazy costumes. For the first time in a long time, we did not do the matching costume thing this year. Mostly because we have run out of ideas by now. We did finally carve pumpkins last night, though, and opted once again for something a little less. . .involved. . .than our spectacular Pirates of the Caribbean pumpkins from a couple years back.
Cy bravely scooped his own pumpkin guts even though he hated every second of it.
Cy's pumpkin was a funny smiley face. I told him that the crooked smile reminded me of his crooked smile. The resemblance is uncanny! Mine was supposed to be a vampire. It looked really cool on the paper, and it was much harder to carve than I was hoping for, but when I turned out the lights, it looked pretty stupid, so I was disappointed. To me, it looked more like Strong Bad or Magneto or some sort of weird owl (not a deer/owl) than a vampire. Oh well.
There was also this really weird picture where the pumpkins looked spooky and possessed. . .I snapped the picture, thought the camera was done, then put it down. When I heard it click a few seconds later, I realized it was still doing its thing. The result? Evil demon pumpkins with flames shooting out the tops!!! Ahh!!!
It is official - there will be a little addition to our family of two next May! Baby Shealy is about 12-13 weeks-ish right now (there has been much debate in the doctor's office as to the official dates). The official due date is May 13, but we are expecting it to be earlier than that. We have been to the ob/gyn several times now, and have had two ultrasounds. On the first ultrasound, the baby was measuring a bit smaller than expected, so they pushed the due date out. On the second date, the baby had caught up to where it should be according to the original date, so there was much confusion about the due date, after which they decided to just stick with the May 13 date even though that seemed wrong. . .we don't get it but they insist they know what they are doing. :)
We are very excited. Things have been a bit rough for me trying to finish up my last semester of grad school while being pregnant. It of course happened that my worst week of morning sickness coincided with the worst week of the semester (the week I had to take the comprehensive exams) but oh well. I also thought (and hoped) I was through the worst of the morning sickness (which is a total misnomer, as I have been feeling nauseous all day long) because I started feeling like a normal human again, but apparently it was just a few days' reprieve and now I am back to the 24-7 nausea. Lovely. Oh well. In the end it will all be worth it when we get to finally hold that precious little baby!
Everything has gone well at doctor appointments, and I was able to get both a seasonal flu shot and an H1N1 flu shot to provide some extra protection for the baby (which is good, as College of Charleston is pretty much Swine Flu Central these days). We are already making big plans for getting the house in order, picking out baby furniture, etc. Now we are just counting down the days until the next big doctor appointment when we get to find out if it's a boy or a girl! Also very exciting. . .our little baby Shealy will get to have a cousin exactly the same age as him/her!
It's been a really long time since we've posted anything on the blog. That is due to it being my last semester of graduate school. In order to make sure this is in fact my last semester of graduate school, I'm having to take three classes and also prepare for the comprehensive exams (which is basically the equivalent of an additional class). I'm taking a class on British Fiction from 1900-1945 (Joseph Conrad, E.M.Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf), 18th Century British Women Writers (some poetry, some plays, and some Jane Austen - yea!), and a class called Principles of Literary Research that is basically a library science/bibliography type class.
It's a lot of work and I'm struggling just to stay caught up, but I finally feel like there is an end in sight! Tomorrow is the comprehensive exam. Once I get through that, I just have to finish up my classes and I will be done. The comprehensive exam is based on a reading list that covers three time periods in literature: British Literature before 1800, British Literature after 1800, and American Literature. For the first category, the works are: Parliament of Fowls by Chaucer, King Lear by Shakespeare, and The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift. The second category is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Man and Superman (play) by George Bernard Shaw, and Crow (super crappy poetry) by Ted Hughes. The American lit. works are The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville (horrible book), The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty (also terrible), and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.
After months of reading the primary works and stacks of literary criticism about the works, I will be taking the exam from 9-12 tomorrow at the Citadel. Cy has planned a celebration for afterward that includes purchasing pumpkins, hitting up Joe Pasta and the used bookstore, and hopefully a pumpkin cupcake. :)
Then with Comps out of the way, I just have to write 4 more papers (one of them being a 30+ page bibliography with 100-150 sources), give a couple of presentations, and take 2 finals in December and I will be done with school forever! Hooray!!!
Yesterday was kind of a bizarre day. Sometimes we really feel like the world is just out to get us. . .stuff keeps happening to us that we couldn't imagine no matter how hard we tried. Like yesterday.
For a couple months now, we've had this weird tall grass/weed stuff taking over our backyard. It grows really fast, gets really tall, and has incredibly thick, strong roots so it's practically impossible to pull. We Googled some stuff that we thought it was (like crabgrass) and couldn't find anything that matched. So last night, on a whim, I thought, it really looks like stuff you see in a marsh to me so I randomly Googled 'marsh grass' (not expecting anything). As it turns out. . .that is in fact what it is. It's called cordgrass or spartina, and it generally only grows in saltwater marshes. Okay, so step 1 was done - we figured out what it was. Step 2 - how do we kill it? We start Googling that, and get all these hits about conserving the marsh grass and coastal erosion and preserving the wetlands. So apparently everyone is trying desperately to save this junk to prevent coastal erosion, and meanwhile we've somehow got it in our yard and there is nothing to kill it with because it's endangered or something. Maybe we can get the government to come dig it up out of our yard and transplant it into a marsh somewhere nearby? We ended up taking some shovels out there and digging up a few of the biggest patches (which was also fun), but there is so much of it out there that will literally take us years.
In addition to our yard turning into a marsh, it has also become infested with baby rabbits (possibly these are marsh rabbits who like the spartina?). So we can't get some sort of normal bug infestation that the exterminator can come take care of. No. We get infested with baby rabbits. We chased at least four of them off the other day when we were working in the yard. So if that's not bad enough. . .yesterday I go outside to scope out the rabbits and see what they are up to, and one of them has crawled up in this tiny niche between two boards of the fence. . .and died. So in addition to digging up marsh grass from our backyard, we also had to dig a dead baby rabbit out of our fence and dispose of it.
We finish all of this nonsense and decide to go play some tennis. I know, it's a bold move after the way things have been going. We head over to St. Andrews, it's slammed, so we make a U-turn and are sitting at the intersection of Playground Road and 61 waiting to turn right onto 61 and some jogger comes running up, apparently decides we're deliberately blocking his passage across the intersection (even though we've been sitting there waiting to turn for quite some time), gets really angry, and runs up and slaps our car as hard as he can. What the heck? Who just runs up and slaps someone's car? Cy was so ticked off by this (which is a rare event and should show just how well things were going for us yesterday), I seriously thought he was going to whip the car around and just run the guy over.
Dazed, we drive downtown to check out the courts at Colonial Lake. We pull in and this low-hanging tree branch scrapes the crap out of the top of the car (same car that has just been slapped by a jogger). And again, all the courts are full. We're like, what the crap?
So we head over to the public courts by the Citadel. On our way there, we see this Neo-Nazi skinhead looking guy on a motorcycle. He's wearing a black leather vest with studs all over it and there is a lime green mohawk sprouting from the top of his helmet. No joke.
We finally find a court over by the Citadel and it's okay (aside from being in the ghetto). It was a little hard to focus on playing what with the pack of dogs barking everytime anyone went past, and the loud music, and the fear of being shot. But we played, and made it home okay, and fortunately, there was no time for anymore weirdness after that.
Is it just us, or is all of that extremely bizarre?
Okay, so I was trying to think of a clever title for this blog entry and in regards to "blooming," all I could think of were bloomin' onions, which in turn made me think of what might be my favorite scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Andrew is riding on the back of Spike's motorcycle and they have the following conversation:- Andrew: You sure you don't wanna stop and pick up some burgers or something, you know, road trip food?
- Spike: It's not a road trip. It's a covert operation.
- Andrew: Right. Right. Gotcha... I—I bet even covert operatives eat curly fries. They're really good.
- Spike: Not as good as those onion blossom things.
- Andrew: Ooh, I love those.
- Spike: Yeah, me, too.
- Andrew: It's an onion... and it's a flower. I—I don't understand how such a thing is possible.
- Spike: See, the genius of it is, you soak it in ice water for an hour so it holds its shape. Then you deep-fry it root-side up for about 5 minutes.
- Andrew: Masterful.
- Spike: Yeah. Tell anyone we had this conversation, I'll bite you.
- Andrew: Right.
Love it. It has nothing to do with this post, but it's just so funny. Anyway, the real reason for this post is to express how super excited I am because one of our crape myrtle trees just started blooming for the first time over the weekend! This may not seem like a big deal, but they are little baby crape myrtle trees and we thought they would not bloom for another couple of years (which I was pretty heartbroken about), so it was a really nice surprise! And the blooms are hot pink, the color of flamingos. I feel like it's my birthday all over again (since I got the trees for my birthday and now they are blooming)!
On Saturday, July 4, at our house we celebrated not the birth of our country, but the birth of Cy. Of course people were making their typical jokes about being born on the Fourth of July (it's not like he hasn't heard every single one of those jokes a billion times before).
We started the festivities on Friday night with a trip to Chili's where our waiter called Cy "Boss" and "Birthday Man." (He was less than thrilled.) We got a free chocolate chip molten cake for his birthday though, so I guess it was worth enduring the silly comments.
On Saturday, we played some tennis then had breakfast at IHOP. Then Saturday night, we headed over to Frank and Andrea's house for some Pizza Hut pizza and break-and-bake cookies (Cy's birthday request). For his birthday, Cy had already received an iPod touch from me and rain barrels from his parents (pictures to come, along with aforementioned pictures of trees). On his birthday, he got the Ultimate Missions Collection (Mission Impossible 1, 2, & 3) on blu-ray from my family, and a plethora of tennis balls and some grip from Wes, Kelly, & Noah (tennis balls are always a great gift, and much needed).
Then we went home to watch one of the Mission Impossible movies and try to ignore the fact that all of our neighbors were setting off fireworks well into the night. The people behind us were setting off some huge ones that we could watch through our living room windows. That was kind of interesting.
Overall, I think it was a good birthday for Cy. Even if he is now only one year away from thirty.
We arrived back on solid ground from our cruise on Saturday, May 30, the day before my birthday. I think we all felt a little shaky once we got off the boat, but I didn't feel too bad. . .until later that night. After removing the seasickness patch, and getting off the boat, I began to experience the worst seasickness yet. I spent most of Saturday night throwing up, and still felt horrible on Sunday, so we had to postpone the birthday festivities. My family went ahead and gave me my presents (Twilight, fabric for two purses!, the book Higher Hope by Robert Whitlow, and various flamingo-themed things) and then hit the road. It was sad that the plans for a pizza party got cancelled.
Finally, by about Tuesday, I was feeling enough better that the Shealys came over (with the cookie cake). We had cookie cake (yum - Rachel is probably still mad that she didn't get any of it), and Noah helped me blow out my candles and open my presents. I got a couple of vampire books that I wanted, and from Cy & his parents I got two crape myrtle trees for the backyard (pictures of trees to come in next post). Cy also gave me Wall-E on blu-ray.
Although my birthday certainly did not go as planned, I still enjoyed it, and I am now clearly getting old - at 26, I am closer to 30 than 25 now!
Cy bravely scooped his own pumpkin guts even though he hated every second of it.
Cy's pumpkin was a funny smiley face. I told him that the crooked smile reminded me of his crooked smile. The resemblance is uncanny! Mine was supposed to be a vampire. It looked really cool on the paper, and it was much harder to carve than I was hoping for, but when I turned out the lights, it looked pretty stupid, so I was disappointed. To me, it looked more like Strong Bad or Magneto or some sort of weird owl (not a deer/owl) than a vampire. Oh well.
There was also this really weird picture where the pumpkins looked spooky and possessed. . .I snapped the picture, thought the camera was done, then put it down. When I heard it click a few seconds later, I realized it was still doing its thing. The result? Evil demon pumpkins with flames shooting out the tops!!! Ahh!!!
