609

Hello everyone! It's the weekend and I have time to post a blog entry... Miss me?

First off, tomorrow is the anniversary of this blog... I've been keeping it for three years now with a total of 609 entries. Crazy, huh?

This past week has been a little long... Monday I went to Waterloo with Leah and got fitted for the dress I'm wearing in her wedding. I love it! It looks great and all they had to do was hem the front and measure for the bustle, since it has a train. I've booked my hotel rooms for next weekend and I'm excited to get my hair done and spend the whole day looking pretty. :-)

Work has been dragging... We had some issues with a different plant that gets parts from us... In the effect that they LOST a large number of them... So we had to make more and on Wednesday there were rumors going around that we'd all have to come in and work 10 hours on Friday AND come in on Saturday. Ug. Nobody was happy about that at *all*. LUCKILY, we only had to work for a bit on Friday. Working 2nd shift isn't all that fun... I'm really glad this is only for the summer.

Friday afternoon before I went to work mom and I went out and looked at cars. I test drove a 1996 Grand Prix and a 1999 Volkswagon Beetle. I liked the Beetle better than the Grand Prix, but neither were the car for me. But it was a start at least. The '96 had 160K miles on it and was a bit rough. The Beetle felt like I was driving in a box.

Yesterday Jessica and I went jet-skiing for the first time this summer! It wasn't as hot as yesterday, and the water was white capping a little bit, but it was a blast! We were out there for about 2 hours and got the boat pretty far out of the water a couple times. :-) I am soooooo sore today. It's pretty uncomfortable. Jessica says I sound like an old woman, but my knees and elbows really hurt!

After we got done jet-skiing we made avocado fetta salsa and watched America's Got Talent. Then we watched Please Be Kind Rewind and had a good laugh. Halfway through Jessica's mom discovered that the freezer had frozen itself off and needed to be thawed before it could work again, so Jessica and I spent an tour taking turns with the hair dryer, trying to thaw the freezer. By the time the movie was over it was time to go home, mostly because we were both exhausted from the days activities.

Today I think we will be going to get ice cream and go to the municipal band concert at 3pm and go see Prince Caspian, since Jessica hasn't seen it yet... Provided she finishes the book yet. I saw Ironman last week and I really liked it! I still want to see Kung Fu Panda and Get Smart.

That's all for this update! Cheers!

Another confession...

Hello world!

I have something to confess... To admit to cyberspace...

I am a nerd.

To regular (and not so regular, but people who know me) readers, this may not come as much as a surprise but I must blog and gloat in my nerdiness....

1. I love Doctor Who. (Duh... Nothing new, right?) Anyway, I just watched The Unicorn and the Wasp today and it was amazing. :-D Agatha Christie is super cool! :-D And I love Donna!

2. To continue along the Doctor Who vein I have discovered this website called Whomix which is made up of fan's versions of the theme song. Some are quite good... Others are... Super cheesy. :-D Some are in midi format after all... haha...

3. I have found printable Doctor Who piano sheet music. Bwahahaha! Now I can play it on the piano whenever I want! (Why didn't I look up this before???) It's not only for the Doctor Who TV theme, but there's the Doomsday theme and Martha's Theme and others.

4. I totally just downloaded the song "They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard" onto my iTunes so I can listen to it forevermore. We're talking hardcore rocking out in the car.

5. I need a car so I can buy this, this and this. Annnnnd maybe this one too... Or this... This? Ahh! I obviously can't decide...

6. And don't forget my TARDIS and K-9 car dashboard air fresheners...

7. Yes, I know, I'm obsessed.

8. I just found a shirt that says "I <3 <3 NNNNNNNNNNY". Doctor Who fans... Take a moment to think about it... There ya go... (<3 = heart)

Okay... That's all for now... Really, I promise...

Question:

If you could marry any fictional character* of your choice** who would you pick? List your top six.***





10th Doctor
Edward Cullen
Fitzwilliam Darcy
Thomas, the Marquis of Schofield (From Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, by Patricia C. Wrede.)
Sir Percy Blakeney from the musical The Scarlet Pimpernel
Will Turner



"In my dreams such beautiful lovers have found me
Storybook lovers surround me
Nothing is real, but I'm flying, sighing
Where, where, where is my storybook ending?
Why does my golden pretending
Leave me with nothing to hold but my dreams?"



*If they are obscure, please list where they are from.
**And enjoy all the benefits of wedded bliss...
***For the sake of variety. Also, because I have problems picking just one....

Ark time?

So this whole flooding thing is really bad. It's really sad to think about all the people who have lost their homes or are trying to deal with the damage and loss of property.

The Winnebago River flooded on Sunday, and major sections of the city were under water. The flood level was at 7 feet and by 11:00 am on Sunday it was at 18. It didn't help that the levee broke. at the wastewater treatment plant which forced the city to shut down the water supply. This meant that all the restaurants in town had to close.

Of course Sunday was the day of Margie and Jon's wedding. I rode to Waverly with Travis and Leah through torrential rains. It was crazy... All the fields were flooded... Like, they weren't even fields anymore. They were lakes and ponds. I can't imagine those crops being worth anything anymore.

Luck for us by the time we got to Waverly we had driven out of the rain, although it was very humid and you could tell that it was going to rain sometime later. The wedding was beautiful! :-) Margie looked like a fairytale princess and Jon looked intense and excited at the same time. I can't believe this wedding got thrown together in a week in March. Margie had a piece composed for the bridal processional, and there was a brass quintet and a small choir of Wartburg people that also sang during the service. Margie's piano professor at Wartburg also played during communion and the recessional. It was lovely all around. :-)

At the reception I was in charge of helping serve cake, which was easy. I only accidentally flipped two pieces of cake. The food at the reception was simple, just ham sandwiches, pasta salad and the like. For the dance they had a little jazz combo and a stereo system. After I was done serving cake and was able too eat myself the dance had started. I didn't dance... Rachel V. and I just played with our cameras and took funny pictures. Christy S. joined in and we did "picture personifications" and that was really fun.

We didn't stay very long at the reception because the weather had the potential for getting worse. Rachel V. ended up riding home with Travis, Leah and me because the weather from Waverly towards Cedar Rapids was really really bad and her parents didn't want her to drive. Leah had a meeting back at Wartburg on Monday so it all worked out.

On the ride home we drove around Nashua and Charles City and looked at the flooding. Parts of Charles City were already closed off. We stopped at Hy-Vee because we finally heard that Mason City had no water so Travis and Leah needed to buy some.... Haha... Hy-Vee was almost out... They bought a 6-pack of bottled water which was about all the was left. We also found out that because of the flooding Mason City was instigating a 9 pm curfew. We just made it and my dad came and picked us up.

Rachel and I ended up ordering pizza and watching Wonder Man, starring Danny Kaye. It was a pretty fun time. I took her back to Leah's apartment in Mason, and then went to go buy some shoes, but I discovered that everything was closed, because no one had water at all.

Clear Lake has water and isn't having the problems like Mason City. The worst of it for us, is that our basement flooded Sunday afternoon because our sump-pump couldn't keep up with the water. It was only one half of the basement... The half where I live, so all my clothes got soaking wet. The carpet soaked most of the water up, which helped contain it and nothing was ruined. My family has been cleaning out the basement and shop-vacing it these past couple days.

Since Sunday Waverly and the Cedar Falls/Waterloo area have been dealing with major flooding...
This is an overhead shot of downtown Waverly. The river is the Cedar River. The bridge at the bottom of the picture is the old railroad bridge that is now a part of the bike path. The bridge further up the picture is what we walk across to get to the Waverly Palace Theatre. It the right of the second bridge is the park where we had a picnic on Friday for Margie's Bachelorette party...

This next picture is taken almost from the corner of the Wartburg Campus. Showing the extent of the flooding from the river over the Taco Johns. (Which doesn't mean much if you aren't from Waverly, but, Wartburg people reading this will know what I mean.)


Here's a link with more pictures of the Waverly flood.

I'm supposed to go with Leah on Monday to Cedar Falls to get my dress fitted for her wedding... I wonder if that's going to happen...

In other news, work is going fine. Nothing too exciting. I do various things that involve building parts of doors... My days are weird and short, since I start work at 3:30 and work until 2 am. I usually get into bed by 2:30 and sleep until 11:30 am. A lot of people have been gone from the plant, due to the flooding and we've gotten behind schedule... We're pretty sure we will have to work on Friday and they are also talking about working a little bit on Saturday... Which kind of stinks. I don't mind Friday so much, but I really hope I don't have to work on Saturday. *IF* I *DO* have to work on either of those days (knock on wood) it will be time and a half, which will be nice at least.

I really want to see Kung Fu Panda... And just chill... Hopefully I'll get to do some of that this weekend.

A question from my tired brain...

How come no one in Doctor Who (or in any movie/TV show that involves time travel) ever suffers from the effects of some form of jet lag? The TARDIS can't ALWAYS land at a calibrated time according to the internal clock of an organic being... (Dispite the fact that the TARDIS *is* organic.) And don't try to tell me that the TARDIS *does* line up the time of the new world with the internal clocks of the Doctor and his companion. Because it doesn't. It crash lands more than anything. You can't crash land on an unknown planet and then be like "Oooh! Just in time for tea!"

No. Don't be silly.

Musings...

Sometimes my brain gets so tangled up in wondering "what ifs" that it gets so full and looped around that I feel like my head is going to explode.

*ramble* Doctor Who *ramble*

Okay, so I just saw the Doctor Who episode The Satan Pit, which is the second half of the Impossible Planet. I had seen The Impossible Planet before, but not the second half. Satan Pit was on our local PBS station tonight, so I finally watched it. It was really good! (It was weird seeing the Ood after seeing The Planet of the Ood... Kind of backwards... Anyway.) Don't ask me how I some how managed to miss this particular episode... I don't know... I just did... I haven't seen the next two either. Or the Rise of the Cybermen and the Age of Steel. That's 4 episodes in season 2 that I missed.... Don't ask me how that happened. I don't know..... I'll just have to get caught up some time.... Ummm. Soon.

ANYWAY!

During the part where the Doctor is down in the pit and looking at this giant scary monster, he was musing about how to get it to talk. And then he said that he was meant to come down there, that that was his intended purpose. That's what the beast wanted. But for what? Why did the beast want the Doctor? And my brain went: "Oh! The beast is chained! It wants the Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver so it can unlock its chains and be free!" and then I realized that that was a dumb idea. Because this beast, whether it's the "devil" or not, has been chained down there for millions of centuries. If the beast couldn't break out of the chains, I'm pretty sure that the Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver couldn't undo them. At least I'd like to think that those chains were the one thing the Sonic Screwdriver couldn't unlock....

And then at the end when the Doctor rescues Rose and everyone else on the rocket as they are getting sucked into the black hole... It was a really happy, YAY! THE DOCTOR SAVES THE DAY moment and I was grinning like an idiot. At the very end when Rose walks back into the TARDIS and she runs up to the Doctor and they hug... Best part of the whole episode. For real. The laugh that the Doctor does as he swings Rose around? It's the "We did it, I missed you, we're back together and now I'm content"-laugh.

Best Doctor laugh ever. :-)