California Here We Come

My DH and I are going with our collective best friend to California in February. The flight has been booked and there is no going back. I am so excited. I have never been west of the Mississippi River and I haven't flown since I was 16 so this is a big thing for me. For my husband too because he's never even set foot on a plane.

For some reason over the years I have built up an aversion to flying. I've flown to Chicago and to NYC and each time I had great flights. But the take off really makes me ill. The whole thought of flying is just terrible. Now if I can do this, I can go anywhere. Not wanting to fly has really held my travels back. Every year we go on vacation, it has to be to some place that we can drive.

So this year we're finally biting the bullet and going to Sacramento to meet up with a very generous friend who has offered to be our escort for the week. We will stay at her home base in Sacramento and then will go to San Francisco for a night and then on to Tahoe to do some skiing. I am super psyched about all of these things, especially San Francisco. Two friends of mine have said that it is their second favorite city after NYC. And one of those friends is a crazy NYC girl and goes there every year without fail. So that is just super neat and exciting.

And upon my safe return to Kentucky, DH and I will start trying to get pregnant again. This is the plan.

So I am pretty psyched about the next 5 months of my life. I have something to look forward to, which helps so much in dealing with the monotony of every day life. Yay me!

Halloween is for kids

I am so sick of adult Halloween parties. I mean, what's up with this?! This weekend I have four parties that I am invited to. FOUR. And I am so not popular or social. It is a weird occurrence for me to be invited to even one party. So now I am obligated to go to great lengths to come up with a costume. This simply does not excite me. I am bored to death by all the slutty costumes that are out there for girls. I can see the allure of wanting to look sexy, but it has gone to far. You can't be a nurse, but you can be a porno star nurse. You can be a witch, but you have to be a witch that wears a bustier and stilleto heels. You can be little red riding hood, but only if you have ample cleavage and a VERY short skirt. That's if you buy your costume. I suppose you could come up with your own, but I don't have time for that (actually, I do, but that's a whole different story). So I will go with the old standby: cat. Easy. Boring.

Maybe it's time I lighten up and have a little fun.

Nah. I don't really wanna.

My point is that I hate Halloween. I hate spiders, I hate horror movies, I hate handing out candy to kids, I hate uncomfortable costumes, and I hate the color orange (unless you are an orange cat).

So there Halloween. Not everyone likes you so much. Take that!

Long live Valentine's Day. Now THERE'S a holiday to celebrate. ;)

Enough said

Check out my new kicks.

I found out what ails me

The following affliction is what I suffer from: cyberchondria

I just think that's a neat word. It's dead on.

Get Green

So today is Blog Action Day 2007. This means that over 15,000 blogs will be uniting to write about the subject of the environment. (I heard about this here.) The environment is a pretty touchy subject for me these days. It seems to me that we have reached sort of a tipping point when it comes to global warming. I am absolutely terrified about global warming. So much that I wonder if bringing a child into the world is such a good idea. #1: Aren't we overpopulated as it is? #2: Why would I want to bring my child into a world that is nearing it's ultimate demise every day. Maybe this is a little bit overdramatic. I don't know. But it does scare me. And what can I do about it?! Well, I do all that I can. I've decided to write a list of things that I already do and can do to ensure that I am not harming my environment any more than I should be. Nothing here is huge or dramatic. But if everybody did these things, it could make a huge difference.

1. Every morning for two years I ate my oatmeal in a plastic bowl with a plastic spoon and drank my coffee out of a styrofoam cup. What?! Why?! Now I happily use a real coffee mug, a glass bowl, and an actual spoon every morning. I figure this saves a little bit of landfill space. I was using way too much simply because it was convenient to throw away my dishes instead of washing them.

2. I recycle all that I can. But I can do better. I am always too lazy to recycle my tin cans. Washing them out seems to be too much trouble. I will do better.

3. From this point forward, I am buying the new and slightly more expensive energy efficient light bulbs. I found this here:
If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.

4. Al Gore says I need to get an electric hot water heater blanket. I do what Al Gore tells me to. A blanket costs less than $18 and can cut your home's CO2 emissions by almost 4 1/2 percent. This is on my to do list.

5. Change your air filters regularly. This is something that I am doing better at. I have marked on my calendar at work when I need to change the filters. Doing this regularly can knock 2 percent off of your CO2 output each year.

6. I wish I could afford a hybrid car. I can't. But I am driving a Corolla. It gets pretty good gas mileage. At least it isn't a gas guzzling SUV (boo! hiss!!)

7. The windows in my house are drafty. I'm buying new ones next spring. No telling how much energy I waste trying to keep my house cool or warm.

8. The next big appliance I buy will be an Energy Star appliance.
If just one in 10 homes used ENERGY STAR qualified appliances, the change would be like planting 1.7 million new acres of trees.

9. I don't have a programmable thermostat, but every day before I leave my home, I hit the $ button on my digital thermostat. This increases the temperature setting in my house by 5 degrees if the A/C is on and it decreases the setting by 5 degrees if the heat is on. This saves energy and it saves me $ too.

10. Whenever I can, I buy green products. For instance, check out these hangers. Pretty cool.

11. I am voting Democrat!!!!!!!!!

I do what I can, but I am sure there is so much more that I can do. I am open to any suggestions.