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Friday was our 5 year anniversary. Jason’s already commented on the occasion, and his was even on the “big day”, but I needed a few days to catch up and ruminate.

My folks never seemed to do much about their anniversary, so I guess I never grew up expecting the day to be something special. I think Dad might have gotten Mom a card and sometimes some flowers, but for all I saw, that was about it. Since Jason and I have been married, though, we’ve never let it pass without having some special moment to mark the event. This year we went out to breakfast before work (OK, really we delayed work to go eat French toast together), and then made plans for next weekend, since my work deadlines in particular made celebration on “the day” problematic.

I think that we ended up moving the big celebration around seems to suit us and our marriage style even better than a big run-up to the specific date on which we got married. Yes, we got married on July 11 in 1998, and that’s something worth celebrating. But that we’re also married on July 12, 13, 14, 15… is just as worthy of celebration. That we love each other, and work to keep that love strong, on every day of the year seems to be a better statement of our “us-ness” than the plans we make to mark that one day of the year.

It was fun to think about 5 years ago, though – how our wedding day played out, the fun we had at our wedding, the trip to the self-service carwash to try to wash the toothpaste off our car (when we sold the car earlier this year, it still said Jason + Tina on its hood, if you glanced at the paint job just right. Flouride apparently interacts with ClearCoat), the special dinner, our first night in our new apartment… [and we’ll leave the memories right there, folks…]. That day was a wonderful day, and a wonderful way to start our marriage. But as a day in a marriage, it doesn’t measure up to the times when you actually go through things together, when you look past your individual needs or wants to work through something as a couple, when you face something you fear and the experience makes you realize that your partner is even better than you ever realized at being the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. Those probably ought to be added to the calendar to be celebrated, too- and hey, I’d get a lot more beautiful roses and hand-crafted poems that way!

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My blogging has been sporadic of late- too many other things pulling me in other directions. I’ll note, though, tech-geek that I am, that I’ve started keeping a list of blog entry ideas in a list in my Treo. I think it’s just there to remind me that occasionally I do have interesting thoughts cross my mind, fleeting and non-fleshed-out as they may be.

Looking at Movable Type’s handy admin page for my blog, I see that I’ve posted 99 different entries since the birth of this blog. No doubt some were better than others, and the general quality of the whole thing could be debated. But I’ve enjoyed the chance to take time to think and then write (preferably in that order). I’ve even had folks contact me because of my blog – the Girly-Girl post was quite the favorite for a while – even ended up with an e-mail penpal because of it. (Hi, Christine!)

Of course, I always wish I had more time to spiff up the site, to do something with style sheets ala the CSS Zen Garden, or to make the general functional interface of the site more useful, but hey, I wish I had more time to do lots of other things in life, too. I’d actually think it’d be a horrible thing if this site ended up winning out, priority-wise, over other aspects and interests in my life. On the list of goals in my life, a great blog ranks way down the list: that MBA, the first marathon race, the afternoon spent blowing bubbles with my daugher, the great dinner eaten out or (even better) cooked with my husband – all beat out a beautiful page design or even more frequent posting.

So I amuse myself with little snippets here and there, and I have a vain (probably in both senses of the word) hope that I amuse others, too. Now 100 entries in, I think the feet are wet, the oars are in, and I’m paddling somewhere, though as yet the destination’s unknown.

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Someone in the coffee area today looked at my belly, even looked for a brief moment like they wanted to touch it, and then said something to the effect of “Hey, starting to show there…”. Uh, starting?

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Sometimes there are just too many blog entry ideas running around to fully explain… So, here’s the brief list of things thought potentially worthy of expounding upon.
* the joy we experienced last night at a Dave Wilcox concert
* how lousy it is to be allergic to my own cats
* that expiring Microsoft certification exams ought to convince to me get up off my keester and finally get around to learning something about .NET
* hey, maybe I should figure out if it makes sense to concentrate (finally) on either the Microsoft path or the Java path. Or what am I doing fixating on technology, anyway – when am I headed back for that MBA?!
* hey, PHP is pretty fun! (would love to offer a link here to something cool I’ve done, but unfortunately, it’s work stuff, not fun stuff)
* the social awkwardness of wanting to revoke a turned-down invitation, but feeling as if to do so would be even worse than having turned down the invitation in the first place
* wouldn’t learning to ride a unicycle be cool? Post-pregnancy, that is. (No heart attacks, hubby/parents/in-laws)
* what it’d be like to win the $190 million Lottery – what amount of money is “enough”, and why is it that that number is so big for most folks?

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We finally know that the little wiggler making my belly dance is a little girl. Funny thing is, we had a boy’s name all picked out. (And no, it wasn’t the name that didn’t get used when we named Cora.) But the girl’s name has been somewhat more elusive. We think we have one, for at least the first name, but we’re still debating the middle name.

Names are funny things. They give away all sorts of information about the parents. For instance, we’re not big fans of trendy names. In fact, if we think of a name we might like, we go out to the Social Security’s baby names page and check to see if it’s been a popular name of late. Names that rank 100 or higher (as in, there were 100 names more popular that year) do better than names that are more popular.

In picking names, we’ve also ended up linking names with the impressions we’ve had of other people we’ve known who’ve had that name. Names of girls who had bad reps in high school, or who one or the other of us had a reason to dislike, generally get axed off the list pretty quick.

And, of course, you really can’t use a name that’s the name of another kid you know. I like the name Samantha, but we’re friends with another couple who already have a daughter by that name, so it seems wrong to “reuse” the name. Not that we’re in favor of creating original names or spelling names in original ways, but I don’t want to “share” a name with someone too close to us.

Got a few more months to figure it out. I don’t think we’re obsessing about it, but it does occur to me that you do spend a lot of time thinking about names. Wonder how many folks have spent more time thinking about the name for their child than they originally spent weighing the decision to have a child? (No political commentary intended there… )

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I offered the director of our Vacation Bible School some assistance in creating “shekel bags”. Since the theme of the VBS is 33 AD (I think – don’t quote me on that), the kids get to shop in the “market” with shekels, and so they each get a little drawstring pouch/wallet kind of thing to hold their shekels (actually metal washers). The VBS director assured me that the bags are easy to make – something very important since my skill and experience with my sewing machine are minimal. She told me that, so long as I could run a straight stitch down some fabric, I’d have no problem.

She was right. I’ve had no problem making shekel bags. The problem is _how many_ shekel bags we need to make – and that’s the question I forgot to ask! The director’s projecting that we’ll have some 220 kids attend VBS, and each of those kids needs a shekel bag. Now, I’m not the only one sewing bags, but my stack of shekel fabric seems pretty deep. Took me about an hour and a half to sew 13 of them tonight, plus set up 10 or so more for sewing tomorrow. I had 15 already done, from previous nights’ labors. And I think I have another 30 to 40 to go, not counting the 25 I “outsourced” to my mother-in-law. (I’ll take ’em back if she can’t get to them – just was hoping to get two pipelines flowing, else I’ll spend a lot of nights over the next week and a half crouched over my sewing machine.)

The wonderful thing is that I’m getting to improve my sewing skill on a project that will help in a very small way with our church’s efforts to spread the gospel to our kids. I’m trying to keep that in mind as I grind away, one shekel bag at a time, and also remember to use it as an object lesson that total effort is the sum of the effort of all the tasks. In this case, it’s sewing one shekel bag, and then another, and then another, and then….

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I realized last night just how much rain we’ve been getting lately when I commented to my husband, “Hey, we didn’t get any rain today!”. I actually had to water my annuals out on the porch this morning… And there’s no rain listed in the forecast until this weekend. Stuff other than mushrooms might grow around our place again.

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A couple of days ago, I took a long look in the mirror as I was brushing my teeth. 23 weeks into this journey of body-stretching, my belly’s little turkey timer looks just about ready to pop. It’s one of those things they don’t tell you, that your belly button will pop out, will look as if it’s frantically seeking to escape your body like the buttons that strain your stomach after a way-too-large Thanksgiving dinner. And the rest of the belly is starting to look like a balloon nearing its boundary. But 23 weeks still leaves quite a ways to go, and I know from our first go-around at this (the balloon prize named Cora) that the belly balloon will somehow find a way to grow even larger. So far it’s just a balloon… 12 or 15 weeks from now I’ll be longing for that light balloon as I lug around a summer watermelon.

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Sucking wind, just to get a little bit of air into my lungs past the goo in my head and chest that’s fighting to expel any bit of pollen, dust, cat dander, or mold that’s entered my environment. My body’s giving its best bunker bomber impression – targeting tiny particles with near-lethal force. Problem is that the invaders are many, and my ability to hold out in the onslaught is weakening. Slipping away in my own snot…

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Last night, David Letterman offered his opinion that Martha Stewart should be cleared of any charges, and he also offered to pay any fines or charges for which Martha Stewart is liable. Now, mind you, Dave had just been stitched up on the air, due to a minor mishap on his finger, so maybe the loss of blood had something to do with his largesse. I agree that Martha’s getting something of a bum rap – one of the charges claims that she committed securities fraud by defending her ImClone trade. The theory is that by claiming that she didn’t do anything illegal, she was attempting to convince shareholders to hold onto the stock, and thus artificially inflated the price. This smacks of a “darned if you do and darned if you don’t” problem – defend yourself, and you’re presumed guilty of fraud. Don’t defend yourself, and you’re presumed guilty of insider trading. Pick your preferred fine and prison term.

I think the first new show Martha does after all of this is cleared up should include such things as: how to wallpaper a bathroom with ridiculous legal paperwork; how to print in mugshot in various shades of tepia; the recipe for a delicious cake, containing a file in the middle; and how to elegantly take the perp walk, umbrella in hand, as demonstrated by M truly. May she make mega-bucks off of the SEC’s ravings, and do so in an over-the-top in-your-face Martha manner.