Travel

Speaking of travel, and after just booking our next trip, a Western Caribbean cruise on the Disney Cruise Line for our 5 year anniversary (hurray!!), I thought how amazing it would be if every New Year's Ben announced where we would go that year for our anniversary and I'd have the whole year to plan it. I thought it would be fun to make a list of places I'd most like to see someday.

Peru and Macchu Picchu (spelling? I'll have to check that)
Zip line over rainforest canopies, maybe Costa Rica?
Skiing somewhere, and that sledding on a zip-line thing looks amazing. Colorado?
Back to Japan, cherry blossoms or winter ice festival maybe?
Long China trip...hold a panda!
Fjords in Norway
Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland
Pacific Northwest
New York City (see more of it)
Galopagos Islands (spelling, again!)
Istanbul and Back to Prague
Greek Isles
Hawaii
Back to California, especially San Diego. To Live? Yes, please.
Switzerland for cute towns, Germany for more cute towns, want to see Kandinsky's house.
Italy, Amalfi Coast specifically
Tanzania
Bora Bora, Tahiti, Gaugin stuff
St. Petersburg, Russia

Hobbies

I'm in a new poetry phase. Is it just a phase or here to stay? Time will tell.

Chris's Mom had an amazing quilting machine and you could tell how proud of it she was and how having it would free her to do what she loved to do. I wanted that. I want to feel free to invest in a hobby. To feel that it could pay me back over time either financially or spiritually.

Can I? Is that in me to do?

I've tried so many things...can any of them fill that role?

Been awhile!

This always happens...I try to keep up with a blog regularly, yet I fail again. I guess it could be worse. I am writing now, right?

In short, once I have a project, it consumes me. I get completely obsessive, especially if the project has anything to do with making something look nice or if it involves travel. In this case, it involved both. Getting our house in working order and looking good after shifting nearly every piece of furniture in it into another room while also baby-proofing it has been quite an undertaking and we're still not finished. We also just returned from a trip to Maine with Jhonen, the first trip I've taken since Ben and I went to Japan and the first trip we've ever taken with Jho, so planning and executing that trip has taken up every other brain cell I had to offer.

Beautifying and organizing the house has been really fun and reminds me how much I like home decorating (although I wish money were not an issue because my eye's desires do not match our cash flow). Going on the trip reminds me just how darn much I adore traveling! And sometimes I think that planning for the trip and planning for the home remodels is even more fun than the trip or the remodels themselves! I also had to remind myself that some plans go the way I, well, plan...and some don't. I got a Maine travel guide from the library and scoured every Maine tourist site on the internet and made our itinerary (google docs are great!). I knew I wanted to pick blueberries, eat seafood (that one was for Ben), see a whale or a puffin or both, go to a lighthouse, and hike. Some of those came to fruition and some didn't. Some did and they were better than expected and some did and they were worse. But as Ben reminded me, how could I know? And good job for coming up with stuff to try! So after Jhonen's first successful airplane flights, a gorgeous lighthouse, lots of seafood meals, a cute puffin shirt for Jho (sans actual puffin sighting), wonderful quarts of hand-picked blueberries, a gorgeous hike in Hobbitland and a less successful hike in creepy bum-forest, some great art in Portland, fun with Chris, his family, Leslie, her family, Melanie, Nate, and others, some peaceful, beautiful scenery, a boat ride, some wildlife (an owl, a dog-bear, a porcupine, some sheep, and Sadie the Springer Spaniel), I can definitely call this trip a fun and memorable success story.

Beautifying our bedroom is a whole other story entirely...