January 28, 2008 by kim.

We went home this past weekend to celebrate my brother Kari’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Kari! We had a great time and it was nice to see the family!

For the past three years I have been making my brother a calendar. You know - one of those photo calendars. The last two years, it ends up being a last minute thing. It’s not that I blank on the fact that he’ll have another birthday in a year and totally wake up at the last minute to make it. I start thinking about it around Thanksgiving, which would really give me enough time to put it together. Then I get “so busy”, and all of a sudden it’s the second week of January. A mild panic sets in, and my creative mind takes a vacation.

This year, I threw some stuff together with pictures and clip art, and showed Chris. His silence was all I needed to hear. That wasn’t going to work. It was sad. I can’t even show it to you because I deleted it, I was so mortified. I could recreate it, but I won’t.

Thankfully, Chris is amazing at graphic design and saved the day.

He came up with a bulletin board idea and showed me how to manipulate the images using Photoshop, which I already knew how to use a tiny bit. Here are a couple of samples from the calendar (of which Chris did both):

Isn’t that cool?

Now, I need to start thinking about next year!

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January 25, 2008 by kim.

I just thought I’d torture myself this icy 20 degree evening (10 with the wind chill) while sitting in our drafty apartment and looking out upon the snow covered sidewalk, by remembering what it was like to walk under this canopy of trees to the beautiful white beach and the clear blue water:

Oh yes. That sure was nice, wasn’t it?

Well, it was.

Posted in Nature, Happy | No Comments »

January 22, 2008 by kim.

In one of my usual moments of weakness last week, I decided to pick up a small package of Ho Hos. I don’t know if they would have been any better if I had bought a whole box, but these just were not up to par.

I remember as a kid eating Ho Hos, and noting how fresh they were, how soft, how tasty…

Not anymore. Now the chocolate has a sort of stale-like snap to it, and the flavor is almost non-existent. I ate two out of the three and decided that I would throw the last one away.

I almost made it to the garbage.

Instead, I passed the drawer where we keep the sandwich bags, and before I knew what was happening, I bagged that third Ho Ho for later.

I am such a namby-pamby.

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January 20, 2008 by kim.

My poor camera! I tried to turn it on last night to take a cute picture of Matilda squished into her too-small cat bed, and when I turned it on, I got the following error message:

Camera error #B03

See users guide

NOOOOOO!! What am I going to do? I looked up the error and tried to get help online, but of course, I am directed to send the camera in for repairs. I did that once before, about two years ago…around this time…hmmm…

Anyway, my warranty ran out a while ago, and when researching how much it would cost to fix, I kept seeing the amount hovering around $135.00.

I don’t think so. I could buy a new camera with better mega pixels for less.

I better save my pennies!

Posted in Annoyance | No Comments »

January 20, 2008 by kim.

If you tried to log onto my blog between the hours of 10:00pm last night until 1:15pm this afternoon, you may have come across something that looked like this:

That’s because my blog was mistakenly deleted by my wonderful husband. He felt awful.

I was in another room last night, when I heard Chris say, “Kim. This is really bad. I’ve deleted the website.”

I thought he was just talking about his new website (www.loducacreative.com) which he had been working on all day. He did accidentally delete that site, but unbeknown to him, my blog site also happened to be connected to that site. POOF! Bye bye blog.

I wasn’t too worried, knowing that the web host would have this backed up on their servers, but I was a little upset with myself for not backing the site up to my computer since last summer. Chris immediately called tech support, and they assured him that it would be reinstalled within 24-48 hours. After he got off the phone, he began to apologize repeatedly until I finally told him to stop. That sort of makes it sound like I forced him to apologize through a major guilt trip until I gave him permission to stop, but that was not the case. Not that he’s aware of, anyway (shhhh)!

As you can see, the site is now running and I have backed it up, so if this should ever happen again, I’ll at least have everything available to reload it.

Whew - close call!

Posted in Annoyance | No Comments »

January 19, 2008 by kim.

Hey there! I know you are all dying to see Stealing Kisses after hearing me talk about it for so long. Here is your chance!

Chris recently posted Stealing Kisses on You Tube:

www.youtube.com/cloduca

It is broken up into 4 parts (the 4th part being the credits) and runs about 30 minutes.

You now have no excuse - go see it already!

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January 18, 2008 by kim.

Okay - just one more blog about the Virgin Islands, and then I’ll stop boring you with vacation pictures…until next time…

We saw a lot of different wildlife during our stay. I hope to have a better camera and a quicker hand the next time we travel, as I missed a few things I wanted to take pictures of, and other things didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped. For instance - if I had my wits about me at 1:30am on one of our walks to the bathroom in the dark with only a flashlight to lead the way, I would have brought my camera along to take a picture of the hermit crab we saw and almost stepped on.

Instead, I was able to snap a shot of this land crab:

Funny thing about this crab - we heard it before we saw it. It was early in the morning and we heard rustling around our tent. We thought it was a person, or at the very least a deer (which we did see another time, but only got blurry photos). Chris bravely peeked out of the “window” and saw the crab. I got my camera and went out to take a picture. It quickly sidestepped away, but I was able to get close enough for the photo. I then hightailed it back to the tent because it was giving me quite a dirty look, and that claw didn’t look too inviting.

Here are some other animals we were able to see:

Pearly-eyed Thrasher

Bananaquit

Ground Lizard

House Gecko

Iguana

Frangipani caterpillar

Goat from Miss Lucy’s establishment

There were also chickens roaming Miss Lucy’s establishment, but I missed getting pictures of them. Of course.

That wraps up our trip to the Virgin Islands. Many thanks to Wally and Vernie for flying us out there - we had a wonderful, wonderful time and think about Cinnamon Bay every day!

I’d also like to give recognition to Chris who took a number of pictures this trip - specifically, Annaberg Sugar Plantation and surrounding landscape, the goats, the Miss Lucy sign, the airplane and Santa. Thanks Chris!!

Hope you all enjoyed our vacation as much as we did!

Posted in Vacation, Nature, Insects, Animals | No Comments »

January 17, 2008 by kim.

The day we left St. John to go to St. Thomas, it rained. Naturally, as we are inclined to do, we decided to get in a little sightseeing. We went to the Sugar Factory right across from the campsite:

Too bad it was raining. We would have liked to hike the trail around those ruins. We didn’t even know there was a trail there until that day, or we would have taken advantage of it when there wasn’t a downpour.

We checked out of our tent to head to St. Thomas where we would be staying in a hotel for a night before flying back to IL the next day. Before we left, though, we took one last look at the beautiful beach that we would be leaving behind:

We were sad to go, but we couldn’t stay forever. Well, we could, but that would require another move…

At any rate, we made it to the taxi that took us to the ferry that took us to St. Thomas, to take another taxi to the hotel where we were able to flop down on a real bed and take a HOT shower.

I really only camped once before, and it seems to me that the shower there was at least warm, but at this campground, I was rather surprised to find the shower to be ice cold and furthermore, outside:

In hindsight, it really wasn’t that bad, but at the time - I was FREEZING.

After getting all cleaned up, we went to eat at the only restaurant within walking distance of the Best Western. Since it was after Christmas, they still had some decorations up. We thought this Santa was pretty cool:

We spent the rest of the day and the next morning wandering around and taking pictures. We had to check out at noon and the flight wasn’t until almost 4:00pm, so we just hung out in the little airport they have there.

The first leg of the flight went pretty well, but the second leg was delayed going into Chicago due to weather. We didn’t get home until 3:00am (after a short detour to McDonalds).

We were happy to be home, but missed St. John at the same time. I’m sure we’ll go back again.

Soon…

Posted in Vacation | No Comments »

January 17, 2008 by kim.

Yet another installment in the Virgin Islands series…

We had a couple days of glorious weather, and then it began to get stormy. It was still sunny with warm weather, but the water was quite choppy.

No swimming for me. There’s no way I’d get in that water, especially with these warnings posted:

After lunch, Vernie and Wally came down to the beach to enjoy the sand and surf. Vernie and I stayed on the sand. Wally and Chris ventured into the surf.

Did I mention that there were warnings?

Chris almost became that guy. This is how it went:

Chris and Wally brave the water

First of many pummeling waves

Wally goes under

Yet another wave

Chris is engulfed as Wally looks on

The men return to the beach

Thankfully, they made it back to the womenfolk with nary a scratch. I’m not sure about Wally, but Chris spent the rest of the day resting and recovering from the beating the ocean gave him.

One’s life flashing before one’s eyes can be quite exhausting, you know.

Posted in Vacation, Nature | No Comments »

January 14, 2008 by kim.

We’d start our day with breakfast at the T’ree Lizard Restaurant.

We’d sit and relax, read the printout of the NY Times, take in the fresh air, and say “Hi” to the three cats who roamed around the dining area.

They were sweet, and if we wanted to, we could have taken them home. It’s true - you can adopt the strays. They’ve been fixed and everything. We just thought Matilda might try to scratch our eyes out if we pulled a stunt like that, so we refrained.

One of the afternoons on the island (all the days seemed the same to us) Wally and Vernie took us for lunch in Coral Bay to a restaurant they liked called Miss Lucy’s.

The food was good, and I enjoyed watching the chickens and goats wander around the place.

Kim & Chris

Wally & Vernie

Later, we went to the Annaberg Sugar Plantation to walk among the ruins.

Windmill used to grind sugar cane stalks into juice for processing in the early 1800s.

So much history on this island, and we only hit the tip of it. Next time, we’ll plan for more sightseeing.

Beautiful!

(To be continued…)

Posted in Vacation, Animals | No Comments »