I was just out walking the dog and noticed that the night was pretty clear. I realized it’s been a while since I actually took the time to look up and look at the stars at night. Its something that I always try to do, but lately I haven’t had a chance to. It’s times like this that I realize that life has been so full of things to do that I haven’t had the time to appreciate the little things.

I immediately found my favorite constellation - Orion. There’s no way you could miss him up there in the sky - a row of three stars held within a rectangle of 4 other stars (5 if you’re lucky). There were many a drunken night in college that me and my friends would lie down in the middle of the quad on our way home from the bars and find our constellation friends. Those nights were the best!

There were also times I remember standing outside my childhood home, searching for stars, or lying in Melanie’s backyard, searching for Cygnus or falling stars, or watching lunar eclipses through the telescope my father gave me, trying to get the best magnification on the telescope as it was perched on my dad’s car.

Unfortunately I didn’t do too much stargazing tonight - the night was a bit chilly and I only had a light jacket on.

But it’s nice to know that the stars are out…it always brings back fond memories and a sense of comfort to me.

Tags: Daily by Yano
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We had plans this weekend to go snowboarding at Devil’s Head, but when we found out that it was going to be 40 degrees and raining on Saturday, we decided not to go. Instead, we hosted “board game party” at my place, since that’s what I would have been doing at Devil’s Head while everyone was on the slopes anyway.

Turns out that no one brought any board games to my place (I haven’t had time yet to accumulate board games) so it was more like eat White Castle that Melanie bought and “Watch cheesy movies” night. My cousin Irio taught me how to make this Brazilian Chicken Pot Pie that he had grown up eating, but I didn’t write anything down so I doubt I’ll remember how to make it. They brought over my godson Kenzo who is growing up so fast! Since we had no games to play, we entertained ourselves by putting Kenzo in a sitting position and trying to guess which direction he’d fall over, since he hasn’t learned how to sit on his own yet.

It was a big disappointment that we didn’t go boarding, but it was nice just to chill out at home and see the cousins…

Tags: Daily by Yano
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Yesterday I was sitting at home with Dave, watching TV as he surfed the net. I was sipping on my homemade concoction of bananas, pineapples, strawberry ice cream and vanilla soy milk (which actually was quite tasty) and he was sipping on a bottled Mocha Frappucino.

I love Frappucinos.

However, in my current condition I was advised to stay away from caffeine. Not that it was forbidden…my doctor had actually said that one or two cups was ok. But just for the baby’s sake, I’ve been avoiding it completely.

It’s hard to avoid it when it’s right in front of your face.

So in a fit of madness, I grabbed Dave’s drink and chugged a bit of it down. My ears were deaf to Dave’s screams of “Christine!!! The baby!!! Think of the baby!” My only thoughts were of savoring those precious gulps of coffee goodness.

Of course, in my haste, I spilled a bunch of it on myself. To which Dave said, “Ha! That’s what you get!”

Later on that night, we were having pizza for dinner, which for some reason I’ve been LOVING lately. I was happily munching on my slice and I happened to look down on my shirt.

For some reason, it looked like a tomato exploded on my shirt. I must have dropped a sausage on myself and it probably bounced off my big belly and went all over the place.

Dave caught me looking at myself and then saw my shirt and bust out laughing. Hard. I gave him my sad face and said pitifully, “I’m a fat pregnant slob!” Dave, in between bouts of laughter, agreed, “My wife is a big slob!”

It was hilarious and sad at the same time, there I sat at the dinner table with my shirt all stained with coffee and pizza sauce, it looked like I’d never eaten before. We had a good laugh over it and then he made me go upstairs to change my shirt because he couldn’t look at me without laughing.

I don’t know what it is, half my food ends up on my shirt now. It could be that I’m so excited to eat that I miss my mouth, or just that my hand eye coordination has been sucking lately. But for some reason, a good percentage of my food ends up on my shirt, rather than in my mouth!

In the middle, Frappucino stains, at the bottom, pizza stains…

Tags: Pregnancy, Pictures by Yano
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Grabbed this from the lovely Tara…

———————————–

1. You have $10 and need to buy snacks at a gas station; what do you buy? A Mountain Dew, Guacamole Doritos, and Ho Ho’s.

2. If you had to be reincarnated as some sort of sea dwelling creature, what would you be? A dolphin. I know they’re incredibly smart creatures (maybe even smarter than us) and I’d love to see what their society is like.

3. Who’s your favorite redhead? Ugh, I guess Dan/Redpac.

4. What do you order when you’re at a pancake house? Biscuits and Sausage Gravy, with a side of pancakes, sausage, bacon and eggs. I love breakfast foods!

5. Do you own any naughty toys? My family reads this, they don’t wanna know.

6. Have you made out with anyone on your link list? What a weird question….the answer is Yes, that’s all you’re gettin’.

7. Describe your favorite pair of underwear: Don’t have a favorite, just as long as they’re comfy and they don’t ride up my crack, they’re good for me.

8. Describe the last time you were injured: Well, I’m starting to get carpal tunnel if that counts.

9. Are there any odd things that make you feel comfortable? It’s kinda weird, but the smell of the subway is kinda comforting to me.

11. Tell me a weird story from your high school years: Some friends and I got together and were playing with a ouija board and contacted this spirit that lived in my friend’s house. My other friend had just gotten out of a bad relationship and she asked the spirit if it could help her get back at him and the spirit said yes. One of the girls we were with freaked out and kicked the board away saying that a good friend of hers died and what if it was because someone asked a spirit to do it. We never got to ‘close’ the session with the spirit and never got a hold of him again, so we were freaked for the next couple weeks…

12. What is the wallpaper on your cell phone? Dave making a butt ugly face

13. Soda? Mountain Dew, if not that, then Coke.

14. Flavor of pudding? Milk Chocolate

15. What type of shirt are you wearing? A big red shirt with what looks like a white collared shirt underneath it, but it’s just a big fat lie - the white collar and cuffs are just sewed in.

16. Prescription medication? Just prenatal vitamins

17. If you could use only one form of transportation for the rest of your life what would it be? I love Tara’s answer to this - a chauffeured limo.

18. How many people are on your links list? Wow, I never realized it was this many - 85

19. How many people on your links list do you know in real life? That I’ve met - 58, That I’m friends with (meaning I’m in contact with them regularly) - 37

20. What are you listening to right now? Deathcab for Cuties - my coworker gave it to me to listen…pretty good group

21. Most recent movie you watched: Memoirs of a Geisha

22. Name 5 things you have with you at all times: Purse (well, it’s actually a camera bag), Camera, Cell phone, lip gloss, pen

23. Would you rather give or receive a foot massage? Receive.

24. Name a teacher you had the hots for: Never really had a hot teacher, but my favorite teacher ever was my high school band director, Mr. K. I still cry when I see Mr. Holland’s Opus.

25. What is a saying that you use a lot? “Yup yup!”, “You know?”

26. What’s one piece of advice that you think should be passed on to every child? Though it’s nice to get things handed to you on a plate, it feels so much better to earn things on your own and know that you achieved something because you worked hard for it.

Tags: Tests by Yano
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Once I got pregnant, I knew my diet had to change. The meatatarian diet I’ve been following for the past 20 years religiously had to make way for a healthier, more well rounded diet. I didn’t want to have a weirdly deformed baby because I didn’t have enough veggies in my diet. But it would be a big change, since ever since I was a little girl I would sit at the table for hours, not eating my vegetables, with my father stating, ‘You’re not leaving the table until you eat your vegetables!’ to which I would then sit in the dark, staring at these green monsters on my plate. Finally, my parents gave up…they already had one daughter that ate veggies like there was no tomorrow (damn you, Claudine), so they left me alone. Later, when people asked me why I didn’t like vegetables, I would make up some statement like, “I don’t like eating fruits and vegetables because we can’t hear them scream when we pull them out of the earth or off trees. How cruel is that? Abusing them when we can’t even know if they’re in pain?” Of course, that logic is horrible. But that’s how I lived, rarely having veggies. However, once I got pregnant, I knew things had to change.

I didn’t think it would be too hard to do. I mean, I had learned how to eat salads at social events and even have a favorite fruit - the avocado. I started buying apples, bananas, pineapples, salad mixes, brocoli and a whole bunch of other healthy things. I got salads when eating out, and ate any veggies that came as a side.

I thought I would get used to it. I even thought that this pregnancy might change my outlook on veggies and I might even crave them.

Nope.

I still hate them.

It’s torture.

I don’t like the taste of them, I don’t like the texture, I don’t like them, period.

But here I am, munching on a banana with a cup of blueberry yogurt for breakfast (which really isn’t that bad)….because it doesn’t matter that I think, it matters that my baby is getting all the nutrients he can get.

He’s definitely going to hear it from me when he’s out - “Because of you, I had to eat VEGETABLES!!! Now go make me a steak!”

Tags: Pregnancy, Daily by Yano
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For any of you who have called my home number in the past 1 1/2 years that we’ve lived in our house and have never had any acknowledgement from either me or Dave, I want you to know that we’ve finally gotten an answering machine that we know how to check. We used to have voicemail service before, which we did know how to check, but we had just forgotten the phone number we were supposed to dial. Yes, yes, I know we could have programed the VM number into our speed dial or something, but that would be too easy now, wouldn’t it?

I think in the time that we had the voicemail, I checked it a total of 3 times. After that, we just forgot about it. We rarely gave out our home phone number anyway. The thing that sucks about voice mail service is that there’s really no way to know that you have messages unless you call it. Ignorance is bliss, so we never called it.

One day about 9 months ago, when I had nothing else to do, I checked the voicemail. I went through about 50 messages or some insane number like that. Seventy percent of those were Dave’s parents wondering where we were (they like to check up on us, like, every day), some were reminders for appointments, some were from my family, several were from a friend that Dave had called to ask advice about a projector, which was really funny, because Dave was pissed that he never heard from him, and lo and behold, our friend had tried so hard to get a hold of us! After realizing how many calls we were missing, I decided to just get an answering machine. That instant notification as soon as we walk through the door and seeing a message button light up would be worth it.

So I got an answering machine/phone combo, plugged it in, made a short and sweet recording to leave us a message, and went on with life.

The phone worked great. I used it for work all the time, since it had a speakerphone function. The old phone was moved upstairs to the office, which helped out a lot since we didn’t have a phone in there.

But as time went on, no messages.

I really didn’t think much of it. I just thought that people got sick of leaving us messages back in the voicemail days that they no longer wanted to leave us messages.

Then this who snafu happened with the doctors office when I showed up for an appointment that they had cancelled, and told me that the left several messages on my home phone telling me so (I had been out traveling, so I wouldn’t have been home to get them anyway). I went home and asked Dave if he’d gotten any messages, and he said no. Seems that he wasn’t curious that in the 7 months we had the machine we never got any messages.

I checked the dreaded voicemail (which I had forgotten to cancel), and there were the messages, along with 30 others!

What was going on? Why wasn’t our new fancy phone picking up the new messages? I had set the ringer pickup to 4 rings, I seemed to have checked everything, and still, it didn’t work.

Of course, I didn’t read the manual. No, no, no, my friends, I’m too cool and too smart for that. Seriously, if you asked me where the manual was, I wouldn’t know, I’d maybe point in the general direction of my kitchen, where most manuals end up anyway.

After a lot of tinkering and a lot of frustration, my eyes saw a button that I had never seen before, but which was so obvious, so blatant, that I had wondered why I had never seen it before.

What button was it?

“On/Off”

What the–?!?!

There’s an on/off switch for this little fucker?

Wait, wait, wait, the phone works, I’m able to make a recording and set the number of rings, everything else seems to function…doesn’t that mean that this thing is on already?

Well, the evidence proved NO, since when I hit that little on/off switch, it lit up all nice and green.

Imagine that! I never turned ON the answering machine!

After that, we started getting messages. We surprised people when they left a message and we called back stating, “Yeah, we got your message and…” We feel all grown up now.

The only thing is, our answering machine still has that robotic ‘Please. Leave. A. Message.” voice….I guess when I made my recordings before it didn’t take. But I’m too lazy to change it, so for the time being, we’re gonna take little steps and take this answering machine business slow…

So leave us a message. We’ll call back this time!

Tags: Daily by Yano
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If you all haven’t heard already, late last week there was a whale in the Thames river in London. It seems that a Northern bottlenose whale got disoriented and swam up the river, passing by landmarks like Big Ben and Westminster Bridge and attracting thousands of onlookers. This is the first time since 1913 that a whale had been sighted in the Thames river, which at its depth of about 20-25 feet isn’t deep enough for whales.

Rescue workers came immediately, trying to prevent the adolescent whale from beaching on the shallow banks of the river and trying to point her downstream, back to the ocean. No one knows how she got lost and came up the river, but various theories say predators, sonar from ships, illness or just got lost chasing a meal.

It was obvious to onlookers that the whale’s health was deteriorating because of lack of food and the shallow waters. She was put upon a rescue barge so they could take her out to the deep see before her condition worsened. However, Saturday night ‘Wally’, as she was dubbed by the British press, suffered from convulsions and died.

So now comes the necropsy (which I guess is the same as an autopsy) to see what could have caused the whale to stray so far from deep water. After that is probably the blame game, since people need someone to blame for a tragedy like this. Number one on the list right now, the UK government, who people believe should have been monitoring the cetacean population around its waters in the first place. Wally’s resting place will be the Natural History Museum, where her bones will be used for scientific research.

Rest in peace, Wally, and hopefully you found your way home to that big deep blue ocean in the sky…

Tags: Cool Link by Yano
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A couple months ago I attended the baptism of my first godchild, Kenzo (whom I call ‘Vader’). This is the first time that someone had trusted me to be the godparent for their child, and I was honored. However, due to scheduling problems, I was not able to attend any of the pre-baptism classes that they had for future godparents.

However, when I went to the ceremony, they gave us some cards that outlined our responsibilities as godparents:

To be chosen as a godparent is a special honor. You, above all others, have been entrusted with a special responsibility: participating in the child’s Christian life, formation and education.

This privilege offers you an opportunity to develop a mutually enriching spiritual relationship…one that hopefully will last through your life time.

There are special things that I’m sure the parish will tell you about in some classes or the day of the baptism [and its rehearsal]. Each parish does unique things for the ritual, such as dressing the child, holding a candle, being responsible in getting the certificate to the parents, etc. Other things that you can do are:

Celebrate the anniversary of this holy day of holy baptism each year with a visit, call, email, or card or all of the above! Also, remember the actual birthday each year. Other visits from the godparent through the year can be special (like going to an amusement park, a special mass or holy day event, etc.).

As your godchild grows, it can be very helpful for you to share in the struggles and triumphs of living the Christian life by keeping yourself informed and updated on the Catholic faith, its doctrine, values, and the bishops teaching, you can be a resource person for the godchild.

Encourage a consistent life of faith through special letters, gifts or holy events, like Christmas, Easter, anniversaries, and also by remembering their graduation, confirmation, first communion, first penance, first job, car, engagement and other events. Sharing a Christian gift [such as a bible, rosary or other religious articles, writing a letter for a retreat, or helping them pay to go on a retreat] are very meaningful and demonstrate your importance in their developing faith.

Being supportive to the godchild’s parents is especially important. They are the primary religious educators of their child. Your support of this means a lot!

Encouraging and being supportive of the godchild’s religious education is also important by being a model of Christian daily prayer, active participation in the parish, by attending liturgy, etc.

Wow! That’s a lot of responsibilities. All I remember from my godparents growing up was an extra-expensive Christmas present. One of my godparents I haven’t seen in about 20 years.

Also, for some reason, I thought that the godparent is someone who gets to have your kid if you should meet an untimely demise. That isn’t mentioned here, did anyone else think that?

So I’m going to try and be the best godparent ever. I will try and guide my little godson into my interpretation of what it is to be a good Catholic. By ‘my interpretation’ I mean that I’m going to teach him about the values and morality of being a good person, but that the Catholic Church itself may still be trying to figure out issues like accepting homosexuals and that Harry Potter isn’t evil, even though the Pope may think so. Also, birth control education is a necessity (even though the church doesn’t think so) because abstinence is not an easy choice for an incredibly hormonal teenager to make.

On the anniversary of his baptism, he’ll get a “Happy Baptism Anniversary!” card…oh wait, they don’t make those. Guess I’ll just have to photoshop one myself…Also, I’ll try and get together with my fellow godparents, Dave, Marlon and Tracy, to hold annual plays about various events in the Christian faith, like “The Nativity Play”, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”, “Noah’s Ark” (starring various pets, like Ewok, Luscious, Caleb, Oliver and Sunny), “Making Wine at the Wedding”, “Sodom and Gomorrah”, and other Bible hits.

Yes, I’m going to ROCK as a godparent!

Me and My Fellow Godparent, Marlon

Me and My Godson, Kenzo

Tags: Daily by Yano
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Sometimes when I’m in an elevator that has bars on the sides for people to hold on to, I like to stand in the corner and left myself up on the bars, pretending that I’m an Olympic gymnast on the parallel bars. Of course, I know that it’s a men’s event, but still, it’s fun to do and it cracks my back nicely. I also like to see how long I can hold myself up by just the strength of my arms…it makes me feel strong!

Anyway, I came across one of those elevators when I was in Vegas.

I put my hands on the bars and lifted. Nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing.

I couldn’t lift up my body weight with my arms.

Of course, it’s no secret that I’ve gained a good amount of weight with this pregnancy, but still, it was a little shock to me that I couldn’t do my elevator-parallel-bars routine.

As I say this, I’m heading out to Old Navy to go pick up a pair of large maternity jeans because the mediums are getting a big snug.

Moooooooooooooooooooooo!

Tags: Pregnancy, Daily by Yano
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There’s no place like home…

I got home late on Tuesday night from my 1 1/2 week stint in Vegas, and I was exhausted! I spent most of yesterday just recharging and being happy that I was home.

I love Vegas, but to tell the truth, by the end of the trip I was a little sick of it. I think if I was just there on vacation with a lot of free time I would have really enjoyed the trip, but since I had to spend most of the days in meetings and thinking really hard by the end of the day I was too tired to do any sightseeing or do anything worthwhile.

I was also just plain homesick. Being away for a while is one thing, but being away for a while and being pregnant is another. I didn’t get as much rest as I normally do when I’m at home, and I definitely didn’t eat as healthy. Damn those buffets!!! I gained about 6lbs while I was gone. My doctor will NOT be happy with me. It was hard for me not to be home, not to be able to have quality time with my belly (many of the times after I was done with meetings in LV, I’d just come back to my room and sleep), and it was difficult to not have Dave around, who has been SO supportive during the pregnancy. I felt bad that he missed out on a week and a half of watching my belly grow and trying to feel the baby kick…

But now I’m home, and everything is OK again. I know I could have opted not to go to Vegas for this meeting, but aside from the homesickness I got a lot out of it. I learned a lot about the new product, got a lot of training, and most importantly, got to meet a lot of the people I will be working with from now on (everyone works in different locations, so it’s hard to get everyone together).

Home! Home! I can’t tell you how joyous I am to be back home again, back on my favorite couch, seeing that my fish are still alive, getting hugs from Dave…I have a new appreciation for it all!

I’d love to go to Vegas again, but next time on vacation where I can relax and have fun…

The Paris Casino Behind the Bellagio Fountains

Tags: Daily by Yano
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