the long slippery slope...

so saturday was my half birthday. why is this important you might ask? if you haven't experienced the kate/deb family tradition of celebrating half birthdays, you have definitely missed out. our birthdays are in the summer so when we were kids, we would miss out on the whole bring-cupcakes-to-school-on-your-birthday thing. so our mothers started celebrating our half birthdays (jan. 28 and feb.2) nothing fancy, cupcakes for school, maybe went out to dinner or got ice cream. anyway it was always a great thing that of course carried into adulthood. our boyfriends/husband's/kids all got to benefit from it.

well this year in july i will be turning 30 much to my chagrin. i never thought that i would be the one to really have a problem with this birthday. but i do. i don't feel like i'm in a place in my life that i wanted to be in when i pictured the big 3-0. i have mega debt, i don't own a house, jason and i haven't gotten married yet because we can't afford a wedding and i don't have kids yet.

when i turned 20 there was a big sense of "thank god that's over with". but with 30 all i can think about is that i'm running out of time or that i'm behind schedule. when i was growing up, i always had the "old" parents. they were older than everyone else's parents and never wanted to go camping or to concerts or to the beach or even sit on the floor. i swore that i would have my kids early (not too early) but that i would still want to have fun and not be old. i know that even as i write this i can see it is totally silly. that voice in my head that tells everyone else who has issues that "you are being ridiculous" is saying the same thing to me. but it doesn't help. i also realize that you are only as young as you feel and all the other warm happy stuff that greeting card companies tell you, but that doesn't seem to fix it.

so one minute after midnight on the 29th of jan., i realized that i am now closer to 30 than i am 29 and it terrifies me.

which do you like?

so i am putting together a temporary logo until my design lady can come up with a better one. i made the one with the black background yesterday but today i don't like it as much since it is being displayed on a white background. so i made a new one. let me know what you think about the white background one or whichever you like better.

Go Steelers!!! Heaven is watching...

So i have never rooted for the Steelers in my life being a die hard Pat's fan with my beloved Arizona alumni Tedy Bruschi playing. But yesterday i witnessed something that i found so lovely that i couldn't resist. Jason's grandmother, a fanatic Steelers fan who loved football so much she had newspaper clippings of upcoming games with her picks circled, passed away yesterday. She lived out on Cape Cod near Hyannis. We drove up there yesterday because jason's parents had called saying she had had a rough night and that if we wanted to see her we should come. We got there about 1pm, and went up to her room. jason's parents went downstairs for some coffee so jason and i sat with her. she was in a coma and her breathing was very labored. it was almost like she was waiting for jason's parents to leave the room before she died. it was very peaceful. we all decided later that she decided to go at 1:30 so that she could get the st. peter-at-the-gates part over before the steelers game at 3pm. which if you watched that game yesterday, you could see she definitely had her finger in that game. so yes the steelers are in the superbowl and someone in heaven is watching.

sandman issues?

so i have had issues sleeping this week. weird dreams, not sleeping through the night, blah, blah, blah. i have talked to a few people i know and they have all said that they were having issues too. so my non-east coast friends/relatives, how have you been sleeping? is this just an east coast thing? my friend marcia thinks it is the moon. but it isn't full anymore so i don't think that is it.

Rural Long Is.

Here are some of the promised photos from Long Island. I really expected Xavier Roberts to pop up and name the cabbages. I recommend clicking on the images to make them bigger in your browser, especially the cabbage one.

same ol' #@%#@@!...

yep nothing exciting to report. i did a lot of shooting this week. i got sent up to hartford twice to shoot uconn men and women's basketball games. that was pretty cool. free food anyway. i also went on the cross sound ferry over to long island on wed. the ferry goes from new london to orient point long island. of course the new london side is an actual metropolitian area but the orient point side is in the middle of nowhere. it is a very rural farming community. some of the pictures i took look like sections of kansas with big fields, vineyards and an actual cabbage patch which i had never seen before. i'll try to remember tonight at work to post some of those pix. anyway, the ferry company over the last couple of years has increased their runs as the popularity of the casinos just north of us increased. the people that live near the ferry on the long island side are pissed because they have to deal with all the traffic. so we are doing a story on the people that are not pleased and what the ferry company has to say about it. needless to say the ferry company is not a big fan of ours. since we have written stories in past months about the pollution they put into long island sound and other not so great things. they had our newspaper boxes removed from their premisis and the ferries themselves. always a classy move in my opinion.

continuing on the sewing theme

jason gave me a sewing machine for christmas which i am so excited about. it was a little creepy though because the first one we got, i was reading the instructions when i noticed handwritten notes in the margins complete with pictures of the bobbin and such. i then tried the machine and it was clearly broken although i fiddled with it forever to make sure it wasn't just something i was doing. so back to target it went. last night i opened the new one and was pleased that at least it wasn't me not knowing what i was doing. it worked fine. i remembered some of what my mom taught me as far as how the machine works, now i just have to deal with my inability to sew in a straight line. it has tons of different stiches which i have tried all of them on a piece of scrap fabric. very cool.

so- a needle pulling thread

I recently read on my friend ann's blog that people most frequently start their posts with the word "so". i just scrolled through my last 10 blogs and 8 out of 10 start with "so". from now on i will have a concerted effort to not use "so" as to break free from english repetiveness.

when slurpee falls from the sky

today was gross. picture that giant slurpee from 7-11 that you had last summer on a really hot day. wasn't it nice? ok today it fell down the back of my neck. all day in fact. it didn't really snow and it didn't really rain, it slushed. i guess at least it didn't have that cherry syrup or i would have been even more grumpy.