Tagged!

The lovely M over at Chinese Take out tagged me a few days ago so here goes...

8 Random Things About Myself....

8. I have small feet for my height. I am 5'7" and wear a size 6.5. In college people poked fun asking if I had trouble balancing on my feet.

7. I have been accused of making funny faces a lot. Of course I can't exactly verify this as I don't have mirrors everywhere.

6. I have a stutter in my sneeze. Meaning, when I sneeze, I "achoo, choo, choo choo". It never ceases to amuse my husband.

5. I have a purse that I named. I have always been a handbag whore until I found Priscilla. She is a Michael Kors bag that I fell in love with last winter and have found myself to now be a monogamous handbag owner.

4. I have had arthritis since I was a teenager. It is only getting worse.

3. When my husband and I first moved in together we lived across the street from the USS Constitution. It resides in the Charlestown Navy Yard and there are a few apartment building there too. It was fun to drive home every day and see those tall masts.

2. I did three terms abroad in college. Sophomore year I went to Florence, Italy to study art history. Junior year I went to DC (okay so it wasn't abroad but it was a term away) to work at the National Endowment for the Arts in a division of the NEA that no longer exists. It was the same division that funded Robert Mapplethorpe so being amongst the controversy was fun. Then Senior year I went to Rennes, France to study french.

1. At the age of 9 I started going to French Camp. It is actually part of a group of summer camps for kids run by Concordia College in Minnesota. They are now called the International Language Villages and have something like 11 international village summer camps. You do all the regular camp stuff like archery and canoing but you do it in a foreign language. You get new name and you eat food from the country you are supposed to be in. For instance, my names at French camp over the 5 years I went included, Paulette Chateaubriand & Angelique Belgique. Now of course those sound like stripper names to me. You could always tell when it was close to meal time b/c the whole camp smelled like freshly baked baguette. Yeah, not bad for summer camp. Two summers I did additional sessions at Chinese camp and German Camp. The best things about those camps were a) learning how to use chop sticks like a pro and b) eating damn good gummy bears every day. Now these camps offer family weeks where you can go with your kids to introduce them to another culture. I have often considered going back with my kids. Here is a link if you are curious....

Tickled Pink Talk... tag...you're it.

How NYC are you?

I am a born and raised Boston Girl so it amazes me how much I connect with NYC (except when it comes to baseball). SJ and I lived there for 3 years after we got married and it is in my blood. Here is what the blog quiz told me...

You Are 72% NYC

You are probably a real New Yorker, though there's a good chance you really live on Long Island.

How NYC Are You?

Which is funny b/c I am not in NYC any more so the LI thing made me laugh!

Smile and this too shall pass...

Yes, admittedly I am very grumpy. I actually have a few things to be grumpy about other than the adoption timeline. However, no one is in harms way so I'll just have to deal. Luckily for me, my mother came to the grumpy girl's rescue tonight with these very funny ads:

Deutsche bank
Ikea and the vibrator
Jenny Stripping
You could jack your car up with that.
Snoring Spouse

Bone me.

I'm in a mood. I'm in one of those don't f*ck with me moods. My USCIS paperwork is up for renewal as my 171H expires on 11/30. CCAA continues to match 1 week of referrals each month and I made the mistake of counting how many weeks there are between 12/8/05 (where they are now) and 7/6/06 (my LID). 33 weeks. Which at this rate means roughly 33 months. From now. I am so in a lapel grabbing mood. The kind when you just want to grab someone's shirt, shak'em up a bit while shouting "what the hell's going on????" On Monday we had to make the decision to meet with our social worker to update our homestudy for hundreds and hundreds of dollars so we could go waste a day of our lives getting refingerprinted and re-file our I-600A. "Bone me" is all I could think to myself. Even better, lets take about a grand - for fun, how about in all singles- ball it up - stick it in the fireplace and light it on fire. Cuz really? really? CCAA you gonna get to us inside of 18 months?? Really??? Yeah, I thought not! So what, I spend all this time and money on paperwork only to have to re-do it 18 months from now when it expires YET AGAIN?!?

Here is my plan: Tom Cruise is the CCAA and I am Cuba and you'll need to subsitute the words "speed up" for "money"...



We are letting our freaking shit expire and when the CCAA shows me a speed up, I will hop, skip, and gleefuly jump over to our USCIS office with my wallet open wide!