slack ass

oh, i have been quite the slacker on the ol' blog.... i blame my 'rents... they were here last week and were a (great) distraction.

so yeah, it was great to see dave and linderella. they came out a week from thursday, 2/25 and left on tuesday, 3/2. They stayed with Brian's parents since we would have nothing but an air mattress to offer them after giving away all of our spare bedroom furniture! the six of us went up to prescott to Paul and Paula's place and hung out with Brian's Nana and Zeyda... it was a great time. We ate, went wine tasting, wandered around in the woods, ate, played in the snow with the doggies and ate. My idea of a good weekend....

This past week we have been finishing up our super shopping spree since everything is so freakin expensive in Aus... I am proud of myself... I have become quite the little patient bargain shopper.... I am hoping I can continue to be patient after starting work full-time again. :-) In the past, my idea of shopping went like this: "I like the outfit that mannequin has on. Do you have all of that in my size? Ok I'll take it. Yes all of it." This is not because I don't like to be frugal, it's more because I just don't have to patience to put a cute outfit together... but in my old age I am getting better. I think my fashion consultant Katie would be proud of me too. :-)

Today was a great day. Paula and Paul had a little going away/birthday open house for me this afternoon. We hung out with Bubbi and Dean, Ken, Roe and Ruth, Harold, Lisa and Taylor and the other Lisa (Von Bargen). Thanks to everyone for coming out today!

This week's agenda is to make a trip or two to Goodwill (we have a gigantic box to donate and I am starting to need the space for sorting other stuff), take the pets to the vet for their blood draw for the quarantine process, and hopefully nail down when I'm going so we can buy my ticket. I am starting to get a bit restless re: not knowing exactly when I'm supposed to go. I heard from our visa agent chick last week and she said I passed the first step, but I don't really have a frame of reference for how many more steps there are, how long they'll take, etc.

We want to go to San Diego before my flight, so the plan is to drive to SD on a Friday and then Brian drive me up to LAX most likely on a Tuesday... but I don't know if it will be two, three or more weeks! Frustrating. I want to make plans. But I got a sweet job in Australia, I need not complain.

Oh another thing Brian and I have been doing is looking at what car to buy when he finally gets to Melbourne. We want a small SUV with enough space in the back to put the pups for weekend trips, similar to what we do with our XTerra now. Right now we are most interested in the Nissan XTrail, Nissan Dualis and the Subaru Forester. Any opinions?

who's blacker, snoop or charles barkley?

that is seriously what the topic is on the George Lopez show.... never saw this show before but i was compelled to watch this one.

Snoop's pissed because Barkley is 75% sub-saharan african and Snoop is 71% sub-saharan african. they actually seemed stoked to get their DNA done... i don't know if I think it's awesome or ridiculous.

BTW, George Lopez's monologue was a whole lot of not funny. i wasn't impressed, although I did like him giving Snoop a Josh Grobin CD because "that's what white people like".

Re: the Australia stuff, I have had a pretty productive few days! I got all of our documents scanned and sent in for the visa paperwork, and today I had to drive down to Tucson to get my passport expedited. $150 and 8 hours later, I now have an updated passport! I had never gotten around to changing my last name on my passport...didn't figure we were going out of the country any time soon.... but obviously that got bumped up on the priority list.

I also bought health insurance for myself today, because they need proof of me being covered to submit for the visa. So without fully understanding their system, I am now a proud owner of some random Australia health insurance plan.

What else? I posted my Prelude on Craigslist and have heard from several folks so far... I have a few people coming over on Saturday to take a look at it. So hopefully we'll be down one car and have some cash in our pockets soon. :-)

ok it's getting late... peace!