Many Things

Hi Folks,

Here's another update from the Desk of RWM.

Carbon the Betta Fish (Thank you mom and dad for the birthday gift):



He is the craziest, most active fish I have ever seen - and that for a Betta (not that I've seen that many fish, but this guy really is crazy). He dives up and down the tank all day long, shimmies along the gravel, hides in the plants, gets stuck near the filter, fits between the thermometer and glass, and would eat 15 pellets of food a day if I let him. He is Fish ADD guy. it is great entertainment. I'm actually kind of worried he might have parasites (which would explain the crazy activity), so I am treating him with medication just in case. He lives in a 3 gallon tank with a UV light, a filter, and heater that keeps his home at a balmy 80 degrees. He is great fun, and everybody else in the office loves coming in to check up on him.

Speaking of which, in case you're curious, here's where I work during the day. My desk ends at the bamboo plant, where Jenny's desk begins:




His tank is only about 11x8. These desks are irritatingly small, although we do get nice back-supportive chairs. Except they don't fit under the desks (too tall). We're normally four to an office, but Jenny and I kind of lucked out because Margaret is a mother of two kids and unfortunately works very strange hours to deal with the child care issue, and Catherine doesn't use her desk much.

Greg and I went on a "Pirate Cruise" on the Quinnipiac. I've been meaning to post a few pictures. I find this picture of me kind of funny, because you can see how completely messed up my teeth are (look at the center of my two front teeth - that's 3/4" away from the center of my nose). Suddenly there's a reason for my chronic jaw pain and TMJ...hmm, braces one day. Getting my wisdom teeth out helped my TMJ tremendously, so I hope one day I can fix it more.



And here're some photos from our first sail in the Cal 20 boat we got for free on Craigslist:





I actually didn't get any good overall shots because by the time we got back it was too dark. Our first sail was on Friday evening during a small craft advisory, wind gusts at 25-30 knots. It was great. It was gorgeous. We're 5 minutes of motoring away from the Long Island Sound and hundreds of miles of beautiful, rocky coastline. The boat is lovely to sail. We are sharing it with our friend Scott:



(The colors on that are really funky, but I don't have time today to fix it...). We plan to go out for a full day on Sunday. I can't wait.

Since this blog is actually supposed to be about, well, the wedding, I should say something about that. We were about to put down a deposit on the villa I posted about below, except I realized I messed up the dates (I asked for Friday-Friday instead of Saturday-Saturday). I wrote back and asked if he could change the dates on the form, and we haven't heard back yet. I can't imagine it would be any problem, but I am worried. I really hope we can just put this deposit down and send out invitations already. Which, by the way, please do not assume anybody is invited. Not that we wouldn't be thrilled that people want to come, but we need to pass those invites along individually.