Cockles and Mussels, alive, alive-o

Well, I did not make it to the inaugeration, although I have a good excuse!  I had just gotten back from Ireland the night before!  Plus, it was really cold.  And crowds scare me!  I would have gotten accidentally pushed onto the metro track like that one lady (who luckily lived I think and had to hide under the platform as the train pulled in!).  But Ireland was fun!  We were only there for a little bit, so we stayed in Dublin again.  This time I saw Christ Church and Dublinia.  Dublinia was about the history of Ireland, mainly in the medieval times and the Viking times.  It was interesting.  Except it had full size humans standing about that were scary because I kept expecting them to move!  There was one room I couldn't even go in because there was a model / statue of a beggar guy right by the doorway and I was afraid he would move and not let me back out!  creepy.  Then again, maybe it was the lack of sleep.  But besides that it was a nice fun little musuem.  We were in the Temple Bar area again, so lots of pubs and restaurants to go to.  We even went back to the Irish singing and dancing show that we went to last year!  The band was not as good as the one last year, but they were still good.  They sang traditional Irish songs.  And then the dancers were the neat part.  It really is a crazy sort of dancing.  Lots of leaping about!  We wanted to find a cool Irish sweater, but did not!  But that will just hopefully motivate me to make the sweater with all of the Aran wool that my brother gave me!  

But it was a nice trip.  I'm afraid I won't get to take any more little mini-breaks until after I move!  But then again, I'll be a lot closer then to a lot more cool places to travel!  Like Prague... And Copenhagen... And Budapest... And Zagreb...  really quite a lot of places left to see!

~L

Musical Me!

(10 points to anyone who got the reference in my title*)

I am the official owner of a piano!  Well, not quite a real piano, but a pretty darn good electronic one!  Now I officially have too many hobbies to take to Ukraine (piano, knitting, wii, learning russian) but hopefully that means that I will never be bored!  There's also the whole work thing to do...  But the piano is pretty cool.  It took a little effort to get it together on the stand (bah! instructions that say two people required!) and in the house for that matter, but luckily, it's actually a lot lighter than one of the other ones I had been looking at.  And it was a little cheaper, yet has cool features like "beats" and "electric piano" sounds.  80's here I come!  Or at least that Night on Bald Mountain song... (with the pipe organ-not the 80s beats!) But for right now, I'm having fun flipping through the book of songs that came with it because it's like a walk down memory lane!  I'm going through and highlighting the songs that I played before.  So far, I can only currently play the one that I think I played in my 6th grade recital, but hey!  That's not too bad for picking it up after about 10 years!  It's funny though, my sight reading is not what it used to be!  I used to be able to get through entire choir practices accompanying them on songs I had never seen before...  (Don't tell the choir teacher!)  My goal is to work back up to my favorite recital piece of all time "Pathetique" by Beethoven.  And no, it's not pathetic.  It's really nice.  Hmm, maybe along with this rediscovery of piano, I should rediscover my classical music cds and get them onto my ipod!  Hooray!  Another hobby!  :)

~L

*Yes, I just re-watched the Harry Potter movies (and am reading them again in Italian to study for my Italian test) and it's a reference to Gilderoy Lockhart's book

(Why am I studying Italian to go to Ukraine?  I just have been refreshing my Italian all year and wanted to see what "score" I could get before I switch over to learning Russian and Ukrainian.)

2009! My Goal: Make Better Choices

The holidays in Indiana were lovely, and I got to meet my newest niece (technically my cousin once removed for the geneology purists out there).  She and her big sister were too cute!  It was also wonderful to see my grandma, my aunts and uncles, and my cousins - including the ones from Ohio who I haven't seen in a long time!

It also was a neat end of the year because three of my friends had daughters!!!  And another friend got engaged!  So, all in all, I must say that 2008 was a pretty fantastic year!  

On to 2009!!!

Last year I decided that laundry lists of new year's resolutions never really work out, so I went with a general goal.  I think it worked!  Well, a little bit at least.  I don't know that I met the goal, but I had a good year anyway.  You know what they say about new year's resolutions...  So this year my goal:  make better choices!  Pretty simple, but it really is the focus of what I'm trying to do with myself right now!  At the Wendy's drive through?  Get the small!  That's a better choice!  Cleaning up after the buns more often = better choice!  Working out more = better choice!  Then again, sometimes sleeping in because you're really tired = a better choice also.  I like how it's flexible.  Something tells me that moving half way around the world is going to require me to be flexible!  Eating more beets = perhaps a better choice???  Learning Russian = necessary choice.  

Things are slowly falling into place so that I can get my head around the move.  The current mystery:  How to provide documentation of a rabies vaccination for the buns when the vets won't give rabies vaccinations to buns....  Stay tuned for this and more fun mysteries involved in moving to a distant land!

~L