Thanks. Wait, what?

I got the most bizarre, back-handed compliment this evening. I was walking around outside of the hospital with my brother and niece, which always causes some confusion re: who belongs to who. I had just come from work, and in an effort to dress less like a 6-year-old, I was wearing a skirt and pantyhose. Nothing too scandalous.

We put Brianna into Rebecca's car and I leaned in to say goodbye. As I'm leaning over, this old man walks up behind me and smacks me on the ass with his clipboard, and goes, "you still have nice legs."

WTF?!

I turned around to look at him and he just walked away. I was pretty much speechless.

Nephew'd

Introducing...

Charles John...
and...

Robert Allen Jr.

They are my nephews. They are very small. I'm pretty sure they've got my (and Rob's) eyebrows.

Earthquake.

I held a short conversation with my dad this afternoon via text message.

Dad: "Did you make it through the earth quake?"
Me: "Yeah, Jer woke up then woke me up. Otherwise I was oblivious. Heavy sleeper."
Dad: "Me too, slept right through her. Apple never falls far from the tree!"

I am a notoriously heavy sleeper. I've slept through bat attacks, alarm clocks, night time visitors, you name it. I'm pretty sure that Bobbi and Jeremy both hate my snooze button addiction with the burning fire of a thousand suns.

I also get very confused when I'm woken, and have been known to carry on full conversations in the middle of the night and not remember anything the next day.

When Jeremy woke up shouting last night that the bed was shaking, my immediate and rational thought was that it had to be ghosts. I woke up this morning completely convinced that our apartment must be haunted. Yeah.

Yeknom

When we were little, my cousins and I were into monkeys. Like, hardcore into monkeys. It was one of those times when a casual interest kind of turned into thinking and talking about monkeys all. the. time. Yeah, we were weird kids.

Anyway, one morning we got up and started farting around with the computer. Actually, I think we were writing a town newspaper for our other burning obsession, Playmobil.

We were using the microphone and sound recorder to try and say "monkey...," backwards. Then, we would reverse the track and play our recording the other way and see how close we'd come to getting the inflection and pronunciation correct.

"YEK-nom"

"mon-KAY"

"yek-NOM"

"MON-kay"

"YEEK-nom"

"mon-KEEE"

It was only after about 30 minutes of this that it occurred to us to say the word forwards, then play the track backwards to see how it sounded. Duh.

In other news, I've encountered my first little copyright-infringement issue. I'm fairly sure that my inaction as far as watermarking my photos and issuing a copyright statement led to a little bit of heartache for all parties involved. Meh.

Progress Update

I've been making moderate progress on my 101 things list...

All in all, things are pretty good. I'm going to be working on cleaning/organizing, gardening, photography and SCUBA in the next few weeks. Yay!

#4 talk to my doctor about switching medications - did it, got more meds to take on top of what I already have, and I'll be going back in a few weeks to increase the dosage. So far the additional thing seems to have helped my sleeping issue.

#28 take longarm quilting course - Went with my auntie to Hiawatha, Iowa last week and took a one-on-one course at the Nolting factory. I have yet to try out any of my new skillz, but we've got some baby quilts to make!

#29 successfully bind a quilt using mitred-corner bindings. I did it, I wasn't impressed, but I'll try it again just to be sure.

#46 get season tickets to the MUNY. They are on their way! I knew we had to go this year...The Producers and Fiddler on the Roof all in one season?!

#51 research grad schools. I am pretty sure I know what I want to do. As long as #49, #50 and #52 go well...

#60 fix carpet issue in hallway - I've finally solved the problem, on my fourth attempt. Let's just say it took a lot of Liquid Nails.

#90 create some art from photos for TU. The poster-sized prints arrived last week. They are pending framing, then I can bring them to the store.

#101 find a cute pair of outfits for Rob's twins - I ended up buying a shit-ton of baby outfits at the thrift and consignment stores. Ally had her baby shower last Saturday and it looks like these boys are set for clothes for at least 6 months.

#99 and #100 - Done! Here's what Jake had to say about my work:

"Laura! Yes, we got the package. It is amazing, and we
couldn't be happier with how it turned out! That book you made is just
incredible quality. The pictures look excellent and it has such a classy style
with the black borders. We really enjoyed looking through it and laughed a lot,
I think we had forgotten how silly our commentary was. I'm going to bring it
into work tomorrow.

Last night we watched the DVD, which was also really well
done. I really can't thank you enough for how great everything turned out. The
pictures you took were perfect, it's really a treasure for us.

Anyway, thank you so much for doing all this work, it really
turned out better than we imagined, and we knew how talented you were after
seeing Sarah's pictures! I hope you are doing well and that we can get
together sometime soon!

Take care,Thanks again!-Jacob"