More Fun in Florida

Our second day in Cocoa Beach didn't start out sunny, but it was dry.  In the morning Sarah and I went out for a swim.  The ocean was a great temperature, no shock at all to wade right in.  The waves were pretty tame, and we floated in the water for about an hour.  I don't think the water is ever this warm in Ocean City MD, even at the end of summer.

We were pretty hungry come lunch time so we walked about a block to a little bar and grill on the water.

Mmm, fish tacos!

We did a little browsing around at the Ron Jon Surf Shop and a couple of other shops, then walked back to the condo.  The sun blazed.

After some lazing around and lengthy naps, it was time to think about dinner.  But first we really wanted to cruise around Cocoa Beach with the top down!  A storm was coming up so we rushed to get in some cruising time.

Dan's real excited!

But he put on his cool persona.

We're having a ball. Sarah is posting a picture on Facebook.  The fun lasts approximately eight minutes... then the rain gets too heavy and we have to put the top up while sitting at a stoplight.

On our third morning in Cocoa Beach I inexplicably wake up at six in the morning.  I wouldn't normally call this serendipitous, but I stepped onto the balcony just moments before the sun rose over the Atlantic.

And after that beautiful show, I climbed back in bed and slept another three hours.  What could be better!

Later in the morning we went swimming again.

Me and Sarah wave hello!

This is the condo as seen from the water's edge.

This is Dan as seen at the water's edge.

We have to leave for Orlando in the afternoon, but first we go with Sarah to Jetty Park in Port Canaveral.

Apparently peacocks roam freely through people's yards in this part of the state.  Also apparently they enjoy posing for people who pull over on the side of the road and get out with their cameras going "Ooooh peacock!!"

Jetty Park has a long fishing pier that runs between the beach and the waterway that pleasure boats, fishing boats, and cruise ships use to get to Port Canaveral.  From the pier we saw pelicans, sea turtles, and dolphins.

Sea turtle.  Duuuude!

Pelican

Dan really wishes he had his boat with him.

Preparing for the march of the cruise ships!  There are three ships leaving today.

The Carnival Sensation

We have to leave Jetty Park, but right before we leave for Orlando, we get to see the Disney Dream cruise ship leaving port.  You can see that everyone on board is apparently already having a blast, especially the people on the water slide!

It's a quick drive to Orlando, but as evening approaches yet another storm comes up.  Welcome to Orlando!

Day One in Cocoa Beach

The Microsoft conference doesn't start until Monday, and here we are in Florida on Friday.  What to do?

Turns out a good Maryland friend, Sarah, is down here in Cocoa Beach for six weeks for work.  She's away from her family, SO lonely... of course it's a humanitarian effort on my part to go and stay with her at her awesome three bedroom condo right on the beach... :)

Seriously though, Sarah was really awesome to let us come stay with her.  Friday morning she had to go to work, so we slept late and completely lazed around, as evidenced by this picture of me sitting on the balcony in my pajamas.

There's the beach, right beyond the dunes.  We were so close that apparently, at night, no one is allowed to turn on their outside balcony lights because it might disturb the sea turtles that come up out of the water to lay their eggs in the sand.  Yay for sea turtles, but also it was really nice having it be so dark and peaceful at night.

Dan and I drove around for a bit (with the top up, because the weather alternated between blazing sun and drizzle) and then after lunch we met up with Sarah at the Kennedy Space Center!

I think the sign looks so retro.

Beyond the entrance here you can see the rocket garden.  They are building a whole new addition to house the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

There are a lot more things to do at the KSC Visitor's Center than I expected.  Since we were there only half a day, we didn't nearly get through everything.  We didn't get to any of the IMAX movies or in to see the rocket garden, or to the Astronaut Hall of Fame.

I think probably the main attraction, though is the bus tour of the Space Center.  Not only did we get to spend some time on a nice air-conditioned non-humid bus... ahhh... but it took us to several different stops and along the way we also saw all kinds of wildlife -- alligators, a manatee, lots of cool birds, and a huge bald eagle's nest.  The nest was so large, the guide said, that a king-size bed could fit in it.

Here's Dan and Sarah goofing off waiting for the bus.  The great thing about going on this tour with Sarah, besides the fact that she's just a lot of fun, is that she is an actual rocket scientist.  In fact the reason she is down in Florida right now is that she is working on a spacecraft that is going to be launched later this year.  So Sarah is just a wealth of extra information.

This is one of the three main engines that power the Space Shuttle.  This very engine flew on 15 missions.

Here's the business end of the engine.  Sarah explained to us how the fuel comes through the engine and the size and shape of the nozzle creates the thrust.  It was fascinating, and Sarah is so animated as she talks, since she truly loves this stuff, that we noticed other people around us stopping to listen in.

This is launch pad 39-A!  It was originally built for the Apollo program, but was modified to be used by the space shuttles.

Obviously I'm pretty excited about seeing the launch pad, even though there will never be another shuttle launch there.

This picture looks like we were being posed by the Sears Photographer.  I don't know what's up with my hand laying so daintily on Dan's shoulder.

Look, there it is!  Right there!!

Also behind us you can see the roads that the crawler used to transport the shuttles out to the launch pads, at a blazing speed of about half a mile per hour.  The crawlers were too heavy to go on the asphalt road so they traveled on a separate road made of small hard stones.  They got an awesome gas mileage of about 42 feet per gallon.

Now we go backwards a bit in time and relive the Space Race, where America went basically from kids playing with toys to putting a man on the moon, in a decade.  Funny what a little good old-fashioned unfriendly competition with another superpower can push you to accomplish!  Here's me and Sarah with a picture of the Saturn V rocket that powered the Apollo missions.

Now this was really cool.  We sat in a room with the actual consoles used in the launch control center for the Apollo missions, and there was a simulation of launch.  It's amazing to think they accomplished all this in the 60s with what we now consider to be such ancient technology.

This is the van that carried the astronauts out to the launch pad.

And here is the actual Saturn V rocket.  It lays horizontally in this huge warehouse.  The scale of the thing is just amazing -- especially when you realize that the actual astronaut capsule is so small.  All of this power was necessary just to get the spacecraft up away from the earth.  Very very cool.

We got to ride on the shuttle simulator, which was a lot of fun.  Then we tooled around the gift shop for a while before heading out.  On the way back to the condo we stopped at a seafood restaurant in Port Canaveral.  I'm not really a seafood person, and I wanted to order some chicken or a burger or something, but I felt like since I was at a seafood restaurant I'd give their fish of the day a try.  It was really yummy -- grilled mahi.  Now, back home I always hear it referred to as "mahi mahi", but down here it was just called "mahi".  ????

So all in all it was a great day in Cocoa Beach, and we were really hoping the next day would be sunny so we could go swimming and cruise around with the top down...

(P.S.  My camera battery died (because I hadn't charged it in weeks) halfway through the day so a lot of these pictures are Sarah's.  Thank you!!  Sarah writes about her work, her kids, and whatever else she feels like writing about, at e-manadventures.blogspot.com )

Florida bound

Hey everybody.  Dan's at a Microsoft conference for work.  I also work in computing but I don't get sent to these kind of cool conferences.  Ah well, I will have to spend my days as a tag-along in Orlando languishing by the pool reading novels instead of listening to nerds talk.  Tough life.

We came down to Florida the weekend before the conference (just me and Dan... no kids, they are with their father this month).  Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure!



Dan loves to have pictures taken in which he is eating something in a strange manner.  In this case he is eating what he calls "potato crack" (McDonalds fries) and we are each enjoying a most healthy cold drink as we wait by our airport gate.



I love window seats.  In this case, while we were sitting on the tarmac for 45 minutes waiting to take off, I could keep watch out the window, cursing all the planes that went ahead of us and laughing at those that we passed by.

There was an enormous rainbow arcing over the airport as we first pulled away from our gate.  I don't know that I have ever seen one so wide.  I wish I had been able to get a picture.



I did get this beautiful sight later, though.  We were flying south and I was on the east side of the plane.  The sun as it set, reflected off the plane's engine, was pretty cool.



I know I haven't gotten so far in my wedding recap to tell the story of how our midsize Chevy Malibu-type rental got mysteriously turned into a BMW X5 SUV.  But strangely enough, this switcheroo happened again this weekend when our reserved economy rental SOMEHOW became a convertible sports car.  You can see a suspicious grin on Dan's face.



Grinning here too as, top down, we speed away from the airport.  Careful you don't catch flies, Dan!



All right, so MAYBE I was enjoying myself...



It's 11:30 pm, and we just pulled up, in our sparkly blue convertible Mustang, to a Dunkin Donuts, in Cocoa Beach, Florida.  Really could this evening be any better??

Next up, more pictures from our time in Cocoa Beach.  I will get back to the wedding soon, I promise!

Update: Strawberries!

Tonight's harvest:

Six very small strawberries.  They may be all I will get this spring from my rebounding plants.

You would not BELIEVE how delicious they are and how sweetly I am savoring them.  Worth it, oh yes.

Garden stuff

Quick garden update, mainly for my own self to look at later.  :)

Blue and white hydrangeas are blooming.  The pink hydrangea has buds for the first year ever -- I'm waiting to see what shade of pink the flowers turn out to be!

The roses have been blooming for some time now and they're doing great this year, after their pruning this past winter.

My tomatoes are finally really bushing out, and I have lots of little yellow flowers.  The pepper plants are all still small, but they also have flowers.  The broccoli plants are growing teeny broccolis tucked down inside their giant leaves.

I dug up and replanted the strawberries late this spring.  I figured it would do away with this spring's harvest, and I was mostly right, but I do have a few ripening berries.  We'll see if I can get to them before the bugs, slugs, and whatever else eats them, do.  In the same strawberry bed I planted a different crop that is supposed to bear fruit in the summer.  I don't know if they'll bear this year though.

The blackberry bush is just teeming with blackberries!  I can't wait until they ripen!  I'm also very pleased to see two brand new branches growing very fast, that will provide me with next year's blackberries.  :)

Last but not least!  First garden harvest!

Potatoes from my Walmart potato bucket.  They're pretty small, but they provided a whole lot of happiness to me as I cooked them up and ate them, with a little butter.  :)

The Wedding, Part Two

In Which Everyone Gets Dressed Up
And I Get All Sentimental Over $30 Worth Of Satin

(read part one)

Even as I was standing in David's Bridal admiring myself in the dress I was about to buy, I was thinking about how my girls would be dressed for the wedding.

I had to keep in mind their individuality.  Thea and Faith, especially, have very different styles.  I wanted each girl to be dressed in her own way, in something that made her feel happy, but still have all three of them complement each other and me.  My green sash planted the seed that grew into the idea we went with -- each girl would pick her own white dress, and then would wear a colored sash with it in her favorite color:  Blue for Thea, pink for Faith, and purple for Holly.

I figured it would not be easy to find dresses to each of their likings, but actually it did not prove too difficult for Faith.  At Burlington Coat Factory she tried on a total of four dresses, and the fourth was the winner.

This was not the dress we picked (it is hanging on the wall behind her),
but doesn't Faith look adorable in this one?

Thea, however, was every bit as difficult as I expected.  We traversed the entire mall (and Arundel Mills is pretty big) and she didn't even find anything worthy of trying on.

In the meantime, Dan searched online for a shirt to wear (smart guy).  He already owned a pair of white linen pants which were perfectly beachy and yet dressy.  He wanted a similarly classy looking Hawaiian shirt.  Originally he thought he might get a blue one, but as the idea of the girls' colored sashes fleshed out, he didn't want to take the chance of clashing with one of them or of this whole thing ending up a mish-mash of color.  Eventually he found a black shirt with a white flower print down one side at HulaOut.com that was perfect.

Here we are on Valentine's Day, still smiling.  Look what a good sport Dan was as I obsessed over every detail of our attire, and he finished his part after an hour or so browsing the internet on his laptop while in bed.
Wait.... who is the good sport here?

Thea's dress search took us to Marley Station Mall one Sunday afternoon where we spent what seemed like four hours in Vivace Bridal while Thea tried on what seemed to be fifty prom-type dresses.  Most were too fancy, too sexy/trashy (in my mom opinion), or too expensive, but we finally came to an agreement on one.  It had detachable spaghetti straps, which Thea did not want to wear, but I was adamant she would not go strapless.  It also had black piping along the folds of the skirt, but I gave in on that since Dan was wearing black.

Modeling the dress at home.  Notice how Thea has strategically arranged her hair
to give the illusion that her dress is indeed strapless.

Luckily Holly was just excited to wear a fancy white dress and couldn't care less where it came from, so a friend from church gave us a flower girl dress her daughter had worn in a wedding years ago.  It was slightly large on Holly, but I fixed that by shortening and re-sewing the straps.

Off to Joann Fabric to get the material for the girls' sashes.  Dan and I picked vividly colored satin and got about three times the amount of each that I actually ended up needing.  Then I spent the next couple of weeks measuring, sewing, ironing, and cursing.  Each sash needed to be a different length and width.  I foolishly decided Thea's and Faith's should be pleated to really look like they went with their dresses.  Keep in mind that I had not done any real sewing in approximately twenty years.  Not going to lie -- there was cursing.

But the result... just as I had imagined.

I mean, look!  I bought the green sash from David's Bridal, but I made the other three.  You can tell they were done by an amateur when you see the way the satin puckered under my needle, and how the pleat sizes are uneven, but I'm still pretty darn proud of them.  They were custom made to be perfect for each girl in each dress.

Sorry, not done bragging about these sashes yet.  :)  The piece de resistance comes next.  This idea was born while I stood there on the platform at David's admiring myself in the mirror and thinking the preliminary thoughts of each girl somehow having her own color.  What I really wanted was a way to tie it all together -- a way to symbolize that in this new marriage, along with me would come a little bit of each of them.

So, with some of the leftover satin from each of the three sashes, I made flowers.  This was time-consuming but not very difficult at all, after I looked over a few tutorials on the internet.  For each flower I cut out 12 to 15 circles of varying sizes.  Using a candle, I just barely melted the circumference of each circle.  This would keep the satin from fraying, and also curled the fabric just enough to give it a very petal-like texture.  Then I held the center of each circle over the candle just until it puckered.

I assembled each flower by hot gluing the circles together, with a dab of glue in each center.  To the top and final circle or two I gave an extra pinch to give it a little more shape.

Beautiful!

I pinned these three flowers, representing my three girls, to my green sash.  It turned out just as lovely as I had imagined, and the meaning behind it was priceless to me, no matter who else noticed.

OK, I think I'm done bragging about the sashes now.  But never fear, there is more nuttiness to come, because wanting to be all unique and sh** AND being a cheapskate always equals going overboard in, yes, a Martha Stewart way.

All this and more in The Wedding, Part Three!

(How many of these egotistical "parts" will there be, you ask?
AS MANY AS I DECIDE THERE WILL BE.)

The Wedding, Part One

In Which We Systematically Destroy
Every Original Wedding Idea We Had

Becky and Dan, summer 2010, in the happy early days well before considering marriage.

So.  Dan and I got engaged last year.  See the ring?  Opals -- my birthstone.

We originally thought we'd have a fall wedding last year, but it didn't work out that way.  Circumstances, yada yada yada, and after a while it seemed like maybe we'd just be engaged forever.  Then in February everything just dropped into place and the wedding was a go.  I still wanted a fall wedding, but October of this year was a long way from February and we were tired of waiting.  Plus we really wanted to have a real family vacation to start off our new lives together, so we decided to get married at the beginning of the girls' spring break and then take a week's vacation with them.

Here we are a few days after we picked our wedding weekend.  Yeah it's not the most flattering picture of me, but see we're still happy?  :)

Our original plan was to get married in Baltimore and then go to Florida for vacation.  We thought we'd have a small ceremony at the Maryland Zoo.  Did you know that you can have an "animal ambassador" attend your zoo wedding?  Like.... a PENGUIN?

Zoo Penguin Wedding Photo by Sweet Pea Photography -- I am jealous!

How cool is that?  We decided that absolutely we were going to have a penguin at our zoo wedding!  Unfortunately, the zoo was doing renovations on the main wedding venue that would not be finished until May, and they were reluctant to schedule us an outdoor wedding at the end of March without the indoor venue as a backup.

So we sadly scrapped our plans for a zoo wedding and decided the heck with it, we would just get married while we were down in Florida.  On the beach!  At sunset!  Why not!

Now to find a dress.  I had plans for an informal white dress, something flowy, simple, a little bohemian.  I found several online that I considered ordering, but I needed to know my exact size, so Dan and I went to David's Bridal to get me fitted.  Of course they brought out a bunch of dresses they wanted me to try on.  And I did -- because it's kind of fun.  :)

Enh... not really what I had in mind...  Plus the dress lady kept sticking
veils on me even though I said I wasn't going to wear one.

WHEW this is tight.  Makes my back view look shapely though!

Liked the idea of a halter, just not this one.

The dress lady loved this birdcage veil which she said was so
retro and fashionable.  I did not. 

But then I put on THIS dress, that I grabbed off the clearance rack because I loved the fabric -- bright white shantung taffeta, crisp like cotton instead of shiny or floaty like everything else I had put on.  The dress lady zipped me into it.  It fit perfectly, straight off the rack, and I stared at myself and said, "Wow."  She later told me that I said "Wow" seven times, and she knew we had a winner.

I loved the idea of a colorful sash, as I had planned on adding some burst of color to whatever dress I was going to order off the internet.  I liked the blue sash a lot, but green is my favorite color so I asked to try the green one, even though it looked dull on the hanger.  And... It was good.

Look -- even with messy hair and no makeup, this dress made me feel gorgeous.

The shape, the fabric, the brightness, and, oh yes, the clearance price.  It was certainly not the informal, breezy dress I had planned on.  It was a big and poofy ball gown.  And I LOVED IT.

Stay tuned for the The Wedding, Part 2 -- In Which I Go All Martha Stewart On This Wedding's A--