For those who don't know what we're talking about, Jen and I like to "hit for the cycle" in terms of seeing all of the West Wingers on TV or Movies in a certain time span. I had a few good spotting's, so we're in the process of making a go for the cycle. Look for updates, even though you don't care!

JJ-I also got Martin Sheen in The Departed and Rob Lowe in the commercials for Brothers and Sisters (do commercials count?).

Congratulations to Emilie! One part down and passed! Remember, the first is the toughest, so take a few deep breathes and enjoy this! Seems like Alex should make dinner/take you out tonight! Time to CELEBRATE!!

i had something I wanted to blog about, but by time I opened the web page and logged in, I had forgotten what it was. I've got some serious short term memory issues today!

I had my Boston Reception last night for work and it went really well. I've got a happy boss, so that's what I call a win. I'm pretty beat today since I got home around midnight. I didn't come in until 10:00, but I couldn't really sleep, so it was kind of a wasted morning, unless of course you are Grace and you got lots of snuggle time on the couch with Mommy!

Rent-a-paloza 2007 is still well under way. I've listened to nothing but since this weekend. I've got to call my mom and tell her, I think it was the longest summer of her life when that was all I listened to when I was home from school. She was ready to kill me by August! I've never seen a parent so happy to send their kid back!

I'm homesick for my kittens today. I just want to go home and cuddle up. I've got a great picture of Liz as my background right now and she just looks so soft and lovable. Clearly, I'm still very tired!

okay...I've killed some time and I still can't remember what I actually wanted to blog about, so I'll be back later when it comes back into my head. What a space cadet!

It is supposed to be 70 degrees today! Yahoo! I'm just about to go get lunch and I can't wait to get outside. My work study just came in wearing shorts and a tee shirt. Now students are kind of dumb, but even still it must be a sign that spring is here!

I have an event in Boston tonight and the people I work with are acting like I've asked them to drive to the moon instead of to the city. It will take less than an hour. It is literally on the road the exit drops you on from the highway. You simply go four blocks and park. It couldn't be easier and I'm tired of the complaining. Move to Machias Maine if you never want drive in traffic. I didn't drive on the highway until I was leaving for college. There isn't a stop light for about 50 miles and multi-lane roads don't exist. Suck it up people! Carpool and then one person can drive and three others can give her a pep talk about the big bad city. Give me a break!

JJ-I'm close to hitting for the West Wing cycle and I need your help! I had Zoey on Grey's Anatomy this week. Kate Harper was in the movie Mystery Alaska and I saw someone else, but they are escaping me at this point. You seen anyone else? I say four counts as a cycle in this post wing world!

I'm watching the Food Network Unwrapped on the Food Network (one of my favorites) and Mark Summers (yes, from Double Dare) just called Paula Dean a cross between Jesus and Oprah. Are you kidding me? I adore Paula and feel privileged to see that she actually shoots her shows in her own kitchen, but a Jesus-Oprah combo? Even I think that's pushing it!

Taylor is off on his way to visit his mom and dad for the day and I'm home alone. Home alone is such a strange and rare thing. To commemorate this, I'm happily doing laundry (I had a dream that my parents were coming to visit so I had to change my sheets, so now I am washing all of my bedding today, from mattress cover to bedspread and everything in between, just in case). I took a long shower, I'm sipping coffee, and blaring Rent and singing along at the top of my lungs. Book club is this afternoon so I can visit with the girls and have yummy food. I still need to wrap my books though. Whenever someone in book club has a baby (which is often, in a year we've had five babies delivered once Amy and Suz drop theirs in the next few weeks), we have a book shower for them. We all buy cute baby books so mom can keep reading and spend time with the baby and she'll think of us and know she has lots of women thinking of her and supporting her. It is a cute tradition and today we're doubling us with two births coming. Fun stuff! Sadly, I didn't read the book at for this meeting--I took it out the library though, so that should give me some points!

Oh, it is the series of songs from Rent that we used to sing at the top of our lungs freshman year. My roommate Kayee and I each had an assigned part and would sing the same three songs over and over. Poor Erin, my sweet conservative third roommate, could have killed us. Singing about AIDS and AZT and lesbians was too much for her. What a fun memory. I should call Kayee and sing to her, but sadly it is like 2:30 am in Hawaii right now, so that probably wouldn't work. Oh well, I'll mentally send her a hello!

I've had the busiest week at work! I had a huge project dumped in my lap that absolutely 100% wasn't my job. But, five days and lots of cups of coffee it is done! I'm a happy girl!

So it is the weekend again already. One thing about working at Santa Maria is that it is so stinking busy that you don't have time to feel like the week is going slowly. As I was wrapping up with the drama of the afternoon today, I could hardly remember the drama of Monday. It is almost Easter and I don't really remember much since Thanksgiving--does time go faster as we get older? What will 60 feel like?

Speaking of Easter, this year I'm making my world famous Bunny Cake again. It has been a few years, probably since I ran the phonathon and could bake anytime and take it to my students who would eat anything on the planet. I think I'll make it anyway this year and take it in to work and tip my hand that I love to bake. At my old job it was bad that they knew that, because they make me bake a few times a month to have birthday treats. Once, in high school, my best friend at the time, Jodi, and I ate a good portion of a bunny cake I took to her house as a treat for her mom before her mom got home from work. In an effort to hide the evidence, we got some coconut and frosting and tried to make the think look natural. It didn't really work, but we had so much fun that it was well worth it. I love the silly memories that you get to have as time fades--Jo and were so close in high school, despite sharing a series of boyfriends, and though time and distance have cooled the friendship the fun memories get to stay. I'm sure we were wearing the same shirt that day too...we were too much!

I'm thinking about marching in my grad school graduation this May. I'm not really sure why, it has been almost a year since I finished classes and I already have my diploma, but for some reason I really feel like I should march. If nothing else, it gives me a chance to visit all of my Assumption friends and hang out for a day. My dear friend Linda recently got stuck with running the commencement ceremony and I would like to be there to help her survive and since I don't work there, being there to help her spot check and problem solve is the best I can do and I can certainly do that in a long black gown. Besides, it will give me a good reason to get a new outfit and some kick ass black sandals!

So it turns out that the cat food drama was caused by rat poison. This is extra dramatic for us, because we feed our cats said food and have essentially been poisoning them without knowing. They are doing fine-no symptoms at all-but I still feel like a horrible cat mom. When I heard about it, I gave them both the biggest squeezes ever. It is a rough month for pet owners as multiple friends have lost cats this month and my niece-puppy Tiller has to have surgery to have her second ACL replaced. Poor puppy! Everyone give a pet a hug tonight!

I promised my number one fan some blogging tonight. I hope you've enjoyed my random stream of consciousness. I'm going to go pretend to read my book for book club on Sunday, but more accurately I'm going to try to convince Liz it is time to take a nap with Mommy!

Scroll to the bottom of this page for a few Disney 2007 photos. I want to go back!!!!!!

I had half a snow day today! I came home (which included skidding going around a corner and landing on my neighbors lawn) and used my time wisely: I watched the Little Mermaid, baked cookies, and took a nap with a kitten. I love a snow day!

Emilie gets a gold star for the week. I wrote the world's longest blog and only got one comment. It was a little disheartening. Thanks for the comment Em!

So last night I'm at a work event with my friend Cassie. She is a sweetheart-but she's so young! Case in point: We're both big fans of the show 24. We both missed last weeks episode, but I caught this weeks, so I was catching her up. I told her how not that much seemed to have happened in the episode that we missed but Ricky Schroeder is on now. She looks at me and responds, "The guy from NYPD Blue?". Are you kidding me! She thinks that is where Ricky's from? I yelled at her, "Ricky Schroeder is from Silver Spoons", and she just looked at me with a blank stare. It was a devastating moment for me. Cassie is six years younger than me, but we're the only two people on campus who are under 30, so the six years don't normally seem like much at all. I almost cried. If I hadn't been at a work event, I would have pulled out my cell phone and called someone for some counseling!

NCAA tournament time. I've done my sheet of integrity and thought I was sure I wanted to pick Florida (yes, I know no team has repeated since Duke in the 91-92 season), but found myself writing a different name in my bracket...Tennessee! That's right-I'm riding the five seed Tennessee all the way to the top! My theory you ask? Well, first their color is Orange, and I love orange teams. I myself was an orange and black team in high school (Go Machias Bulldogs). Next, Peyton Manning went to Tennessee and he had a pretty good year. I'm hoping the luck continues for the school. Finally, I picked Tennessee because their mascot is the Volunteer. How can you not like the Volunteers? It is the greatest mascot ever simply for the randomness of it! I work with volunteers every day, so it's time to put my bracket where my mouth is and back the Volunteers. Go Orange!

Okay-I stink. I haven't done the Disney recap for anyone yet--here is a quick go at it!

We had an absolute ball! The weather was great-upper 80’s the first few days then in the low 70’s. Not sweating and not freezing, so we were both happy. I got the slightest hint of color, but I wouldn’t call it a tan. Oh well, no vacation is perfect.

It was ESPN the Weekend, which most of you won't care about--but we thought was cool--so there were lots of athletes roaming around. We rode on Everest (9 times in one day) with Ben Rothlesburger of the Steelers twice and once with Trey Whingo who is an ESPN host. We went to a few Sports Center tapings and were on TV once. We got to meet lots of cool athletes and TV hosts. Richard Seymour was there doing a little talk one day, and I knew he would be, so brought my Seymour jersey in and wore it-he thought that was really cool. They weren’t really allowed to give autographs there-they put them in cars and drove them down the main street in the studios and took them right out-but he pointed me out a few times and waved while he was on stage and again while he was in the car in the “parade”. It was neat. I didn't get to see the taping of Mike and Mike, my favorite show that I get ready for work to every morning, but I did get a chance to see Greenie roaming around the park with his wife and kids. I've got a celeb radar-we could be standing on top of a famous person and Taylor wouldn't notice but I could spot them two attractions away!

The lines weren’t bad at all. The longest thing we waited for was Soarin’ and that was with a fast pass. They were redoing the floors in the normal fast pass line, so they were directing people back through the exit for fast pass. It was a nightmare. You missed the pre-show (which I love...Puddy!) and so the load/safety stuff all had to be done in the room and it took a lot of time. That said, we still road 3 times!

We did the dining plan and would highly recommend it (especially for Emilie--we said that while we were eating every single table service meal- Em would just love it!). We ate our last night at the California Grill on top of the Contemporary. We had late reservations and asked to wait for a window table. We were right on the corner overlooking the Magic Kingdom. We had the best seat in the house! We saw Wishes from up there as well as the fireworks for the Princess and Pirates special event that was taking place. They dim the lights and pipe in the music-it was unreal. We also at in Morocco, at the Kona Café in the Polynesian (yumm-o!) and at Boma in the Animal Kingdom Lodge. Boma was good, but the cool part is after the meal we went out to where they have a pen of animals and watched them thought the night vision glasses. It was feeding time, so they were all out roaming around and we got a real fun view of everything.

The other new stuff for us (besides Everest-which is awesome) were the two Nemo events. The new Nemo show in Animal Kingdom was neat-it is puppets, kind of. The other was the new clamshell ride into the Living Seas (which is now The Seas with Nemo). That was a fun little ride too. Taylor made me ride it about 5 times-I guess he really used to like the sea cabs that were there, so he wanted to fully check out the clamshells.

Oh, and we got a dream! We were in the Animal Kingdom in the afternoon about to go on Tough to be a Bug when they herded together a group of us in the line and gave us an extra hour in the park once it had closed. There were maybe 1000 people left in the park, so you could just walk onto rides. It was neat, but we got stuck on Primeval Whirl (which is still one of my favorite rides) for about 30 minutes and missed most of the “magic”, but it was fun to say we had a dream!

We had a little drama our last day there with our house—the realtor called and said our door was wide open and she thought we might have been robbed-but we were only concerned that our cats got out. It definitely took us out of the moment and ruined our last day, but we weren’t going into the parks anyway, and were able to go to Downtown Disney and pick up the few gifts we needed to get for folks (and eat at yummy Earl of Sandwich). It turned out we weren’t robbed and that we just had a silly agent who couldn’t close a door, so it was all fine, but we were ready to come home and check on our kids.

What else...I got some guy really angry at me in the line for the Tiki Room. It was really one of the highlights of the trip because he was just steaming angry because we didn't walk all the way up to the front of the queue and then looked like a jackass when the little show happened by the waterfall that you can't see from the top of the queue. It sounds dumb when I write it down, but it was funny at the time. We called him Grumpy for the rest of the trip. It cracked me up!

Oh! We went to a soft opening of the Laugh Floor in the Magic Kingdom. It a show based on Monsters Inc. It still needs some work but was cute and it was cool to go to a soft opening of something. It is a show similar to Turtle Talk where there is some audience interaction with the animated characters. The kids eat that up!

Taylor was really happy because it was warm enough to go on Splash Mountain, which is his favorite ride. I of course got far more wet than he did, but it wasn't that cold. Speaking of getting wet, Taylor also volunteered us to be in the show on the backlot tour. We were the two deck hands who get shot at. Again, I somehow managed to get far more wet than he did and walked around the park for an hour looking like I was lactating! I wasn't impressed, but we got an adorable picture, so it was worth it I guess.

It was a great trip. It had been long enough since our last one (almost 2 years) that there were new things to see and do and that we didn’t remember every single detail of every ride. I’m glad we went, even spur of the moment. It wasn't our normal method of planning for months, but the whirlwind nature of the trip added to the fun. We really enjoyed every moment and already can't wait to go back! I'll put my pictures up on ophoto this weekend for anyone who is interested.

We're back!

We had an awesome time. It was sunny and warm the first few days, then cooler but still nice. We only had one of those famous Florida rain storms the whole trip and we even escaped most of that by hopping into a ride. No lines, no waiting. Great food, great company, a great time.

I'm super bummed to be home, but was glad to kiss my babies last night. More later-just a fast hello for now! Missed you all!