July 2006 Archives

Why is my husband a genius? Because he signed us up for AAA. It had been on my To Do list for months now... but I just never got around to it. Scott had some car problems a few weeks ago, so after all that trouble he signed us both up for AAA straight away. Didn't procrastinate or wait til it was too late.

Of course, I've got a schedule full of meetings today (in the DTC, then lunch at Flat Irons) and my car decides not to start!! I had to reschedule the 10am but fortunately AAA is coming to the rescue. I called them up using the little temporary paper card that Scott gave me. They're supposed to show up in the next hour and give me a jumpstart or give me a new battery if needbe. If all goes well I should still make my lunch meeting. Then the 10am is rescheduled for 3pm, which, of course, interferes with the conference call I had set up with another client at 3pm and my 4pm workout, so hopefully I can reschedule those. Craziness!

Needless to say, Scott would have helped me with the jumpstart but he's in Brazil and his car (jumping cables included) is parked at the airport. Not to worry, though, my genius-of-a-husband would never leave me stranded... nope he made sure AAA would be available to come to my rescue when he's not around.

Charlotte and I got up early yesterday morning and headed up to climb Mt. Bierstadt, a 14,000 ft. peak near Georgetown, CO. I've been all excited about photgraphy since we've been looking at wedding and scuba pictures, so I decided to bring up the heavy camera gear -- digital SLR, two lenses, and my heavy Bogen/Manfrotto tripod. I had thought about renting a nice wide angle lens for the hike, but I didn't look into it until Friday and the camera shop didn't have the one I wanted in stock.

So I'm not sure about all of you... but I am eager to get the professional photos of our wedding. It was such a magical night and I can't wait to see how it was all captured by a "professional" photographer. All the pics from our friends and families have been wonderful... but, I don't know, I'm thinking the pro photos will be even better. Supposedly, they were mailed to us a week and a half ago from Mexico. Fingers crossed they come soon!

In the meantime, enjoy these pictures that I took of the flowers in our backyard. If Scott and I have green thumbs, we have not discovered them yet! I dream of one day getting in touch with a secret passion for gardening but it just hasn't happened yet. Our yard is going crazy with weeds and hay... but the beautiful thing is that the previous owners of our home were retired and apparently loved planting flowers. And without any effort on our part, millions of flowers are blooming everywhere (okay, maybe not millions, but I counted close to 30 varieties if you count the weeds that bloom). Pretty amazing. And even more amazing is the fact that if you look at these photos (notice they're all really up close) you wouldn't even know that our yard is infested with weeds. Woohoo!

I just wanted to write an entry to thank my family in France for the AMAZING video that they put together for our wedding. For those of you who don't know by now, I have a huge family in France (and Holland, too) -- and because of the distance and timing, only a few cousins could make it to the wedding in Mexico. Since my grandmother, Mannick, my mom's 8 brothers and sisters, their spouses, and kids couldn't make it... they decided to put together a video montage of messages from each of the families to send us their best wishes. Martine and her family were in charge of the production work and Folkert and Penelope did a great job with editing and music and everything.

For anybody who's interested, here's Captain Jon's take on last week's dive trip.

I was going to write a nice heartfelt entry thanking everyone for traveling overseas to come be with us on our special day -- but Scott beat me to it! I have a good excuse though: I've been working on photos of the week in Mexico (as well as from our honeymoon in Belize). The professional photographer's photos are in the mail so we won't have those until next week. The ones we do have will be posted soon for all to see. In the meantime, a few of our friends and family have sent us links to online photos albums, we thought we might share them with you all here:

Sally's Album
Sandy's Album
Molly's Album
Val's Album
Megan and Michael's Album

By the way, we're wondering, for those of you who did take photos... could you do us a huge favor and send us a CD of all your pictures. The online albums are great for viewing but we would love to have the hi-res versions. Email us if you need our mailing address. Thanks in advance!!

Well, we're home again. Last night Emilie picked us up from the airport at about midnight. It was a long day of waiting, flying, racing through airports, barely making flights, and losing luggage, but we finally made it. I carried my new wife over the threshold when we got back and we raced upstairs for some much needed sleep!

Today we're in recovery mode. I slept until eleven o'clock this morning, which is pretty unheard of these days. We did some grocery shopping so we can get back to being healthy (it was nice, however to gorge ourselves without guilt these last two weeks). I'm hoping we can catch a movie, but it's getting late already, and I have to go to work in the morning!

Our initial briefing from Captain John of the Belize Aggressor III brought me down, you could say. Three big storms were to roll through, degrading the diving and probably preventing our trip to the Blue Hole. We'd heard of bad weather in Mexico when we first arrived there, but another week of beating the weather geniuses seemed too much to ask. However, after a single day of overcast skies and rain, we enjoyed sun, clear diving conditions, and even made our scheduled trip to the depths of the Blue Hole.

Our wedding week on Isla Mujeres was so fantastic! We started the week with almost twenty people arriving Sunday. Every following day was like Christmas, having our great friends and family trickling in. It was so special to have all our guests take a vacation with us. We had planned so many excursions, but once we got to the beach at Na Balam, we couldn't seem to pry ourselves out of the water! Soon we'd settled into a nice routine of rolling out to bed, heading to the beach, making our way to the Loncheria for lunch, having a siesta, and heading back to the beach for the afternoon before all meeting up in the evening for dinner.