Tuesday, November 14, 2006

tidbits

ONE
It's on its way...my new Macbook Pro, that is! If pigs in shit are really as happy as we're made to think, then call me Porky and roll me in a cow pattie. I've used Macs in the past, but never for personal use, so I am beyond excited.

TWO
We have made an offer on a house (contigent upon the sale of our house, though luckily the sellers are being nice enough to give us plenty of time; that wouldn't stop them, however, from taking another offer if it came along). But anyway, we are signing the official contract on Thursday. It's a rockin' house, a 1978 contemporary on 13.5 wooded acres. We're very excited about it, but I'm maintaining a realistic perspective. The market for selling our house is terrible, and a major employer just announced it was leaving our town. So things aren't poised to improve anytime soon. In lieu of burying a statue of St. Joseph upside down in the yard, I plan to devise a similar ritual involving a small, plastic Ned Flanders figurine...

THREE
To Jennifer: You commented recently asking what we went to Belize for, and I tried to reply to your comment but Blogger was being screwy and it didn't take and I was too lazy to get around to it again. But what I wanted to say was that more stories and pictures from this Belize trip are forthcoming, pending the arrival of the Macbook, but that in the meantime, I thought you might be most interested in something we did there last year. We visited a cave called Actun Tunichil Muknal (Cave of the Crystal Sepulchre). To enter the cave, you must swim about 100 ft, and you remain in water ranging from ankle- to chest-deep for about 80% of the tour. There are no guardrails, no installed lighting. When you get to the part with the artifacts (after climbing a large, near-vertical ladder and squiggling your way through some pretty small tunnel-like areas), you walk in your socks and are careful not to step on pottery fragments. Or areas of crystallized bone. Visitors won't be able to experience the cave like this for long. It was an amazing experience!

3 comments:

Jennifer said...

Ok, seeing my name in a blog post made my hair stand on end! But it's all good, whew. Anyway... this is the cave I was telling you about previously, with the speleoarchaeology program! I am SO frickin' jealous! It's like a 2-month program, and it's expensive. (You do all the work and pay for it!) But it would be the experience of a lifetime. One of these days, I'm gonna do it.

Anonymous said...

Very exciting stuff! I'm jealous of your Mac. My next computer will probably be one, but it'll be tough to get used to it after using a PC for all this time.

13.5 acres! I thought our 5.5 was impressive but that's really great! Are you going to have animals?

Kat E said...

Jennifer--too cool! Let me know if you ever decide to do it:)

MB--I am using my new Mac right now! I have to admit, it's been about 5 years since I've used one on a regular basis, and I'm feeling slightly clueless at the moment. But it'll all work out.

As for the 13.5 acres, it's all lightly wooded, but half of it is wetlands. So not sure it'd be great for too many animals...though I'd love to have a goat or something, currently I'm at full animal-care capacity!