About me

For those of you who asked about my new banner (and thanks for the compliments! :), I did, indeed, make it myself. I'm a Web Developer by trade, a mutt-variety, who does a little bit of everything and not an expert in hardly anything. My Photoshop skills extend to swiping someone else's cute graphic of a tree and editing it to suit my means ;).

In TTC news, I'm going to call my nurse right after I finish writing this post and trying to move up my HCG b/w to tomorrow from Thursday. I really, really am hoping to get that saline sonogram done this cycle and I only have until about mid-next week to schedule it. Wish me luck in getting the nurse to change the appt, it's not always so easy.

I was lucky enough to receive two awards this past week and I'll do the first one today, the other tomorrow (that's yours, Esperanza!).

Thank you Circus Children for the Kreativ Blogger Award!!

Here are the rules that accompany this esteemed honor:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award - check

2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog. - check

3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award. - check

4. Name 7 things about yourself that people may not know.

5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers.

6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.

7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know they’ve been nominated.

And here's another seven things you don't yet (but are about to) know about me:

1. I was arrested in college for stealing a street sign. "Criminal Possession of Stolen Property" We had to go in front of a judge and he put us on probation for 6 months. Traumatic at the time, but funny now. Never told my parents, to this day. (See the end of #7)

2. I tried out for The Amazing Race in 2002. The dot-com I was working for in lower Manhattan was going under, a victim of the post 9/11 market crashes. They were able to stretch themselves into early 2002 by cutting down our days and, thus, our salaries, but by spring 2002 we were told they'd be shutting down by June. A friend/co-worker and I decided it was the perfect time to be on TAR and filmed a video application where she played up her "crazy" (didn't take much playing up) and I played up my sanity but still we apparently weren't "niche" enough for a callback. But making the video was a hoot, we filmed in TAR-style, running through the East Village.

3. I don't talk to my dad. I don't hate him, and I wish him the best, but he was a very difficult dad to have, a perpetual Peter Pan who never grew up. He had a pretty good job up until I was about 8 years old and that company went out of business and he never really worked again. Despite my mother begging him, despite the family needing to go on food stamps to buy food, despite me having to pay for college applications with cash withdrawls from my Discover card. He just didn't like to work, didn't like being told what to do. It's not that he sat at home watching TV all the time, he was out and about constantly, he was jokingly called The Mayor of 23rd Street by our neighbors. So, he certainly had time and energy to work, it just wasn't a priority to him. My parents marriage and my sister's and my relationship with him disintegrated more and more. When my mom and sisters moved to NJ in 1997, he didn't want to come and went his own way. It took more than 10 years for my parents of formally divorce (which I paid for -- hello, therapists, if that's not f'ed up, I don't know what is) but as far as I know, he's still in NYC, my family is in Texas and I'm up here in New England. I wish him the best, I feel guilty often over what his life might be like, but he is an exhausting, draining person and I'm not up to the challenge.

4 . I helped my mom buy her house. Just so you don't think I'm a horrible daughter. My mom's biggest dream while I was growing up was to own a house and I knew she'd never do it on her own, without someone doing all the legwork. So, at 25, I started taking her out to NJ every weekend, setting up appts with realtors, renting cars to get there, etc. Eventually we found a great little house for her and my sisters in a commuter town. I financed the closing costs (we were house newbies and didn't realize all the expenses that go with buying a house, and my mom had only saved the down payment amount) and all the new furniture with a loan from my 401k. Not the greatest financial decision, I'm sure Suze Orman would tell me, but I don't regret it for a second. My mom's job transferred her to TX 5 years ago and she was able to sell that NJ house for twice what she paid and buy a beautiful 5-bedroom home in Plano, TX.

5. I was featured in a Dutch travel brochure. My mother is from Holland, and we had gone back to visit her family when I was 7. My uncle took a picture of me kneeling and picking a flower with a windmill in the background. He later submitted that photo in a travel agency contest and it won 3rd place, enough to be featured in their brochures.

6. I once saw Jon Favreau coming out of Ferrara's, a famous bakery in New York's Little Italy, stuffing an entire (not-mini) cannoli in his mouth in one bite. Quite impressive and horrifying.

7. I was almost kidnapped twice as a child. Once as a toddler, I was in a shopping cart with my mom at a supermarket in Brooklyn. Two men walked by and as my mom turned a bit away to pick something off a shelf, they grabbed me out of the cart and started running down the aisle with me. My mom ran after them and reached out and was able to grab me by my hair and yank me back. It started enough of a commotion that the men got scared and ran out. The second time was in third grade when I was 8 years old. We were at recess in our school playground, we lived in Manhattan at the time. A man came to the playground gates -- this was before playgrounds had guards and were totally locked down -- and called my friend Katherine and me over. He knew alot about our other friend, Renee, who was absent that day and told us that she was very sick and needed one of us. We were old enough to know that we shouldn't go with a strange man, but young enough to still be gullible and intimidated by authority. When both of us started going with him, he corrected us and said only one could come - of course, DANGER SIGN! My friend Katherine started walking down the street with him, and this is so typical of me to this day -- I would rather something bad happen to me than feel guilty that something bad happened to someone else, so I ran after them and said I would go instead. This man and I walked about 8 or 9 blocks away from the school. I don't know what his initial plan was, I imagine to take a little kid up to his apartment. But as we were walking, more and more people were giving us strange looks -- he was clearly not my father and this was the 1970s, when it still was considered noteworthy for a black man to be alone, walking on the street with a young white child. Even as an 8-year-old, I knew the people giving us looks were suspicious of what they were seeing and I can only imagine that's why he chickened out. He told me to wait on the corner and he was going to go upstairs and get Renee. I waited for about 15 minutes and then started walking back to school. When I got to about 2 blocks from school, a few teachers were there looking for me and took me back. They asked me a few questions about what he looked like and that was it. They never brought it up to me again, they never told my parents what happened, and I never told my parents (I thought I'd get in trouble and this was the beginning of my very successful Act Angelic, Get Away with Murder campaign used throughout my childhood and adolesence, see #1). Ah, the 1970s, it's a wonder any of us made it through them.

I'd like to pass on this award to:
1. IF Crossroads
2. Inconceivable!
3. Bang Head Here
4. Happy-go-lucky
5. Dreams and False Alarms
6. The Elderly Ovary
7. Life and Love in the Petri Dish