Wedding dresses: before and after

This past week I have been doing some wedding dress shopping! My mom is coming to visit next week so that I can hopefully purchase the actual dress with her, and in anticipation a friend and I went and looked at a few places.

Right after I got engaged last November my mom and I did a quick shopping trip in Virginia just to get an idea of styles and whatnot. I was disappointed by how a lot of the dresses looked on me because I had gained a lot of weight in the previous year or two. Although I had been trying to lose weight, I hadn't been successful, and seeing pictures of myself in the dresses was one of the big incentives I had to really figure it out. As you know, I found the magical world of Paleo/Primal living, and I now feel so good about my body and health.

I didn't realize until I was going through the old pictures to look at the dresses, but I actually tried on the exact same dress both in November and this week. I hated how it looked back then, but now it is one of my favorites!

Here is the before and after:

And some other examples of similar dresses:

(This ballgown style was the only silhouette I thought was flattering the first time around.)

And now I can even try on form-fitting styles! (Though I don't know if I actually want to go "sexy" for my wedding.)

It has been a totally different experience actually feeling good about how I look in the dresses. Now I can pick a dress based on the style, embellishments, fabrics, etc. instead of just finding one that I think looks flattering. It's fun! But it also means I have way too many dresses to chose from! Luckily I love shopping, so I am having fun trying them on and searching websites. Unfortunately most wedding salons seem to think you should try on three dresses and then buy one - so not my style!

The Menagerie

After my last post Eva asked about how many pets we have, so I thought I'd do a run down! 

The two sugar gliders and my cat Tex live at home, so we really only have three pets. The sugar gliders are pretty easy, maintenance-wise. They mostly just live in their cage and we feed them (dried pellets and apple slices) once a day. When we want to work on bonding we carry them around in a pouch and try to pet them while they sleep. Every so often we clean out the tray under their cage. Once they bond with us supposedly we will carry them around all the time and they will just chill in our pockets or their pouch. (They currently don't really like us to hold them, but are happy in their pouch and playing with our hands in their cage.)

At work we have the remaining animals. I just went over to the lab room and took pictures of everyone, and will supplement with other photos we have. Roll call!

A chameleon

A bearded dragon

A White's tree frog

An American Green tree frog


Two dart frogs

Three striped reed frogs

Three walking sticks

Three crabs

3 scorpions 

A tarantula
It was hiding so I couldn't get a picture, but it looks something like this:

A vinegaroon (Alex's hand)

Whip spider (also called tailless whip scorpion, the gross bug in Harry Potter)

3 centipedes

4 millipedes

Cockroaches

And some wild newts and tadpoles (temporarily before being released back to the wild)

We have had, at various other times, different dart frogs, fire-bellied toads, long-tailed lizards, hermit crabs, and more scorpions.

I mostly only have anything to do with the frogs and chameleon, the rest are all Alex's business. Some of them he just thinks are cool, but most everything he uses in his classes. Since he teaches paleontology, a lot of it is learning about different body parts and animal types. In particular he likes to study invertebrates like trilobites. He also looks at the tracks that some of these animals leave behind, to compare to trace fossils that they find.

Hello Spring!

Spring has finally sprung around here, and my mood is so improved! I still miss Austin a lot, and I think a large part of that is the weather. I just do not like cold, dark, wet weather. It makes me gloomy. This time of year is also helped by the fact that classes just ended and so I now can smell the hints of free time again! (Still have finals and grading, but I'm ignoring that for now.)

This semester I taught a new course on Observational Astronomy, using the on-campus telescope and teaching about CCDs and data reduction. After last semester's new course on Extraterrestrial Life, I found this one a bit less interesting and much more challenging to prep. In the end I got the course to a place that I was happy with, but it took longer than I would have liked. Two semesters in a row of new preps has really wiped me out, though. I feel like I have lost touch with all of my friends and have had just zero time for anything interesting or new. Next semester I am not doing any new classes, which will be a huge relief. I am, however, testing a large-class format, jumping from ~45 students to 150+ students. I may even go bigger because I have had 45 students email me to get on my wait list! 45! It is a little ridiculous. While I would like to take all the credit as being an awesome professor, it is also that there are limited good science general ed courses on campus. I think that is a shame and I really want the students to have the opportunity to take an interesting science course, so I am going to do my best to teach as many of them as I can. I am actually excited to see how the big class works out.

In my personal life, the big goings-on is that Alex and I are finally moving forward on wedding plans! We have decided to do the wedding in Key West on New Year's Eve. As I mentioned earlier, my mom lives in Key West and our original plan was to get married there this summer, but Alex's mom's illness prevented us from going to check things out last winter. Since we didn't want to get married during the school year, and we didn't want to wait a whole another year (whole 'nother year? what is the expression?), that left the winter break. We were worried that travel might be challenging for people near the holidays, but most of the people we have talked to have been excited about the idea. I think it is going to be super fun! My mom is ecstatic and has pretty much planned the whole wedding in the last week. I am being quite the downer by asking questions about rain plans and parking and whatnot.

Alex and I recently acquired two new pets! They are baby sugar gliders (sugar bears) and they are super duper cute. They are like flying squirrels, but are marsupials, and they will one day live in our pockets :) We are still in the bonding stage, when they are getting used to us being their new family. It is very hard not to just pick them up all the time, but we are slowly getting there. It is tough to get a good picture of them because they are nocturnal, and their eyes look a little wild with the flash, but nonetheless allow me to introduce you to Bacon and Buttons:

More cuter pictures to come :)

The other thing that I have been wanting to blog about is that I have gone "primal" and have been following the paleo/primal diet and lifestyle for about five months now. I really really like it and feel as though I have discovered some secret to easy healthy living. I also have lost over 30 pounds and am feeling really good about myself. I'll tell you more about it in a future post!

Wedding plans (or lack thereof)

Warning: way more than you ever wanted to know about my wedding ideas! Those of you who are married will probably roll your eyes. Or hopefully offer useful suggestions!

People keep asking how the wedding plans are going, and the brief answer is that they are not going at all! We really just can't decide what we want to do, and nothing is really calling to us. We are unsure on just about everything, from venues to actual city locations.

For venues, I really liked my friend Andrea's wedding in Phoenix this summer, where she got married at a natural history museum under a mastodon. She had so many fun sciencey touches and I totally wanted to copy her wedding. I am from the DC area, so I first looked at the Smithsonian museums (Natural History and Air & Space), but sadly they do not allow private parties (except for non-profit groups). My next thought was the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, which is indeed totally rentable for private parties. But alas it is included on many lists of the most expensive places to get married in NYC. 

Also on this list was another choice of ours, the New York Public Library. Thanks to Sex and the City that is in hot demand and definitely out of our price range. 

My mom has hinted that she may be willing to splurge for my dream wedding, but do I really want her to spend that much money? I could buy a small house instead. Or two cars. 

Also on the science museum front, there is a nice New York history (science and otherwise) museum in Albany that has a pretty nice terrace area overlooking downtown Albany.

This museum probably would be doable, and is an option. However, I don't really have any ties to Albany (it is ~1.5 hours north of New Paltz) and it is not a particularly wonderful city. It's not horrible, just not my dream locale, either. It also would be a bit of a trek to drive from northern Virginia, which is a consideration for some of our guests.

One last science-y venue thought was an aquarium. We went to the Long Island Aquarium when we went to the Hamptons last fall, and we had a really good time there. We had already thought of that kind of thing for a venue, and that particular aquarium has been on the TV show Four Weddings twice now that I have seen. It is perhaps just a bit too gimmicky as a venue, though. At least other museums have nice marble-pillared rooms instead of just fish tanks. (And yes, I am watching Four Weddings now - since they film in the NYC area there are a ton of local venues shown, but so far no super inspirations!)

Our next venue thought was something outdoors, like a national or state park. In Virginia there is Great Falls, where we went when we were first getting together. 

The downside to the park is that it is public and they won't reserve spaces. You also can't set up chairs or anything. So you basically just show up, hope no tourists are in your way, stand there and say I do, and leave. The same is true of almost every state park, at least in Virginia, Florida, and New York, anyway. That rules out parks in the Hudson Valley, Central Park in NYC, and the beach parks of Key West. There are some parks in the Catskills which have pavilions you can use, and those are a possible venue that we have considered.

Along those lines, if we were to stay in the Hudson Valley area, we are leaning toward an outdoor rustic barn kind of wedding. There are several barn locations in the area that cater to this kind of thing, and there is one that some friends of ours had an anniversary party at that could be a good choice. 

We also have considered wineries and other similar places in the area. There are also a plethora of cute little inns and such. However, I really wanted a venue that was more personal to us, and not just a wedding factory, as the Hudson Valley seems to be (see the TV show Four Weddings and the NYC area crowd streaming up here).

Earlier I mentioned national parks as well as state parks. The national parks do often have venues for weddings and private parties. Alex and I had a fun time out west this summer touring a lot of them, so that could be a cool idea. Unfortunately many of them seem as though the wedding venue is just an indoor lodge that doesn't necessarily have a particularly good view or location within the park, so you might as well go anywhere. Plus, national parks tend not to be very close to airports, so guest travel would be a consideration.

As you can see, we are still very undecided even about the city. Our initial thought was Key West, as I've mentioned. My mom lives there and it would be a fun destination. I really do like the idea of a destination wedding so that I can spend quality time with my friends. However, with Alex's mom being sick this winter we were unable to go to Key West over our holiday break, so we couldn't set up anything for this summer. This put Key West to the bottom of the list. It also got us thinking about the destination idea in general. It would be pretty expensive for our guests, which we can appreciate, and so it would also mean a much smaller guest list. That is fine, as it would be more quality time with a few people. However, most of our mutual friends are from New Paltz, and we have only known them for a shorter amount of time, so likely none of them would travel too far. That means that the wedding would be mostly close older school friends, but few current friends. We thought about having a reception in New Paltz after we get back, but then really nobody from here would go to the actual wedding.

Alex grew up about an hour and a half away from New Paltz, and he went to college near Albany, also about that far away. That means that if we were to get married in this area it would be very convenient for all of his friends and our current mutual friends. My college friends largely live in Virginia and so could drive up if desired. Grad school friends on both sides would probably have to fly, since they are scattered all around. That is a disadvantage for this area. Travel to New Paltz is not easy. You can fly to NYC and take the train, and then get picked up in Poughkeepsie to drive 20 minutes to New Paltz. Or I guess you could rent a car in NYC and drive 1.5 hours up to New Paltz. This area also doesn't have any decent hotels at all. There is maybe one or two in Poughkeepsie, but that town is not pretty. Everything else is either a Motel 8 or a little tiny inn that could never hold all the wedding guests. There also is the Mohonk Mountain House, which is a fancy resort just outside of New Paltz and would be a logical choice of venue for the whole thing. Unfortunately the guest rooms run about $400/night, so I'm thinking that would be prohibitive for our guests. I suppose I could ask what the wedding specials are, though.

Another downside to having it here is that I lose the fun of a destination. If we do something around here then Alex has suggested that we schedule a plan of events for the week leading up to the wedding to encourage people to come hang out for longer than the weekend. Hiking, trips to NYC, etc. That is possible. I actually looked into some local dude-ranch type places for the wedding venue thinking it would be fun to hang out and play games and such with the guests for a while. (Also kid friendly.) At first Alex scoffed, but it could be fun. 

For travel reasons NYC seems like a nice venue - it is kind of a destination wedding, is easy to travel to, and is pretty local to us and centrally located to our guests. Unfortunately it has a crazy wedding scene and is very expensive. Also, Alex is not really a city guy, so it is not a perfect match to our personalities. Though it would be a fun place to go visit for anniversaries.

The other obvious venue is my hometown in Virginia. We have thought about that, but there really isn't a venue there that is super exciting to me. It would probably mean getting married at an old historic home nearby. That is fine, but as I said not really too exciting. It would also be a little tough to plan from afar, especially with my mom mostly in Key West now. Though I could probably convince her to go up to VA to plan the wedding for a while. Washington, DC obviously is under consideration in the same way, but since most of the museums don't allow weddings that takes away most of my venue thoughts. We would have loved the Library of Congress, but that's a no-go too. I looked up some scientific society buildings, and I think there was one that had a nice dome room popular for weddings, but the room itself had no evidence of science, so it could have been any other pretty place.

Now that the summer is 3-5 months away it seems rather unlikely that we will be able to get married this summer. If I knew what I wanted and could get going on the planning then it could be doable, but that isn't the case. I really don't want to get married in the middle of the school year, because it would mean going back to work immediately, and certainly no honeymoon. However the Hudson Valley in the fall would be lovely, so I suppose it is still on the table. If we are looking at later dates then Key West comes back into the picture. We could go visit this summer and schedule something for later. Perhaps Key West for New Year's Eve? A rustic winter wedding nearby so that people can then do NYE in NYC? I am a little worried that people wouldn't be able to travel so close to the holidays, but as I said before I fear that few people would travel to Key West anyway, so maybe it would work out the same.

In some of the above it may have sounded like I was giving too much thought to guest convenience instead of just going with what I want. But the problem is that I don't know what I want! (And neither does Alex.) I want a unique venue that reflects our personalities, and I want to get the chance to spend quality time with my friends and family. Other than that I don't know. 

The last possibility is to just elope... both of my parents have suggested it, and my dad has said he will give me the wedding money regardless of how we spend it. We are going to Vegas over spring break with the geology department. Perhaps...? But no, I'd be sad not to have a few key people there. Maybe that should guide me with what to do.

What I did on my winter vacation

Hello everyone!

It's back to school time around here, which means that things are busy busy busy again. But at the same time it means that my schedule is returning to some kind of normalcy, and I find myself once again sitting at a desk trying to procrastinate on working!

Last semester went really late, with finals pushing right up until the holidays, and grades due on the 26th. I actually was grading papers on Christmas day - fun! As I mentioned previously, Alex's mom was very sick, and she really just wanted to make it to Christmas. I went to visit on the 22nd and did presents with his family then. I decided to go home to my family for Christmas, partially because I knew that I would not be able to go later if his mom's funeral would be soon, and also because Alex insisted that I take the opportunity to spend time with my family since it happens so infrequently. Since my mom has sold her house in Virginia (to make her home base in Key West now) she and I both stayed with my older brother. It was fun to get to hang out with him more this year. His wife works for the State Department and is doing her required "hardship" tour right now, as the chief political officer in Israel. It is both very interesting and exciting, and also scary and sad to miss her. In a way it is dangerous, but in a way she is very well protected. Nonetheless, it was different to have Christmas without her, especially at her house, but I'm glad that we were there with my brother so he wasn't too lonely.

Alex's mom did make it to Christmas after all, and had a really great day with Alex, his dad, and his aunt (her sister). On the 26th she took a turn for the worse, and on the 27th she passed away. I came back up for the calling hours and funeral. The calling hours were amazing - in the past I had just known of it as a sort of wake or social occasion where people stop by and pay their respects, but in this case it was more of a receiving line with Alex's dad, Alex, me, and Alex's aunt all shaking hands with every visitor. Alex's mom was very loved and a huge part of the community (she was a high school teacher) and she had over 300 visitors. We literally were on our feet shaking hands for three hours straight, and there was a line out the door that entire time. It was quite a demonstration of her life's influence. The next day was the funeral, on New Year's Eve. She was very involved with her church (at various times treasurer, organist, liturgist, etc.) and so there again was a really touching sense of community at the funeral as well. Alex's college friends drove in from all over, which was really great of them, and the first time I had met most of them. People keep asking me how Alex is doing with the loss, and the real answer is that he is doing really well. The time with her while she was alive, but knowing that she was dying soon, made it much easier. He of course is still sad, and still worries about his dad a lot, but otherwise things are pretty much back to normal. I think that is how she would have wanted it. The toughest part for me has been getting used to missing Alex (while he was spending November and December mostly at his parents' house) and then getting used to having him back in the house all the time again! Speaking of which, Alex just bought a mouth guard that is supposed to prevent snoring and it actually works! It is a magical magical device that allows us to actually sleep in the same room again.

During the first week of January I went to the American Astronomical Society meeting as usual. It was ok, but it seems like a lot of people skipped it this year, so I didn't get to catch up with many people. I also am starting to sense the people who are leaving the field - how am I supposed to stay in touch with my non-academic grad school friends?! This year I participated in a program called the AAS Ambassadors, which is a new initiative to help early-career astronomers with presentation, teaching, and outreach skills so that there will be astronomers out there spreading the gospel, as it were. When I told my department chair about it she said "couldn't you give that workshop?" and it kinda turns out that she was right, but it was still good to connect with those folks.

I then had one week back to prepare for classes, and then the semester started. I always feel like break is way too short, and I guess it is when I go to the AAS every year. I don't think I'll stop going though, since it is my only real connection to other astronomers anymore.

You may notice that one thing I did not do over winter break was go to Key West to plan the wedding, as was my original intention. That means that the Key West destination idea has fallen to the bottom of the wedding options, and we have been looking for places near us to make it easier to plan. My next post will have to be all about the delights of wedding planning! (Note sarcasm.)

Merry Christmas!

(Alex and I were too busy to do paper cards this year, so here is your holiday greeting! )

Our Story

This time of year is the anniversary of when Alex and I started dating, so it has me all nostalgic for that fun time. Alex is spending most of his time with his mom these days (understandably), so I don't get to see him very much and it is making me miss him a lot! Since I can't really re-live our anniversary with him as I'd like to, I'll just share it here instead. I never wrote about how we got together in the first place, so here it is!

Alex and I had been friends since I got here to New Paltz. He is three cohorts ahead of me as a faculty member and so was already here. He was part of a group of science faculty that goes to lunch weekly, and his office was in my building, so we saw each other a lot. He was married then and so I never thought of him as anything other than a friend. Over the next two and a half years we became good friends, and we were each other's go-to people for grabbing dinner or snacks or just taking a break at work. Meanwhile, he had gotten divorced and dated a few other people. I got the feeling that he was interested in me as more than friends, but he was still planted firmly in the "friend zone" in my mind. He cleaned up an old microscope in the department and gave it to me for Valentine's Day last year, but I totally did not connect it to a V-Day gift - I thought he just found it lying around. (He still gives me a hard time about that.) He went to France and brought me back a celtic necklace, which was a pretty obvious declaration, but I brushed it off and he was too shy to do anything else. Apparently at one point we were out at a bar and I was "overserved" as they say, and he asked what it would take for me to go out with him. I have no recollection of this, but he claims that I said, "There's not enough bourbon in the world." That was so incredibly mean of me, I feel really bad about it, and it's amazing that he continued to pursue me. Now we can laugh about how apparently there is enough bourbon in the world! Bourbon will have to be prominent at our wedding (as if it wouldn't be anyway!). I think that many of our coworkers and students thought that we were dating already at this point, but we weren't.

Last year on the weekend after the last class of the fall 2011 semester (one year ago, Saturday the 17th) he and a group of friends were all going out to the bars downtown to celebrate. They had some time to kill before going out and Alex suggested they stop by my house, knowing that I keep an ample bar for entertaining. He now says that he just wanted an excuse to see me. Alex's favorite part of the story (for which I give him a hard time, since it has nothing to do with the two of us), is that they sent one of the guys that I hadn't met yet up to ring my doorbell. When I answered he said "I'm here for the gang bang." I said "Come on in!" The rest of the boys were giggling in the bushes at this hilarity. While at my house the boys convinced me to join them out on the town, and thus the fun ensued. This was definitely a night of excess, and all of us were incredibly drunk (except Alex who doesn't really drink much). The staple drink of the evening was something horrid called a Bear Fight, which consists of an Irish Car Bomb followed immediately by a Jager Bomb. For some unknown reason Alex actually likes the taste of Irish Car Bombs, so we split them and I did his Jager Bombs (in addition to my usual bourbon beverages). When I get this much alcohol in my system I get rather amorous (better than being a mean drunk, right?) and I have to confess that Alex was one of many men in my sights that night. But at some point the two of us were dancing with each other on the dance floor, rather closely, and I could tell that he wanted to kiss me. He was very very shy during that first week or two; I've never seen him that bashful before or since. So finally I was getting bored and said "If you're going to kiss me then go ahead and do it!" And he did. So our first kiss was a drunken make-out on the dance floor at the undergrad bar downtown. Ahhh, so romantic. Not exactly a story for the grandkids.

That night ended with some of the guys passing out at my house, while Alex wrangled some of them home (three of them were his roommates at the time). Alex and I kissed goodnight some more, but that was all. The next day was largely consumed by hangovers on all accounts. I was worried that Alex was going to think we were in a relationship or something. I had an impression of him as a very goody-two-shoes, inexperienced with women, shy kind of guy. In the next couple of days I learned that I was very wrong about that, and that he had actually dated many more people than I had, which was a big help in getting him out of the friend zone in my mind. But for that day I was concerned that he would read too much into things. The day after, on Monday, I saw Alex at work and we had a bit of an awkward conversation about things. Basically he knew that it was just a fun night out, but he took the opportunity to tell me that he thought we should be dating. I, in turn, told him the reasons that I didn't think we would be good together in a relationship. I won't rehash them here, but some of them do remain some of the things that we work on in our relationship, but they are small in the grand scheme of things, and shouldn't have been a barrier to us dating. Eventually he wore me down a bit, but I still had my doubts. That night we went out for wing night with the same friends. He and I continued our conversation in a thinly veiled way, while I simultaneously had a secretive conversation with our mutual friend about it (who was the one person that didn't think we should be dating). That night I told my brain to sleep on it - I believe that you can set your brain working on a problem while you are sleeping and sometimes wake up with a solution. Well, I had a hot dream about Alex and I making out in my office, that actually woke me up with its intensity! So I guess that answered that!

The next morning (Tuesday the 20th) I posted on facebook that I had had a weird dream the night before. Alex responded and asked me if it was about him. I have no idea how he knew that. After some coyness, I said yes, that we were making out in my office. He asked if I wanted to try it in real life, I said he'd have to come by to find out. He did, and we had our first sober kiss! At first it was a little weird since we were such good friends, but there was definitely a lot of chemistry between us - I was surprised by how much! That night we both had a ton of grading to do, so we both set up shop in his lab room and graded all night long together. (Literally, we went home at like 5am.) We really even were grading for most of the time, with some intermittent breaks for kissing :) It was reeeeaally hard to concentrate with him there, which probably had some influence on how long the grading took. My brain was a total teenage girl's single-minded obsession. Oh, and we listened to Bloodhound Gang a lot that night, so their entire album One Fierce Beer Coaster is "our song," but totally inappropriate to play for our first dance! After some sleep at home we were back at work, where it was still hard to concentrate, but we had to get our grades done by the next day.

The next day (Thursday the 22nd) we went to lunch together on campus and that night we went to dinner - our first real date - at a Japanese restaurant in town. We went our separate ways afterward, but then he found some excuse to come over and we hung out a little longer. I was definitely obsessed with him and the chemistry between us was amazing. Sadly, the next day (the 23rd) I had to drive to Virginia, and he had to make his way to his parents house. We were on our phones constantly all day long over the holidays, and after our families went to bed we chatted online late into the night. We couldn't handle being away from each other, so he made an impromptu visit to my house in Virginia, arriving at 2am on the night of the 30th. That was a tricky one to explain to the parents! Things were still just starting with us, so I couldn't really call him my boyfriend or anything. It must have been really funny to my family. We claimed he was looking for fossils in the area, which meant that we actually had to go do that (at Potomac Falls and Calvert Cliffs). We got to spend New Year's Eve together, and he met some of my college friends and my whole family. On the drive back to New Paltz from Virginia we stopped at the Delaware rest stop, and that is when we decided that we were officially dating.

From then on we were pretty much inseparable, with him basically moving into my house when we got back to New Paltz. For the first couple of weeks I just kept thinking how amazing it was that it had been him the whole time and I just didn't see it! He still was shy for a while, and was always trying to please me, like he still had to prove to me that we were right. But I didn't need convincing! The rest of the story you know already - our parents saw it coming way before we did and love that we are together, he moved in officially over the summer, and we just got engaged last month!

Because of the extended way we got together we don't really have one anniversary day to celebrate. As I said in the beginning, I am sad that we can't relive our anniversary week this year. Last night we could have gone to "our bar" and kissed on the dance floor, tomorrow would be wing night, Tuesday we'd stay up all night grading (once again needed given the pile of papers on my desk), and Thursday we'd go out for Japanese food. Unfortunately it does look like we will once again spend Christmas apart, as I want to go see my family at some point, and he certainly can't leave his mom and dad right now. Hopefully next year's holiday season will be a happier one!

Our first picture as a couple, at Potomac Falls.