As you may or may not know, I now work in a pain management clinic. We manage chronic pain, both with interventional injections and with medications. I'm pretty much on the medication side. Because it's a specialty clinic, we have more time to spend with our patients than I did as a family doctor. I find this a bit disheartening for the state of primary care in the US. There is no time to develop relationships, to actually get to know and understand the patient's outside influences on his health. Granted, it might not be as important for a runny nose or allergy season, but it's profoundly important when treating a patient's pain.
Anyway, I have a patient I've been seeing for about a year with his atypical face pain. He's had his ups and downs and he's a patient who doesn't really do well to cover up when he's feeling down or blue. Last month, when he came for his medication appointment, he was down and I asked him why that was. He said he'd been trying to get into touch with a buddy of his from his Marine Corps days and he was having problems finding his friend. They served overseas together in Japan, and he know that his friend lived in the area. This is not uncommon in North Carolina, plenty of Marines from 2MEF that were stationed in Jacksonville, NC, wind up retiring down here. With Jacksonville's Marine Corps base and Ft. Bragg in Fayetteville, I've spent the last 10 years treating a number of military and their families.
Anyway, Mr Smith, as we'll call him, told me it was making him feel down that he couldn't find his friend who had an unusual name. When he told me the name, I asked to confirm the friend's first name and asked if he had an Asian wife. Indeed it was the same person I had seen as a patient for about 4 years in Angier, NC.
I didn't know how to get in touch with his friend, my former patient, but I knew someone who still worked for my former employer and so I called her that night. I hadn't spoken to her in over a year. We caught up on our families, our lives, and then she told me she would try to find some information and call me back. I had not heard from her in several weeks, so I assumed she had not found anything.
Today, at my office, I got a call from my former patient. He told me how he was doing, that he was planning on moving up to Washington, DC, in August to a veterans retirement village and that he's doing well. He and his wife are now divorced, unfortunately, but still friends and remain in the area. He confirmed that he did, indeed, know my current patient, and I passed on the phone number.
About an hour or 2 ago, I got an email from my former patient. He had his friend, my current patient, had been able to connect on the phone and spent some time catching up. He thanked me for following up, and thanked me again for being his doctor at least for a while.
It just reminded me that a network is not about facebook or blog updates. It's not about screaming on the internet about what you think and feel. It isn't about sitting at a computer, looking at pictures. While it has been a great bit of fun to reconnect with people from another time in my life, my real network is more grounded, less wired, less web enabled.
My network is about real connections, being part of people's lives, even in small ways. It's about paying attention sometimes.
I love facebook and blogs. I'll keep using the internet to kill monsters, read news stories, find charitable actions, and rage against injustices and bad grammar. But I am so much more richly rewarded having been able to speak to that former patient, to put him in contact with his old friend. The initial impact we have on one another maybe small at first, but the ripple of energy from that impact can become enormous. And that gives me great joy.

Wow, it's been so long since I posted anything here. I guess I forgot how much fun it was to dump my brain in more than 244 characters at a time. Or maybe I thought people had stopped reading. Or I had just moved on.
But today is a monumental day. It was Ella's first day of school.
Real school. Not pre-K, not daycare that calls itself school. But bona fide, she could have ridden the school bus and she had to take lunch money with her school.
We did the open house thing on Tuesday, but that just didn't prepare her, it seems for the bells that would ring and say "parents, it's time to leave." She's been in a pre-K that allowed parents to stay for circle time and allowed us to pick her up whenever.
But now? Now she has to be there by 7:55 and she gets picked up at 2:15.
She has a seat with her name on it, a cubby with the same, she has lines she has to stand in and schedules that have to be followed.
She's a child, not a baby.

So about 5 years ago, I was hanging out at the James Joyce, which is a bar I once frequented in Durham. The bouncer there and my best friend were madly flirting with one another. One night, said bouncer's roommate showed up at the bar. "Keely, this is my roommate, Noah."

Nice to meet you's and such were exchanged.
Over the next few months, we saw each other more, hung out more, etc. A mutual friend said "I think you should hook up with Noah" and I looked at him in a whole new way. Suddenly, where he was the friend of a friend, he became a prospect.

Well, 3 months of flirting later, I was getting nowhere, so I gave up. More or less.
The 30th of December, Lou and I were headed out and we called Noah to come meet up with us. Laura drove, so my car was at her place. After a while of hanging out, she claimed she was tired and she left me with him to give me a ride to my car.

He gave me a ride back, and we sat in his car talking for a while, and I realized that if he didn't kiss me right that second, it was hopeless. And thankfully, he did. And continued to kiss me for about 4 hours. Sometime around 5am, I made him take me to the gas station up the street to use the bathroom and get a couple of bottles of water. We went back to our parking spot and we made out some more. Everyone kept their clothes on, it was just good, old fashioned making out in the car. Around 7:30 we went to Honey's. It's a greasy spoon sort of place for people to go to sober up after the bar closes. The waitress brought us our eggs and toast and called us lovebirds.

We had a very rocky start, me and Noah. We even broke up a couple of times. I missed my period at the beginning of April and it took 5 pregnancy tests to make me truly believe that I was pregnant. I had just broken up with Noah 3 days before. But as anyone who was around at that time knew, it didn't take.

We still had our rocky moments, but Ella came along and suddenly, Noah was making more trips to Holly Springs to see us, and things were changing. Dad kept asking us why we weren't getting married, but it was complicated. I wanted him to want me, not just to marry because we had a baby.

Ella got bigger, Noah and I changed. We hit another bump in the road here and there and one of them almost seemed to do us in. But we found a way to work things out between us. And it was that bump in the road that made him say out loud to me, "You and Ella are the most important things in my life." While I thought maybe that could be the case, he'd never said it out loud before.

One day, Noah sits up in the bed and asks me to marry him. I thought he was joking at first. He had told me long ago that he didn't really believe in marriage. He meant it when he asked me though. And about 8 months later, we managed to tie the knot. I finally moved in with him once and for all about 3 weeks later (although we pretty much were staying here all the time).

Our first Valentine's day was spent at a bar, being mildly annoyed at something I'm not sure I remember what. Our second was the day Ella got her first set of shots, and we watched movies at my house and played with our 2 month old. I am not sure I remember all of them after that. Last year was spent celebrating our recent wedding and attending the wedding of some friends.

This year, I'm sitting in our home, looking at the beautiful roses he bought me, and watching him and Ella clean up the kitchen together, and thinking to myself, I am the luckiest girl I know.

So it's February. We think about love. And flowers and chocolates and such.
But we also think about how freaking freezing it is outside.
And how freaking cold it is in Wisconsin.


But this friend of mine? He is going to jump into a lake. In the winter. In Wisconsin.
And he'll be mostly nekkid.

go here: https://www.specialolympicswisconsin.org/pp10/pledge.asp?id_p=1728

Give him money to do it.
No really. Give him money.
Please.

This was my dad auctioning at my wedding. I can't wait until he's well enough to do this again.

So as most of you may or may not know, my dad suffered a fairly large stroke on the 9th. My mom and brother called me and kept me up to date through the night, but since I am the only provider in my practice, I couldn't just not go to work the next day. I went to the office, told the staff and planned on going to DC Friday afternoon. Unfortunately, my mom called me the next day during the day to tell me that they had put him on a ventilator and sedated him, and we just didn't know what was going to happen.

I was upset about that, but still had patients to see, including the one who's room I had left in order to take my mom's call. When I went back into the room, I was upset but holding it together. I sent the patient to the lab, and then just needed to break down a little bit, so I went into the bathroom and cried. Our employee bathroom is near the lab, and the patient heard me crying so she knocked on the door. I opened it, and there stood this wonderful woman, who simply said, "can I pray with you?"

I said yes and she hugged me and stood there with me and prayed with me about my dad, my tears, my anxiety, my travel for a good 10 or 15 minutes.

For whatever reason, I didn't tell anyone that until about a day ago. I didn't realize how much it meant to me that my patients heal me as much as I try and help them. I didn't realize how much it meant to me that this woman cared enough for me as a person, as a daughter, as a doctor to stop and treat me with the compassion and love I hope that I can show to the patients who come to me. It just reminded me that we all have our broken hearts and our hurts and sometimes they just break through to the surface whether we want them to or not. And it reminded me that I get as much healing from the people I see every day as I hope they do.

It's one of the reasons I so love my job.

So my kid is better than I am at Tekken6 for the PS3.
She's FOUR.

Not level 4. She's a few weeks shy of being 4 years old.

sigh

A few years ago, my best friend fell. She tripped coming in to her house and hit her head on a concrete step. Hard. Luckily, it didn't kill her, but she did get a pretty good concussion. It was a hard enough hit that when she went into the house to get some ice, she passed out. She called 911 and was seen at the hospital. Unfortunately, several people she would have called for help were out of town, and she wasn't sure whom to call. She did find a ride home from the hospital and she was (and is) fine.

However, she learned something from the process: it's scary to get hurt when you're alone. What's even scarier is the people to whom you will subsequently tell your story after an event like this will break down into two groups: the ones who make it about you and the ones who make it about them. She had several people (myself included, sadly) who, instead of asking "oh, are you ok?" asked her "why didn't you call ME?" She beautifully put this down by saying "this isn't about you."

Why am I bringing this up now? I had a patient come in to me last week who has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. She has surgery scheduled on Friday to remove her breast. After that, they're going to find her an oncologist and decide if she needs radiation and chemo or just chemo. They can't decide that until they stage out her cancer after the surgery.

After her initial diagnosis, she didn't tell anyone aside from her husband and daughters for a couple of days and she just went back to work. Then she had to schedule the time out for the surgery and she had to tell someone at work. From there it spread to her friends. She was in my office last week in tears with the stress. She wasn't there because of the stress of her diagnosis. No, she came to see me because her friends and family are slowly driving her insane. She can't sleep because of concern about the surgery, of course, but now she's also concerned about whether she's doing the right thing. One friend will call and tell her she needs this. Another will call and tell her she needs that. "You need an oncologist right now," one says. "Don't go see that guy, under any circumstances," another one tells her. Do this, do that, no don't go there, go here, call them today. It's all she hears all day long.

The most frequent call she has received in the week since her diagnosis? "Why didn't you tell me?" She can't eat, she can't sleep and she cries all the time. She's home from work, on sick leave, but she gets no reprieve because her phone is constantly ringing.

Let me give you a little background, without violating her confidentiality. I work, and she and her family live, in a small town. She works for the school system. She has 2 young adult daughters who were active in school. She's lived here for the better part of her life. She and her husband have an active life in this community and there are few people in this area she doesn't know or in some way have contact. She's not a hermit in a cave. She has friends and family in the area, and they all care for her. And they all mean well. But they are killing her emotionally with their well wishing.

So here's my advice to you when your loved one, friend, colleague, whatever gets a diagnosis. Shut up. I'm not saying not to support her. I'm not saying not to care for her. I'm saying just lay low for a while and let that person get her feet under her. Let her make decisions with her family. Don't give the unsolicited advice or tell her what she should do about her diagnosis. Yes, your mother or sister or someone's cousin might have had this or that sort of experience with her breast cancer, but let each person take the path themselves. Be there, but do it in a reasonable and non-intrusive way.

Some of us are crisis managers: we hear about an emergency and we kick into high gear and take over. Some of us are crisis supporters: that same emergency drives us to drop off food or clean up someone's kitchen when they can't. Sometimes we need one, sometimes we need the other. Most of the time, though, what we really need is just to know that there is a manager if we need one and there is a supporter if we need one, but ultimately that we are loved. We need to know that the love and support are there for us to draw upon when we're ready, not when it's forced down our throats. That's not love and support, that's control.

Mostly, I believe, what we need when we're hurt or struggling is not to have someone make us feel guilty for not thinking about them. We need people to understand that it's not about playing favorites or picking teams. It's not about saying your the best friend or the 3rd best friend, it's about getting through a difficult time the best way we know how.

On hearing of an emergency or hearing of an illness or a need second hand rather than directly from our friend in crisis, if your first thought is "why didn't she call me?", I challenge you to sit down, realize that it is not about you and that you have no right to make it about you. I challenge you to leave a voice message, send an email or better yet a card in the mail that simply says, "I love you. I'm here and you can always call me for anything." And I challenge you to leave at that for a while. Let your loved one adjust to the idea of the crisis and then call on you. Don't push them to do something because YOU want it done.

Just a little unsolicited advice.

So my kid has made the transfer from Noggin, now Nick Jr with a stupidly bad website that sucks, to PBS kids. One of her PBS kids shows she loves is Kid Fitness. it's not a bad show, they exercise a lot. I mean, he is Kid fitness.

Anyway, he always says "come on, kids, get off that couch and with us." Ella is concerned about this for several reasons: 1--she always gets up to exercise with him and 2) we don't have a couch. She will yell back at the tv: stop telling me to get off the couch, we don't have one!

I find it hilarious.

I thought I had more interesting things to say, but I apparently don't.

So, yes, I still love my WoW. Although I think I'm getting bored with it. I'm not sure. Maybe it's just because my main toon is in a raiding guild and I never get to raid (Noah and I swap weeks when it's our turn to raid) and my other toons are in our fairly small social guild and we never really do much.

Anyway, we've known that Champions Online was coming, and Noah, being the gaming nerd he is from long ago, was looking forward to it. Well, it's in open beta right now and it's fun. It's customizable from a character point of view. Customizable to the point where you can spend your first hour of play not even in the game on the server because you're trying to make your costume look better or your character taller with hair that's slightly redder with dragon wings. Or, you know, whatever.

There's leveling, questing, etc etc. We've pre-ordered our copies from Best Buy since it does release in about a week or so. Wow, not even a week, since it's already Friday.

So, when I lose my job, I hope you guys will buy me some cool playtime cards for my various games, since they'll be my undoing anyway.

The only problem is that, once again, I'm creating characters who need names. But now instead of WoW names, they're super hero or super villian names. Egad. I'm just not that creative.

That's right.
I'm a nerd.
I subscribed to the Blizzcon internet feed because I want a grunty the murloc pet.
Sue me.
Don't, actually, I wasted my money on the blizzcon feed.

hahahahahaahaha

I'm sorry, I'm punchy and I'm tired and I still have 4 more hours of this crap to go yet today before I can go home and have a drink and lay on my bed and hate how annoying my job has become.

So the Penguins managed to pull it out last night. Sadly, I did not watch the game, as I have a toddler who does not allow hockey to be watched. We're discussing her options for tonight's hurricanes game. I've come to enjoy the 'canes and I think I might even root for them over my Pens if the series were to come to that. I think I'd almost just rather the Pens sweep the whole damn thing so I don't have to worry much about it.

The other reason I didn't get to watch it was that our guild (my new one for my priest, The Dropouts) was too busy flailing about in 25man Ulduar. We 2-shotted Hodir (despite the fact that he should be a very easy one shot if people just pay attention and free the NPCs), we one shotted everything else up to Thorim. We didn't attempt Freya yet. We wiped for a good hour on Thorim. How annoying. On 10 man, it's a cake walk. On 25? The tunnel group was too slow so by the time they finally stopped wiping and made it to Thorim, the arena group started wiping because we had 3+ minutes of adds totally mopping the floor with us. Sigh.

So tonight will be another attempt. I have a feeling we'll head for Freya first, just to see if we can't wipe on something else for a while before banging our heads against the Thorim fight again. Our 10-man group got to Mimiron and we kept wiping last week. Best we did was to get 1 segment down and the other 2 at 2% or less, but by then there was so much DPS down, we couldn't kill them fast enough to stop the self repair. Sigh.

In other news, my kid is still awesome. You expected something different?

I wish I had other interesting news, but I don't.

So, for about a year and a half, I have been getting emails from various Duke activities. This class is meeting at this time, your syllabus is online, here are the Duke Alumni activities for the month, that sort of thing.

I've had to unsubscribe to 4 or 5 duke mailing managers.
I've had to email people to tell them not to mail me about classes I'm not taking.

Sincerely, if you're in college and you know that you're going to be contacted for your classes and registration and such, don't you think you'd give them the correct email address?

I can see it being wrong for 1 thing. But I am getting emails from several sources and I'm pretty sure this person has sent the wrong email address, MY email address, to several different places.

Dude.
Seriously.

I know I never post. And when I do it's usually WoW. And this is no different. Well, it's sort of different. I'll start with the different stuff.

Life as a married woman doesn't suck. No, really, it doesn't. We have this happy little home, although right now it's a little worrisome as it has been raining all day (and now it's snowing) and we have a funk in the house. We're trying to locate it, and we're not sure of the location, but we'll find it. Or light enough candles to burn the place down. But the home is still happy. I'm officially a Godwin now, although ironically, Ella isn't not, since in order to change her name with social security, despite the fact that I married her father, whose name is on the birth certificate, we have to do a legal name change. Which means posting our intention to change her name on the courthouse bulletin board for 10 days and then getting it all legal and THEN changing it on her SS card. Pain. in. my. ass.

Other than that, it's all good. I can't remember to sign godwin though. I sign Burns all day long at work, and that occasional check or credit card receipt? It just gets the Keely Bu--Godwin signature. Sigh. The trials and travails are many when you're happily married.

Speaking of travails, my work does, indeed, suck right now. Between the late peaking flu season and the EMR from hell, it's just been a monster every day to try and be on time. People are waiting up to an hour and a half to be seen in my office, which I find unacceptable. It just isn't ok with me for people to wait that long to see me, whether they have an appointment or not. Especially, however, if they do. I'm not sure of the answer, although I have some solutions for the EMR issue, just not the late peaking flu issue. That's for God, nature and some good old fashioned hand washing to take care of.

As to the WoW, I'm now level 80 on 3 charactes, although really only one of them is well geared in any way. She's my ret pally. It hurts my feelings when people ask me to tank or heal. I want to smush up faces. I don't want to tank or heal. My husband's (squee!) main character, who was once our guild main tank is now dps spec, and he tanks the lower instances, but he doesn't much care for it either. There will be joy in mudville when the dual spec comes out. In the meantime, since our guild is small and not doing much in the way of raid progression (we get through about half of 10 man naxx on a good night, since people have to clear out early), we spend most of our time with the world PvP. As Noah puts it, we have a big PvPness. (We can't take credit for that, there's a guild on our server called Has a Big PvPness. I'm only sorry we didn't think of it first.) But now there are a couple of infamous gankers on our server who pretty much universally respond to the call of "there are jerks from Dead Zeppelin ganking in [insert zone name here]" and that makes us happy. And dead a lot. With ridiculously long resurrection timers, but hey, it's why we didn't roll on a carebear server.

So if you're alliance on Eredar, we will probably kill you if we see you and the fight looks reasonably winnable or even just fair. We don't pick the fights that are unwinnable, I mean, what fun is that? Anyway, it's now nearly 1am, we've been ganking all evening, the snow is on the ground, the candles in the house to dispel the funk are lit, and I still haven't any idea if I'm working tomorrow or not. Harnett county schools are stupid and dont' announce until the last minute so I'm sure I'll be up at 7, calling the staff asking how the roads are and letting them know that even if they schools aren't, we will be on a 2 hour delay. Awesome, that'll keep everyone happy.

sigh
But did I mention? I'm happily married? Because I am.

So the annoyance here is this: I understand that the roads are possibly icy. I understand that it's still 18 degrees outside.

What I don't understand is why, when the road you're on is completely clear, has been scraped and sanded and salted, you feel like driving 15 MPH is ok. If you are so very anxious about driving in cold weather, don't do it. Cancel the appointment you're not rushing to make on time, gerrymander your schedule a little so you can stay home. That way those of us who are ok with driving 45 MPH on the 55MPH road can actually get to work less than 2 hours late.

Now, had the road been icy, had the thing not been obviously covered in salt, I can get that. But it wasn't. Sigh.

it's hard when you grow up in the snow and then move to NC where they get snow every 3 to 5 years and then act as if the world has come to an end.

In other news, my husband is awesome. That is all.

So I swore I'd start writing down when Ella says or does awesome things, because, well, a) she does it all the time and 2) I know I'll forget that she was so damn awesome. Well, not entirely, but I'll forget the details.

So tonight, we put her in her bed with the usual fight: I have to get some water, I need medicine for my cough (I say "you're not coughing" and she fakes a cough), I need to go potty, I need you to read me one more book (followed by reading the book up until the penultimate page where she says "I don't like this book" and gets another--she doesn't think I've caught on to that trick yet).

So after reading the last book (If You Give a Moose a Muffin), she gets in bed and I come out to the living room to play wow with my husband and with some friends of ours. Soon, I see the child standing on the steps to the living room with her duck costume hat on (from when she was 10 months old for Halloween 06) and she says she has to go potty. I take her potty, she does her thing and as I'm putting her back into her bed, her face lights up and she says, "I totally sneaked out of bed and into your room. And no one saw me."

I laugh and say "yes, you totally did." And then I realize what she's said. She sneaked into my room.

She then says "I put my money in your room." At that point she gets up, we go into my room and she has hidden a couple of play coins from her toy piggy bank in a slipper on my nightstand. And she shows them to me. Then she shows me a real quarter and says, "I put this in my mouth. I know it's trouble."

At that point, she walks back into her bedroom, climbs in her bed and lies down.

Seriously, come ON.

So, Geithner is probably going to get confirmed as secretary of treasury. The guy didn't pay his own taxes. He didn't "forget" or "make a mistake". He actively evaded paying his taxes. For a couple of years. And everyone is just patting him on the back. They're saying "oh, well pay it now and it'll be fine." So he pays the taxes and the interest, but shockingly got no penalty (which would have been and is hefty, but somehow doesn't apply to him. . . .why?).


We've been so dumbed down to believe that there's a crisis and because of that, we need to sweep him under the rug. Give me a break. The guy is IN CHARGE of collecting taxes. He will be the leader of the IRS. He doesn't even pay his own. And it wasn't like it was one year that he made a mistake and underpaid. He hadn't paid his taxes for several years and was told in 2006, that's right nearly THREE years ago, that he had to pay these taxes and but then he never did. He willfully avoided and evaded paying his taxes. It wasn't an honest mistake. An honest mistake is saying, in 2006 when it was pointed out by the IRS when he was audited, "oh, I better pay those now." It is not avoiding paying them for another couple of years and then literally days before the announcement of your nomination to Treasury Secretary paying them, which is what happened in this case.

Why is he still even being considered?!? Why are we still talking about him. Remember a few years ago, back in the day when Bush nominated someone for something (I hate that I don't remember the details--they are so vague that I can't even remember if it was 41 or 43 who did it) and it turned out that her nanny was an illegal and that totally canned her nomination? Remember that?

So now here's Geithner, who is guilty of tax evasion (and by the way, how do I get hit with a penalty for just paying late a couple of months, and he gets no penalty for not paying at all for YEARS?), as well as the fact that he, too, had an illegal for a nanny and we're sitting here saying that he's going to be SecTreas?

I swear to you that if a republican administration had tried to nominate this guy, his nomination wouldn't have even made it to committee, let alone passed committee or have been an option for more than a week.

Does it strike no one else as odd that the guy Obama wants to put in charge of the treasury and therefore the IRS and tax collection and enforcement is a guy who isn't even ethical enough to pay his own taxes? The phone lines should be on fire with people calling their senators to shoot this guy down. And yet we're all so damn euphoric about the historical events this week that we fail to see that this is important. We're so busy trying to tell ourselves that it's all going to be okay now that we're overlooking what it will take to make it ok. And that includes putting people into a position that at least have a modicum of appropriateness for their position. A guy who willfully evades his taxes is not the right guy for the Treasury.

A woman who's husband has a foundation that receives millions of dollars in contributions from foreign leaders (including dictators) is not the right woman for State. And don't give me the crap about the agreement that the Clintons had with the Obama transition team about their transparency. There is no more transition team, so that agreement is now null. That smacks of conflict of interest.

And yet, once again, in this era of hope and change, whatever that means, we're going to let her skate on through and be Secretary of State.

I submit that once again, if this were a republican administration, there would be screaming and shouting and gnashing of teeth and neither of these nominations would have a leg to stand on for more than a few minutes. But we're so busy as a nation worshiping Obama and deifying him that we can't see past it to truly evaluate the team he's putting into place.

"Double standard," you say?
Why yes.
Yes, I do say.

So snow has come to NC. We got a couple of inches last night and we're expected to maybe get another inch during the day. However, since it's supposed to be 55 on Friday. I thought Montana had some turbulent weather changes. Apparently NC is much more erratic.

Anyway, just my luck, on my one snow day, it's patch day and the servers are down until 1pm. Curse you, Blizzard and your Tuesday morning patchiness. I guess there's never a good time to take all the realms offline, but damn. Why did it have to be my snow day? Why couldn't it have been last week?

So, instead, I get to play with my family and drink coffee and eat biscuits and enjoy the fire in our woodstove. Ella went outside to play in the snow and she thought it was pretty cool. Well, cold actually. And she's not sure she likes it as much as she thought she would. She does like to stand at the door and admire it, though. As do I.

Speaking of Ella, she has decided that sprinkles go on everything. She's had sprinkles on pancakes, on toast, on her grapes (that didn't work so well), on her cheese toast and on her pizza. She prefers the easter bunny sprinkles, but she'll take just about any of them. Today she's having a red and green sugar sparkles sandwich. we opened up a biscuit and put red on one side and green on the other, and now she's amazed at how they mix together when you put them together. Ah, to be 3 and have a love for sprinkles such as she does.

In other news, I'm just about done moving all of my stuff into our Durham house and ready to sell the Holly Springs house. That makes me so happy you have no idea. I need to get rid of my big ole horizontal file cabinet. I think I might put it up on craigslist or freecycle. I just want it to go away.

In other WoW news, my pally is about 2/3 of the way through 78 and Noah's lock is about 60% of the way through 77. That means that we can fly around in Northrend, finally, and we can mine to our heart's content. We used to split the nodes so we could both get points, but I guess that's changed with today's patch (thankfully). However, now we have to shift-right click when we hit it so it doesn't get looted but you do get the point. And then the next person can loot it. That's how we both did our herbalism back when we were rushing to 70 on our priest/shammy combo.

I will say that having a ret pally and an affliction lock run around makes for some ridiculous fun world PvP. I am gankarrific. I see no reason not to. I like to play, I like to play other players. And I like it when we will kill someone and his level 80 friend comes to help and we kill that guy too. It doesn't always work out that way, but damn, having 2 stuns on my character and 2 fears on Noah's makes it a lot easier for us to manage the inevitable 80 human ret pally that shows up to put us in our places. And then kill him.

My new favorite? Ganking people in the little quest posts where it looks like the people there might be guards and aggro you, but they don't. And before I open up with my hammer of justice and judgment of command, I like to say "hi, we're the assholes your friends are talking about in general chat."

It's the little things that make me happy.

So there's so much to talk about, wedding wise, and no one really wants to hear all about it, frankly. I mean, people ask you how the wedding was, but they don't want the details, they just want to know it was beautiful. So, well, it was beautiful.

We had a couple of dramas (minor, of course):
My brother and sister in law forgot their hanger bag with his suit and her dress. God bless Nordstom's for being open on New Year's day and having same day tailoring. They both looked wonderful.

Noah's brother was a little late, but he showed up, looking as handsome as could be and ushered like a champ.

The family pictures were lacking a little in the form of the brothers but we made up for it later, so we have lots of shots.

I have a review site for the pro pictures (my friend Leslie is awesome!) at www.godwin.weddingherald.com and we got all the pics from the table top cameras loaded to the flickr site (www.flickr.com/photos/keelamonster).

I will give one piece of advice to any and all of you attending weddings where these cameras are sitting on the tables: Don't take pictures of the bride and groom, unless they ask you to. We didn't ask either way, but the truth is this: we had a pro to take pictures of us. She did a great job and her pictures have more light and are suited to the light in the room at the reception. What most brides and grooms want with those pictures are pictures of the guests. The pro, unless they're making the rounds to every single table (and in our case, we did no assigned seating, so she didn't), isn't going to get pictures of all the guests. And that's what you find lacking when you're going through all the pictures at the end. We wanted pictures of the people attending, we got lots of pictures of us.

Oh, well, the pictures we do have of our attendees are great, and we have a few extra pics of us. Not exactly the end of the world.

Oh! Another piece of advice: if you write a check for a bride and groom, write it to Bride OR Groom, not Bride and Groom. We don't have a joint account yet, and if it hadn't been for the teller at the bank being a patient of mine, I think it would have been difficult to cash/deposit the checks. Granted, we're going to put each other on the accounts, but it would have been a tremendous pain.

So far the best check we got so far? The one from Keir and Elena that was written for 101.09. Since we got married on 1/01/09. Cutest ever? Probably.