In more important news…

October 14, 2009 3:37 pm

…I’m officially a Dickerson! The lady from Social Security called me last week while we were at the airport to tell me that she had finally managed to procure a certificate number for my birth certificate, so I could come on back to the office. So I went down this afternoon to get this name changing business taken care of. Of course, it didn’t go exactly smoothly. She needed my ID, and the only real one I have is now expired. I gave her my temporary CA license, which she had to go ask about. Her supervisor’s original answer was no, she couldn’t use that, but when she explained who I was (I’m known down there), she said to go ahead and use it. Which is good, because I can’t get my real CA license until SS changes my name, so that would have been a handy little disaster. But it’s done, it all went through, I have an official receipt, and should have my new card in 2 weeks. She proclaimed me “Mrs. Dickerson” before I left, and I signed the paperwork “Jessica H. Dickerson,” ‘cuz that’s who I am now.

And now, a photographic representation of how I feel about this:0626Fireworks

Next stop: the DMV. When I tried to think of a photo that would represent my feelings on returning there, all I could think of was slimy disgusting mold, and google’s image search finds some really nasty things. I’m not posting them on here. You’re welcome.

It’s raining outside.

October 13, 2009 3:58 pm

Like, a lot. Has been all day. Pretty hard, too! It rained once several weeks ago, but other than that, we haven’t seen rain since we moved here. So this is both unusual and wonderful. I’ve got windows open so I can hear it, and to let the fresh air in. Basically, I just wanted everyone to know that I’m really enjoying the weather here today.

I know, I still need to blog about our trip to Utah, but I’ve been rather lacking in energy for the last, I dunno, several weeks. I’ll get there.

Disaster In the Kitchen (Yes, Again!)

October 4, 2009 5:57 pm

Last night, I made brownies. I’ve been wanting to make round ones, and Kyle finally relented to my silliness. He also agreed to let me put the remaining candles in and blow them out. (I’m still not sure what we were celebrating, but we needed to celebrate something! I think I told him we were celebrating Fall, because when we got the mail on Friday, it felt like a Blustery Day.)IMG_1548

Anyway, when I pulled the candles out, I learned that they had a very low melting point, and there were now 3 pools of wax in the middle of my brownies. (Yes, of course we put them in while the brownies were still warm.) Booooooo…IMG_1550

A Day for Eeyore

September 24, 2009 1:42 pm

Eeyore-Birthday-HatWell, Sunday was my 29th birthday. I’ve not usually been big into celebrating birthdays, but this one was pretty good and Kyle’s been harassing me to blog it, so here we go.

We started the festivities with dinner on Saturday night at the Cheesecake Factory. I’ve always adored their dulce de leche cheesecake, and I’ve recently fallen in love with their chicken marsala with mushrooms, so that’s where I chose to go. I would highly recommend both to anyone, but Kyle of course abhors the “demon fungus.” Weirdo. He did get some very tasty cashew chicken, though, even if he did insist on getting strawberry cheesecake. Anyway…

Our church is at 9 am, so I pretty much never have breakfast on Sundays (unless it’s a granola bar or Pop Tarts), but Kyle got up and made a real breakfast(!) of scrambled eggs and french toast while I showered. After church, I wanted to open presents, but Kyle said I wasn’t allowed to until we had cake (which wouldn’t be until that evening). But I already knew that one of the presents was a laptop (mine has been dying, so Kyle had been watching sales for several weeks, and we picked one out about a week ago), and I knew it would require a bit of setup. I also knew we had all afternoon ahead of us, which would be a perfect time to do all that setup, so I convinced Kyle that he could get the cake in the oven, and then I could open just that one present. (I later convinced him, with my womanly wiles, that waiting until we had cake would be silly; we compromised and I opened the rest of the presents after the cake was finished.)

So Kyle worked on the cake. Now, I had requested, for my birthday cake, white cake with cherry frosting. But when Kyle went to the store on Saturday, he couldn’t find cherry frosting anywhere. Oh, I forgot to mention that I was actually sick all weekend (just a cold, and the worst of it was on Friday and Monday-Tuesday, oddly enough), so I didn’t accompany him to the store. When he got back, he told me he’d actually been to three stores and hadn’t found any frosting. He was going back out, though. I told him to only go to one more store, and just get cream cheese frosting if they didn’t have cherry, but he went to three more (he claims they were “on the way,” which makes no sense at all) and still couldn’t find any. He came home all upset that I wasn’t going to get the cake that I wanted, and I had a hard time consoling him. But the cake still turned out great.

I opened up the laptop:

a new laptop from Kyleand we spent quite some time getting things set up. We had to get Windows off of it and Linux on to it, and then get all my old stuff transferred over. Fortunately, I married a Master of Science who knows how to do all this stuff fairly easily, so now I’m just getting used to things like a slightly different keyboard layout. And loving that I can actually unplug it and move it around, unlike my old one. Brilliant.

I had to do at least a Body Test on the Wii Fit because Kyle told me that it would do special things for my birthday, and he was right! It was so exciting. The Fit Board guy who talks to you and such wore a party hat, and there were streamers and confetti!

even Wii Fit is in on the celebration!We invited some friends over for cake (and rice krispie treats and apple crisp) that evening. This is one reason we’d hoped the couches would have been here by then, but they weren’t. It turned out alright, though, because one of the couples has a daughter, Chloe, who amused herself all night by jumping on the air mattress. It’s good that she got to come over while it was still out. Anyway, they sang happy birthday and I only had to cheat a little bit to blow out all the candles:

DSCN4405 DSCN4407We had yummy treats, hung out and talked for a long time, and even played Mario Kart. All in all, it was a great way to start my last year as a twenty-something.