Chris & Maria's Blog

Chris made it to the Ghostbusters blog! 🙂

After six hours on the road (three there and three back), we’ve pretty much recovered from our Nashville trip to see the great Eddie Izzard.  Overall, it was a great trip and Eddie was riot.  He did nearly two hours of standup, then stood outside the Ryman theater for 20 minutes talking to his fans.  Like an idiot, I didn’t take my camera, so I’ll have to wait for Anna to dump the images from her camera so I can post them.

There were lots of cool things about the day.  It started a little rough when Budget didn’t have the car that we reserved (insert Seinfeld joke here).  They made up for it a couple of hours later by upgrading us to a Prius.  So not only did we have a good time in Nashville, we did the trip with a shade of green.  I think my next car will be a Prius or some similar hybrid.  We averaged 45 MPG there and back, and that’s without hypermiling.

We also met up with Lizzie from The Leaky Cauldron.  It’s always nice to meet up with Leaky people, as they seem to be some of the nicest people I’ve met.  So nice, in fact, that I married one of them.  😛

We’ve got to go back to Nashville in a week.  Maria got her  appointment to get her biometrics taken for the green card application.  I’m pretty sure that just means fingerprinting, so that means we’ll drive for six hours in total for about 10 minutes worth of processing.  We’re going to make the most of it, though, and go down the night before.  We’re also going to try and meet up with Lizzie again.  More news as there is news!

High: Our papers being cleared at USCIS. One more step!

High: lots of family time this weekend: We had dinner out for Chris’s mom’s birthday, a barbecue for Father’s Day and  went to a ‘crawfish broil’ at our realtor’s house (she is a family friend).

High: We went to AdventureCon at the weekend too. Chris was a judge at the costume contest – see his pictures with fellow judges Danielle Harris and Jennifer Blanc, and with Michael Biehn and Ernie Hudson. We also met with Disney artist Richard Green – he animated Lumiere in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – which was great fun, and we bought an original piece of artwork from him.

Low: ummmmmm…..er……..

A round-up of last week, while I can still remember it….

High: Spending Saturday evening playing crazy golf / putt putt and retro arcade games.

Low: Dealing with Ginny’s Liquid Evil on Monday morning. I’m not even going to explain what that is, it’s too revolting.

High: Booking tickets to see the Beach Boys. Woohoo!

Low: Finding our perfect house, then finding it already had a contract on it.

High: Taking a trip to Elkmont in the mountains to watch the fireflies. They were absolutely amazing; just beautiful. Taking pictures didn’t really work, it’s more something you have to watch to appreciate I think. However Chris and Pete did get some great photos of the river, and I really like these two that Pete took of us here and here.

Last week was a interesting week of highs and lows.

Low: getting woken up by Trixie yelping and moaning in pain. She wouldn’t put any pressure on her back left leg and kept whimpering. Of course it was a public holiday so we had to take her across town to the emergency out-of-hours animal ER. She got progressively better the longer we waited there and by the time we left she was almost running! Anyway the vet thought she possibly had some tissue or ligament damage and she got given some anti-inflammatory drugs but she only needed to take them for a couple of days before she was back to normal.

High: spending a great afternoon / evening at the Yeary’s Yearly Memorial Day Feast. Both food geniuses (genii?).

Low: losing a very special lady. Neighbour and friend to my parents for nearly 30 years, Rosemary also featured in what I believe is my very first memory at pre-school nursery. She will be sorely missed.

Low: losing my parents cat (who also belonged to a couple of my sisters at various points in his life). This was before last week but as most people agree, Beamish was a wizard so time frames don’t count with him. He lived for a couple of hundred years at least.

High: spending Friday night with a great group of women watching the SATC movie, and then eating chocolate fondue afterwards. I’ve never seen so many pairs of high-heels in a cinema!

High: Trixie’s summer haircut.