Archive for May, 2006

The last couple of weeks have been crazy hectic! I got back from Tucson, Arizona last Monday and dove right back into work. I had a wonderful time with Ruth and the rest of the bridesmaids that weekend. Sure, it was definately a challenge to get everything accomplished that needed to be done, but in the end it was a beautiful wedding! I have posted a couple of the pictures I took (one of the bridesmaids at the Tucson Botannical Gardens, and one at the bachelorette party). For those of you that were there, I’d be happy to send you my files in e-mail form, just let me know!

This Memorial Day weekend, Andy, Griffin, and I drove down to Austin, Texas (this sentence sure does have enough commas!) to celebrate their cousin Caitlin’s high school graduation. Congrats Caitlin! Any celebration in the Trommer/Rose family is a huge deal! Andy’s Grandma Rose and Aunt Susan drove down from Kansas to party with us. We spent most of Saturday chatting, snacking, and watching embarrassing family videos. On Sunday, we had a huge lunch at Andy’s parent’s house. There was lasagna, salad, garlic bread, and sherbet! I’d forgotten how much I enjoy sherbet! FYI: sherbet contains more ingredients than sorbet. Examples of these extra ingredients are milk, egg whites, or gelatin. Sorbet is a non-milk version of italian gelato.

Today, Andy and I spent most of the day wiring our house with special internet cables. For you computer people out there, I believe they are CAT 6 cables. And if you need any, we still have over 500 feet left! Pulte Homes (our builders and mortgage company) would have charged us $1200 to install Andy’s special cables. Buying all the equipment and doing all the manual labor ourselves only cost us $400. I have learned more about wiring than I ever care to know in my lifetime! It was a long hard hot day, and especially stinky! The workers had parked the porta potty in our front yard. ^_^ In the end, we’re done and the house is back on its road to an early completion! Yay for that!

Well, I’m calling an early weekend this week! Why? Because I’m off to Tucson, Arizona to see my most awesome college roommate, Ruth, get married! I’m very excited to see her, plus we haven’t gotten the opportunity to hang out for several years. The weekend sounds like it’s going to be pretty busy, what with rehearsals, bachelorette parties, just chilling out time, and of course, the BIG DAY! I plan on having a blast and who knows, maybe I’ll fall in love with Tucson? Hm…probably not, since I’m not all too fond of unbearably hot weather. Actually, I’m sitting at work right now waiting for Andy to come pick me up to go to the airport. I figured I had better post something before I leave.

It was another required frisbee afternoon at work today. I’m actually getting the hang of this crazy sport. Of course, I wasn’t all too pleased to be out in the hot overbearing sunshine (the nice weather has ended) sweating like a pig. Andy won a free pedometer (it’s a funny little machine that you clip to your pants that measures the number of steps you take a day) at work yesterday. I was curious as to how far I walk each day at work. Don’t scoff! Labwork is difficult and we tend to run from place to place trying to get everything done. A normal person is supposed to walk at least 10,000 steps (approximately 5 miles) a day. I am currently at…7609 steps. Plus I accidentally reset the stupid thing earlier in the morning, so I’m definately up there in steps!

Anyways, I was so tired and hot after running around in the hot Texas weather that I wrote my very own, what I thought to be a haiku sounding poem, to Andy. Ahem…

Hot Frisbee Hot

Sweaty

Tired

5770 steps

Angela in Cold Room

For all of you non-science people, a cold room is like a refridgerated room for experiments. Of course, I know this isn’t actually a haiku. And at the time, I was sweaty and disgusting, and not really in the mood to look up the proper structure for the actual poem. It was my sad little attempt to be cute. Andy wrote back and had the gall to correct my cuteness, without a single compliment on me working to improve my frisbee skills or my poem! So, I wrote this in response…

Mean Andy Mean

Picky

Annoying

6542 steps

Angela likes her haiku

Sigh…apparently I’m quite grouchy after exercising. Well, I’m off to hide while I wait for Andy, lest my boss decides to give me more work to do since I’m still here. Have a happy weekend everybody!

So, the weather here in North Texas has been strangely beautiful, 75 degrees F with a slight breeze, for the last 2-3 days. It’s absolutely surprising, since it’s usually horribly hot and humid by this time. I plan on enjoying this nice weather for every second that it’s here. Apparently, everybody else also has the same idea, including my boss. He announced a few weeks ago that we should really get together to play some Ultimate Frisbee sometime this summer. Everybody chimed in about how that’s a terrific idea! I remain very quiet, thinking to myself, “gee…I’ve never in my life correctly flung a frisbee or had any desire to do so”.

Truthfully, I figured that we would all be too busy to really get around to it. Alas, Dr. Schetz brought three frisbees to work this week. Due to my happy good weather, we were all marched outside to the big grassy field and threw frisbees for practice (we’re not good enough to attempt playing a real game yet). I admit, it was actually very nice to be outside. However, my frisbee throwing skills really are just as bad as I claim. So of course, I have 6 guys trying to teach me how to throw straight (mainly because they’re tired of chasing down my bad throws and also not so fond of being clunked in the head because I can’t aim).

In an attempt to improve myself, I begged Andy to give me a one-on-one frisbee flinging course. So, last night we went to North Lakes Park and he tried very hard to help my hopeless frisbee cause. At the end of this week, I can indeed properly throw a frisbee, well…maybe only half the time. Plus this strange frisbee sport has left me with a bruised fourth finger and a giant weirdly shaped bruise on my wrist. To make me feel better, Andy and I chased some wimpy kids off the playground equipment so we could swing, slide, and attempt the monkey bars (which really meant we just hung there while standing on our tippy toes). It was a good preface to the weekend.

I have to admit, most of my weekends as of late have been frantically trying to set up plans for the wedding, anxiously hovering over our developing mound of dirt (aka: our house), or just zooming all over the DFW area running errands. This typically makes the weekend very busy and extremely short. This weekend, however, was a very refreshing change of pace. Andy and I drove down to Georgetown (Austin) on Friday night and proceeded to have a nice relaxing weekend, which we’ve been needing for a long time.

On Saturday afternoon, Rick, Sherry, Andy and I drove down to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center for a stroll among the pretty flowers. We had a great time enjoying the sunshine and beautiful floral arrangements. I am currently having some issues posting pictures on my blog. But I promise that as soon as I figure it out (or rather Andy figures it out), there will be pictures galore!
We rushed back to Georgetown just in time to beat another storm. We’ve had a tremendous amount of violent thunderstorms lately. Leave it to us to buy a house the year that the Texas drought is ending. Anywho, we got all dolled up and met Josh and Kat in Austin for the Big Bad Voodoo Daddies concert. They played with the Austin Symphony Orchestra. The music was terrific, the company was even more excellent, and we had a thoroughly enjoyable time. Andy and I attempted to apply our meager amount of swing dancing knowledge to the dance floor. Sadly, we’ve discovered that although we can muster a few spiffy moves, we haven’t a clue how to connect them into a real dance. So this results in us doing a spin and then staring at each other for a few minutes afterwards trying to figure out how to proceed next. ^-^

After the show, we all headed to Chez Zee for drinks and dessert. I had the most amazing cake…I mean, carrot sticks ever! We talked about all sorts of interesting subjects, but my favorite was when Kat and I realized that we both loved the Babysitter’s Club series, but hated reading about the babysitting parts. In fact, we would both skip over those chapters and go straight for the juicy teenage romance sections. I know I’ve said it before, but sometimes it’s just nice to have another gal around to talk about girly subjects. At that point in the conversation, Josh and Andy just rolled their eyes at the outburst of giggling and started talking about CAT6 cables for wiring the house… see what I mean about needing a gal around?

Today is my co-worker, David’s birthday. In an attempt to cook some chow mein for the occasion (Chinese people eat long noodles on birthdays to symbolize living a long life), Jordan, Ben, Griffin, and Andy were my guinea pigs last weekend. I discovered that chow mein isn’t as easy to make as I thought. First off, Ben told me that I needed one handful of noodles per person. That ended up with me cooking off 2-3 pounds of spaghetti!! Needless to say, it was a little bit of an overkill. To top it off, all the tasty things in chow mein (carrots, egg, chicken…etc) wouldn’t stay mixed in the noodles! Despite my best efforts and an enormous amount of upper arm strength, I couldn’t toss the noodles well enough and the toppings would just sink to the bottom. Sigh…though it was pretty tasty, if I do say so myself, but in the end it was way too much work!

Admitting defeat in the chow mein arena, I went to the Thai restaurant down the road and bought David 4 boxes of to-go chow mein. I could have packaged up the pre-made noodles to look like my own cooking. However, #1 surely nobody could believe that I would sit there and cut my carrots into tiny flowers and #2 lying is bad. Everything turned out well in the end. Dr. Dave’s wife made us fudge and Dr. Schetz baked a cake. So…it was a pretty odd lunch, but a nice celebration. Though, everybody is now on a major sugar high from the massive amounts of fudge that was consumed. That’s what everybody wants to hear, right? Seven scientists working around dangerous equipment/chemicals on a sugar high!