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Staying in a hotel all weekend with a boy is still funny to me, even though I'm actually married to this one. Maybe because most of my memories of hotels and/or hotel etiquette were from my childhood stays at Best Westerns and Holiday Inns. You know how sometimes you see traces of your parents in your words or actions? Mine become more pronounced when in a hotel room. I can also distinguish between dad and mom traits. For example, I am constantly going around and around the room moving and/or organizing all of our stuff. It's like I need housekeeping to know that I am a very.neat.person and that they shouldn't expend too much effort cleaning my room. I organize, then reorganize. I move the laundry from one bag to another. I make sure I put the glasses back next to the ice bucket when I am done with them. I place all my toiletries back into my bag each morning after doing a quick inventory. I BASICALLY BECOME MY MOM. I also get kind of OCD and worry that we are going to

This weekend was Val's wedding, so we were in Houston for several days. Houston has its charms, including the following: 1. BFF from Lyondell. I seriously adore my former coworkers (both from my first job at the Bayport plant and my second job downtown).  Serious love fest. Here we are in the photo booth: Then we took more pics with new friends: Then I had a photo session with the bride (cost: priceless): 2. Delicious and cheap foodstuffs.  My fave foods from Houston that I still crave are the $6 Doozo dumplings and the $11 Barnaby's Chef Salad (that feeds 2 people). We also randomly ate at this cafe in the Heights and it was delicious. 3. The fancy Barnes & Noble on Gray. 4. The bizarre downtown Houston tunnel system. I can still navigate it pretty well! 5. Our random stop at a day spa in the Heights for a quick massage. 6. Saturday lunch with my downtown friends and their charming spouses. 7. Random break from the heat to watch "Thor" at Edwar

I've been thinking about weddings quite a bit recently. It seems like we attend about one per month, and that sometimes they are the only events where we see a large number of our friends. This weekend I am heading to Houston to witness two extremely lovely people tie the knot. And you may have heard about the little British family wedding that took place last week, which was watched with much excitement by these 2 fascinator-wearing anglophiles: And thinking about my lovely, hardworking friend, and all the stress over all the wedding minutiae that she is probably feeling right now took my right back to that stressful week in January 2010 preceding my own wedding. Wedding culture is strange and over the top, and I was never really aware of it until I had to plan one. There are countless magazines and websites which purport to help you plan the perfect event. They claim to give you ideas for how to make everything simultaneously elegant, funky, traditional, unique, fun, staid, y

I randomly stumbled upon the livejournal I kept from about 2001-2005, and it made me miss blogging. I am terrible at keeping journals...maybe I just hate my handwriting? The pressure of writing something profound? I'm not sure. But I kept that little livejournal going for years. I chronicled my day to day life as an engineer, the day I met my future husband, and the day I lost my dad. It ended right around the time I met my dear Mr. N, and I switched over to blogger, where other blog friends resided. But it was never quite as honest or stream-of-consciousness-like as my old livejournal. So I hope that this space can be similar...a place to keep my random musings and thoughts. Where I can be real and candid and hopefully make you laugh. This week has been strangely cosmic and magical and weird. Our air conditioner was broken and our yard torn up by the utility company for no apparent reason, and we were just overheated and down in the dumps. So we decided to turn it all around, tak