A trip to DC, not on the Metro

Hello everyone,

Juice and I took a trip to downtown DC to visit our neighbor, Marie, who had eye surgery. I guess she has something wrong with her thyroid and since it was never detected, it did a lot of things to her body. Including making her eyes bug out of her head, which is not good. If they hadn't caught it now, it would have blinded her. So they had to do surgery and go through her nose and sink her eyes farther into her skull, but drilling part of her skull. Ouch!! They also had to stitch her eyes closed to make sure that everything stays in there. In any case, we wanted to make sure that we saw her. William, her husband, drove us down there.

As we were driving, we're getting closer into DC and we're seeing less and less white people. Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing about the African American race but it's a little disconcerting to be the minority. I've never had that happen.

Marie was looking like she was doing okay. She was hurting (of course) and had ice over he eyes but she had a good time talking with everyone. Her parents came too. Her dad has the most awesome voice. Deep and resonating like James Earl Jones.

As we were leaving the hospital, William had to pull over to see where we were. And I'm counting the people on the street. 12 walk past, all black. Then another 12, again, all black. Here we are, 4 white people in a very black neighborhood. All the windows had bars, even the doors had bars. Wow. Now, this was not a bad neighborhood in DC. We were in the NE corner. Which isn't terrible. You don't want to go into SE. That's a neighborhood where people get shot in broad daylight. Stay away from there!

In any case, we got home safe and sound, and no worse for wear because of our trip downtown.

Love you all,
Safirecat and Juice

Welcome!

Hello all,

This is the first post on my blog I made to keep everyone in touch with what Juice and I are doing out here in Maryland. I know we don't keep in touch as much as we'd like to, and I thought that this would be a good thing to let everyone know what's been going on with us. So, just a quick overview and then I'll get up to date.

Juice and I moved out to the east coast almost exactly a year ago. Although at the time we moved to Virginia to a nice apartment complex. It was a cute, 2 bedroom apartment on the second floor with a washer and dryer! My favorite thing in that apartment. We stayed there about 8 months and then moved to Maryland.

Why did we move? Well, in those 8 months that we lived there, Juice got a job as a systems engineer at Lockheed Martin (http://www.lockheedmartin.com). The job was in MD and we thought it wouldn't be too bad of a commute for Juice so that we could stay where we were. Boy were we wrong! He had a 2 and half hour commute one way, so that was 5 hours a day he spent trying to go places. We thought, 5 hours driving, 40 hour work week, and him going to school full time was too much. So we moved.

We decided to buy a house because the interest rates were fantastic and we would be paying just as much with rent as a mortgage payment. So we took the plunge! We found the house we bought the very first day out looking. It was just what we were looking for. 3 bedrooms, 2 and a half baths, with another washer and dryer. Very important, those washer and dryers. :) So on April 1, 2004, we closed on the house and moved in! Juice now only drives 10 minutes to work every day and is able to go home for lunch every day. Lucky dog.

So that pretty much brings us up to speed on where we are. Now on to what we're doing. We bought a Cairn Terrier puppy soon after moving to our house. We named her Soot. She was so sweet as a tiny puppy, and now she's just so much fun. She loves people and can do all sorts of tricks. She can sit, stay, lay down, speak, and shake. The shake is adorable but she sits and lays down the best.

We just celebrated our 3rd anniversary with a trip to West Virginia. It was beautiful. This summer has been nice and restful.

Coming up in our lives is school for Juice. He'll continue at George Washington University as a grad student. This will be his last full year. I continue to work at Genetics and IVF (http://www.givf.com) in Virigina, making apointments for either infertility and prenatal genetic testing. Boy have I leared a lot!

We've been enjoying our time here in Maryland! More updates to come!