Unfoldment of Events

Greetings, you gorgeous hunks of readers, you. And you too, Doug. It has certainly been an eventful time since last we met, and I apologize for my long absence from these hallowed halls of blogdom. But it's Sunday morning, it's still cool, and I have coffee, so lets share some syllables, shall we?

The biggest news is that we've moved. As you may recall, Mrs. Marius has come down with a case of persistent pregnancy, and though we tried to stay in our former digs, it became all-too clear that 2 bedrooms for four human beings was just not going to cut it. In my 47 years I've experienced most milestones of life, but this baby thing is virgin territory (hee hee) and I had no idea how much stuff babies need. You'd think that, being such small,squirmy things, they wouldn't need much room. HA! So we made the decision to seek a 3 bedroom place. Thus the anguish of finding out that the maximum we could afford, rent-wise, is considered low here in the the Tampa Bay area. We found a couple of hovels, and one seemed tolerable, but then the landlord, after trying to rush us into moving two weeks sooner than we were ready, ignored our application for 10 days! Keep in mind that we were living in a friend's town house, and were not just going to run out on her without a reasonable amount of notice. Two days after we had decided that the other landlord must have rented to someone else and just not bothered to tell us, we get a call asking if we still wanted the place, and if so we needed to move the next week. We politely told him to piss off. We were on the verge of abandoning the search, as the cut-off point for Mrs. Marius's ability to assist was fast approaching, when I put out a lament on Facebook asking if anyone knew of a suitable rental in a less than war torn area. Miraculously within minutes I heard from a colleague here in Saint Petersburg who was moving to a new house, and needed renters for his old place. So to cut a long story short, we are here now. It's a very nice little 3/2 with a great yard, quiet neighborhood, and it's only 10 minutes from where I work! The move was relatively smooth, and we had many wonderful people show up to help, and the cats have almost forgiven us. The only fly in the ointment is that this place doesn't have central air, and we are still experimenting with fans and the wall units to keep things comfortable without spending as much on electricity as we do on rent.

In other news, Friday was the final launch of the US space shuttle program. I was supposed to go over to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch with my friend Unkk, who works at NASA, but the weather was predicting a 70% chance that the launch would be scrubbed. Given the amount of work to be done here, and my wife's continued insistence on being pregnant, I decided that I'd wait for the inevitable scrub, and then go over for the next launch window. Usually, at this time of year, it's a no-brainer to count on afternoon thunderstorms down here, but not this time. Friday morning Atlantis leaped off the pad in a flawless launch, with me 200 miles away watching it on TV. And it was raining like hell here, so I couldn't even see her as a tiny, bright light in the sky. But I'll most likely be going over there for Atlantis' landing, which is something I've never done, so that will be cool.

And finally, thanks to a random encounter with my coworker J, I've landed a lighting design gig. She's doing the costumes for a show at a local theatre here in St. Pete, and we both just happened to stop by the school the other day and got to talking about it, and she mentioned that they needed an LD. I said I'd be willing, and they called. It's very short notice, as the show opens Thursday, so I'll be working my ass off this week, but it will finally get my work seen outside of the collegiate circles, and may lead to more freelance work in the future. Woot!

So those are the highlights of the past few weeks, my dear readers. Hopefully as the boxes slowly disappear, and normalcy regains a foothold...although in all honesty there will be a baby here very soon, so I suppose that's a vain thought...I'll blog more. And, speaking of the baby, little Sharon Elizabeth is doing very well, as is her mommy, and once she is with us on the outside I'm sure I'll have many a tale of adorableness, frustration, and foul excretions to share. So you have that to look forward to. :-)

Next week is our 9th anniversary, and we'll be going to see both the new Harry Potter movie (yay) and Transformers 3 (um...) so expect some movie reviewage as well.

OK, I need more coffee. Love and hugs to you all...yes, even you, Doug. ;-)

Peace,
Marius

Oh, one last thing. Netflix now has every Star Trek show except DS9 on it's streaming video. SWEET!!!