Our baby!

We are pleased to announce a new addition to the Cruikshank household. Meet Rosie!

We decided after much deliberation and planning to purchase this little washer/drier combo. That's right, she washes and dries all in the same machine.

Now for you non-New Yorkers I know you are wondering why on earth I would even care to post this. BUT having a washer of your own is UNHEARD of in this city. I recently read a New York Times article about how washing machines are a great equalizer. Neither the rich nor the poor have laundry capabilities in their homes. It just doesn't happen. Well one of the perks of living so far up in the Bronx is that out apartment has always had washing machine hook-ups in the kitchen. Our lease has a clause that doesn't allow driers but Rosie here doesn't work like a regular drier and requires no special pluming, venting, or an additional outlet (none of which we have). So she was allowed in.

I am on my 5th load (we had quite the back up of laundry and she doesn't hold very much) and I am loving her. Welcome Rosie!

Camping

Over the weekend I went cabin camping with my friends Suzan and Shelly. Suzan had never been camping before and really wanted to stay in a cabin in the woods. Well she found one in the Taconic State Park and invited me along.

We enjoyed a hike up to Bash Bish Falls which involved crossing the border from NY State to Massachusetts. The falls were very pretty.

We also built a campfire and introduced Suzan to smores which she had never experienced before. I was very proud of myself for building a fire (plus a second one indoors in the fireplace!). Watching Greg all these years must have rubbed off on me.

Suzan shares my love of jigsaw puzzles and brought along a 3D puzzle for us to work on. We stayed up till 2am the first night putting it together and managed to complete it by lunch the next day. We left it behind for some other campers to try. I never do the same puzzle twice!

It was a quick little trip. We went up on Friday night and were back by Sunday afternoon. It reminded me a lot of camping in the northwest because it was really overcast and rainy the whole time and kind of chilly. Plus I don't see a lot of forests in my day to day activities in NYC so that reminded me of the PacNW too. We had lots of fun!

Garden Update

When we had the heat wave her in NYC a few weeks ago we lost a great deal of our garden. Several days over 100 degrees was just too much for some things to take, even with lots of watering. We lost most of our cucumbers, watermelon, bowl gourd, zucchini (though it was almost dead from pests), pumpkin, and and some other vines. Not much is left.
One thing that did make it was a warted gourd that Greg planted. This morning I came down to these giant blooms. It has just rained and they looked so fresh and pretty. Unfortunately we can't eat warted guards but they make pretty decorations at Halloween.

Another thing that not only withstood the heat but is doing great are the tomatoes. Greg is delighted. I don't really like raw tomatoes but I planted Romas this year in hopes of making some sauce with them (I love cooked tomatoes!). These beauties came off the vine this morning and are coming camping with me. Don't tell them we are eating them on our tacos!

Lastly are the yellow squash or summer squash. This one ended up getting a little too big and may not steam up as nice as a small one would. So far this is the only fruit from this vine but it has a few blooms and may produce something else.

The morning glory was blooming this morning too. Unfortunately its beauty is tainted by the fact that it is such a nasty weed. We also have lots of big carrots and beets which I will photograph soon when we pull them up and eat them.

Have a great weekend!

Scrapbook Update - August Kit

I received my August kit last week in the mail. It was a little late because I had to pick it up at the post office. I was a little disappointed that the color were orange and pink. What am I going to do with this? Then I got a brainstorm. I am using this kit to make a mini-album of my trip to BSF headquarters. I know you are sick of hearing about BSF but I have a workshop next week and I thought taking a mini-book would be a great way to show people the trip and even drum up some more volunteers for next year.

I don't have any photos of the book because I am doing it a little bit backwards. I am using a new-ish photo service called www.scrapbookphotos.com which is a lot like other online photo developers except that they have tons of photo sizes to choose from, artsy borders, even color spot treatments. This mini book is 6 x 6 so all my photos are 2x2 or 2x3 in size. And they are coming to me pre-cropped. I am really excited about this but it took a ton more work than I usually do. I had to sketch out each page in advance to figure out how the photos would all fit and to pick the sizes. I was hoping the photos would arrive before this blog entry but I am still waiting.

I am going camping this weekend with some girlfriends so I probably won't get to scrap again until next week. I will be taking some vacation days and hope to spend one whole day scrapbooking. I may even meet my goal next week since I will only need 7 more layouts to make it to my goal total! How cool is that!

Rafiki Foundation

One of the perks of visiting BSF headquarters is that the Rafiki Foundation also has their headquarters on campus there too, as well as a store.

The Rafiki Foundation is a non-profit that's aim is to:
"help orphaned and vulnerable children in Africa to become godly contributors to their communities and the world"
They do this through specially designed orphanages and girls training centers.

The orphanages are cool. There is a village with a main center building and then small cottages around the perimeter. In each cottage live 10 orphans and one woman who is designated their permanent mother. Siblings are kept together and the cottage does everything together as a "family". They receive food, clothing, medicine, education and some kind of marketable skill training within the little village. I just think it is such a cool concept.

The training centers specifically target girls in developing countries who would not be able to attend school or are too young to find jobs. They receive an education and are taught a skill that results in a product. The products are sold in the US and all proceeds go directly back to the training centers. The photo shows the items I picked up at the Rafiki store.

Carved wooden ark - Malawi
Trees - Tanzania
Soaps - Cape Town
Quilted bag - Nigeria
Earrings- Can't remember

They had so many wonderful things and they were all very inexpensive. It is so nice shopping with the assurance that the products are helping children. Please check out their website and if you are in San Antonio definitely swing by the store. They do have a child sponsorship program too.

Super Nanny Alexis!

While my friend Karen is away on vacation I have been feeding her cats twice a day for the past few days. The only way to get them to hold still for a photo was to feed them. I have been calling them "Fat Buster and Mini Meow". If you know Austin Powers you will get it. The older cat is Buster and he is a little, well how should I put it....big boned. And then there is the new kitten Margarita. They look like twins but Margarita is from totally different stock.

This morning I went to feed them and I poured out their water and went to refill the bowls but there was no water coming from the faucet! I forgot that Karen got a note on Sunday that the water was going to be shut off for a day. I couldn't leave them with no water so the kitties are drinking Evian today. It's all I could find besides Diet Coke and OJ. For one day they can live the high life!

In the evenings I play with them a little.
Mini Meow is easily entertained. Greg came with me over the weekend and found this elastic ball thing to hang from the door. She loves it and it keeps her entertained for a while.

This is the extent of Buster playing. Mostly he flops his big belly out on the coffee table and lets me brush him. He is a real sweetie.

Occasionally I think about getting a cat. I am really allergic but we aren't allowed to have a dog in our building but cats are ok (so unfair I know!). Cat sitting has cured me of the desire. Cleaning out the litter box and dishing up the nasty smelling wet food is a little much for me. Oh and did I mention that Buster vomits if he eats too fast. Yeah, that was fun to clean-up too. I will just settle for visiting them when I hang out with Karen.

Have a good weekend!

Greg is here to pick me up so I have to run. I am hoping to get lots of fun projects done this weekend and will post about them next week. I leave you with a photo collage of my BSF trip that wouldn't post yesterday.

Have a great weekend!

Sorry! BSF trip update.

I have been a REALLY bad blogger. It has been almost a week since I posted. When I started this blog things were really slow at home and work so I had plenty of time to post but lately it has been go, go, go. I will try harder!
We made it home safe and sound from Texas (eventually!). It was a great trip and we especially loved working at BSF headquarters for a couple of days. In the above photo Alice and I are on a tour of the facility and got this photo in the library where the BSF staff meet each morning for their devotional time. It was fun hearing a little more of the story of BSF's founder. The facilities were wonderful and so well kept and run. The volunteer coordination staff couldn't have been more friendly or more accommodating. They made sure that we took lots of breaks and they were constantly feeding us! That may be a Texas thing.

When you volunteer you do whatever they need that day but most of the work is done in the warehouse sorting, packing, weighing, and organizing the materials that are printed in-house. Alice and I spent half our time sorting and organizing packing slips and letters and half our time weighing out Home Training Pages into 100 sheet bundles so they could be shipped off to classes around the world. It was very cool to see the process it takes to get materials to the classes, the materials we enjoy using each week. It is truly an opportunity to see the BIG PICTURE!

We met lots of great people and got to rub elbows with some of the executive staff (or BSF celebrities as I like to call them) and we were kind of like little celebrities too since we were from the NYC class. Everyone wanted to ask us about it. Alice is already organizing a trip for next year (we hope to get into on-campus housing for $10 a day! You can't beat that!) so if you are interested drop me a line and I will forward you on to her.

OOPS!!

I am in San Antonio right now with my friend Alice. We are SUPPOSED to be on a plane right now but we missed our flight!!! Mom, you aren't the only one who has trouble in airports I guess! With the recent problems with air travel we were extra careful to be at the airport 2 hours early sans viscous liquids. Only problem was we thought our flight was at 7pm but in fact it had been at 5pm! We had misread the itinerary. Or rather Alice mis-read it and I was too lazy to check it at all. We make such a great team!!!!!

Anyway, we are staying in a hotel tonight by the airport until our flight first thing in the morning. We had a great time volunteering at BSF headquarters on Thursday and Friday and met so many wonderful and fun people. We ate our way through Texas and it is true, everything is bigger here including the portions. We visited the Alamo and the Riverwalk, Market Square and did lots of shopping. We are looking forward to getting home but are enjoying this evening to take a break and relax. We have been working on some knitting projects and I am currently washing laundry since I was out of clean clothes after today.

I have tons of photos to share soon. Have a wonderful Sunday!

Good-Bye Again!

It is such a beautiful day today. Not too hot, breezy, and low humidity! I love days like this. This is what summer SHOULD be like, for everyone. I wish I had some fun photos to post today but that would mean I have been doing fun things and alas I have not. I have been working pretty late most nights and I have been trying to go to bed at 10pm each night this week so that I can get up earlier and that leaves little time for much else.

I am leaving tonight on a jet plane for Texas with my dear friend and faithful blog reader ALICE (hi Alice!). We are heading to San Antonio for a few days to volunteer at BSF headquarters. I am really looking forward to it and hope that it will really get me excited for class to start in just a few short weeks. I am packed and ready to go. I just have to tie up all loose ends at work.

On a fun note my friend Susan (from Texas!) is here in NYC today and I will get a chance to say a quick hi to her and Lily this afternoon. You can see a photo of her and baby Lily on my last post. It was her baby shower that was featured.

I won't be able to post again until next week so I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Scrapbook Update

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. We enjoyed much cooler weather and I had some time to do a little scrapbooking. I am now only 8 layouts away from meeting my 2006 goal. I can't express how excited I am about that. Space is clearing up in my scrapbook area where boxes of photos used to be and it feels so good. Here are the layouts I did this week. I have been changing the way I scrapbook in that at times along the way I will just glue things down instead of agonizing over them and rearranging for hours. Sometimes it works great and other times I regret doing it but I move ahead anyway. This was one of those times. I started sticking down stickers and putting in brads and then decided I hated the way it looked. But I moved on anyway. I ended up added some paint to this layout (I am now loving paint!) and I think it redeemed it a little but this is still not one of my favorite layouts. I am slowly learning to let go of my perfectionism and just live and learn.
This layout features a baby shower I attended for my friend and recent blog reader, Susan Glassmoyer. I had a ton of photos of her opening each gift and a few not so great crowd shots. So I picked the best of the present shots and cut out individual heads from the group shots. I added the photos from her birth announcement to complete the story. Greg agreed that this layout used the pictures really well considering the limitations. I used some Ghost Letters from Heide Swapp but I painted the back of letters with peach paint to coordinate with the paper. I am loving paint right now. It is such an easy way to add color. I just have to be careful not to go buying a million tubes of it.

This was a quicky of a bachelorette party we had at work (or with work people I should say). Super simple and using KI paper which I have tons of. No real embellishments except letter stickers.

I received notice that my new August kit will be shipping soon. I still have old kit stuff to use so I had better get busy!

Relief

The heat finally broke today and we are enjoying temps in the low 90s and much less humidity. Still pretty darn hot but so much more tolerable. Work was a lot quieter today and I was able to catch up on all my normal work. We have plans this weekend to visit with some friends we haven't seen in ages and will even be taking in a movie IN A THEATER. Something we don't often do. So here are some pictures from our trip. Nothing amazing mind you!
Greg jumped a fence to get this shot on Martha's Vineyard in Edgartown. Such a rebel!

Here I am at American Stonehenge in New Hampshire. That face is the one you get when you say to me "go and climb inside that little cave". Are you joking!?! I was a little overheated and tired by this point in the day so I wasn't amused by Greg's request.

A problem we faced on this trip was that we didn't end up with a single photo with both of us in it. I'm definitly one of those people who doesn't want to stop strangers on the street and beg them to photograph us but there really weren't any of those kinds of opportunities. If you have been following my scrapbooking on this blog you know that I end each album with a page about our anniversary complete with a photo and since our anniversary occurred on this trip I had hoped to get a cute photo of us after 5 years of marriage. So when we got home I forced Greg into a home photo session. I pulled out that piece of black velvet I bought at Christmas and we tried our best at an artsy portrait. It is a little off since we were using a tripod and a timer but I still like it a lot. Happy Anniversary darling!

Have a great weekend everyone!

When it rains.....There is fire!

What? Upon returning from vacation I found out that there was a big problem with one of my multi-million dollar grants at work. So since pulling up in the driveway from a wonderful little vacation with my hubby I have been dealing with the problem. I am known at work for not getting worried but this issue has worried me. Mostly because my boss is away on vacation and I have had to deal with it on my own. It isn't really resolved yet but I feel that I have done all I can do and now I just need to pray that it will work out fine. But in the heat of that problem we had a lab fire yesterday!

I couldn't help but laugh. We were working in the lab (I was actually seeding plates to help out a post-doc, something I haven't done in 2 years) and the fire alarm went off. We were kind of annoyed because not only were we all really busy but it was 110 degrees outside and we didn't really want to stand out there. We assumed that it was a drill or someone pulled the alarm which happens often at this school but usually during finals week! So the girls and I went down and ran off to get some coffee instead of standing around. When we returned to the building we started hearing rumors that the problem had been on the 7th floor. HUH? That is was room 766. HUH? That's my lab! Turns out that in the room next to where we had been seeding plates the temp had gotten so high (it is a growth chamber used for growing plants and has lots of hot lights in it) that the sprinkler head had melted and set off the sprinklers which triggered the alarm and then the spraying water ignited a light socket and caused it to blow. And we were right there and didn't hear or see anything! When we returned to the lab there was about an inch of water on the floor and about 4 inches inside the room so they couldn't open the door. The room is supposed to automatically shut itself off when it gets to hot but apparently there was a glitch in the control panel and it just kept heating and heating and heating. We had about 40 NYU personnel here cleaning and investigating the whole thing and I couldn't help but laugh. When it rains it pours (or starts a fire!).

I had wonderful plans to post this week about my trip and some other stuff I am doing but have been really pre-occupied. Last night I worked till 10pm but after today things should quiet back down. Unless something else in the lab decides to explode!

Welcome Back Cruikshank

I just wanted to let everyone know that I am back safe and sound from our little road trip last weekend. Things kind of blew up at work while I was gone (it's amazing what can go wrong in 3 days time!) so I have been really preoccupied since getting home and checking my email for the first time.

We had a wonderful trip. Here is a quick break down (places we stopped to visit and/or stayed in):

Day 1: Mystic Connecticut, Newport Rhode Island & New Bedford Massachusetts. New Bedford is an old whaling town where Moby Dick was written and featured.

Day 2: Martha's Vineyard

Day 3: Boston & Salem Massachusetts, and American Stonehenge North Salem New Hampshire. We celebrated our anniversary in Concord New Hampshire and had a really nice dinner and some swimming. Perfect evening!

Day 4: Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury New Hampshire & Lowell Massachusetts. The Shaker Village had the BEST brunch I have ever eaten. I would highly recommend a visit just for the food.

We were supposed to stay away 5 days but decided to drive home on Sunday instead of paying to sleep somewhere just to drive home Monday. We rolled in at about 12:30am.

We had a marvelous time but are glad to be home. Unfortunately with the heat index today it is 106-110 degrees and there are tons of heat warnings and I am worried about brown-outs tonight. I just want my one little air conditioner to run so I can sleep. That doesn't seem like too much to ask!

More later!