My, how the time flies

And this time I'm not talking about how long it's been since I last posted. This month marks 10 years since Gary and I have been married (legally - we had the ceremony for family and friends in August), and for that matter, 10 years since he's been in the country. Now, what does one say upon 10 years of marriage? It was the best of times; it was the worst of times? ;-) Fortunately, many more bests than worsts! Beyond that, life keeps trucking along. Rowan finished up level 2 swim lessons but level 3 was the same time as our Girl Scout meetings, so she switched over to gymnastics at the same place. She's just as happy either way, so, yay. Maybe one of these days I'll go watch. (The problem with that is her lessons are the night before the Girl Scout meetings when I'm usually finishing up some crazy project or another to prepare.) I've given myself a challenge to photograph all of the church steeples in Worcester. Worcester has a LOT of churches (and they don't all have steeples, which led to my first dilemma - to photograph non steepled churches or not). I have no idea what inspired (insteepled?) this, but this is my quest. So last weekend we set out on stage one of the adventure; it was a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon. We ended the day with a picnic dinner at Elm Park. I remember always wanting to have a picnic there, but my mother wasn't a big fan of picnics. Now that I am the one having to pack everything, I can see why! But it was a nice diversion. Anyhow, I put the pictures on Flickr if you're interested in my "Steeple Chase Worcester" project (there are also some other photos if you're more interested in the Wellers themselves). Speaking of Elm Park, this cracks me up, the city has hired a Border Collie to patrol the park and chase away Canadian (or Canada, if you prefer for some odd reason) Geese. The city can't afford to keep all of its schools open, but we can hire a dog. Part of the concern with the geese is that they leave goose poop everywhere (here I go with the parentheses again, but I was even more cracked up about this whole thing to see the local paper writing about poop, in those terms. The scoop on poop, no less. Ah, high fallutin journalism isn't just limited to the Columbia News Wire apparently!). Aaaanyhow, back from the parentheses... so part of the reason they hired this dog was to eliminate the goose eliminations. So are they going to hire some human to go around cleaning up after the dog?? I do hope the dog has his papers, we know there's a big fuss about hiring undocumented workers and would hate to see a scandal. The other great irony here is that Worcester has an ordinance banning dogs from city parks. Apparently working dogs are allowed. Hopefully they will not make similar allowances for working girls. And back to more important matters - ME! I had my 3 year review at work this week, it amazes me it's been 3 years, but it also amazes me it's only been 3 years. That makes sense in my head, dammit! It was a positive review, so all's good there. Our big annual event is coming up, so things have moved to a slightly frenzied pace to prepare, plus all of the other daily frenzied stuff. We have a speaker coming who is drawing a good deal of attention and whom I'm very excited to hear speak, which I'm trying to remind myself as the next few weeks go by. And.... look what Rowan can *finally* do!! She's so excited, and we're so excited for her (and if you want some funny pictures, ask me to send the ones where you can really see Gary barelling after her on foot to make sure she doesn't fall - he is such a protective bear about his little cub, the boys are in trouble when she starts dating. When she's 30 if he has his way).