Guess where I am?
I am sitting in a big fluffy hotel bed drinking coffee and waiting for room service breakfast. Really. Dan and I are in beautiful Ruidoso New Mexico for the weekend, celebrating our third anniversary a little early. It's actually on April 19th, but what with all the moving to be done in the next few weeks, we'll probably celebrate the actual day by ordering some pizza to eat while we continue to pack boxes.
Ruidoso is a beautiful little ski town, so we'll post some photos when we get back.
Have a good weekend!

This weekend was wonderful. We are really not big activity people, so while Ruidoso is having a slow tourism year because of a lack of snow, and therefore, a lack of ski tourists, we were not there for the skiing, but more for the wandering around in weird little shops and eating. Some day I'll tell you some stories about why I don't go for high-risk sports. (Or low-risk sports for that matter.) But for now, photos from our trip.

Dan getting ready to dig into the room service breakfast I mentioned in my earlier post. It was excellent.

Me on the balcony of our hotel room overlooking Mescalero Lake at the Inn of the Mountain Gods.

Dan goofing off in front of the same magnificent view.

In Ruidoso, we went into this candy store that had ... well, lots of candy. Dan got strawberry ice cream and I bought two pecan turtles. Mmmmm.

The following two photos were taken in front of a store that for some reason, had lots of statues. I don't really know what they sold, because we didn't go in, having no need for a giant-sized statue of a chicken, but we did take some photos. Here is Dan with a baby dinosaur.

Me and two knights in shining armor. One inexplicably shorter than the other.

There are lots of other photos, but I'm tired and I need to go to sleep so that the Daylight Savings Time wallop doesn't render me completely useless tomorrow. Have a good brand new week. Thank you for the kind wishes for our early anniversary, and I'll post more photos soon.

On Wednesday nights, Dan and I teach a class of 3-6 year old kids at our church in a sort of Sunday School class environment while their parents are in a Bible study. We've been doing this for about three years, and I regret that I have not been writing down some of the hilarious things these kids said over that time. But, better late than never.

Tonight, I stopped in the lesson I was teaching about brothers and sisters to ask a question. The Bible story was about when God told Moses to go talk to Pharoah about letting the Israelites leave Egypt. When Moses told God that he didn't want to go, God told him that since Moses' brother Aaron was a good speaker, Aaron would go with Moses to talk to Pharoah. After all this setup, the kid-friendly lesson I was delivering was about how our brothers and sisters can help us and we can help them. Towards the end, I asked the kids what kind of things they thought they could do to help their brothers and sisters this week.

The child next to me was a newcomer to our class, an adorable little blonde-haired blue eyed boy. He raised his hand, so I called on him to answer the question, expecting to hear something like "You could help them make up their bed," or "You could share your toys."

Instead, the little boy paused a moment, looked at me hard and said "You're pretty big."

No further comment was offered, so I just agreed that yes, I am pretty big, and asked the question again. But then I tried not to laugh, because seriously, where does that kind of comment come from? I doubt the kid was calling me fat, but I would love to see some kind of flow chart documenting what question he thought he was answering with that pronouncement.

Thus ends tonight's installment of "Things Our Church Kids Said." If you want, I'll tell you another one next week.

Greetings.
I write to you from my bed, where I am propped up waiting for the Advil to kick in and make me once again able to move without agony after a weekend of packing boxes. You would think that after the first round of this, I would figure out some kind of technique that does not involve quite so much bending and lifting, but alas, I do not learn from my stupid, stupid mistakes, and so I will be hobbling to work tomorrow.
I am mostly writing to ask for your patience in the next few weeks, as blog entries will probably be few and far between. I'm not saying that I won't post at all, just that things are going to be a little crazy for a while. Here's what I mean: In the next 21 days, I will get on a plane and go out of town for four days, Dan and I will celebrate our official three-year wedding anniversary, Dan and I will close on our house, Dan will get on a plane and go out of town for five days, I will start moving carloads of small things into the house at night after work while he's gone, and the day after he gets back, a bunch of very nice people from our church will come and help us move all the furniture into our brand new house. Then, we will begin the process of unpacking the boxes and trying to decipher the incoherent code words I have scrawled on the side of the aforementioned boxes in a futile effort to make the process simpler. All of this will be accomplished while we hold down full-time jobs! If there were cameras, this would make a great reality show. Who will crack first under pressure? Who will get packing-taped to the wall by an irritable spouse? Who will show up to work with Sharpie marks on their face? And who will survive to win the big prize: A three-bedroom, two-bath house on the West Side. Find out on tonight's installment of "First Time Homeowners!"
But seriously, if you feel alone and abandoned in this space in the coming weeks, hang on, because we really will be back.

I know I was just saying that I'm not going to be posting very much these days, but I am fickle and even though I should be packing boxes tonight, I don't want to. There you have it
So instead , here are more photos from our trip. Since we were in the southern part of the state, we swung by Alamogordo, New Mexico, where Dan lived when he was a little boy. His dad was stationed at Holloman Air Force Base twice, if I'm not mistaken. Using Goosle maps and Dan's sense of direction, we actually managed to find his old house on Shadow Mountain Drive.

A few years ago, a college friend of mine drove with me to Yazoo City, Mississippi, where we drove to my childhood home on East 16th Street. It was a weird experience seeing it again after years, and realizing that the street really isn't that big, and the house isn't either, and my world was generally a lot smallere than I thought it was at the time, age eight. Dan and I had a good conversation about the Childhood Home effect, a kind of surreal feeling that if you just turn around fast enough, you might see your childhood self jumping over a fence or coming home from school.
But the main point is that now Dan will tell you why this house is known in Wachdorf family lore as The Scorpion House.

"When we lived in Alamogordo our house had a nastry scorpion infestation. Scorpions would show up in the mornings in various corners of the house, usually above one of my sisters' beds. I can't count the number of times we had exterminators come and spray the attic to no avail. The scorpion infestation continued. It got to a point were we would spray the scorpions and place the deads ones in the guest shower, which we rarely used. This worked well untill we had an out of town guest come and we forgot to clean out the shower. Needless to say you could hear the screams from quite a distance."

Hahaha! What's your favorite Childhood House story?

Today I was on a shuttle bus from the airport to the parking lot where I had left my car over the weekend. Since Easter Sunday is not a big travel day, I was the only one on the shuttle at the moment, so I had a lot of time to think about the experience of shuttle-riding. As I was doing so, I noticed that a Bach concerto was playing over the sound system in the shuttle instead of the rap music/country music/ bad pop music station you're usually treated to.
Then I noticed that over the luggage rack there is a dry erase board that usually says "Your driver is:" and then the name of the driver. But today, the sign was adjusted to read "You are listening to: BACH!"

It was so random and funny that I tipped that guy extra just for making a valiant effort to inflict some culture on the masses, even if he is driving a shuttle. I think I'm going to start doing something similar, like reading great literature out loud while I walk from my office to my parking garage on the off-chance that someone might enjoy it and be moved to go out and read a book. In that case, though, I suppose I would have to tape a sign on my shirt saying "You are listening to: FLANNERY O' CONNOR."

It was funny, and it made me laugh, but it also made me think. If you stand around in our culture for more than ten minute, it's clear that people want tacky reality TV, mediocre fiction and talentless music, and from a commercial perspective, you gotta give 'em what they want. It's just capitalism, and I don't have a beef with that. But every once in a while, shouldn't someone try to give 'em a little bit of what they need, too? I think so. And now I'm not alone. The shuttle driver and I will start a revolution. I'll let you know how it goes. Or call me up if you want to join.
I'll let you pick your own book to read and everything.

Happy third anniversary, Dan. I love you so much and I'm so glad that you are my husband.

Since we closed on the house on Thursday (Woo-hoo!) we have been to Lowe's and Home Depot about 6 times, and I am thinking we should just go ahead and sign up for a Lowe's credit card, because apparently, we're going to be there a lot. Like every day for the next six months.
But it's all for a good cause .... painting the inside of our house all the colors that we want. After living in dorm rooms with white walls and then post-college apartments with more white walls for about the last eight years, my need to paint a wall a color ... any color ... is approaching some kind of obsessive level, so the prospect of a whole house with blank, white walls just crying out for color makes me giddy.
We got started this weekend, almost the minute we were given keys to the place, testing colors on the wall. We didn't end up liking the one I'm using here, but look at the glee on my face.

I love this house, and every time I walk into it, I just know how happy we're going to be there. This house probably represents the next eight to ten years of our life together, and that will make you think about the future a lot. Sometimes that freaks me out, but in this case, it all seems really good.
There's a yard with two beautiful trees and flower beds, and I think about all the things I want to grow.

Look, there's even a rose bush in the front yard. I'm going to read all about roses, and maybe I'll plant some more.

There is an office that we're going to paint green, and I'm going to put all my bookshelves there, and have a big fluffy chair for reading. And of course, there are a couple of extra bedrooms that will one day be rooms for our kids. For now, they make great guest rooms, so if anyone wants to come and visit, feel free. You can choose your room. But we might make you paint a wall to earn your keep.

Here is the free advice I am dispensing for the day.
Ladies: No matter how enthralled you are with the new sandals you bought for the summer, no matter how comfortable you think they are, do not succumb to your desire to wear them for the first time on a day when you know for a fact that you must make a professional visit to Local University With Completely Inadequate Parking, where you will be forced to park about 6 miles away from where you need to go. You will, of course, be late, and will be forced to speed walk in an extremely unprofessional manner across campus, and by the time you get to the third floor of that building, you will have blisters on your feet that will make you want to walk barefoot back to your car after the meeting rather than suffer through that walk again. It will also not look good when you go back to your office and use up all the Band-Aids in the first aid kit by taping them all to your feet.
Simple, straightforward advice. That's what we're all about here.
Now, does anyone have any tips for blister treatment? I'm considering wearing bedroom slippers to work tomorrow.