Just a quick note: We've moved into our new house this weekend and should have Internet access by the end of today. Once we do, pictures will follow. That is, if we can locate the camera with which we took the pictures in the midst of the chaotic jungle of boxes that is our habitat for now.
Keep checking back.

In lieu of pictures, which in spite of our new Internet connection, still can't be downloaded for various technology-related reasons, I will tell you a funny story.
Tonight, Dan and I had a lawn care related conversation. It did not go very well. When we moved into the house, I noticed that the grass was looking kind of crunchy, so we've been running the sprinklers religously. However, I'm not a very patient person, so after three whole days of this, I was irritated that we still do not have lush, green grass. Therefore, I was telling Dan that he should get out and turn on the sprinklers again. But also, I added, I think we should aerate the yard. For those of you who don't know, aerating is this odd yard-related procedure where you basically dig up all these little plugs of dirt and grass when it is too packed down to grow grass. It loosens up the soil, or so I have been informed in the last half hour. But at the time, I was just throwing it out there because I've heard people talk about aerating the yard, but based on no real knowledge.

Me: "I think the yard is sick."
Dan: "No it's not. It just needs water. It's getting better."
Me: "No, it's not better. I think we need to aerate it."
Dan: "What do you think that means?"
Haley: "Probably that it puts air in the dirt?"
Dan: "Hahahahahaha." (Sucks in some breath) "Ahhhhhahahahahaha!"

So anyway, we will continue to run the sprinklers. But if it doesn't work soon, I'm going to go get an oxygen tank for the grass.

Today is my mom and dad's 33rd wedding anniversary. Thirty-three years of marriage is quite an accomplishment, and I feel blessed to have parents who have loved each other for so long and who put so much love and work inito their marriage and their children. And trust me, we were a lot of work.
We love you, mom and dad. Happy anniversary.

For folks who want an update on how Aaron is doing, check out this story that ran in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. It must have been a follow-up to when they wrote about Aaron being hurt. Anyway, enjoy.

I am currently having the horrifying experience of watching 65 mile an hour winds rip down the big tree in our backyard. (!) It hasn't fallen yet, but it's roots are coming up, it's leaning badly, and I'm pretty sure it's going to fall or, if it doesn't fall, die anyway from the root damage. I warned the neighbors to get their pets in, and if we're lucky it will fall in our yards and not on anyone's house. But ... it's my tree!

I'll keep you posted. And if it falls, I will try not to cry. But I might have to.

Update: So the wind has died down a bit and the tree still stands. But its roots are kind of tilted up on one side, and I think it might still fall down or die. All in all, though, I'm glad it didn't crash down in the wind. I'm pretty sure it would have been freaky to watch, and if it had fallen on the house, I don't know what I would have done, since Dan is out of town and I'm not exactly experienced at tree removal. Ah, homeownership!

Anyone care to guess how much longer I can put off posting anything of real substance on this blog? Not too much longer, because I have some photos of a friend's new baby to put up soon and those are way cooler than anything else I've got waiting! But this is not the post of substance. This is just a post to show you a photo that noted photojournalist Eric Kluth, a good friend of ours and the former photographer for my former newspaper in Clovis, New Mexico, took when he was our houseguest this weekend. Notice that Dan is wearing his sunglasses. I cannot tell you how many Christmas card-worthy pictures in the last year have been disqualified because Dan was wearing his sunglasses.

Stay tuned.

OK, here are two house pictures!
This is our living room. We are waiting on the installation date for some blinds we've ordered, but aside from that, this is what we've got, complete with the paint job that Dan heroically tackled alone while I unpacked boxes over the last couple of weekends.

And this is a shot of our as-yet-unpainted kitchen. Or depending on how you look at it, a Splenda commercial.

More pictures! Aside from our kitchen, we have now painted just about everything we intend to paint for the moment. So here are the results. This is our red wall. Notice that we're not totally sure where we're going to put the desk, as it has appeared in two photos now in two completely different locations. The main issue is that frankly, our couch and coffee table pretty much make up our entire furniture collection, so certain areas are bare. But they're bare and painted!
It should be noted that we probably tried five different colors of red paint before we found something between "grape juice" and "blood spatter." Red is a tricky color.

Now we have a shot of the color in our office. I deeply love this color, so if you don't, then lie.

And last but not least, our bedroom. We chose this color that was called "Pear," which looked like a slightly yellow-tinged off-white, and which did not look NEARLY this yellow when we tested it. At first, we were kind of horrified by the brightness. But while this was certainly not the color we intended, it looks good, and it's a color I would probably have never had the guts to intentionally put on a wall. So now the theme song for this room is "Yellow" by Coldplay.

The Spurs just lost to Dallas in overtime and are out of the series. It's not a good night in the Wachdorf house. But it was nice to see Gregg Popovich and Avery Johnson hug each other and look really sincere about it at the end of a bitter seven-game series that came down to a handful of points each game. That's what I like about the Spurs, and therefore former Spur Johnson - they are nice boys, gentleman, even when they lose. So there's part of me that supposes it's OK that we lost, since we lost to such a nice coach.

But then I think about Mark Cuban and it just makes me mad all over again.

Better luck to your team, readers. Perhaps I'll consider rooting for you now that the real best team in the world is out of the running.

Recently, I took the Myers-Briggs personality test for the first time in a number of years. (At least, I took an online version ... I seem to remember the real one being more in-depth.) Personality tests are something that you seem to be called upon to do a lot when you're in college, but that seems kind of silly to me now that I've been out of college for five years and realize how much I was still kind of trying to find my way around my own personality back then.

For instance, on the Myers-Briggs test, the first letter of your four-letter personality profile is either "E" for extrovert or "I" for introvert. Back in college, I used to test right on the line between the two. Now, I consistently test out as an introvert, something I used to doubt but am now convinced is accurate.

Perhaps that is why I so enjoyed this article, "Caring for Your Introvert" that talks about some of the misconceptions related to introverted people and how to deal with them. It made me laugh, because as an Extrovert married to an Introvert, I think Dan is competely mystified sometimes by my need to just ... be ...alone. But bless his heart, he tries to understand me, and if you are an introvert, or have an introvert in your life, you should read this. It's just about the best thing I've read on the subject.

And if you want to read something really funny, check out the descriptions of my personality type, the INFJ (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judging) and Dan's ESTP (Extraverted, Sensing, Thinking, Perceiving). Notice how none of those letters are the same? It must be true what they say about opposites attracting.

If you want to take the test, go here.

About ten years ago, our family lived on a street called Country Lane. We had a few neighbors, even on a street with such a remote-sounding name, and one of them was the Twedt family. Kristen Twedt writes a column for the Hattiesburg American newspaper, and had I realized that those columns were available online, I would have linked to them a long time ago. However, she's given me a perfect opportunity to do so by including our family in her Memorial Day column. To read it, click here.

And for more of her columns, click here
Happy Memorial Day.

I got new glasses this week for the first time in five or six years. I usually wear contacts, and I haven't bothered to replace my glasses as my prescription has changed over the years because I never needed them enough to make it worth the money. But this year's unusually dry and windy weather has made it really uncomfortable to wear contacts somedays, so I broke down and bought new ones, since I'm probably legally blind in my old pair. Dan is a brave man for spending about two hours with me trying on pair after pair of glasses until I found these. They're MUCH bolder than my old pair of glasses, but that was kind of what I was going for. I figure, if you're going to wear glasses, you should at least wear some cool glasses. I'm shooting for a look that's more Lisa Loeb than Buddy Holly, but let me know if I'm succeeding. There's a 30-day return policy on these.