Updates.

Yesterday was our eleven monthiversary!

So what's been going on in the past month? I can't believe my last post was all the way back at Easter - that seems like forever ago.

Well first up, Florida! I can't believe I haven't posted about that yet... what a slacker. We had an awesome mini-vacay that was semi-sponsored by work because James had to go to Orlando for an award. It was a great time. I think I'll dedicate a whole post to that, though, because I don't want to forget the details but I also don't want to make this post enormously long.

Last month, we spent a long time looking for a reputable dog breeder in New England. I did a lot of research, we decided on a breed - Havanese - and even went as far as to email back and forth with a breeder for a bit. And I was ridiculously, over-the-moon excited at the thought of owning a puppy. But something didn't feel right - it was the timing, really. We have a lot of trips planned for the next couple of years, and while a bunch of them are short weekend jaunts, they wouldn't neccessarily be easy to bring a dog along, and we couldn't leave a puppy home along for more than a few hours (depending on the age), so we'd be putting the puppy in a kennel a lot more than I felt comfortable with. There was a lot of back and forth, where I'd say "That's it! We're not getting a dog yet!" and then I'd be back to searching for a breeder the next day. Then, suddenly, a few weeks ago, we decided once and for all: no puppy. Not yet. It just wouldn't be fair to the pooch to do all this travelling, and there's no way we'd give up on those trips - we want to see a lot before we get into the baby stage.

So we decided that instead of a puppy, we'd get a bunny: unlike a dog, a rabbit could be left over the weekend with plenty of food and water and be just fine. And we already get our neighbors to look in on Lucy and Winston when we go on longer trips; asking them to look after one more low-maintenance animal shouldn't be too big of a deal. It was a pretty sudden and possibly not extremely well-thought-out idea; we decided on a Thursday I think, went looking at a local pet store that evening, then on Friday drove over to Nashua to another pet store, where we bought our bunny.

And here he is! Isn't he the cutest?

We named him Butter Bean. We've been socializing him a lot, spending lots of time with him and petting him - but also giving him space, not forcing ourselves on him either - and he's really warmed up to us. We don't let him roam freely (yet) because of the cat (who is mostly afraid of him), but when we have him out on the couch he'll hop around and then jump into our lap for a snuggle. He's pretty good!

James and I are on a health kick lately. We've always been pretty healthy about food, eating lots of veggies and avoiding fast food and junk, but we're really making an effort to be really good about it now. For breakfast, we have a hot cereal from Bob's Red Mill - 7 grain or 10 grain cereals or something. It's just the grains ground up, no sugar, no anything else. We cut out soda and snacking and an indulgence that was rare to start with but then became an everyday thing: potato chips at lunch. Sea salt and vinegar kettle chips, to be exact. They're so good but we kind of got addicted to them, and I think that's why we saw our weight creeping up. Sometimes it's really hard to see the pile of chips bags in the cafeteria and not buy one! And when the work day is stressful, I used to get a candybar in the afternoon, so I had to cut that out. Which is hard because work is still stressful! But we weigh ourselves every morning and record it on a paper, and it's worth it to skip the chocolate if I can get that number to keep going down. We're not going crazy about it though, we still have dessert after dinner - just a less of it. I'm baking a lot less, at least temporarily until we reach our goal weights. We both want to drop 20-ish pounds to reach what the internet tells us is our ideal weights. As of this morning, I've lost about 5 pounds! We're both wearing jeans today that had been hanging in our closet for a long time because we couldn't fit into them - that feels pretty great. Our goal is to be in good shape for our trip to Hawaii in September. An added bonus is that I'm feeling more trim and fit for my 5th year reunion at Lafayette.

We're also being more active. We're using our elliptical on a regular basis, and we bought a book about hikes in Massachusetts. We did one the weekend before last (James hurt his neck last week so we took it easy last weekend), and it was pretty rigorous, it took about two and a half hours and it was wonderful to get out into nature. The guide book directs us turn by turn, which is good because the path we took wasn't very well marked! The locations of the hikes aren't obvious either, like state park hiking trails: this was some obscure reservation that we never would have known about without that book. The weather's supposed to be great this weekend, so we're planning on doing another hike. I also want to get us started on a couch-to-5K program, and get a Wii workout game from Jillian Michaels, to keep things from getting boring. I think Jillian would kick our butts, which I'd really like.

I've been doing a lot of research lately for our Hawaii trip. We decided on going for two weeks in September, and we bought three Lonely Planet guidebooks that I've been poring over - one for Hawaii's Big Island, one for Kauai, and one for Oahu. It's really exciting to read about all the things we could see, and to start planning out our itinerary, although it's going to be hard to have to wait until September to actually do it!

Other adventures coming up:

My 5th year reunion at Lafayette is the first weekend in June. My sister's flying in from Norway because it's also her 10 year reunion, and my parents are coming up even though it's an off-year for my dad, so we'll have a mini family reunion. I can't wait.

We had been planning on going up to Canada this summer, but we realized that it would be more prudent to wait on that and save our pennies for Hawaii. Since we had reserved two days of vacation time for Canada, we decided to tack those on to the 4th of July weekend (we get the 5th off as a paid holiday), so we'll be going down to Jersey to spend a nice long weekend with my parents.

Two weeks later, we'll be meeting my parents in southern Mass to go camping at Wells State Park and visit Sturbridge Village. It'll only be a three-day weekend, but we'll use mod time to take Friday off so we won't have to dip into our vacation time.