Around the world

It kind of freaks me out on nights like this. Mum and Dad are in Liverpool. Alison is in Scotland. Andrew is in Tanzania. Carlo is in Tucson. I'm in Arlington, miles away from any of my most loved and all the people that would be on my ICE number list. To be honest, it kinda scares the shit out of me, but I'm hoping that Carlo arrives in Dallas tomorrow early evening and I will finally have some emergency number to contact me that can actually pick me up in an emergency.

I'm just so lucky to be a part of a family that being spread out on multi-continents is a norm!

If Andrew by any chance sees this, kwa bahati nzuri! I can't wait to hear about your adventures when you come home.

Aunt in training....

Happy holidays and apologies for the lack of blogging. Free time has equaled a pathetic laziness and I haven't been up for blogging.

For those few who don't know already, I'm about to be an aunt in 6 months. While I'm frightened as all hell that I'm supposed to be somewhat a responsible adult in 6 months, I'm excited nonetheless. In fact, I've been having some good aunt training in Arlington this past day. Mum and Dad, as well as Andrew, left on Christmas day for the exciting locales of Liverpool (not really exciting) and Tanzania (super exciting) and I have been left in charge of the cats. If my aunty skills are indicative of my cat-sitting skills, baby austin is going to be at the metaphorical four-seasons when it comes and stays with me and Carlo since the damn cats had a delicious dinner of lump crab meat! That is what happens when I'm alone (plus the 2 bottles of nice wine! :)

Even though I haven't fully wrangled my head around the thought of becoming an aunt, I've already started looking for baby shit today! I have no idea of the gender of the baby, but I was trolling Baby Gap like it was nobody's business today. This baby better get used to a crazy aunt from Austin!

I hope everyone's holiday was full of happiness and love. I know mine was. I got to celebrate twice. With my family on the 24th and with the Bergmann's so graciously on the 25th. Now I'm drunk and have watched two bad movies on the 26th and have looked over the many cats and all of their fights knowing, "Shit, I'm about to become an aunt and need to take some responsibility in my life." Cats one step, baby the next....I can't wait....

One down, one more to go

I forgot to post on Tuesday that I gained 0.8 lbs this week. I'm really shocked that I didn't gain more because I totally went on an eating binge to "reward" myself for finishing my thesis and graduating.

I hate having to watch what I eat, since the stuff I really like to eat just makes me fat. I wish I was one of those people who craved fruit and healthy shit. I'm almost 12 months into this "dieting" phase and I still find it hard to eat right and to think I will have to do this for the rest of my life! Carlo had a little diet meltdown tonight because we are once again eating fish. He said that he is so sick of eating fish and that we have probably cooked fish almost 100 times this year. In an effort to make him feel better and so we wouldn't hit the Whole Foods prepared aisle, I told him I would make him a baked potato loaded with 2% cheese, fat free sour cream, and fake butter. It is sad that this is considered a treat now!

I have one more project to finish and turn in tomorrow and then I'm down with my master’s degree! Even though I should be excited and want to turn in this paper, I cannot get myself motivated at all. I hope that waking up early tomorrow morning will force me to crank it out before I go to work at the Blanton. I just want to be done and have my life back.

Doh!!!

I feel like an asshole right now. I sent a bitchy email to the University Coop this morning regarding them giving me the wrong regalia for graduation. BUT it turns out I was wearing the right hood and tassle. White doesn't mean a Liberal Arts masters like I thought. Instead, a white hood means I got a Masters of Art and all students that got a MA wore white. Pink is for a Masters of Music.

Master of the Universe

It has been a busy weekend and I'm only getting round to blogging now, but Saturday was graduation and I officially became a Master of the Arts, although I prefer the title of Master of the Universe. The ceremony was long since it included all of the students graduating with a masters and PhD. Special thanks to Carlo, Mum, Dad & Andrew for waiting through the 2-hour ceremony even though I was one of the first students to walk across the stage.

Here is a photo of me in all my regalia although like my undergraduate graduation, the stupid Coop gave me the wrong colour hood. I'm wearing white for Liberal Arts and I should be wearing pink for Fine Arts. Oh well, I will just have to do my PhD so I can wear the right colours.

Carlo and me

Andrew, Dad, me and Mum

Thanks to everyone for all the support you have given me over the past 3.5 years to help make this day possible, especially Carlo, Mum, Dad and Andrew!!

The whole graduation weekend was fun with far too much food and wine. On Friday night, we celebrated graduation with dinner at Fino.

Carlo and Me

Mum and Dad

On Saturday after graduation, we went to Enoteca Vespaio for a delicious lunch and Giles Coren, the food critic for Gordon Ramsay's F Word series sat down next to us. It was kind of exciting considering Carlo and I are watching the show right now and that he was in Austin and sat down to probably the only two people in the city who would recognize him. When we got up to leave, Carlo stopped by his table and told him that he should order the squirrel, a play on the episode when Giles ate squirrel and tried to get others in England to start eating it. Giles looked completely shocked and couldn't say anything it first. He said he had no idea the show was on in the US, although he did say that Carlo had made his day.

Saturday night was the Trail of Lights 5K in Zilker Park, which was lots of fun. Carlo and I ran the race in 33:33 minutes, a significant improvement over my time last year which was 42 minutes! Plus, this time was Carlo's best ever 5K time!!!! We got there early and took lots of photos of us under the Zilker Christmas tree.

The fam and Carlo

Dad and Andrew

Mum and Dad

All in all it was a great weekend.

Thesis Turned In? Check!

My thesis is officially turned in!!! I turned it in an hour or so ago and I didn't realize that a degree evaluator would have to look through it and make sure it was perfect (or just looked perfect per UT's regulations). It was an anxious 5 minutes or so, but he said it passed.

Turning it in was pretty anticlimatic. At least the auditor guy said "Congratulations" a few times since I've heard from other friends that they just get grunts of approval. It also didn't help that my thesis--the equivalent of 3.5 years of school, thousands and thousands of dollars of education loans, countless pints of tears, anxiety attacks, hundreds of dollars of therapy, far too many sleepless nights, and no social life for the past year--looks like this:

Granted nothing could ever encapsulate the experience of the past 3.5 years, the mix of both the best and worst times of my life in recent memory, but I just wanted some epic finish to a long long journey. The journey by far still isn't over since I plan on working on my thesis topic for my PhD, so there at least another 6 or 7 years left to plan that epic finish.

Bye Bye Turkey Day Lard and WW

I'm officially no longer a WW member. For the past few months, I had only been going to WW to weigh in and I never attended the meeting. I decided that it was stupid to spend $40 a month to use someone else's scale when I have a perfectly good one at home. Plus with graduating and finding a new job next year, I didn't know whether I would ever start attending meetings again. It also gets annoying that the same women bitch each week about how hard it is to lose weight and even though they are there every week, they certainly haven't lost any weight--or at least any amount that is noticable.

I weighed in at home this morning and was down to 165.6 with a loss of 3.6 lbs. From past comparisons between what my scale at home said and the WW one said, I think my scale is fairly on target with the WW scale so I think this loss is a bit inflated since I weighed in with no clothes on this morning when I was always clothed at WW (even if it was the lightest clothing I could find!). This week is just a new starting point and I will be able to really determine how much weight I'm losing or not losing next week.