well, that and my thesis work....

So a while back (I’m talking, like, September) Jon and I picked our wedding location. Instantly, Jon wanted to write about it in this blog, being the good communicator that he is. I, on the other hand, wanted to draw out the suspense for people reading the blog, and make the announcement all flashy. To be honest with you, dear reader, I was in semi-audition for my once favorite blog, weddingbee.com. At this site a group of bloggers talks through their wedding process; from choosing linens and centerpieces to the details of their relationship. This community seemed to be full of strong females (and some times males!) wanting a place to talk about weddings with other wedding-obsessed brides and grooms. Here was my chance to finally talk about my wedding, at length, and not have people roll their eyes, or get bored! Sure, it’s frivolous and a bit shallow to get all excited about one day, but the day has so much meaning and worth, why not celebrate it, and put some effort into projects that make that day a little more personal and special?

A potential project I am considering...
courtesy of oncewed.com

Around the same time as my last post, however, I found out that the woman who had started the site, who calls herself “Mrs. Bee” was selling the website. To eharmony.com. A long, long discussion ensued online. Accusations were thrown about not being fair to the GBLT community, insults were had, and lets just say, it was a real discussion about serious issues. A lot of the current and past bloggers left the community. The result? I was really turned off by a large majority of people in the community, and started reading other blogs and entertaining other ideas. And kinda turned my back on this one.

Bummer. So I apologize; I’m the reason the blog got held up. But no more! Now that wedding STD’s are flying around, its time to begin again! I have the added joy of knowing that a few of you may be friends and family that were directed here by our website. From now on, I promise to try and give you, the reader, better insight into Jon and I and the life we lead, in addition to the gigantic, awesome party we are planning for August. That way if you are trying to catch up on either front before you see us again, it will be worth your while to read this blog. I’ll start by trying to wrap up my discussion of the other potential wedding sites we visited, staring tomorrow :-)

Lets be buddies again, yes?

Ottawa and More!

So much news!

We’ll have to take a break from explaining ourselves and what we do to explain where we have been for the past couple of weeks.First off, we went to visit my great-aunt, who is doing a magnificent job battling cancer. Spending a weekend with her was not enough, and we may try and visit her for Thanksgiving.

When we got back we had to hit the ground running. The annual American Fisheries Society conference started the subsequent week and Jon and I had to kick butt to get our presentations together. About mid week, I got good news; I was the recipient of the AIFRB travel award! It certainly made the work I had to do a lot easier to swallow ;-)

Me accepting my award at the conference

The next 8 days were a blur. They started with an eleven hour drive to Ottawa for the conference. Then we rubbed elbows with all sorts of interesting fisheries people, listened to some great talks, explored Ottawa, and spent buku-bucks on liquor at night! If anyone is thinking about visiting Ottawa soon, be aware that things cost a good deal more up there.

Jon takes on all of AFS...

he probably could have eaten half of 'em

Around the time we were preparing for the 11 hour trip back home I got a message from a venue Jon and I had visited and become smitten with. Another couple wanted our date and location! I immediately went into research mode, trying to figure out how many places could visit before the venue decision deadline (which was only a few days away!). Armed with my list, we made our way back to the US….

A sneak peak...

More to come on the venue search!

Pretty girls; awesome sunset!

We had one of those days of work that leaves you feeling, well, unsatisfied. So we came home, changed and took the dog for a job. When we got to the beach we looked out to a flat bay and said to each other: "why aren't we out on the boat?" So we went out and things just kept getting crazier.Buzzards Bay is known more for its afternoon chop then afternoon calm. So we were fairly excited to head out on near-glass. The air was cool, the breeze mellow, and the light perfect.
We headed out of the harbor into the bay and turned up towards Marion. We really didn't have anything much on our minds and I simply set a course, pegged the throttle, watched Talia's hair flowing in the breeze, the dog shivering and uncomfortable, it was great.

After awhile we decided to head back, and Talia wanted to drive, so I gave her the helm. She is really good with a boat but still a bit unfamiliar with the upper bay. As we headed down we spotted all of the navigational markers, discussed the rules of the road, and simply enjoyed the sunset. I tired to take some photos of Talia at the Helm but none of them came out so well (between the low light and rocking boat).

Just as we crossed back into Mattapoisett harbor things got crazy. The colors spectrum cascaded from orange to deep blue.
Then just as we pulled up to the mooring it really started to peak!
I was exceptionally happy to be out with my girls!
Talia and I hope to have the venue figured out soon. We should have a great post on the venue search, we saw some awesome place in New Hampshire!

ps. and then she made pie!

Most Important of All

Before a couple gets married, they ought to have a good idea that they can work through issues and problems together. It is SO easy to get wrapped up in the fun and festivities of planning a wedding and ignore the issues and problems. You can’t forget what getting married really means: you are going to spend the rest of your lives together! Therefore last night Jon and I went to a relationship counselor, because all this wedding talk has reminded us that we want to get along better so that “the rest of our lives” together can be better. (Photo Credit: Michelle Bachman)

The counselor we were going to see was a male, and so therefore I was expecting to spend an hour with Dr. Frasier Crane, of “Cheers” and “Frasier” fame.

Frasier is the one in the middle (Wikipedia.com)

The entire ride to his office I kept thinking that no matter what he looked like, he was going to remind me of Frasier; be he bald, tall, short, round, skinny... I thought up some pretty hilarious fake older men on that ride. Ahh, the things the brain does when you are a bit nervous.

As it turns out, the second we started talking all TV and movie thoughts left my head. This guy was going to help us work through communication problems and underlying issues in our relationship. I knew I liked him when he mentioned that often, one or the other partner will keep pursuing an issue and the other will put up a wall (that would be my forte), so the issue often goes unresolved. That issue doesn’t go away, however.

He told us to imagine that our brains are like a doll houses, and every time an issue gets dropped it gets shoved into one of the little rooms in our head. There may be several rooms, but eventually, if you have so many issues locked away, at some point there won’t be an open room to shove the issue in. And then it will blow up, in your face, hard.

His goal, as he explained it, was to help us open those rooms, and resolve the issues in a safe environment. It will need to be us doing the work, he can’t solve the problems for us. But he can give us better ways to talk about them and work through them. Has anyone else been to a therapist and found them helpful at unlocking doors or doing something else?

Diversions

This particular blog is meant to be like the most recent Star Wars films; relevant (in that its the chronicles of Jon and I and family) but fun in how completely off they are from the originals. Well, its really only fun if you like old cars and squirrels.

It all started last Monday when we came home from a fabulous weekend in New Hampshire. We had spent the weekend at my aunt and uncle’s second house on the lake, who graciously lent us one of their rooms and made their daughter sleep on the couch. I am going to owe my cousin Jack a fabulous bridesmaid gift!! :-) It was also a lovely weekend because a good portion of my family ended up there; even my mom came up and stayed at my grandmothers house (Right next to my aunt and uncle’s)! Really, it was all thanks to my Grandfather, whose birthday we were celebrating. So how did we celebrate?With a family game of cards and dessert, of course! Sure no one looks that happy, but the game lasted until 2 am...you would be too tired to play harts too. Then again, no one in this family is willing to admit defeat. Especially not mom (reference: Jon's face)

Hearts is the game of choice when we get together. Not that anyone had any heart for granny, who took point after point:As you can tell from Grandpa and Jessie's expression, it didn't matter anyway; I ended up kicking everyones butts. Either that or she just took one of many queen of spades :-)

Now I can’t get away from telling you that we also celebrated just being together. This involved waterskiing (both Jon and Jessie got to slaloming, although Jon is still complaining about a particularly bad fall the bruised his ribs….)

But my ultimate favorite was swimming with

Jon,

Jessie,

Jack (I didn't get a pic, but aren't we cute?),













Leela, and of course, Leela’s red bone :







So where do the squirrels and cars come in? Well our happy weekend came to an end when we got back and discovered that squirrels like bananas. So much so, that they are willing to chew and claw through a screen to get at them.

You can tell from this picture that the bananas were left on the sill where the little mo fo broke through. Needless to say, no more food will be left on the sill. Thankfully the little guy was gone by the time we got back, but Jon claims to have seen him at the screen again.

And the car? Well, fast forward to this past weekend, when Jon and I went north again (more info on our visit to our first venue to come!) and met half way up there so we had to drive part of the way south together in different cars on the way home. Around the New Bedford area Jon called and told me to pull over at the next exit. He was “sick of driving my car”. I detected irritation in his voice, and my fear multiplied when he pulled over immediately, got out, and told me to go look at the car. After a few tense moments he mentioned the odometer, and I remembered, my car was turning 200,000 miles old soon!

Jon was so gracious letting me drive those last and fist miles around 200,000. There was a fair bit of slow driving, taking pictures, and honking that ensued.

Making a Living and Having Fun

I suppose when I made the list of things to blog about next, I just wanted to give those readers who haven’t seen us in a while (or maybe even those who do but don’t know our seedy underbelly J) a chance to get to know us a little better. With that in mind, I’ll start with our jobs (OK, so not so seedy…)

Jon and I were both given the opportunity of a lifetime two years back when our advisor, Steve, offered us positions as grad students. Not just grad students, but paid, fully insured grad students! The positions were at the School for Marine Science and Technology (from now on referred to as SMAST) which is located on the south shore of Massachusetts, in New Bedford. It’s a new division of the University of Massachusetts, and our degrees will actually come from the School for Marine Science students (SMS), which is a collaborative between all the different UMASS’s all over the state. Confused over the identities? So are we, and all the administrators involved J You can try and navigate the websites and figure it out yourself in the links on this page…

A compilation of the various organizations that sponsor us

So what do we study? Jon is the master of the codfish, the infamous fish here in New England which gave Cape Cod its name. Here are two paragraphs he wrote when I asked him to explain it:

“I am testing for patterns in the movement of cod (Gadus morhua) tagged in spawning groups along the New England coast. Movement patterns have a number of interesting implications, and previous tagging investigations as well as several genetic studies offer prior evidence that they exist. The main method I have been utilizing is conventional tag-recapture, where a plastic tag, containing an individual identification number, is attached to a live cod. The position and time of the cod is recorded and the fish released. Later a fisherman will hopefully catch the cod, see the tag, and report the date and position where they caught the cod. There are numerous methods that can be applied towards analyzing patterns in tagging data. I am very interested in expanding those methods commonly used in fisheries investigations.

One of Jon's many tagged cod

So, you may wonder why should be interested in the movement patterns of cod. There are several important implications that could arise from patterned movement. For example, if there are noticeable patterns in the area where cod from a spawning aggregation are recaptured we may be interested in developing more informed ways to manage this particular group. An interesting historical aside are cod numbers along the Maine coastline. Prior to the 1930’s there were large quantities of cod that lived along the Maine coast (now famous for lobster). Tagging studies showed that these cod were very sedentary. Large catches of cod in the 1930’s lead to a dramatic decrease in the cod numbers and these numbers have not rebounded.”

Thanks Jon! :-)

I myself am studying the lobster Homarus americanus the animal that the tourists to New England go crazy for. For good reason, the meat is delicious (imagine a creamy kind of chicken…or feel free to describe the taste in the “comments” section if you can think of something better) and filling. For all my Hampshire friends out there, this means that yes, once again, I am working on lobster sex J More specifically, I am working on a project that tried to restore a population of lobsters to Rhode Island after the 1997 North Cape oil spill. The method used to restore the population was tagging, with a v-notch in the tail, which signals to the lobstermen that the lobster cannot be harvested. These notches are only put on a female, which means she has a chance to reproduce and create a clutch of eggs before molting her shell and loosing her v-notch and protection (they theoretically will reproduce before molting). The project involved six years of this kind of tagging, with the hope that the estimated 9 million lobsters that got killed by the oil spill would be restored. I, my friends, am the lucky lady who gets to take all this data and determine if they reached that goal. This entails a lot of modeling (translation: lots of math) and biological work to determine if we think the effort brought the population back to its place. Stay tuned to find out the answer.

In addition to the work we do on our thesis, we help out around the office on other projects as well. I help a lot with outreach to local schools and programs, showing kids how we tag fish and why. Jon works a lot on other animal tagging, such as scallop, winter flounder, cod and yellowtail. Then, of course, there’s the classes, which used to involve a lot of tests and *groan* homework. Both of us are almost done with our course load, thank goodness. But on pain of death, don’t you dare ask when our thesis will be done…

I started with our jobs because it lets you, the reader, know why we are tied to our area. Right now we live in Mattapoisett, MA, right on the coast and close to SMAST. Well, we aren’t *directly* on the coast, but pretty close. Our bestest girly girl (also known as “grand-dog” to my parents, “sweety”, “boot-boots”, “leela-may”, “leela bean”, “stick dog” and “doofus”) Lila (pronounced lee-la) LOVES that we live so close to the ocean – true to her lab roots she is a water dog! When she was a puppy we named her Salila, which in Hindu means “water”, to encourage her to be into the water like we were. We certainly didn’t need to do that, fetching sticks came quite natural to this lab mix dog! We got her from the greatest shelter out in Oregon (http://www.homeatlasths.org/) when we were living there. My co-worker Jody’s mom was one of the main caretakers there, and let us see her when she was only 5 weeks old, and from then on it was true love! Man was she cute.

I really could start a different blog about our dog, but I won’t here. I apologize for the diversion, but she really is an integral part of our little family unit here in Mattapoisett. “Integral” meaning she makes us take at least two walks a day down to the lighthouse, where she gets to swim on the beach and occasionally meet with other dogs and plays.

So how do we afford living in such a beautiful area? One of the reasons the SMAST opportunity was so awesome was thanks to my parents. When my grandmother passed away in 2004 my parents bought her house on the ocean, which served as a weekend getaway for my dad occasionally. They have been super good in letting us stay in the house, for free, while we tried to get our degrees. This means ocean kayaking, boating, and beach walks abound!

So why don’t we get married on the coast? As much as we both love and work on the ocean, the salt water isn’t as true to our love as freshwater is. Jon, as many of you know, grew up in a beautiful and remote area of Washington, close to the Columbia river and deep in the woods. Likewise, I grew up alternating time between our suburb-of-Boston house in Massachusetts and my grandparents place in Meredith, New Hampshire. This house is right on lake Winnipesauke and thanks to my nature-loving grandmother, I spent plenty of time in the woods, appreciating nature and freshwater stuff – mainly waterskiing and swimming.

Well, I am getting tired of writing and need to get some work done, so I will talk about what we do for fun next. Perhaps I will even convince Jon to write a little bit about his recent kayaking adventures…

Finally....

After months of sitting around looking at other people’s blogs and casually considering creating my own, I have gone ahead and done it! Awesome sauce. I guess the "waterfall wedding" title, albeit cheesy, is a bit hopefully rather than telling. Ultimately, I think Jon and I both want to be married on a river, and hopefully somewhere scenic like a waterfall. Why a river, you ask? If you’re asking that then you must not know Jon. Jon is an avid kayaker, and by that I mean that if kayaking were a girl, he would marry her not me. Every weekend and every vacation is centered on kayaking. You can check some of his fabulous photos out here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jon.loehrke He is really, really good at it. I think the only reason he doesn’t quit his job and go pro for a living is that he can’t see himself as conceded like that and really wants to make a difference in the world in addition to enjoying himself…but those are two of the reasons I love my baby! A touch of adventure and a touch of caring – the perfect blend!

I want to be married on the river because I too enjoy kayaking, but more importantly, some of the best times in my life have been had on the water – be it a river or a lake. I myself have always had a real love of freshwater, and I think the symboligy of the ever changing river and a natural setting will really suit us. More on all that natural stuff and why it suits us later.

We want to find a place that means something to us, however, and with both families being on both coasts, that is a challenge. I think having at least the reception on lake Winnipesauke would be perfect. My extended family have a lot of property in the town of Meredith, so some people would have free places to stay, and I grew up there in the summers and LOVE it. Plus its real close to the Manchester airport, so people could get there easy enough. But that leaves out Jon and his family! Another option would be Jon’s parents place. It’s beautiful and remote, and would meet a lot of our criteria for setting. It would be great for people’s budgets because there are ample camping areas for them to utilize. It would be hard for the princess in me, however, because it is really out there and not near any sort of recreational centers that would have motels, etc. While I am sure it could be blinged out enough, it would take some serious work to make some of those special areas I always envisioned for getting ready – like a place to put on a white dress and get my hair did ;-) Also, it is a good two hours from the airport, and I would have a lot of relatives flying in who do not do so well with travel…Oh yea, and did I mention, the most important thing ever is to have our best black friend, the test-child, the best gift the universe has ever given us, involved and at the wedding?

Its great to have options though! We have also had plenty of discussions about a ceremony and reception one place, and another, follow up party on the other coast so that everyone will have a chance to participate. On our next foray into the north woods I am thinking I am going to make Jon look at some potential areas. With only a year to go and a TON of relatives on both sides, I want to get the news out there. If oil prices continue to rise the way they have, it may be near impossible to get people together to celebrate with us, and that would be a real bummer.

I hate to leave you with all these questions, but I have to get off the computer and go make something out of myself. In fact, I am supposed to baby-sit our next door neighbor, Charlotte, soon. She is absolutely adorable and a bit of a princess like me. I’ll leave you with a picture of her that I took this past winter while bothering Jon who was trying to get some work done…

Coming up:

What we do for a living and what we do for fun

How we met

The proposal