Mark has been sending me pictures while he's out on cruise.  Here are just a few.  The first two pictures are from the ship--some sort of exercise.  The next three were taken in Singapore.  The last three are pictures he took from the flight deck near Dubai.  He PROMISES the mustache will be gone before he comes home, that it's "just a gulf thing". 

This last one is of Carl (Amanda's hubby) and another guy (Coles) doing a little shopping. :-)

Bass Lake

Amanda and I went to Bass Lake for the day today. She had never been up there before (and you know how much I like to play tour guide!) so I had this WHOLE great day planned out. We were going to spend a day in the sun, walking around the Peddler's Fair, taking in the great views from the dock at the lake, and then eating some yummy Mexican food on our way out of town. Funny...that was MY plan...but click *here* to find out what actually happened.

She already put up several photos...here are some from my camera. :-)

Mark is going to be in port again soon. This is his second port, and if it's anything like the first he'll be calling me several times over the next few days. I'm so excited already!!

Every time I start to miss him (I miss him every day, constantly...but I mean REALLY miss him) I look around for "pieces" of him, some little reminder. Like, photographs of him or us in my apt or photo albums, or notes he wrote to me, or little gifts he gave to me, or old text messages that were super-sweet that I saved to my phone...like this one. I was looking through old texts and decided this is my favorite of those I have saved. He sent this to me while I was in Italy, just a few days before he left for cruise:

I think I texted him to say that I'd emailed him. He replied...and it makes me smile every time I read it. Oh just so you know, we were engaged when he sent this--we just call each other "girlfriend" and "boyfriend"...and we probably will for a while! At least until something cute like "honey" or "sweetie" or "hotstuff" starts to stick. It's a hard habit to break...and it's kinda cute. :-)

Have I mentioned lately...5 months to go! Less than that now!

baseball

So it's been about two weeks or so since I wrote last...not much has happened. :-)

Mother's day was nice. I went to the last FSU baseball game with my parents and of course I had to slather on the SPF 50 and use an umbrella to block the sun--dad's orders. It was strange to be back there again...I hadn't been to a game in years. But other than the crowd being abnormally small (mothers day and about 90 degrees), nothing had changed. It was great.

Yesterday I went to another baseball game. One of the students that I took to Italy came to my classroom after school on Friday and handed me an envelope. I opened it to find four tickets to Sunday's Grizzlies game.  Fun!  Except that it was going to be 101.  I struggled with the option of not going for a while, but when I checked the website to see what the promotion was and saw that Will Clark was going to be there signing autographs, I started to get super-excited.  

I remembered that one of Mark's favorite players growing up was Will Clark.  So I dug through all my old baseball cards to find my Will Clark cards--I had four.  The game was scheduled for 2:05 but by 1:00 when Katie and I got to the ballpark, there was already a line for autographs (which were not scheduled to start until 2:15!!).  We stood in the 101 degree shade for TWO AND A HALF hours but finally made it to the front of the line...

...and then went up to watch the game. :-)  So fun!