We got a postcard in the mail today from Troy, from Dubai. And by “we” I mean, clearly, our cats. Oh yes. Wanna see what he wrote on it?

Katy & Lily,
This place is a kitten’s dream! Three words for you:
World’s Largest Catbox
And this time of year, it is purfect!
xoxo,
Papa

If you’ve been following my Flickr photoset 180+ Photos for Troy, and you know that today was Day 179, you might be wondering if Troy is coming home tomorrow. But then you might notice that I added that plus sign to the name of the set.

Nope, Troy isn’t coming home tomorrow. I’m being vague about the actual date because of a little thing called national security. You’d be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t, I don’t know) by the things Troy isn’t allowed to tell me, and the things I’m not supposed to publish here on this blog. You might notice I’ve never mentioned the name of Troy’s ship, for example. I don’t tell you where he’s been till after he’s been there. And I won’t mention the day he’s coming home till he’s here, probably. That’s just the way things are in a post-9/11 world. But don’t feel too bad for us; Troy will be home very soon. The rest of his shipmates won’t be home for a few more months, so we’re actually getting him back early. I’m counting that as a blessing and not getting upset about having to add a plus sign to the name of my photoset.

And very quickly after Troy gets home, we’re up and moving across the country again. We’ll have a few days to relax first. We hope to see most of our friends once more, we plan to take Annalie to Disneyland, we’ll eat at our favorite restaurants. The packers and movers will descend on our house like locusts on a field, quickly and efficiently wrapping and packing and boxing and taping, and taking most of our earthly possessions with them on a giant truck. We’ll follow a few days later: Troy, me, Annalie, my mom, both cats and the portable litterbox, driving across the country in our so-very-worth-it minivan, stopping once or twice to see family and friends along the way.

When we get there we’ll make ourselves comfortable in a hotel or base lodging before we start looking in the local classifieds and online for houses to rent and following up on the houses Troy’s already been researching from the ship. We’ll look at so many houses and neighborhoods in the span of a few days that they will all blur together. It’s all rather crazy but it’s also part of the routine of moving. I’ve been doing this every couple of years since I married Troy, nine days shy of my 21st birthday, and I kind of love it and look forward to it every time.

Of course I’ll miss it here. I’ll miss the sunny, warm winter days when we could go to the park in short sleeves and flip-flops. I’ll miss our fantastic house and the view from our deck and the palm trees and the bougainvillea. I’ll miss our town and our little mall with the pottery studio and all the fountains and the two-level Target. I’ll really miss all the good friends we have around here and I’m trying not to think about that just yet. I want to enjoy my last times with them, to hang out and talk and laugh with them, and not be dragged down by a heavy heart. So I’m putting those emotions off till after we’ve left. They are there, hovering around the edges, but I’m keeping them at bay for now.

And by the time I give those emotions free reign, Troy will be home. I’m pretty sure we’ll be so happy to have him with us again that we won’t spend much time being sad. Aside from being kind and thoughtful and just generally awesome, this is the guy who sends his cats postcards about how they’d like the desert because it’s the world’s biggest catbox, just because he knew it would make us laugh. He’s good at making people laugh, and he does it a lot. Even 3,000-mile road trips are a blast with Troy.

Hey, that reminds me! A while back I painted Troy a mug. He’d mentioned that he would like for me to paint him one, and I told him to let me know what he wanted, and then he got distracted and never did. And then I had a fantastic idea and painted him a mug to send him for Christmas. I never blogged it because I didn’t want him to see it and ruin the surprise, but he’s had the mug for a couple of months now so I think I can post the photos.

It’s a fact: Troy is awesome. I regularly thank him, after I’ve heard stories about someone else’s husband being obtuse or irresponsible or neglectful, for being awesome. I painted this mug half in serious tribute, half as an inside joke. And at least once, when Troy was carrying this mug down a passageway on the ship, someone read the mug out loud as he passed by and he was able to cheerfully say, “You’re welcome!” See? Like I said: AWESOME.

Omaha got its first significant snowfall on Christmas Day since 1941 this year, with about 12 inches of snow! It’s magical and all, but the city is pretty much shut down. Many flights out of Omaha were cancelled today, which makes me nervous because we’re supposed to fly home tomorrow, and I have to pick up a certain Australian at the airport in L.A. on Monday.

I know it’ll all work out, but I really hope our flight doesn’t get cancelled. Flying at Christmastime is crazy enough without adding cancelled flights to the mix on top of the added security we’ll have because of that guy who attempted to blow up a flight to Detroit. I’m very thankful that my mom is coming home with us for a short visit so it won’t be just me and Annalie navigating the insanity at the airports.

Don’t mind me, I’m just being a tiny bit Scrooge-ish because it was a weird day. Christmas worship was cancelled, the city was snowed in, and I was missing Troy extra today. But even with all that it was a good day. Annalie had a blast opening and playing with her presents. We watched movies and lounged in our pajamas and ate too many cookies. I made another big batch of sugar-and-spice candied nuts, and homemade mac & cheese for dinner.

And I finished the babette! In a stroke of serendipity, I had just enough black yarn to do a border. I wish I could give the blanket to Ben and Angie in person but with the snow and us leaving tomorrow that’s not likely. I’ll just wash it, wrap it, and leave it here for them to pick up once the roads are clear.

I posted photos of two ornaments I’d painted and then blogged about them a couple of weeks ago. Bex expressed a wish to own the star-shaped one, so I put it in my Etsy shop and she promptly bought it. I brought it to Omaha with me so I could mail it as soon as I got here. Ha.

After a week in Omaha, I remembered the star. I finally mailed it TODAY, at 5:15pm, just before the post office closed. And I had to buy bubble wrap while I was there because my mom had run out.

Bex, your ornament should arrive in 2-3 days! Unless the box gets “accidentally” damaged and someone from the USPS takes a liking to it.

We had lunch today with my friend Stephanie—the same Stephanie with whom we went to the zoo after we first moved to California. She happened to be passing through Omaha on her way to spend Christmas with family in central Nebraska, so we arranged to meet for lunch at Wheatfields. It was great to see her, as always.

I splurged and let Annalie get hot cocoa. Boy was I glad I did that, because this was what the waitress brought out to her!

I wish I had gotten a photo of when the waitress first set the cocoa down in front of her. Annalie’s jaw dropped, and she was so happy and excited! I love how kids can really appreciate the simple things. The thoughtful waitress had even added a few ice cubes to the cocoa to cool it down, so Annalie didn’t have to wait to drink it.

The cocoa made up for Annalie’s disappointment that we didn’t get to sit in the sun deck by the fountain, as we usually do. So did the fact that we were sitting next to a gingerbread Dr. Seuss town. Yep, someone recreated Whoville from How the Grinch Stole Christmas in gingerbread, frosting, and candy! I especially love the gumballs (or giant jawbreakers or whatever they are) that were used in various places.

If you look at the biggest size of the second photo you can see a little Grinch towards the bottom, with a Wheatfields restaurant on the right, and a movie theater that’s playing It’s a Wonderful Life. I kind of wanted to take more photos, but everyone was waiting for me. Anyway, as long as the weather cooperates we’ll be going back to Wheatfields on Wednesday for brunch with a bunch of friends. Maybe I’ll get the chance to take more photos then.

This was my alternate 7 Days shot. Scooters is an Omaha-based coffee company that has really good coffee at their many drive-thru locations. Today my mom and I stopped there after lunch for lattes.

Annalie got a GloDoodle at our early family Christmas on Sunday, and she’s been playing with it a lot. Can you tell we miss Troy? We do. Thank goodness we have snow and beloved restaurants and friends and family, especially a sweet new baby, to distract us.

I’ve been feeling pretty indifferent about Christmas this year. I didn’t put our tree up early and write and mail one-third of our Christmas cards already because I’m so filled with Christmas spirit. It’s more like taking out the trash.

Whaaa? you might be asking yourself, How on earth are Christmas decorations and holiday salutations like taking out the trash?

See, when Troy is around, I keep stuffing things into the kitchen trash can because I know that eventually Troy will notice it’s full and cheerfully empty it. When Troy is gone, I’m much more likely to take the trash out as soon as I notice it’s full, because it’s not like Annalie or the cats are gonna do it for me. I’m the only adult here right now, so if a Christmas-related task is going to get accomplished, then I’d better get on it.

Silver wreath ornament purchased from doow‘s etsy shop.

But my heart hasn’t really been in it. This is the first Christmas in 15 years that Troy and I have been apart, and it’s hitting me harder than I expected it to, seasoned Navy wife that I am.

In a way, this whole deployment has been relatively easy. I thought having a child would make Troy being gone much more difficult, and in a way it has, but mostly it’s been much easier than every previous deployment. I’m not living by myself, eating all my meals alone. I have a sidekick this time around, one who misses Troy just as much as I do, and funnily enough that’s made the past few months much more bearable for both of us.

Lately though, it’s been harder. It started with Thanksgiving, and now that I’m looking ahead to Christmas, I’m definitely missing Troy more—not in an I’m-so-empty-without-him, crying-myself-to-sleep kind of way. It’s more like I’m just aware of his absence all the time, and sighing a lot. That’s why I’ve been going through the Advent and Christmas motions, but not really too excited about them.

Today something changed. I think it started when Annalie wrote her very first thank-you note. Well, she’s written dozens of thank-you notes over the years by dictating them to me, and colored many thank-you drawings. This, however, was the very first thank-you note that Annalie wrote entirely with her own hand, only asking me for help with spelling. Then she decided to draw and color a little Christmas tree at the bottom, which made me smile and smile. Annalie usually only draws with one color, despite my occasional suggestions that she make her drawings colorful. The fact that she colored the Christmas tree green and added blue and red and orange ornaments and a yellow star, and then a rainbow-wrapped present underneath the tree made me very happy.

At some point after that I decided I’d better get cracking on some Christmas baking, since that’s going to be a major component of the gifts I give this year. (Spoiler alert! If you expect to get a Christmas gift from us this year and you want it to remain a surprise, you might want to skip the rest of this paragraph.) I made more granola bars and some candied nuts, and I made the pastry dough and cooked the filling for my all-time favorite apricot cookies, and somewhere in there I hung Christmas lights in the kitchen window.

Last Christmas we hung lights on the outside of the house and in the lemon tree. After Christmas we never took them down, which is handy since I wouldn’t have been able to hang all those again by myself. But to me it doesn’t really feel like Christmas unless there are lights in windows in every room of the house. I love turning off all the overhead lights and lamps and plugging in colorful Christmas lights all over the house.

Tonight I hung lights in the kitchen window. I sang along with BNL as they lamented the plight of worker elves. I breathed in the cinnamon scent of the candied nuts cooling on the counter and listened to the apricot filling bubbling on the stove. I thought, “Christmas is coming!” and I was happy about it.

Last week we had a vanilla-making party. The whole thing was Sonja‘s idea, and Brenda, Sue, Heather, Jen and Bonnie all quickly agreed it was a brilliant one.

Plans were made, vanilla beans and bottles and vodka were procured, everyone was looking forward to the party. Yay!

Then something sad happened: Sonja got sick, and she couldn’t make the drive down for the vanilla party. We were all bummed she couldn’t be there, but we decided to go ahead with the vanilla-making. Because it had taken approximately two weeks and 78 emails back and forth between everyone to figure out one day when we were all free, we thought if we postponed the party would likely never happen at all.

If the party had never happened that would have been sadder still, because it was a fun day. Annalie wasn’t interested in making vanilla again (she’s made it before) and Bonnie’s son E preferred to chase the cats and play outside. But the rest of the moms and kids were really into it. Bug and Audrey and M and even 2-year-old Molly all stuffed beans into bottles and took turns pouring vodka from a measuring cup into a funnel.

Bug especially enjoyed holding the beans to her nose and sniffing “the yummy, yummy vanilla!” The rest of us enjoyed her cute vanilla-caviar mustache.

Altogether I think we made more than 60 bottles of vanilla extract that day. Since we bought everything in bulk, each 4-ounce bottle cost less than $2.50, which is about one-third what a similar bottle would have cost at the grocery store.

Even though we started out with 5.25 liters of vodka we ran out before we were done. So I grabbed a bottle of rum that had been languishing in our cupboard and used that for a few bottles of extract. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s much of a difference in taste.

M was quite proud of the fact that she did all these bottles by herself. She was a vanilla-making champ. Molly wandered off at some point and jumped on the futon with a yellow balloon. She is a futon-jumping champ.

And these three transformed into kittens with a few strokes of a washable marker. They spent quite a while crawling around on all fours and meowing.

Brenda did some stealthy crafting while the rest of us finished up the vanilla. She’s had wreaths on the brain for a while now.

Basically, a good time was had by all. Except when we were missing Sonja and Noah, and wishing they were there. Thanks for the idea, though, Sonja…consider yourself permanently invited to any and all parties at my house in the future. Especially on January 10th!

Today, as you might know, was Thanksgiving in the U.S. We had a fabulous feast at our house with Brenda and Toby and Bug, and Brenda’s parents Sue and Tom. It was extremely kind of them to come to our house and share the day with us, distracting us from the fact that we really miss Troy and wish he had been here too. When we counted our blessings today—along with the arrival of my newborn niece, the beautiful weather, the upcoming 3rd season of Chuck, the many times this past week we’ve been able to Skype with Troy—we counted each and every one of our friends who have made this long deployment of Troy’s so much easier to bear. Thanks, you guys! You know who you are. I hope you know how much we love and appreciate you!

I am so thankful for all the amazing people the internet has brought into my life. I am thankful that email and this blog have allowed me to maintain friendships that otherwise might have faded away. In honor of that gratitude, I’m going to give some stuff away! If you comment on this post before December 1st, 2009, you will be entered in a drawing for one of five prizes: three bottles of homemade vanilla extract, this plate, or a $15 gift card to the winner’s choice of Starbucks, Target, or iTunes.

Have a great rest-of-the-weekend, everyone! What are some things you are thankful for?

Comments are now closed. Winners will be selected and announced soon!

Today was a good day. Annalie and I hung out at home in our jammies most of the morning. We had peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for lunch. After lunch, Annalie spent almost an hour telling me an elaborate story about how she was born in Mexico but her parents couldn’t take care of her so she had to live at a children’s helping place and then we adopted her, but not before her abuela taught her how to cook a soup with carrots…only they aren’t really carrots, they’re yellow onions and they have to be cut up very small. That last part she told me while she was using a paring knife to chop up five or six baby carrots into 1/4-inch pieces, which she then put in a bowl and snacked on while she watched The Electric Company.

We ran some errands, including the pottery studio, where I was just going to pick up a couple of mugs to paint later. But while we were there, Annalie said she wanted to paint something. Usually I’m lucky if she’ll paint for ten minutes, and then I’ll try to distract her with snacks for another half-hour before giving up and coming back another day to finish my project. Today I was able to almost finish both mugs (and would have completely finished them except I didn’t have information I needed to write something on the bottom of the mugs). Annalie knew exactly what she wanted to do, and spent 45 minutes painting one thing, then almost as long painting a second item. I offered to wrap my mugs up and take her home when she was done, but she said, “No, that’s okay. I’ll color with markers till you’re done.” And that was on top of earlier today when she was going downstairs for some reason, and she turned back and said, “Can I get you a snack while I’m downstairs? Or a Diet Coke maybe?”

As some commenters noted on my last post, 5 1/2 is just one of those ages where there’s a lot of questioning and challenging going on with most kids. And Annalie certainly does miss her daddy. We talk about Troy all the time and pray for him every night. We take a photo for him every day, and she’s always drawing him pictures or typing him emails. Goodness knows that when I am having a bad day, I’m often thinking Waaah, I want Troy! so it makes perfect sense that she’d be thinking the same thing when she’s having a bad day.

I’m sure we’ll have plenty more time-outs and talks about anger and not letting your temper get the better of you, but for now things are back to normal. Maybe even a little better than normal.

*Troy asked me what the title of this post meant, since it seemed like the day I wrote about had been a pretty good day. It’s actually a line of the song “Bad Day” from Barenaked Ladies’ album SNACKTIME!, the one they wrote with kids in mind. You can find the lyrics and play the song here.

Woohoo! We’ve made it through 100 days without Troy, and Troy’s made it through 100 days of deployment. I know, we should have made a fuss over Day 90 because that’s allegedly the halfway point, but Troy’s homecoming date is up in the air, so who knows.

It seemed right to make a fuss about 100 days, though, because, c’mon, A HUNDRED DAYS! Look at all those photos. We’ve actually managed to take a picture every day, more or less. I only had to fudge once.

Here’s to 100 days down!

View the photoset 180 photos for Troy on Flickr, or view the mosaic large.

Nothing but water, as far as the eye can see.

Anyone care to guess how many planes are visible in this photo? Anyone?

Computers in my office…does the desktop wallpaper on the far right look familiar? It’s Day 4 of 180 photos for Troy (the photos Bethany and Annalie are taking for me every day while I’m gone).

[My husband Troy is in the U.S. Navy. He's on a six-month deployment right now, and thanks to the wonders of the internet it's easy to stay in touch. We email daily, and occasionally he'll send me photos. Just like when I first started blogging (as I explain on my About page) I'm posting photos here so our friends and family can keep tabs on what Troy's up to halfway around the world. Troy and his ship are both on Twitter, if you want to follow them. And you can add Troy as a Flickr friend, too. ---Bethany]

In the hangar bay. The guy who took this actually took two and both were way out of focus. This one was the better of the two.

We drove 180ft from USNS Bridge for five hours and got 1.5 million gallons of jet fuel, 237 tons of food and a ton of mail!

I don’t think I can convey just how cool it was to be launching aircraft while driving alongside another ship transferring stores and fuel.

One night when I was in my office writing an e-mail to Bethany the screensaver came on the laptop. The lines would cross back and forth across both monitors as if they were one really wide monitor. In the dark it looked especially cool.

[My husband Troy is in the U.S. Navy. He's on a six-month deployment right now, and thanks to the wonders of the internet it's easy to stay in touch. We email daily, and occasionally he'll send me photos. Just like when I first started blogging (as I explain on my About page) I'm posting photos here so our friends and family can keep tabs on what Troy's up to halfway around the world. Troy and his ship are both on Twitter, if you want to follow them. And you can add Troy as a Flickr friend, too....We hope you enjoy this glimpse into the life of a Navy officer. ---Bethany]