Before the Blog: Meet Ms. & Ms. Shrike-Whozat

Two updates in a month - amazing!

Our big news is that last Friday we went to court to finalize the hyphenation of our last names. We thought that the legal stuff would be a pain in the butt, but it's starting to look like that was nothing compared to getting them changed on all our various documents.

So far, we've applied for our new Social Security cards, I have my new driver's license and Shrike has taken care of changing her health insurance. Lots more to do, though; every day we think of another company or institution that we have to deal with.

This past weekend was a busy one. We baby-sat Shrike's niece and nephew from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. This is the first time we've kept them overnight, and we were a bit worried, since despite having kept them several evenings, we'd never actually succeeded at getting her nephew to sleep.

We did manage it this time, with some clever ventriloquism on my part, if I do say so myself. (It involved his toy shark being very tired, but very lonely, and needing to be snuggled - don't ask.) All in all, it went pretty well; we had a good time, and we think the kids did, too.

After we dropped the kids off at Shrike's parents' house we headed to TownNoOneOutsideOfBlueStateCanPronounce to see Melissa Etheridge in concert. Of course, that was incredible.

I smuggled a camera in (no thanks to Shrike, who upon seeing the "No Cameras" sign at the door proclaimed loudly "Honey, you can't take your camera in.")

They didn't hear her and I managed to get it in and take a couple of photos. The plan was to take some with flash and some without, not knowing which would work better. However, we decided it was best just to blow it off, after a woman seated in front of us was threatened with arrest for refusing to give up her camera. If those two photos turn out to be any good we'll post them here.

That's about all the excitement around here - and it's about all we can handle.