I owe you lots of pictures and news.

I only have a minute as I'm due for a phone date with pregnant Megan in Evanston. So nine minutes will have to suffice. I'll short hand the news.

1.) We returned the Jetta to Carmax in Lauderdale. We didn't buy the poopie-smelling Golf. We DID buy a beautiful champagne-colored Honda Accord from a small lot three doors down from my office. It's a 2001, only 38,000 miles, a few scratches where the old man hit things here and there, but otherwise in mint condition. I love it.

2.) On Valentine's Day we made dinner together. Twice. I learned that hoisin sauce in Florida is verrrry different than hoisin sauce in Chicago. Not enough asians down here, I guess. It's tragic. The stir fry was perfect. Except that it tasted tangy and a little sweet, but not in a good way. So Brad made take-2 and forgot to preheat the pan, so we had stir-poached chicken for dinner. It was fun though.

3.) We had the whole family over last friday for dinner-- burgers on the grill and smores for dessert. The logs wouldn't light, though, so Brad rolled up chunks of the yellow pages and we made smores quickly before the yellow-page-logs burned up.

4.) We're trying to sell the Mercedes. The thing seems to run on hundred-dollar-bills instead of gas. After pouring two grand into it SINCE AUGUST, we've decided maybe it's not the best car for us. Please pray that we get a fair price for it and that we can find a good car for Brad.

Here are a bunch of pictures in rapid fashion.

Last week it got realllly cold here-- well, at least abnormal-for-Florida-cold. We woke up Tuesday with frost on the car! Too bad we threw away our window scrapers in Chicago. A bit too hasty we were.

We made our Valentine's dinner twice. If this was Brad's face on the second try, just imagine how thrilled he was with our first try.

Yeah, here's the nasty hoisin. Never buy Dynasty Hoisin Sauce from Supertarget. It is really nasty.

I win the nearly-clean-plate award! (Trust me, the water chestnut ratio was way off, so I didn't eat all of mine.

On Friday after burgers on the lanai, we went into the driveway to make the fire. Here is Jeff starting in on the phone book. Little did we know how important that phonebook would be to our dessert.

So the phonebook logs burned well, but the real logs in top never really became the campfire we were hoping for. But you get an A+ for effort, Love, and lots of gold stars for working so hard to make your wife feel happy and loved.

On Saturday morning I finally picked out some colors for the walls. The straightjacket days of white walls everywhere are gone! Benjamin Moore has little samples you can use to try some of their colors. I chose a gray-blue for the bedroom. The one on the left is way dark, and the one on the right is a little too powder-blue for me.

The entry/great room/kitchen/hall will be creamy-gold. Neither of these really send me-- the top one is too 70s harvest gold, the bottom one is too perky. I want something calming and comfortable, with a hint of warm hug in it.

On Saturday night we went to the Edison Festival of Light Grand Parade in downtown Fort Myers. Edison had a winter house here and that's pretty much the claim to fame of Fort Myers. Oh, Ford had one, too, next door to Edison.

Here we are at the parade on the WAY-FM risers. They built a set of risers on a flatbed and parked on the sidewalk-- prime seats for the parade! WAY-FM is one of the Christian radio stations in Fort Myers.

We met up with Robin, my new buddy from work, and her daughter and daughter's friend. She had saved seats for us on the risers.

When it got dark the fireworks started behind us in the high school parking lot.

If you look carefully you can see the beginning of the parade... John Deere tractors. They came down the street, turned around, and went back the other way. I knew from that moment that this wasn't no Chicago-style parade. I now live in a small town, with lots of country folks. I'm still getting over all the confederate flags on cars, t-shirts, and massive belt buckles. But I usually only see that at Walmart. I'm just a city girl through and through. John Deere tractors to start the parade. Why didn't I think of that.

The first thing in the parade after the tractors was a guy wrapped in twinkle lights riding a segway down the street. (No idea how to comment on that. What the heck?) The rest of the parade was your typical small-town parade-- flatbeds covered in astroturf with the staff of the Dodge-Chrysler dealership waving, high school marching bands with pom girls, old folks sitting on the back of convertibles, etc. We did get to see Vonzell from American Idol. She's a Fort Myers native, too.

Eventually we got cold and went home a bit early.

Oh- one other thing that blew my mind, er, I mean, we saw. The motorcycle police gang did a little "act"-- two lines of four bikes each going south, three lines of four bikes each going north, towards each other. Can you picture? The groups drove toward each other but slipped between the other lines so as to avoid collisions. Pretty neat, yeah, whatever. But THEN-- one of the genius cops stood up-- STOOD UP-- on his seat with his arms outstretched and drove south through the north-headed lines, threading the needle so to speak. Sorry for the awkward description-- but seriously...? Cops? Standing on their bike seats? Ok, so does that mean that if I become a parent I should run with scissors, but only the kids should not? Does anyone else see anything funny about that? Things just don't make sense down here!

Oh, dear.

Has it really been a month since I last updated? If you've decided to stop checking in on me, I understand. It's been nutso since I started my new job. No excuse, though. I'm sorry.

Yes, I started my new job on January 17th after a weekend in Chicago visiting with family and friends. We had a ball even though it was bleeping cold there. I feel truly Floridian now. I hate the cold. I realized while we were there that we talked about the weather A LOT. (I'm sorry.) And now I think I know why. See, in Chicago, people live there expressly for the city, the activities, etc. And so they talk about the city, activities, etc. But in Florida, people live here for the weather, so we talk about the weather. Not like, huh, I guess it's nice today. No, more like, Man! I LOVE this weather! It makes me so happy! We should be outside today! And on and on. I'm not ashamed anymore. I love this weather and it DOES make me happy.

Speaking of the weather, it rained last weekend. That was weird. We haven't seen rain for months, and then Saturday was a veritable monsoon. I really hated it. And we were driving over to the other coast (Fort Lauderdale) to check out a car for Brad. It turned out to be a dud but we bought one at Carmax that afternoon! It was a beautiful thing. Canyon Red Volkswagen Jetta, tan leather interior, just a beaut. But when we got it home we found it had a coolant leak and some other issues, so thanks to Carmax's nice 5-day return policy, back it went on Wednesday night. Hey, Brad, do I get extra Good Wife points for giving up date night to deal with cars?

While we were at Carmax the second time we looked at a gorgeous silver VW Golf. It was just really pretty (man, did I marry a car guy or what? Three years ago I would never have called a car gorgeous or really pretty. Pretty soon we'll start dressing alike.) Anyway, it was pretty on the outside, ran like a dream, and smelled like poop. Really. Have you seen the Seinfeld episode where Jerry gets his car back from the shop and it smells like the shop guy's body odor? Well, this would have been the opposite. We would have gotten b.o. from the car. No, thank you.

So we decided to continue our hunt on this coast. The next day Brad found a nice champagne-colored Honda Accord just up the street from my office. He drove it and it's great. I'm going to drive it tomorrow morning, and we might buy it. Beautiful inside and out, and runs nicely. A 2001 I think, with 34,000 miles (!); it was owned by an elderly couple and the guy died. But not before taking excellent care of the car.

Work has been good, thanks for asking. I absolutely love this job. I sit in a tiny closet with no windows and horrid circulation, alternately baking and shivering, going batty from the overhead fluorescent lights, but I love it. Robin, Glenn, and John are all really great people to be around. Robin is the bookkeeper and office manager and is teaching me the ropes of how the filing system works, etc. Glenn is the paperwork-man and is teaching me all there is to know about getting a house permitted for building. He is terribly patient and very pleasant to be around. I couldn't ask for a better boss. John is the superintendent, or field-man, so he's rarely around. When he is, he's great. I'm doing a lot of getting-systems-in-place. Like I've said, they usually build around 8 houses a year, and right now we have NINE being processed for permitting. I feel like I'm learning a ton, I like what I'm learning, and my work is appreciated. Meanwhile, my teaching replacement is struggling with kids and one nearly stabbed her with a pencil the second day she was there. I do NOT miss that job one bit.

I was on a blog today and came across this fun list to fill out. Write a comment and tell me your Fours, ok?

Four jobs I've had:
Counting checks at a bank
Inspecting road construction work
Being a houseparent to forty international high school girls
Teaching junior high

Four movies I can watch over and over:
Chocolat
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (seriously)
Father of the Bride
Mostly Martha

Four places I have lived:
Libertyville, Illinois
Baltimore, Maryland
Evanston, Illinois
Lehigh Acres, Florida

Four tv shows I love to watch:
That 70s Show
The Planet's Funniest Animals
Crossing Jordan
Anything HGTV

Four places I have been on holiday:
New York City
Boston
Chicago
Playa Del Carmen

Four of my favorite dishes:
Chicken Parmesan
Filet Mignon with Twice Baked Potatoes
Cashew Chicken
My Mom's Creole Pot Roast

Four websites I visit daily:
ask.metafilter.com
msnbc.com
notmartha.org
roominroppongi.blogspot.com

Four places I'd rather be:
In bed-- stayed up too late last night
At a show on Broadway
Exploring Charleston, SC
At Mimi's Cafe eating chicken pot pie