Christmas Eve - a good time for feel good stories?

I woke up this morning to a warm, muggy Christmas Eve here in Miami. The headlines abound with feel good stories of soldiers coming home for the holidays and the impending rain that is due to fall by tonight. There's always going to be good and bad in a society on any given day. Christmas is no exception...

The Miami Herald today wrote about a Cuban Woman, apparently the wife of one of the 3 Cuban spies that just last week were traded back to Cuba. She wanted to get pregnant and the Cuban Government collaborated with the CIA to get her some of his sperm. Yes, you read that correctly: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article4834107.html The US GOVERNMENT helped a convicted spy get his sperm to his wife so she can get pregnant. This story is all about Christmas Cheer, right? We helped a thug, who was a convicted felon here in the US, get his wife pregnant. Where in the annals of US doctrine does that felon have rights that allow for that??

That is a disgusting story and I am not happy that an animal like that, who was directly responsible for giving information to the Cuban government, is able to procreate. It's just not right. OK Rant over.

I have tons of mixed emotions with the Cuba thing. Most of it is a passionate & emotional response to what happened 50+ years ago with my own family. I refuse to allow this generation of young adults to grow up and forget the stories that were told and lived my our forefathers. I will always tell our stories and continue to be a proud CUBAN-AMERICAN. My parents and grandparents fought to leave the oppressed country so that I would have a bright future. Everyone deserves a free future.
Merry Christmas to whoever is reading...

The Road to Married... The Big Day plus 77 days AND TANGENTS!!

The last statement on my last Blog piece was "I love the planning stage". Well, I do. I can talk about it, blog it, make lists and go on and on. Once the event is over, I'm like a person in deep mourning. I've abandoned the blog once more because I didn't know what to write about.

My friend Alina said I should write about anything. Write about the stupid people you encounter. Write about politics. Write about how much I like Rick Sanchez (no judgement, it's a secret crush). So I'm going to try just that to see if I can get some creativity flowing from my brain.

This mourning period has to pass. It's been 77 days since the wedding. A wedding and honeymoon, which is quite possible the most fun a couple can have if they truly belong together. Nelson and I had a grand trip and we made the most of every day. I have 2200 pictures to prove it, and not creative outlet to show for it. I tried Shutterfly and pic Monkey but I'm in a creative coma. I don't want to look backwards and create a photo album, I want to look forward and plan more trips. Psychotic, I know. 

So I'm going to try something new. I'm going to write and then create. I'll give myself a few hours daily to create and edit a few pictures at a time. I want to get through this. I'll get behind in the projects and then I'll never finish and never have a proper photo album. That's not fair to Nelsons. He should be able to see what the painstaking hours of photography at the top (and bottom) of Matador Beach looked like. What the hours of photography at the Partners Statue at a minuscule Disneyland Castle can look like....

Wow, this just took me on a major tangent... Blogger just auto-corrected my spelling of miniscule. Which led me to research miniscule vs minuscule: According to the website: english.stackexchange.com  The word was originally minuscule, borrowed from French. The minuscule spelling has always been the preferred spelling. However, miniscule is not as simple as a typo. According to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary): Variant of MINUSCULE adj., probably arising partly from shift of stress from the second to the first syllable, and partly from association with MINIATURE adj., MINIMUM adj. 

So, there are two reasons that miniscule persists as a variant.

The first is the shift in stress. In English, unstressed vowels are often reduced to schwa, [ə], no matter what the fully stressed vowel would have been. Minuscule used to always be pronounced with stress on the second syllable (containing the "u"), and was therefore unambiguously an [u] sound. When minuscule began to get stress on the first syllable, it was no longer clear from hearing the word what the second vowel was. The second was the existence of semantically similar words that contained the spelling mini, such as miniature and minimum. The word mini is associated with small things.

Therefore, a person spelling the word minuscule, having no auditory cues to indicate the spelling "minu", and knowing other smallness words contain "mini", has every logical reason to think the spelling should be "miniscule". 

Furthermore, it should be noted that minuscule has its origin in lettering, as in writing letters of the alphabet. The "minus" in this case means less, not small, and it means lower-case letters. It is the opposite of majuscule. (This makes the most sense to me, since in Spanish, the capital letters are "majuscula" and the lowercase letters are "minuscula")

See what happened there.. a neat little tangent became something to write about. I still plan to finish the wedding and honeymoon photo albums. They are memories that deserve a story. 

I'll keep trying to remember to write. As I have more things to say or acquire more readers, I'm sure it will be easier. There will always be someone that says or reports something that make a story. Thanks for listening. Here are a few pictures of my events so you can see it truly was an amazing trip:

The Road to Married... 6 days!

We have SIX DAYS left!! This is amazing that I started counting about 400 days ago and all of the hard work is about to pay off!

We are leaving on Wednesday and we can't be more jazzed. We have a few errands tomorrow (Labor Day) and Nelson is going to finish packing tomorrow. Tuesday, we are both due int he office for one final day of work. I hope it flies by. I'm only working until about 2pm, but it's still a work day and we must be able to focus. Nelson isn't as lucky. He probably has to stay until about 7pm tying up loose ends.

I keep looking up websites for Restaurant recommendations and possible party hot spots. I think that listing has reached it's apex. I have more than a dozen restaurants in each city and we are only staying maximum 4 days in each. I'm a bit food-crazy. I have top things to do plus eateries but top 10 lists on every stop. I'm driving Nelson crazy.

I guess that's what happens when I have too much time to plan, but I wouldn't have it any other day. I love every second of the planning...

The Road to married - 48 days!

Hey folks (or perchance I'm writing this for my own amusement). Once again, I've abandoned the blog. It's now been 60 days since I've written anything, but there hasn't been much to report. We are diligently finishing all of the to-do things and have paid off most of the wedding. Now the waiting game. The waiting game is such, that I wish the wedding was tomorrow, and then I panic, because I'm not ready, but I am ready, then I realize there's something else to do... confusion ensues...

I actually dont have much to do thankfully. The favors are mostly done, the playing cards are done, the CDs are being copied and the labels are being printed. There is a bit of busy work but we will finish the rest of the stuff in the coming weeks (only seven left!)

The next thing I am working on is saying my vows, but my hormones have gotten the best of me. I am mostly finished writing them and I keep practicing saying them to a picture of Nelson. I cry every single time. I think that if I read them from a paper, it will be easier, because if I have to look into his eyes, I'm a mess. I'll report on the progress.

Not much today. Just felt like getting some thoughts on screen.

Sitting at work, while dreaming of vacation.

I'm sitting at lunch and I'm realizing that concentrating on work will never be more difficult than this week, before my trips.

I mean, freakin A, I am going to Italy!!! Do you realize how many people only dream of this kind of trip?? Anyway, not trying to gloat, I'm just still in awe that in 8 short days I'm hopping the pond.

Funny story from this past weekend: I downloaded the google translator, and I was importing common phrases so I would have a few things to stay set. Nelson heard me talking to my phone several versions of the same question and he asked me what I was doing. I explained that I was trying to figure out the easiest sentence to ask someone where the closest metro station was because the translations were all coming out too long:
Dove si tropa blah blah stazione della metropolitana etc.
With the straightest face ever, he said, Babe, don't you think that if you ask someone "Metro?" that they will know what you mean?
I instantly felt like an idiot and we laughed about that for about 20 minutes.
So. No more convoluted sentences. Time for short concise "hey I'm an American but I'm trying" questions. LMAO

More later