12.1.2004 - 12.31.2004

December 28, 2004:  Who knew we could drink that much champagne!  If you didn't figure it out from our last post I'll just say it, we got married last week!  We talked about it a lot and decided that we would have a small, private wedding with just the two of us and then in two years, after graduation, we will have a blowout for the record books!  The day we decided on was December 20th, 2004 and we had a justice of the peace do the ceremony at a local park in the small town we live in.  It was very cold but very clear so the few pictures that our neighbor was nice enough to take came out great.  The first snow of the year fell the night before so it looked really awesome outside.  We went to a this really cool mountain town in NH called North Conway for a few days before Christmas.  The hotel we stayed at was awesome, had a hot tub in our room and everything.  We couldn't believe how much champagne we were able to put down in just a couple days.  We blame it on the fact that it was really hot in our room the whole time so we needed it to keep cool, yeah, that's it.  So now it's for real, we are officially Mr. and Mrs. Jason Nault.  I added a couple pictures of our wedding bands to the rings page on the right.  I also added a page to the weddings section with some pictures from the ceremony and the cool little town we went to for our honeymoon.  Well, that's all I have for now, it's a short week for us at work with new year's eve on Friday.  I'm on call this weekend so we won't be partying it up too much, but we will have a few more glasses of champagne to celebrate!

December 17, 2004:  "Weddings traditionally are about tackling three enormous undertakings simultaneously - a legal agreement, a romantic commitment and a party.  For some couples, especially those who are planning big weddings, secretly separating the commitment ceremony from the party can help manage the anxiety of both... Instead of choosing elopement versus a big to-do, they are opting to do both, getting privately married before they get publicly married."

December 15, 2004:  It's been a while since we spoke, lots of craziness here, I'll try to cover it all.  The day Lisa got home from Florida Isis had another "episode" at the house.  She was in her cage and tried her best to get out, breaking most of her teeth and bleeding all over the place in the process.  She bent some of the bars in the cage but never made it any further than that.  I couldn't bend the same bars back with two hands!  Our vet had recommended lowering her dose of Prozac because it didn't seem to be working, well, it turns out that it really was.  She had a couple more teeth pulled and some roots removed later that week.  We made an appointment at Tuft's Veterinary Hospital in the behavioral clinic to have a consultation with Dr. Dodman, a world leader in animal behavior studies.  This guy has written books, been on TV news programs many times and is really the man in this field.  We showed him the pictures of her past "episodes" and he wanted to use them as examples in his classes, he also teaches at Tuft's.  He told us a bunch of things we need to do for her and upped her dose of Prozac and added some Xanax too.  Lisa asked him if he had seen cases worse than this, he said he had seen a few dogs that had some of these symptoms but never one with all of them.  So the Jury has decided, Isis is the World's Craziest Dog!  I got back from my trip to Washington, DC on Tuesday, the training was alright, not quite what I expected it to be.  I learned some stuff but not as much as I had hoped.  Now I have to do the certification that my boss signed me up for.  The requirements are a full network design and full perimeter security design for a fictitious company and a 30+ page research paper on an approved topic.  When that is done I get to take two written tests.  If that all goes well I will be certified by a company that people have barely heard of.  Can you tell I'm not really into it?  I'll give it my best I guess, I have 5 months to get it all submitted.  We will be going up to NH for the holidays this year, I'm actually not on call or working this year!  Watch for exciting news in the next few weeks.  Well, we hope you all have a great holiday, we'll talk again soon.

December 5, 2004:  And we're back!  That was WE, as in Jay AND Lisa.  I had to go into work yesterday morning and then picked her up at the airport in the afternoon, I barely recognized her.  Its been a long time and she did get a totally new haircut so I have a good excuse.  It's so nice for her to be back, this place was so quiet and lonely without her.  It's awesome that she's back but that fun will be cut short by me leaving for training on Wednesday.  I'll be gone for almost a week, coming back late next Tuesday night.  Work has been crazy all week.  We had another outage for the firewall project we have been working on and it failed again, we'll get it right one of these times.  We have a ton of work to do and this week of training I'm going to isn't going help get it all done.  Between the work I have to do and Lisa being back home, I really don't want to go right now.  Sorry this isn't much of an update, hopefully we'll have time for more the next one.  Good luck with your holiday shopping, we'll talk again soon.