Well it's Peggy again trying to waste some time. Let's see, since the last time I wrote, we fully moved into our new apartment and we've had two parties and are working on the third for this weekend. Our anniversary came and went with a fun filled trip to Montreal where we spent hours searching for windshield wiper blades in the pouring rain at night in New Hampshire and Vermont. I think I started a post that weekend - maybe I should go back and find it and actually post it...hm.....

Then mid-October we had Jill and Andy's wedding - go check out the pictures. It was my first trip to Illinois and it was a blast. And the best part....they have bars that you can SMOKE in - ok well maybe it's not the best part - the best part was seeing Jill and Andy get married and how happy they are. We wish them the best of luck. But the smoking in the bar part was really cool too - as was smoking in Denny's - and the price of smokes....ok enough about smokes. Matt and I did manage to see some of the sites of Springfield - the Dana-Thomas house was amazing and I'm sure Lincoln's house was cool too but we missed that tour. OH well.

Then let's see - after that, I went to Indiana. Then it was Thanksgiving time - 2 days with my family and two days with Matt's family - very nice and relaxing - no major catastrophes and even the traffic wasn't that bad. Then we spent a full week getting ready for our first annual Christmas Party which was a big success, if I do say so myself. Matt was the ultimate winner and outlasted everyone - he was the last one to go to bed and even did some cleaning before waking me up so that we could go to bed. It was a blast and most of the food went so not too much waste - always a good time - of course we missed all you that could not make it.

Now it's Christmas season - Saturday will be my all day shopping expedition and hopefully I can get most of the stuff bought that I need to get bought - then I'll drop it in Matt's lap, look pathetically cute and he'll wrap most of it for me while I struggle with a few odds and ends. Now that the season is upon us and our first annual xmas party is behind us, well I may actually be looking forward to the end - of course that could just be this sickness talking - I have some sort of bug and it makes me hurt so I'll sign off now and one of us will check back soon.

We've been married for almost a year now - October 10, 2005 will be one year and this may very well be actually posted on that date. Regardless, we decided to go on an adventure for our anniversary - just get in the car and drive with no particular destination in mind except perchance Montréal. Thursday night, we pack for our trip so that we can leave directly from my office when I get off at 6:30PM. Well unfortunately, we forgot Matt's passport and my birth certificate so we meet at the house, gather those items and some cds and off we go. We make it to New Hampshire and the rain starts. OOPS!!!! We forgot just how bad our windshield wipers were and I can hardly see the road or the cars around me so we detour at Manchester and can't find anything open - no AutoZone, no auto store at all. Back on the road we go and stop again at Concord b/c the rain is getting heavier. Finally we find an AutoZone that apparently closed 17 minutes before we got there, so we head to Shaws and there is nothing there either. Drats spoiled again!!!!!!

However, Matt has an ability that I do not - he can ask people for directions - so he asked the lovely customer service ladies at Shaws in the area and they give us perfect directions. We find Target, purchase new wiper blades and lo and behold - we can see again. Matt is now in the driver's seat and we stop at Applebees for dinner. However, after eatting there - we know why we never go there - we ordered spinach and artichoke dip that was hideous tasting - we ate abou 1/4 of it and sent back the rest. Matt's burger smelled like burnt rubber and my chicken fingers were just dull. Back on the road we go - after almost 2 hours in Concord NH - definately considered a stop on our adventure.

Now we're getting tired and it's approaching midnight - so we stop in Lebanon - no hotels to be found. Fortunately the gentleman at Fireside Suites was nice enough to have a list of the hotels in the area with available rooms and we head to White River Junction, VT to get a room at the Hampton Inn. Decent enough room for $179/night. Unfortunately the coffee we bought in Lebanon after the first hotel rejected us, kicked in and we stayed up till almost 3AM watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith (a pretty good movie if I do say so myself - definate chemistry between Brad and Angelina and they play off of each other really well.)

Saturday morning we are back on the road after a very mediocre breakfast at the Hampton Inn - but it was free and for $179/night we were eatting it - of course we stopped at Shell and bought some candy and cookies and a digital camera b/c we forgot ours and picked up some real coffee at Dunkin Donuts - back on the road....

Finally we make it to the Canadian border - we're sitting in line and I take out my license and birth certificate and once more comment and wonder on the fact that my driver's license has my married name on it and my birth certificate has my maiden name on it but they never ask for my marriage license to prove the link. So in essence, any terrorist or alien who has the same first name as me and the same birth date can use my birth certificate with their driver's license to get into Canada. I'm still very confused as to how this makes sense. Then we approach the gate and get asked some very important questions - do we have any alcohol in the vehicle...do we have any tobacco products? They don't ask if we have any illegal narcotics or firearms - or bombs or hazardous materials - nope - just alcohol and tobacco.

Of course, the highlight of our border adventure was my husband lying to border patrol. The question was "when was your last visit to Canada?" his answer..."Never been" - um....Matthew - we were just in Nova Scotia in July - and WE JUST HAD THIS CONVERSATION 20 MINUTES AGO and last night and last week. OH well....

So after traveling over some pretty bad roads for a piece, we make it to Montreal - we drive around looking for a hotel for about 20 minutes or so and finally we find a Sheraton that we decide to try. Luckily they had rooms available and with our triple AAA discount - the room was $149 Canadian - much cheaper in American dollars I'm sure. Well we are off to see the wonderful city of Montreal (including the casino if I can convince Matthew).

I think we can declare ourselves officially moved in now! We have a few more things that need to be done but they will just have to get done slowly, one thing at a time - Chez Wollman was apparently not built in a day. So that's where we've been - moving and cleaning and painting and organizing and building things - all that fun stuff. But we're back now and I think Fall is almost here. It was a beautiful morning today - crisp and clean and marvelous.

So what did everyone do for Labor Day? Did you get a chance to enjoy the long weekend? We spent time with family and just relaxing - all in all, good times.

Ok, so about five weeks ago aliens abducted me. They took me on board their space vessel and performed peculiar experiments involving a spatula, a beach ball, and a sandwich. At first I was all about the sandwich but they did not like that too much. So they threw me out.

I also have land in South Florida I?m willing to part with for $200 an acre.

In addition I went to RUG 2005 last week and had a lot of fun, met a lot of really cool people, and learned a lot about Remedy. Other then that there have been weekend trips to families, Irish Mythology and Folklore, and lots of work. I hope things have been good with everyone else and I hope to keep a bit more current on this thing but don?t keep your hopes up. I also would like to take this time to wish Jenny and Ryan happy trails.

OK so this is the question of the month: when you order chinese food - do you order the same thing every single time? or....do you try different things and order a variety so that you can eat more then say sweet and sour chicken (or pork) with fried rice, egg roll and crab rangoon every time?

My answer - I like a variety - I like to order 4 different things and share them and have leftovers for the next three days. Someone else I know only orders the same thing every single time!

Wow. Time sure does fly when you are busy. Two weekends ago I was involved in Matt's wedding which was beautiful and I had a great time along with my wife. Monday, we went to Plymouth to help my parents organzie stuff for a yard sale we did this weekend. during the week I spent almost every night out, with friends and this weekend we went to Plymouth, on Friday, came back on Sunday and went to Nahant Beach, north of Boston and enjoyed the beautiful weather. I'm also not used to posting in a long time. This weekend was a marvelous one. What did you do?

This is my first attempt at a blog. Don't worry - I won't hog Matt's website too much. Today is the big day for Matt Staub and Natalie and I just wanted to send out my best wishes as well. So best wishes, good luck and congratulations. Of course, I am extremely jealous that you get to go on a lovely honeymoon - it was one of the best parts of our wedding - just Matt and I with no schedule but our own and no pressures except where we were going to eat for dinner. Have a great time and relax as much as you possibly can!!!!

The contact Page is now working with FormMail!

So the final took me an hour. I think I did well, the answers came to me rapidly and I wrote as fast as I could. Work however is going to all hell, New things coming up faster then I can fix them. It's stressing me out. I'm very excited about this weekend, however. My friend Matthew is getting married. I want to take a moment and congratulate Matthew and Natalie and wish them a long and wonderful life together.

So Don McGill is leaving the employ of Harvard and last night some of his colleagues and I went to Shay's and had a few drinks in his honor. I did not get home till late and did not study. I hope I can do a little today at work and hope I do well on the exam. Wish me luck. I still have to figure out what class I am going to take in the summer as well. Perferably on Mondays and Wednesdays at night. Harvard Summer School has a lot of choices.

So here is the new mattwollman.com. basic blogging is up and running along with comments. The archives and the post pages are there but not including my SSI includes. I might have to scrap the includes on the index and archive pages. Not sure if I like that plan yet. I reorganized my porfolio directories so those don't work any more, and I need to clean those pages up anyway. I need to clean up the links on my portal to make it more useful for myself. A lot of work still yet to be done. Do the custom 404 and 403 pages work? I haven't tried them yet. If any of my family friends or readers discover anything not working or have suggestions email me through the contact page. Maybe tomorrow I'll work on it some more, though I relly should study for my World Religions final.

The project is due to day and I'm only a third done with my planned ideas. I emailed Sonal today and told her I may need to use some tokens for this project. Though I'm pulling an all-nighter anyway maybe I'll get it done. Started with converting my first assignment. the about page to my template. I copied the css into my main styles because I think many of them will apply. I changed the colorvalues and the div ids in the html to match the css.

I had taken the day off today to sse the new Star Wars movie. I did do alot awork prior to this and after my World religions class. I worked on the nav and footer elements tested them in other browsers, used mock up text in the main div for testing. and split the page up into SSI includes. Uploaded it, tested it and ran it through validators. I started to work on my ther pages like the portal. I copied my bookmarks.html from my FireFox profile to my web folder. But that involved a lot of cleanup and took my longer then a expected.

So final project time begins. I would have done this sooner, but I had a final paper due in World Religions that was a lot tougher. That took too much time. I started work tonight on the basic template. It took me a while to figure out the colors and how to use my base image (the grass). On the advice of my trusted web design mentor Ryan I used Photoshop to "cutout" the four most prominent colors from the photo and used those as my color selection. I faded the middle column to have a nice light background on which to write. Then I worked on the title image and nav. This took to pretty late, so I wrapped up.