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We’re down to one month to go, with not a whole lot to report. Stephanie has been lucky enough to have a good, healthy pregnancy without too many troubles (except for one memorable cat bite), but is really looking forward to the home-stretch. The baby room is ready (photos forthcoming!), the hospital bags are packed, and Steph is putting the finishing touches on the birthing plan. So at this point, it’s just us enjoying the last few days of … “just us”!

And heartfelt well-wishes to our friends, the Mullens, who recently welcomed a healthy baby boy to their family!

We’re making slow and steady progress getting the house (and our lives!) ready for February. With the help of some very generous friends we moved my home office to the basement and have cleared out the new baby room so we (read: I) can paint and furnish. In addition, for our distant friends and relatives I have finally gotten around to setting up Skype on the home computer to share all those fun baby moments in a few months. If you’d like to connect, send me an email (or check my Facebook page) for my username.

At the urging of our friends of family, we have taken a break from routine baby prep to register for all sorts of infant goodies. This is just a start – we’ll continue to work on these lists throughout the coming weeks, but our registries at Babies R Us and Target are now viewable.

So now that everyone is gleefully telling us that our lives will be “over” in February, we’re packing in as many adventures as we can. I added photos to the gallery of our recent trip to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, which was all kinds of bizarre fun. And this past weekend, I had a 30-hour whirlwind trip to New York with some friends to see one of the last Yankees games in their old stadium. Sorry, I’m not a Yankees fan (but it was still a fun experience). Other than that, there’s not much going on now except for Stephanie’s impending birthday – she can usually manage to stretch the celebration out to at least a week or two, so we’ll see how she does this year.

I can’t believe it either, but we joined some friends for my first Jimmy Buffett concert on Saturday. Stephanie (a certified “parrothead”) gave me fair warning about what to expect, but I still felt unprepared. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed cameras inside the venue, and I didn’t rove around the parking lot enough beforehand for wacky tailgating photos. It was a great time, though – all the years he’s been touring and he still put on a really fun show. The audience was absolutely nuts, and it turned out that I knew way more songs than I thought. Hopefully we’ll do it again next year!

It’s August, and that means it’s time once again to celebrate the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death by eating too much and reading ridiculous stories about the King. As before, we cooked up some of the most fried and butter-laden goodness we could think of, and read choice excerpts from the book Elvis and the Memphis Mafia. What better way to spend a Saturday than hearing about Elvis shooting out TVs and filling limos with live chickens?