Autumn in New York

Hello from beautiful central New York!  We are here for a week visiting Eric's family for the holiday.  We landed in our little puddle jumper on Thanksgiving Day and enjoyed a delicious traditional holiday meal prepared by Eric's mom.  That evening we also paid a visit to the rest of her side of the family and met the older of the two new babies in our family, Eric's cousin's little boy, Aiden.  What a cutie! 

The next day we slept in a bit and relaxed until late in the morning so we wouldn't have to battle the Black Friday crowds.  My one major purchase was a new pair of classic black boots on major sale at JCPenney, but we also finished up our Christmas shopping for Eric's side and spent quality time with our beautiful and amazing teeny-tiny nephew, Andrew Wilson Kazmarek!  He was born November 9, so he's still only a few weeks old. We are crazy about him!  Here are some cute photos I've taken of the little guy.

Ain't he a sweetheart?  In the meantime, we've just been relaxing, spending time with family, opening gifts, and hanging out with Andrew, introducing him to our favorite holiday movie, Elf!  Perfect examples of the Comedy Rule of Threes for the future superstar. 

Pomp and Circumstance

Eric finally gradumatated this summer.  He has been taking online classes toward his Bachelor's in business administration, so he had been joking about having his own graduation ceremony and walking past the webcam on our laptop when it was all over, but since his mom was in town during the school's official ceremony, he decided to physically attend a school event for the first (and last) time.  We kept it a secret until the day of the event, so she was pretty excited when she found out where we were going that day!

Eric and mom at the ceremony venue

Eric meets the dean of the business school

(Don't look too closely at the above photo if you are easily offended)

This is what Eric thinks of Everest University

A celebratory bike ride

I'm very proud of Eric for sticking with it--I'm not gonna lie: the online program was bull$#!+ so he was tempted to quit many times--but now it's over!  Everest University, we will forever be in your debt.  Go, Sherpas!

On a Mission...to Chicago

I promised there would be a post about our trip to Chicago to visit my AXO sister Rachel and her boyfriend Ollie, so now, since we're about to have our own visit from the Londoners, is a good a time as any!

As you know, we moved into the new house in less than three non-vacation days because we'd already planned our Chicago vacation with the assumption that we would have closed on the house by the time we flew out.  We thought we would be a bit stressed out to leave behind such a mess, but the trip was actually a welcome distraction from the madness awaiting us at home.  We spent the first day flying, doing a little shopping, socializing, and regressing on the Scott family trampoline.  Eric split his pants during the making of this photo.

The next day we ventured from the suburbs into the city for authentic deep dish Chicago-style pizza on our way to the Cubs game!  They lost (no surprise there) but we have now had the official bleacher bum experience.

Our third day in Chicago was spent sightseeing in the city.  We rode the El, stopped by Chicago Lyric Opera, and found ourselves at the Bean.  (See our reflection behind us?)

Then we happened to run into the crew of Transformers 3 filming on location.  There were more childhood regressions when we sneaked a peak at Bumblebee!  Further down the street was faux destruction and controlled mayhem for the shoot.

Then we had a tasty lunch on the river and explored the Tribune building where we found a little piece of central Florida all the way up in Illi-noise.

Our final stop in the city that day was the Museum of Science and Industry.  We experienced a bit more regression mingling with the field trip kids, stopping by the ice cream parlor, and playing around on the exhibits.

The rest of our time was spent relaxing and spending time with our friends.  All in all, it was a sweet little taste of a city new to us and a great time with Ollie and Rachel.  They're flying in from England for a visit on New Year's Eve, so we're bound to have more adventures to write about in a few short weeks!

Holy Crap...

...as in, "Holy crap...it's been a long time since I blogged."  I know people have been waiting by the computer for a new post, so I apologize to those faithfully (imaginary) obsessed readers for the delay.  We really and truly were so busy around the house--until about three weeks ago (I'll explain in a minute)--that we didn't have time for much else.  Then I just became accustomed to not blogging, so it took me until now to get back into the swing of things.

If you know me well, you know that I'm not a morning person.  If you're any random person stumbling onto this post on the web, you can see that I'm posting this at 8:30 in the morning.  This is because Eric woke me out of spite this morning because I kept him up last night.  I might be a bit biased, but I don't think silently doing a crossword puzzle with the lamp on (while someone who can easily fall back to sleep is sleeping) should be repaid with being generally boisterous with the overhead light on (while someone who can not easily fall back to sleep is sleeping).  So, now I'm officially awake, on my day off, at 8:30am, and I decided to take on a big project that I've been putting off: moving my digital photos and posting about some of our recent adventures.  I had my mind all made up about what site I was going to choose, but after doing a bit of research, I changed my mind about trusting that service with my precious photos.  So now I'm back to square one, but in the meantime, I'm trying out Picasa Web Albums (Google's photo storage service, which stores this blog's photos anyway) just for kicks.  That way, at least for now, I can post about a few of our adventures and there will be visual aids!