Keeping Busy

With all the wedding recaps there hasn't been a chance to post about much else. I'm glad I took the time to write all those posts, but I'm sure glad they're done! There are a few more details to mention, but that can come later, when I get my second wedding recap wind.

In any case, the past few weeks have been busy! I know some of these updates are long overdue, but here they are anyway.

First, Thanksgiving. My dad and I continued our tradition of running the Manchester Road Race. There were over 14,000 people in the race. It's always a fun race and this year the weather was beautiful, plus running a 5 mile race makes Thanksgiving dessert taste even better! After the race we all went to the Pulaski's for dinner.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, our friends Ryan and Kelly hosted "Friendsgiving". Every year for the past three years, we have gotten a large group of old friends together for Thanksgiving dinner to celebrate our lasting friendship and to honor the memory of our close friend, Jason Lantieri, who was tragically killed in Iraq in October 2007. It a special day and hopefully a tradition that will last for many years.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, James and I took up a big project. We currently live in a two-family house owned by my parents. The downstairs tenants recently moved out and we decided to remodel the apartment and make the move from the top floor to the first floor. The first floor apartment is bigger and will give us access to the basement. We like the idea of more space and a basement, but remodeling the apartment has turned out to be a ton of work. The existing wallpaper hadn't been changed in 30 years, everything needed a fresh coat of paint, the wood floors needed to be refinished and the old tenants were seriously just dirty (you should have seen the shower)! We've been cleaning, scrapping, painting, wallpapering and refinishing for the past three weeks straight. An end is in sight but it's unlikely we'll be moved before Christmas.

Other happenings include birthdays, holiday parties, goodbye parties and babies. We celebrated (from afar) our nephew Andrew's 2nd birthday, James' mom's birthday and my dad's birthday this month. We only have pictures from the impromptu birthday dinner we had at our house for my dad, but Happy birthday everyone!!!

The only candle I had in the house was a "5", so that's what dad got, even though he's 60-something...

Also, one of my colleagues, Emily, just had a baby girl, Josie. We got to meet Josie for the first time at a two-for-one goodbye party for two other colleagues, John and Rachael. John and his wife Wendy will be moving to the Bay Area and Racheal and her husband Uli will be moving to Germany next month. It will be sad to see them go and with Emily out on maternity leave our office will be desolate this winter!

Emily and Josie and Uli, Rachael and Josie

Holiday parties at my office are no big deal but for James' company they go all out. Last Friday we donned fancy clothes and headed out to make small talk with the big wigs at the Robert E. Morris annual holiday party. It was fun to meet the folks James works with - now I can put a face to all those stories he brings home! He even won a $60 bottle of wine in a raffle (I was going for the I-Pod touch, that didn't work out so well).

UConn holiday party at Luigi's and John's goodbye gift

Finally, we decorated. With the impending move, we decided reluctantly not to get a real tree this year. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So instead, we found a small fake one in the attic of James' parents house and "made it work". I also let James decorate our house. James loves Christmas decorations. If I let him, he's go crazy with the Christmas lights, just like Chevy Chase in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. After some struggle (he wanted to get the automated life-size reindeer set), we settled on a single strand of large white lights. Kris came over and helped James string them on the house. I stood below and made sure they were all straight and to my liking. =)

Summit trying to figure out why we have a fake tree this year... also, playing "Santa Paws"

Besides the house and work, we've had our hands full like everyone else trying to finish up holiday projects and shopping. Thankfully, we're almost done - we better be though, Christmas is only four days away, can you believe it?!?