26

I officially turned 26 on Sunday (yea!) but I had to spend the day studying (boo!) since I had gone to Boston with Chuck earlier in the weekend. We had a review session after class on Monday and when I arrived everyone sang Happy Birthday and we had ice cream cake!

Emily (one of my classmates), The BDay Girl

Boston Weekend

Chuck and I drove to Boston this weekend to see Boston College take on Virginia Tech! Chuck went to BC and has been itching to get back for a game now that he is back on the east coast. We stayed with Jason and Dani (some of Chuck's college friends) in their cool new apartment and we tailgated with some of Chuck's old roommates!

Chuck, Paige, Jason, Dani

Nuck, Tom, Chuck

life.is.good.

Beautiful weather, perfect water, grouper sammie, a plate of onion rings as big as my head and a cold Corona (or two...) at the Rod and Reel.
It just doesn't get much better.

Here are the fruits of all of Paige's hard labor 6 months ago in the new vegetable garden. Thanks Paige, we couldn't have done this without your help. And when I say "we", I really mean Jeff because he worked on his 38 new jars of sauce for about 10 hours yesterday. As you can imagine, he, the dogs and even the cats all had a little bit of red on them when I got home from work.

Love Julie

"Roughing" It

This weekend Sheldon and I decided to go hiking and camping in Harriman State Park, which is conveniently accessible via public transit. We were only going to be out for 1 night... Sheldon and I each had 20 + lb bags of equipment, water, food and "emergency supplies" - note the intense knife in Exhibit A.

When we arrived at the train station before our hike, we began our "roughing" it experience by perusing the local farmers market and getting some delicious pizza, fresh homemade foccacia, and potentially the best cannoli I have ever had (Paige - this might be the Veniero's of Veniero's...). The trail we picked was recommended by the Boy Scouts of America for "young troops", so we figured it wouldn't be too challenging.

This was before I nearly stepped on the biggest snake I'd ever seen, that just so happened to warn me from stepping on it by SHAKING ITS RATTLE - AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH. From then on we let Sheldon lead.

That was a little bit terrifying, but after my heart stopped beating a mile a minute it was back to enjoying the wilderness. Until we realized we had taken a wrong turn on our easy boy scout trail while being distracted by said rattler. We ended up hiking a harder, longer trail, but it ended up putting us on top of a mountain with a great view.

After heading back to our trail (thanks to Sheldon's map and compass, part of the ever present extra equipment) we made it to our campsite with plenty of time to spare. We proceeded with our roughing it by blowing up our air mattress pads and putting up our comfy tent. Then we rehydrated some curry from one of those overpriced but really easy to make tinfoil packets.

All said and told, our couch is much more comfy to rough it on. Plus, there's a much smaller chance accidentally climbing a mountain in between. However, I'd feel a lot more guilty going to sleep at 6p on our couch.

The Ultrasounds

This flyer just got emailed out to all Columbia University Medical Center students and I think the name is genius.

Eureka it works!

So I was checking my email after work today and John (the dad of our first Saltus student) had sent me this email:

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Katherine, Connor got a 100 on his first math speed test in school!

best ,John

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YAY!

Labor Day 2010

This was my last free weekend before school starts back up for the fall semester so Katherine, Sheldon, Chuck and I headed up to get spoiled by Dad and Julie and we had a pretty raucous fire on the deck last night that included about 4 bottles of wine, a late night trip out to the lake to look at stars and marshmallow-less smores:

Aunt Christine in NYC

We discovered that Aunt Christine was in town (watching the US Open) and demanded that she come meet us for a drink!