Memorial Day Weekend 08

From Memorial Day ...

From Memorial Day ...

Over Memorial Day weekend Scott and I got to go see a lot of the fun things around my hometown that I like to take visitors to. Of course we ate tons of green chile and pretty much gained 5 pounds each, but that was to be expected when I'm able to get my hands on food that is nowhere to be found in NYC. I haven't found quality New Mexican food just yet.

From Memorial Day ...

Aside from eating, we visited the Aztec ruins, which are these amazing Pueblo Indian ruins sitting amongst a residential neighborhood. They were all deserted before 1300 AD, but they're still around today, even though there are some features that aren't architecturally sound, such as doorways set into corners. It's always fun to see things that are so ancient and to compare what their life must have been like to the way I live mine.

From Memorial Day ...

From Memorial Day ...

Supposedly they were having a hot air balloon fiesta at Farmington Lake. I think this was all a fantasy, because by the time Scott and I got there, there was nothing but us and the ducks.

From Memorial Day ...

From Memorial Day ...

The ducks did have mohawks, but there was no sign of hot air baloons. We even tried looking for them from up on the hill where my parents bought some property, to no avail. My sister brought her boyfriend's new puppy, Cara along. He is in Germany for the summer so she's a surrogate puppy mom.

From Erin's Gradua...

From Memorial Day ...

Sunday we went to the horse races where we ran into one of Hannah's Aunts and even my dad's friend who is the owner of one of the horses that was favored to win. It was a fun family outing. We all went down to the horse pens before each race to check out the horses and pick our favorites, then Scott spent a lot of time studying all the stats while I scientifically based my $2 bet on hunches. I think my hunches paid off maybe twice out of 8 races. It was entertaining to see the horses run though. The owner of horse number 8 who in the eight race offered to have us come down to the winners circle for a picture, but I think he jinxed himself because his horse balked at the start. He was certainly fast and almost made up the time, but as you can see by the picture when you're still in the starting gate and all the other horses are off it doesn't really allow for a win.

From Memorial Day ...

My parents dropped us off in Albuquerque with my Aunt Luella and Uncle Diego who fed us very well and took us around to see the place where they're going to be building a new house. My aunt decided to sit on her future porch to check out the view while Scott learned about how prickely tumble-weeds can bee and got a sticker in his foot. Good ole New Mexico.

From Memorial Day ...

From Memorial Day ...

From Memorial Day ...

From Memorial Day ...

Happy New Year!

From 2008_01_01

Scott and I have Lucas, Scott's best man visiting us for the week. After we returned from our travels we picked Lucas up on Sunday. Everyone went out for a NYC New Years. It was nice since usually we're travelling on New Years Eve. I think I'm usually on a plane or train or at home in bed. This year we went to Uncle Ming's. We got there and looked around and asked aloud where it was and the people standing near the door said "it's right here." It was one of those clubs that you have to know about to go into. They seem to have a lot of those in New York, I think they think it makes them seem exclusive. We had fun. I hope everyone else had a good one!

From 2008_01_01

Last post of 2007

The last weeks of 2007 have been busy ones. Scott and I flew to Des Moines Iowa the weekend before Christmas. We had good timing since they had a storm the day before we flew in. The runways were snow covered and the wind made the snow blow along the ground, either the snowflakes were very small or it was just pieces of snowflakes being blown along like dust along the ground. I tried to get a picture but it wasn't really possible.

From Christmas

Scott's mom picked us up and we decided that we'd need to stop at Walgreens since Scott's bag hadn't arrived with us despite the 3 hour layover and the fact that my bag made it there. We made the hour long drive to Toledo where Scott's Mom, Susan tried to drop off some stuff in a storage unit. Of course we realized once we pulled into the driveway that it was a solid sheet of ice and that we'd have to do some major manuvering to get back out. Scott and I got out and pushed and we managed to skate our way back out again. Later that night Scott's bag got delivered too, so everything worked out.

From Christmas

From Christmas

We opened presents at Scott's grandparent's house on Christmas eve since we'd have to head back to Des Moines on Christmas day to catch our flight to New Mexico. We had a nice time playing cards with his family and even managed to go for a walk out into the cornfields for a mini photo shoot.

From Christmas

From Christmas

We got to New Mexico with no problem and my Aunt Luella and Uncle Diego picked us up for the 3 hour drive to Farmington. We got to have another Christmas dinner and presents there.

From Christmas

From Christmas

It snowed enough to make the roads slick, but as ususal for NM snow it melted before noon.

From Christmas

My sister Erin will be graduating soon, so she wanted to try taking some senior pictures, but it was so freezing and windy that we didn't get much done. When the snow is outracing the car then you know it's windy. Hair blowing straight up in the air doesn't make for the most attractive pictures.

From Erin's Senior...

It was a short visit, but we also got to have some coffee with Chris and Tammie Billey of Largo Photography. We also got to meet their son Treston who is even more adorable in person than in pictures :) Scott got a mentos and coke rocket launcher in his stocking, but we didn't want to carry the soda so we launched it before we left.

From Christmas

From Christmas

From Christmas

Afterwards we headed back to Albuquerque so we could catch our flight the next day back to New York. I took some pictures of the NM scenery along the way.

From Christmas

From Christmas

From Christmas

Again we got lucky since we flew through Chicago and they'd just had a very large snowstorm the day before. We got home all in one piece and with lots of extra goodies. It was very nice to see everyone. It may have been a whirlwind trip, but it was definitely worth it!

From Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays to everyone. Scott and I are in Iowa enjoying a ton of card games and food with his mom and grandparents. It's pretty frigid here, but luckily we flew in Sunday, which was the day after their big snowstorm. I noticed that they'd had so much wind and snow that the parking garage had about an inch of snow all the way in the center of it and it's completely covered by a roof. Brrrr. We got some nice presents including yet more food and Scott got a toy transformer. I think that was his favorite :) The airline lost Scott's bag but got mine here ok, even though we had a 3 hour layover on the connection. But I was pretty impressed that they drove it out to us that same night by 11:30 even though we're over an hour away from the airport. Otherwise, Scott would have had to wear some of the "authentic western wear" we found at a local Ponida store. We're on to New Mexico early tomorrow. I hope you're all well and you'll have to comment about your favorite gift from this year!

Holiday Soiree

I'm going to make this quick, though I haven't posted in awhile. I have been doing pretty much the same thing everyone else has, which is shopping and planning for travel and holiday-ness. I went to my company Christmas party, which is nice. The only drawback is that we aren't allowed to bring a guest, so Scott didn't get to come. It's held at the St. Regis Hotel with a very nice food spread and open bar. It's funny because we all end up dancing with colleagues, and I'm probably one of the youngest employees so I don't feel intimidated on the dance floor. Every year our CEO hands out raffle prizes and everyone is wearing lovely yellow wristbands that give them entrance to the party along with their raffle number. So we're all staring at our yellow wristbands waiting for our number to be called. I did hand out the wristbands and when I handed my coworker Derek his I told him it was a winner and it was! Except he didn't get the 40" flat screen he got the CD gift set. Oh well I didn't promise him the best prize. Anyway, I decided I wouldn't take my camera but other people had theirs there, so here are some pictures. Oh yeah, I also got my hair cut. We're heading to Iowa on Sunday and New Mexico the day after Christmas. So we've got lots of travel. I'll cross my fingers that the weather holds.

From Holiday Party...

The St. Regis Ballroom, so very gilded. These are a couple of my work friends. The girl with dark hair is our volleyball team captain.

From Holiday Party...

This is the corp comm department. That's my boss in the pink jacket next to the CEO of Sony, Howard Stringer.

From Holiday Party...

This is most of the accounting department who also happen to be a good portion of the softball team.

Fall Adventure

It's been awhile, but I've been busy. Lots of good news to report. Last week we won all three sets of our volleyball game. Whooo hooo! No games this week, so hopefully we don't lose our momentum. This weekend Sky, Anna, Scott and I all went on a road trip to Salem. It was great! A nice fall trip. The leaves hadn't really started changing too much yet since the weather has been so warm, but it was still nice to see the New England Coastline. Salem is about 10 miles outside of Boston, and it's a funny little town. Of course it's famous for the Salem Witch Trials where they burned a lot of innocent women at the stake for being "witches." These days it's just a nice town that really likes Halloween. There were people already dressed up in costume just because it was October. We went to the psychic fair, Scott got his Aura read, and Sky and Anna had a Tarot card reading. All very amusing. We saw a historical play where we were the audience/jury for a witch trial. Then in the end we convinced our hotel to bake a pumpkin pie that we brought them since Anna really wanted some and we couldn't find anywhere but the grocery store to buy one. The next day we tried to visit a cranberry bog but didn't quite succeed.

From Salem Fall Tr...

Instead we walked around in a corn maze, even though there was no one there for us to pay. I'll have to try to find a cranberry bog next year.

From Salem Fall Tr...

From Salem Fall Tr...

After traveling through 4 states we added a new one to the list, and stopped for lunch in the 5th state, Rhode Island. Providence is a nice town and we found the Brown University Campus and relived our college days sitting on the lawn. The buildings were all quite beautiful, and it made me think for half a minute that it would have been nice to go to school there. Then I remembered that it would be cold in the winter and was glad that I didn't. All in all it was a fantastic weekend. We love hanging out with Sky and Anna who are so fun and such great friends. This last picture is of a sign post that I saw in Providence covered with staples from flyers that have been posted there. I thought it looked neat.

From Salem Fall Tr...

Oh one more good thing. I heard from the camera repair people that they would fix my DSLR under warranty. Now I just hope it gets back to me in time for my class.

Keep on Moving

I know it's been awhile, but the last week has been a little busy. On Thursday I coordinated a trip to the Liberty Science Center It is here in New Jersey near Scott and I, but we went for work because they just recently upgraded their space. Since we're in the process of doing the same thing we decided to see how their project went. It was a fantastic place with over 200,000 square feet of science based exhibits. You could spend an entire day there and still not see everything. Then I tried to rush back to the office since I was coordinating a surprise joint wedding shower for a couple of my coworkers and I still had a to get the cake and make the centerpieces. That was thwarted by a driver who was totally lost and showed up half an hour after the other car. Oh well, I managed to buy flowers and make a centerpiece and get everything together just in time. I did learn that flower arranging isn't nearly as easy as it looks, and I was quite proud of the outcome, but glad I decided not to do my own wedding flowers. That afternoon Scott and I told our friend Kevin, who lives in Brooklyn, that we'd help him move, so I got home as fast as I could and found another friend Eric pulled up to our house unloading some items. At first I thought some new person was moving into the neighborhood when I saw the U-Haul, then I recognised Eric and vaguely recalled Scott saying something about him staying with us at the end of the month. So we got some of his stuff loaded into the house and got the U-haul turned around on our dead end street and he went on his way to go help his sister move. Eric stayed with us over the weekend since he had a little time between moving out of his place and moving to Germany! Anyway, Scott showed up and we got Kevin moved to his new place which wasn't too far from his old one. My little car has now moved two mattress sets. It was a good thing I had a short Friday, since I was pretty tired from Thursday. My boss let me go early so I grabbed some lunch with Scott and the folks from his lab. We had some tasty burgers and checked out the bathrooms. Not because the food was bad, because they were interesting. You went upstairs and there was no door, it was just a wall of stalls with clear glass doors so you could see the toilets. The only difference between male and female rooms was the color of light inside. When you step inside and lock the door, the clear glass turns opaque and you can pee in privacy. A nifty little trick. That night I packed up and got ready to head to Denver to see Sarah! I'll tell all of my Denver adventures in the next post. For now I've got to go say hello to my man.