'Tuesdays are Blog Update Days'

Or at least, so I've been told. Gotta give the people what they want.

It's raining in St. Louis. Hard. And pretty cold. And especially cold in my office.

Any other questions?

In other news, we traveled over to the east side of the St. Louis metro area on Saturday to pick out and cut down our Christmas tree. Maybe should have gotten something bigger, but it's pretty decent.



Take that, nature. I pwn you. And then the Deacs won at Gonzaga Saturday afternoon. A good day.

Christmas shopping is nearly complete, and if my brother would ever e-mail me back, we might be able to finish things off.

And then we decorated the tree and the house on Sunday. See?





Next up - holiday party on Saturday night with some friends. Oh, and yesterday marked 18 months of marriage. We celebrated by having a nice beer and cheese soup with crescent rolls. Living the high life.

Happy Thanksgiving

Let's ignore the fact that no one's reading this and that it's been updated once in the past year. Trivial facts.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of this blog's dedicated readers. We are headed to Maryland, where it is slated to rain as much as it's been raining in St. Louis the last month, which is a lot.

Things are chugging along in St. Louis. We finally attended our first hockey game here last week, when the Blues took down the Phoenix Coyotes (Winnipeg Jets) 17 seconds into overtime. We saw Phantom of the Opera at the Fox Theater, which takes me back to my days as a spoiled brat growing up in CT, when my parents tried to take me to a performance of that for my birthday and I pretty much whined until they turned the car around. Sorry, Mom and Dad. And we've seen a couple of plays at SLU, which have been ... interesting?

Courtney is halfway done with her five years of indentured servitude, er, graduate school, and I'm still gainfully employed, and there's something to be said for that. After Thanksgiving, we'll be looking forward to a trip to Mexico over Christmas with my family, and then a trip down to Oklahoma in early January.

Let's Try This Again

Since my friend Greg mentioned he saw that I had a blog, I figure maybe I should actually post on it.

Things are fine here in St. Louis as the summer begins to set in. I think we last checked in here after our trip to Hawaii for Carl & Joanne's wedding in October. Since then, we went to Tulsa to see Courtney's dad for Thanksgiving, and split Christmas between Maryland and North Carolina, catching up with a large chunk of Courtney's family as well as mine.

There was a rough start to 2009, especially within Courtney's family, with some injuries and some really terrible situations, and our thoughts are with all of them as recoveries and healing continues.

We're approaching our first anniversary - the year has definitely flown by. Courtney is through two years of a projected five-year PhD program at St. Louis University, and I'm happy to still be employed in the marketing department of commercial real estate firm CB Richard Ellis (I survived a layoff where two of the five in our department got laid off).

Courtney's project is coming along, and she'll spend the summer studying for her the oral portion of her qualification exams, or prelims (I may or may not have that right) and beginning to gather some data that will hopefully go into her dissertation. I don't think it's much secret that we hope to get back to the East Coast somewhere once she finishes up, but we'll see where the job market takes us at that point.

We moved a couple of blocks in late January to a new apartment that's working out pretty well for us. Softball season has now started up again, and with two wins out of three games, I think we've already doubled last season's win total.

We've got a "Pujols Pack" of tickets to seven Cardinals games throughout the season, with another one coming up this week. We made it to Las Vegas in March, where we hung out with the Sleeps, Geometry and J-Bo and even saw my parents, who were there for their anniversary. I'm headed to Southport, NC, for Father's Day weekend to play in a golf tournament with my dad, and Courtney's heading back to Maryland for Fourth of July weekend, and we're hoping to make a trip down to Oklahoma to see Courtney's dad soon too. And we're headed back to Winston-Salem for the first time in a long while in October for Homecoming, which is my 10th out of college (crazy). Thankfully, airfares have been pretty decent for a few of the trips we've planned.

Here's a picture from Vegas - I'm a big fan of this one. Props to J-Bo for taking it. Quit the IT biz and become a photographer. It's much less lucrative.



Oh, and how could I forget - at the end of June, Sleepy is coming out to St. Louis - something that all of you are welcome to do as well, by the way. Even though we want to get back to the East Coast, St. Louis is a pretty nice place to come for a visit and there's plenty to keep you busy. I think we'll probably take in a Cards game, hit up one of the casinos, maybe tour the Anheuser-Busch ... er... InBev plant, check out the Arch, etc. Mom and Dad, I promise you it's nicer here in the summer - way better than at the end of January.

I'll try to keep this up to date a little better, so I can talk about much more worthless stuff, like the fact that we saw Angels & Demons, or that we're halfway through the second season of "The Wire" on Netflix. You know, the stuff everyone really cares about.