Boom, I'm back

Kind of surprised this thing still exists. No removal for inactivity, I guess. Plus, I've been twittering like crazy, trying to keep Chad Ochocinco in line.

So here we are - late April of 2010. Life moves along, and I've been in St. Louis for nearly two and a half years, and Courtney's almost done with Year 3 of her PhD program (two years to go!)

I can directly trace my lack of blog posts to 1) a lack of ideas; and 2) taking on more responsibility at work. And maybe 3) PQ. But work has gotten busier. I survived multiple rounds of layoffs and it appears things are getting better. I'm now part of a national "Enterprise Marketing Team" that consists of about a dozen people who come up with marketing tips for the company.

We spent Christmas in Mexico with my parents and brother and had a great time. Courtney's really worked hard to get in shape and (sappy) I'm pretty proud of her.

In March, Scott came out to visit St. Louis and, incredibly, we avoided the plagues of hot weather (Sleepy) and food poisoning (Justin). And the Spaulding brothers visited just a week ago, so it appears that the curse of visiting us in St. Louis may be over.

The biggest news, of course, was Wake Forest's firing of Dino Gaudio and the subsequent hiring of Jeff Bzdelik. If I'd bothered to update this blog, I could have given you the scoop.

The summer promises to be busy. I'm headed to Alabammer in May for a golf trip with Sleepy, Carl and Burns, taking a long weekend along the RTJ Trail. In June, I'll head back to the Hyphen to play in the Pine Brook Member-Guest with Sleepy, and in late June, Courtney and I will head to Europe for a week, visiting Portugal and England and attending her friend Beth's wedding in the process. Finally, in August, we will be headed to Boston for her friend Laura's wedding, and hopefully taking in a game at Fenway, Courtney's first visit.

PQ remains the most active subnet on the Intertubez. Isle is NOT excited about adding to his family, and Bish is now a Lakers fan. If you don't understand this part of the blog, consider yourself an outsider and lucky.

'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.

Long time, no updates?

Where to start? Well, both the concerts in Rocktober were very entertaining. Matt did not enjoy Death Cab's opening act at all. On the flip side, Ben Fold's opening act, Missy Higgins, was enjoyed by both of us. 

After the concerts we were off to Hawaii, which was beautiful. We really enjoyed going on vacation with all of our friends. It made for a lot of great memories. Carl and Joanne had a sunset wedding by the beach and guests were treated to 4 desserts. While in Hawaii we took surfing lessons (Guess which Harrington got up on the first try and which one didn't? ). We also swam with sharks, went snorkeling on a coral reef where we saw endangered sea turtles and met a former Neil Diamond roadie who regaled us with tales of life on the road with Neil. 

On the plane ride home from Honolulu, the captain came over the loudspeaker and announced that the current temperature in St. Louis was about 38 degrees. Matt was wearing shorts and a t-shirt...brrrr. 

A week later, I went out to my former field site and took down bird houses while having a small graduate student retreat (I don't know if I have mentioned that I somehow became chair of the social committee). We had a bonfire and got to see the stars. It was a nice break from the day to day. Matt stayed home and watched football games. 

I had a stressful few weeks at school where I felt like I would never catch up. I'm still not completely above water, but am definitely feeling better in general as the semester comes to a close. 

We went bowling with a group of Matt's coworkers recently in a really cool bowling alley that has been in the upstairs of this building since 1916.  Matt beat me in both games we played, I maintain that I never got warmed up.  

Other than that we've just been hanging out around the house for the most part. It was 28 degrees today on my way into school. If I had my way, I would never leave the house until the cold went away. 

We're off to OK for thanksgiving and will be in MD and NC over the christmas holidays. Hopefully we will get to spend some time with most of you. 

Courtney

Rocktober

Matt has taken to calling this month Rocktober and tonight kicks off our 2 concerts in 3 days music-palooza. We are going to see Death Cab for Cutie tonight at the fox. Then thursday we will be seeing Ben Folds at the Pageant. 

I think we're enjoying living in a city where we can go to a concert on a weeknight and not have to worry about needing to take the next day off. 

Next week we're heading to Carl's wedding in Hawaii. Tuesday night we fly to Phoenix and then Wednesday during the day we head to Honolulu. In addition to the wedding events, we also plan to take some surfing lessons, do some snorkeling and swim with sharks! We will be sure to post some pictures when we get home. 

Well, Matt did say he didn't promise to update you

Well shortly before our last update on the status of my exams, Matt and I went to the Ryder Cup. It was my first golf tournament and what an introduction! We walked for miles and miles, stretched and strained to see over people's heads and ultimately saw many exciting shots and had a great time. The concessions ran out of water on Sunday and it was really hot, so Matt even offered to leave early (even though we both knew he didn't mean it). I was glad we didn't miss the awesome finish when the U.S. won the cup. I think maybe next time we're going to a golf tournament I will buy some water early in the day. 

Last weekend, I took off to Maryland for a few days for a visit with my mom and to go to my Aunt Susie's wedding. We had a nice time at the wedding (even if we did get lost in Baltimore thanks to my new Uncle Mark's terrible directions). We had even more fun just getting to spend some time together. It really makes me long for east coast living again. We bought all the stuff so I could start my wedding scrapbook, but as of yet it's stayed in the bag. 

This weekend, we are both staying in town. Tonight we are off to an Oktoberfest party in Soulard (St. Louis' french quarter) with some friends. Tomorrow we are going to another friend's birthday party. I definitely plan to enjoy being at home and sleep in a bit. Monday, I start jury duty. Hopefully I don't get picked because it's not a great time school and teaching wise to be missing out on my life. I guess since it's my civic duty and all I will do it though. 

I met with my advisor this week and we set up a new experimental design and set a deadline for my dissertation proposal. That means I need to come up with one more chapter of research to do and get it written by the end of the semester. So grant proposals, the dissertation proposal and studying for my oral exams are all on my plate. 

Matt has been working hard on a quarterly report and 4 page press release for work. That went out this week. Also, I know that his boss has asked him to sit in on their Monday meeting to explain how another large press release he wrote got picked up by at least 4 media outlets and that it's a valuable way to get free publicity. So I am sure that once the brokers get that idea in their heads, Matt won't be wanting for work to do. 

Hope everyone is enjoying the crisp fall air coming in,

Courtney