Here are the pictures I took on Sunday – fall has arrived! In addition, we carved our pumpkin last night and Jet posed with it. Today is Halloween and there will may be kids stopping by tonight for candy. It will be in the 70’s down here (again), so it should be great weather for trick-or-treating. Since I have class tonight, Jet will have to do it alone. As I said in the last post, I am not sure if we will get a lot of traffic, but Jet did get some candy to pass out.
We have had a pretty good stretch of weather lately (mid 70’s and sunshine) and with the trees just turning colors, it reminds me of fall up in Wisconsin. I took some pictures during our walk yesterday morning that I will share in the next post. It is getting harder and harder to find time to get our daily walks in now that it is getting dark so soon.
Tomorrow is Halloween and we still need to carve our pumpkin and get candy to pass out. I am not sure how much foot traffic we will receive, but it is better to be safe than sorry.
We went to Atlanta on Saturday for another footy match and then went to lunch at a different Thai restaurant. Jet liked the food because it tasted authentic, but they gave us small portions (without appetizer) at a fairly high price ($8 lunch menu), so I wasn’t that impressed. We had dinner with Donald and Linda last night. Jet made mussaman curry while Linda made pork chops with sauerkraut, canned cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes on the side. It was a treat eating the cranberries from the can since I usually only have that once a year at Thanksgiving.
Speaking of Thanksgiving … it is only 3 more weeks until we are back in town! We have a lot planned for our time there and hopefully we will have a chance to meet up with each of you and let you know how much you are missed.
Here are a couple of pictures (taken this morning) around the baby room. As you can tell, it is a work in progress. I will continue posting pictures of the baby room as it continues to take shape. Looking forward to hear your comments and suggestions!
It is getting cold down here! It reminds me of Wisconsin, except I don’t have enough jackets or coats to cover me. I am too big for my coats and jackets, but I don’t want to spend money for something that I will only use for couple more months. Who knows, maybe I won’t get back the same size!
Everytime I go to the mall or other shopping places and I see Christmas stuff, it makes me so sad that I won’t be with all of you this year. I still can’t make up my mind for that yet. I don’t know what we will do for Christmas eve and Christmas day without seeing all the kids running around. This is the most wonderful time for me to be around Andy’s family. I never looked forward to Christmas before until I met them. Now I have to wait till next year.
I am very excited to go back Milwaukee next month and I can’t wait to see how all of the nieces and nephews have grown. It seems so long since we left, but it has only been three months.
We have completed part of the baby room but we still have a lot more to do. I want to take time to look and find the crib sheet set that I like the most. Andy is very picky about things, so it makes us move much slower to make a decision. Anyway, we will update the site later with pictures to show you our progress.
Well, we have now reached the six-month marker. Jet is still doing pretty well, but some things are getting to be more and more difficult for her. Things like bending over, cutting her toe nails, and either standing or sitting in one position too long are giving her trouble, while she is mentioned pain in her legs and feet more and more. Jet told me the other day that it three months do not seem long when she thinks about it as the time until her mother visits again, however, it does seem long when she thinks about it as the time until the baby arrives. Thanks for the recent comments … as I mentioned in the previous posts, Jet really looks forward to reading those each day. It’s her main connection to home while at work.
Now that Dad has gone back home, it is back to life as usual around here. I believe that Dad had a good time here because both Jet and I did during his stay. Jet is already missing him a lot because she liked having breakfast with him in the mornings, liked having him as a shopping “partner”, tasting his food, and enjoyed having conversations with him. I look forward to hearing from you on which stories he shares with you about his time down here.
Before I dropped Dad off at the airport yesterday morning, Buddy 1 invited us out to breakfast at the Cracker Barrel. It ended up being Buddy 1, Sandra (his girlfriend), Donald, Linda, Dad, and I at breakfast together, which was a really nice going-away gift because it gave us all a chance to relax, reflect on the two weeks that he was here, eat a lot of food, and have a good time. Dad will be missed down here. When I returned from dropping Dad off, I stopped by to chat with Donald and Linda for a while. The first comment that Donald said was, “Me and your Dad could be gooood friends”. The running joke for the past few days was trying to convince Dad to move down here, perhaps as a winter home … leaving Milwaukee in October and returning in April, in time to see both Talladega races. We had a good time together.
This weekend is homecoming weekend at JSU. This is the first college that I have been involved with that has had a football team and they really are serious about it. UW-Green Bay and UW-Milwaukee tried their best with only soccer teams, but I get the feeling that this will be a bit different. They have a parade, marching band, and beauty pageant (Homecoming Queen) in addition to the homecoming game. Before the game begins, the school will be open for alumni and others to tour the campus and see all of the exciting things we are doing. I will be on campus that day to show off my computer lab and to meet several alumni. I am really looking forward to it.
As an aside, has anyone had not much to say lately? Jet checks our blog about three times a day at work (she says) just to see if anyone had anything to share. Was our posts about Dad that boring? Is anything exciting happening up there by you?
Good Morning! We had a very exciting (and busy) day yesterday. We won our footy match yesterday morning, ate some Thai food in Atlanta, then visited Stone Mountain. In the middle of all of that, we took a look at more baby furniture at the Burlington Coat Factory and Babies R’ Us. Unfortunately, we still didn’t find a complete set that we liked, so we will probably go looking at Target and other places today. Man, this is tough!
Dad made it through the work week fine. That was a big concern of ours when we knew Dad would be visiting us. Since I have work to do at school each day and Jet has work, what would Dad do home alone? On Monday, Dad made his ribs (which were awesome!) and potato salad and we invited the neighbors (Donald and Linda) over to join us. On Tuesday, Dad worked with our builder in getting some things fixed around the house. On Wednesday and Thursday, Dad continued on working on things around the house, but did a lot of work trying to ‘restore’ one of our dressers. Today (Friday) he may be coming with me to school to check out how Dr. Ciganek goes to work every day. He will also be making Chili today since it is expected to only be in the 60’s for highs today. Brrrr! That’s downright brisk!
We will be heading to Atlanta tomorrow for a full day of events. I have an Aussie rules game at 10:00am, then we were planning on having lunch at one of the Thai restaurants in town, then going to Stone Mountain for some sightseeing. I listed off a number of things that we could do and visit in Atlanta, but the only thing Dad was interested in seeing was Stone Mountain because he saw something on it on TV not too long ago. Go figure. Anyways, before we return home, we will also stop by a Burlington Coat Factory to check out some baby funiture. As a last stop, of course we will also hit the huge International grocery store to stock up for the week.
On Sunday, Dad was planning on making Lasagna for us and we might take drive over to Birmingham to see more baby furniture. Busy weekend ahead! Dad will be leaving on Wednesday, so I hope that he has (and will) enjoy his visit here.
What an exciting finish to the Cup race! The action took place in turn 3 on the final lap, so we did not see what happened except for the cloud of dust after Junior and Johnson hit the grass. We were listening to Kenseth’s radio the whole race, so we knew something happened “caution’s out! caution’s out!”, but we didn’t know who was involved until the field made it around to the tri-oval and a couple of the leaders were missing. Everyone was upset because they wanted Junior to win … about 75% of the fans were pulling for him (you can notice from all of the red that the fans are wearing in the stands) and they all went crazy every time he led a lap. Perhaps it was because we were sitting in good seats, but I didn’t notice any “bad” or “redneck” fans all weekend long that Sandy warned me about. In fact, I think I was able to solve the traffic problem as well. It only took us 30 minutes to park at the Speedway leaving from home and only 30 minutes to get out after the race and back home. A normal drive (without the race going on) is around 15 to 20 minutes.
All in all, the weekend was a blast. Each of the 3 races were exciting (although they all ended in caution … I guess that’s SuperSpeedway racing for you), traffic was not bad, Dad enjoyed himself, and Kenseth had a good day.
I included a couple of pictures below … the first shot of Dad before the race began, the next of the field taking the green to start the race, the next with Kenseth taking the lead for the first time in the race, and the last of Brian Vickers celebrating after his win.
Another exciting day down here. This morning was “Oxfordfest” in downtown where there were a lot of crafts, baked goods, and other Nick-knacks for sale. The place was packed with people! We visited our neighbor, Donald, who was selling some of his walking sticks outside of the lodge adjacent to all of the booths and crowds.
Today was the first-ever truck race at Talladega. We arrived early again and got a parking spot close to where we were yesterday … however, a little closer to the exit. It made all the difference as it only took us 2 minutes to get out of the lot today (and there were a lot more people at today’s race than yesterday) than 45 minutes yesterday. It was great. Before the race we walked around again and Dad bought a few more items. I also got a few more pictures of him in front of Matt Kenseth’s merchandise trailer. For the picture I got with Dad in front of all of the Chase contenders this year, he originally was covering “Junior’s” face and pointing to Kenseth … but a few people nearby saw this and didn’t approve so Dad took the “safe” picture you see below. The race was great and exciting with Mark Martin winning the race. We listened to his radio conversations all race long using Dad’s radio scanner, which was pretty cool too.
Tomorrow we will be getting up early to eat breakfast at the Cracker Barrel so that we can get a full belly of food in us for the long day at the track. We will be leaving much earlier for the track (around 9:00am) so that we can avoid much of the traffic delays that Dad keeps talking about. Will let you know how that all works out.
