40 Hours Roundtrip

On Thanksgiving we were able to visit both families in Springfield, and managed to eat two humongous meals in a span of 4 1/2 hours. Everyone is doing well, except Dream kept looking for her friend Phoebe at my mom's house.

Our Friday got off to a bad start. We'd basically been assured by a salesman at Sears in St. Louis that we'd just have to call him before 10 a.m. on Friday and he'd sell us a 46" LCD TV at the sale price and order one if they were sold out. Roger called at a little before 8 and the guy said he was sold out and nothing he could do for us. After a call to his manager, who promised to call back and never did, we decided to take our business elsewhere.

Friday did turn around, even though the best "deal" we got was on a dog bed! We finally got to meet Mason, Brian and Lindsay's son who was born in July. Our camera was buried in the back of the car so we didn't get any pictures, but I stole some from their site. He sure is getting big!

Love That Midwest Livin

Promise this will be the only post all year complaining about the weather patterns of the Midwest, BUT...

To this day, I DO NOT UNDERSTAND how we can reach a high of 76 degrees this afternoon only to look at the forecast and see that the "feels like" temperature tomorrow night will be 20!!?!?

Mother Nature must be having a total mood swing this week or something.

Time to Catch a Breather!

Wow.

We've been busy for the last two weeks.

Aside from the normal things that keep us busy week in and week out, these last two weeks have been littered with special events, primarily work related.

In a span of 11 days...

- Dream modeled her new pink camo collar

- I put the wraps on our alumni magazine

- Our soccer team advanced to the state quarterfinals - we lost and we froze watching the game

- We hosted a state quarterfinal football game and won - which meant we hosted the semifinal game...

- In conjunction with the semis, we also hosted a tailgate party for our alumni ...

- On the same night we had a preview party for our largest fundraiser of the year

- We held our annual auction and raised lot of money. Bids were entirely out of our league so we came home empty-handed but with a few drinks in us.

- I drafted an amendment to a city ordinance for the school...

- Which was presented and recieved even better than we had anticipated

- Rog replaced some wood on the house and painted

- The bulk of our leaves fell off our of 5 million trees

- Several nights of meetings --> yuck!

After all of that, we can now take a bit of a breather. The president of our school is great and decided that tomorrow is a holiday too, which means 5 days for me! Rog gets his standard Thursday and Friday off, but we at least get to go home and stay until Saturday morning.

We are very thankful to be able to get away for a few days!

And Then There Were 12

After several discussions and a few bids, we had two good-sized poplar trees taken down in our backyard on Thursday.

The people who initially lived in the house must have been tree huggers, with these two trees out, we're down to "The Dirty Dozen" in the backyard ... the dirty part being especially true after this weekend! Is it necessary to have 14 trees in one yard, much less just the back??!?!

The guys who won the bid to take the trees out were amazed that they didn't fall during the ice storms we had last year since they were about 35 feet tall and top 10 or so feet were dead. Rather than rolling the dice through another winter, we sucked it up and had them removed. Great timing though since almost all of the leaves were still on the branches :).

Finally Some Halloween Pics

As you may have read in a previous post, we celebrated Halloween along with Erica's 30th birthday by going to a party at a haunted mansion near the brewery and crashing downtown to avoid any mishaps on the ride home.

To complete our disguises as tourists, complete with zinc oxide, maps, tree finders, fanny packs and socks with sandals, it was necessary to use a camera with actual film in it which is why the posting of these pictures took so long. That and scanning, and an "internet outage" in our area for about 2 days....

Here are a few pictures from our group. Jon and his brother, Drew, were the Dick in a Box guys ... Jon's nasty 80s coat was perfect! We also had Angelina and Brad (Deana and Kyle) with babies fo different races and lots of tatoos. Tons of awesome costumes at the party, we got some great ideas for next year!