First Road Trip of 2008 - Pam's 30th

With Roger having weekends off for the first half of the year, we have a few road trips in the works and took our first one of the year this weekend to celebrate Pam's 30th birthday.

My mom and Larry came to visit Saturday morning, Mom leaves on Tuesday for 3 weeks in Mexico and wanted to see us and Heidi one last time should she drink some bad tequila or get abducted or something on her trip. So we headed out a bit later than we'd anticipated, but still got to Kristy and Graham's house in time for dinner and a few drinks before heading to the city.

We met everyone at Martini Park, it was nice to see just about everyone again ... including a surprise visit by Rebecca who flew in from San Antonio to celebrate Pam's birthday as well as her own! It was a fun night, as always with some craziness - me not making friends with others inside yet becoming a homeless man's best friend outside the bar by giving him a tissue from my pocket while we waited for the car.

Since organization is not my or Rog's middle names, it should come as no surprise that we left a picture for Pam and our camera at the Brown's house and left the card in the car after we dropped it at the valet. That being said, no pics of us with the guest of honor for the evening, just a few I stole from Becky's site :).

Sunday we got to hang out with Payton after he came home from Kristy's parent's house. He really like Roger, but had a difficult time saying his name. He just called him "Rhino" all morning.

Roger the ribbon dancer

Celebrating Pam, who preceeds us into the 30s

Me and my friend Sami with Payton and his buddy Rhino

What a Disaster Area!!

Since closing on our house, we've painted all but the kitchen, formal living room, a guest room, our room and the hallways.

We finally had enough of the lovely lavendar in our bedroom and decided last weekend was prime painting time - I had Friday off, Rog had the weekend and Heidi would be here to help out too.

This one wasn't just walls, it was the vaulted ceiling and a beam holding our ceiling fan in place. Needless to say it was a big job since the walls also had to be primed.

Here's how is worked out ... not as planned. I ended up working on Friday, Rog had to work Friday and Saturday and Heidi went home on Thursday for the weekend. Miraculously, we managed to get all of the various levels of painting done and furniture shuffled back into the right spots by 11:42 p.m. Sunday.

It's nice that that ugly purple color is gone, but I think we could have timed it just a bit better. Hope this isn't an indication of how the rest of our projects will be in 2008!!

A Foster No More

So it's been just over two weeks since the last post, and I'm proud to report that we're all alive and well at our house.

Work has been completely insane during that time with several large-scale project happening all at once. And I'm not exaggerating, last Monday I arrived at work at 5:30 a.m. for a live TV remote, worked the regular day, went home for about 2 hours and then went to a meeting until 11:45 p.m. That really set the tone for the week...

Heidi has moved in and has started her internship. It's had its peaks and valleys in the short time she's been working, but I think she enjoys it.

Aside from having Heidi we us, we also have Barney. BUT at a meet & greet last weekend, a lady from Quincy, IL drove down to meet him and fell in love with him. He moves in with her the weekend of Feb. 1-2.

This weekend we're heading to the frozen tundra of Chicago, it's supposed to be 45 here on Sunday and probably -45 there!! We haven't done a northern trip in a while, and what better reason than to celebrated Pam's 30th!

Awesome Weekend

I doubt there will be many more Januarys that we live in St. Louis when we can legitimately say we accomplished a lot of work outside this weekend.

The hounds enjoyed it too, spending a ton of time playing (and getting muddy) in the back yard.

We totally took advantage of two 74 degree days to take down all of our Christmas lights, clean up some more leaves and pick up sticks and debris from a storm. It made me feel like we were back in NOLA, minus all of the good food!

Having to put on a jacket again on Tuesday seemed like a slap in the face ... until we looked at the calendar.

New Year's at the DeHart's

It was quite an exciting evening at the DeHart's on New Year's Eve as you can tell from this picture we took of the hounds at 11 p.m.

Rog had to work until 8:30, which

left us plenty of time to go out if we wanted to. I thought I was the only one who really wasn't in the spirit, but after talking with a few of our friends, we all ended up staying in that night. We cooked a fabulous shrimp dinner (thanks to Trader Joe's fresh catch) and enjoyed a pretty laid back evening, which was actually kind of nice. We woke up Barney and Dream to help us ring in the new year ... they were pretty excited, the true picture of livin la vida loca.