Christmas plans...

Well, again, it's been a long time since we've posted... unfortunately my school firewall has discovered the immense distraction that blogger.com can be and they've blocked it, which means no more "updating on planning" for me!

Outside of crazy work stuff, we've been working on our holiday plans and getting the house ready for Christmas. This will be the first year we've ever stayed home for part of the vacation, so we're doing it up as far as decorating!! We may need more than just our small cardboard box to store our "Christmas stuff" now! Since we started decorating on Thanksgiving, we've been able to enjoy them quite a bit - and we seem to add something each weekend. I think we're finally done... "oh, wait... you know what would look cool...?"

The Blythes Sr. will be here this weekend through Christmas day and we're really looking forward to seeing them!! Then we'll be heading to NY to see the Sanford side of the family and our friends up North. Yey, fun! THEN, we'll be on our way to FL to spend New Year's with Mike & Jenn in Cocoa. Woo-hoo! We'll head back home just in time to head back to work, so we'll be tired, but we'll get to see lots of people! :)

Here's a fun picture of the kitties...

Yey, Mike and Jenn!

Yey, Mike and Jenn came to visit for Thanksgiving! We had such a good time, as usual. Unfortunately that meant they had to drive back on Sunday, when everyone else in the country was driving home too... lots of sitting on the highway, ugh. We can't wait to see them for New Year's!

We made such a yummy Thanksgiving dinner... pumpkin soup, cheesy green bean casserole, potatoes, oyster dressing, corn, rolls, and of course turkey and gravy! Mmm...


We also took our obligatory trip to Ikea - yey!!! We bought some fun things that kept Mike and Brad busy while Jenn and Stacie started decorating for Christmas. The house is starting to look very festive! We'll post pictures...

On Saturday, we got to see Chris, Antoinette and her grandaughter as they passed through town on the way back to NY. That was a nice treat! We hung out for a little while and went out to lunch before they had to get back on the road. Very nice!

Here's a cute picture of Abby enjoying her new dog bed under the Christmas tree... and, of course, sporting the Bills bandana in celebration of the win on Sunday!

Nerdy Science Night!

Anissa and Russ came to visit us last weekend and we had such a good time. We love having people come visit - it was so great having family here!!!!

The first night they were here, we had a campfire night and turned it into a Mr. Wizard type experience - woohoo!! (We decided Mr. Wizard over Bill Nye for the ornery characteristics of Mr. Wizard.)

Anyway, here's the fun video of one of our "experiments"... non-dairy creamer plus fire equals fun! It made the crappy "dura"-flame log much more enjoyable. :) We suggest Hazelnut flavor if you decide to try it. :)

Happy Birthday to me!

As usual, Brad made my birthday week very sweet and a lot of fun! This weekend we went to Augusta to the Blue Horse Music Hall to see Edwin McCain in concert. (Edwin was kind enough to play for my birthday again so we had to go!) It was a great afternoon and night. We found that Augusta is a strange town - no one around on a beautiful Saturday afternoon!

Fortunately we found a great Irish Pub to pass the time in. :) And we do mean great - look it up if you're ever in Augusta - Red Hugh's is the name of it, and the owner, Jeff, is very cool.
He even gave us a sweet hook-up. He knows one of the managers at the music hall and gave him a call to reserve us a prime seat at the show!! Woo-hoo!

The show was great!! Sam Thacker opened for him and he was great too. We had an amazing time!!!!!


We'll post some more pictures soon. For fun, here's a picture of Abby watching the trick-or-treaters at our door... :)

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!!

We've had fun carving pumpkins this year! Check them out! We have to give the creative credit to zombiepumpkin.com where we got most of the stencils... fun! I did the flower free-hand, though - The boys were picking on me during the football game because it was girly and totally not scary... whatever! :)







Oh, and can you tell it's been cold? (well, actually, it was 77 yesterday, but it was cold! :) )

Yay, Jamaica!!

We had a great week on vacation last week with Mike and Jenn, yay Jamaica!! We spent the first 3 days at Couples Sans Souci and the rest of the week at Couples Ocho Rios. Sans Souci was nice and very pretty - we had hoped it would be better, but that just made us appreciate Ochi even more! It's always so great to get there and see all of our favorite bartenders and waitresses who always remember us! (Does that mean we eat and drink too much when we're there? ...surely not...)

The Bills win!!! & Welcome Kaitlyn!!!

... and during the game, Abby's new bandana was completed. It will now be an integral part of the Sunday rituals. :)

And anyway, she looks adorable! :)



Welcome Kaitlyn!! Jamie and Nicole have a new beautiful baby girl in their family - Kaitlyn was born September 27th! :) Congratulations, guys!! Here's a picture:



We can't wait to meet her!! :) There are more pictures on their website - see the link in the column on the right of this page!!

Happy Wednesday!

Yey, Pirates!

Thanks, Amy!!

Brad:

My pirate name is:

Iron Sam Read

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the sterotypes. You've got taste and education. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

Stacie:

My pirate name is:

Calico Grace Rackham

Often indecisive, you can't even choose a favorite color. You're apt to follow wherever the wind blows you, just like Calico Jack Rackham, your namesake. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

And you??????

Moonshine...

Tonight, our friend Amy brought over some moonshine that a friend of her's got in Tennessee. One of those, "put money in the mailbox and in the morning, if the flag is up, the delivery has been made" sort of deals... no kidding.
Abby, let's just say, was excited about it. We knew she was a "booze hound", but apparently she prefers the hard stuff.

Abby with Amy

So, like 2 weeks ago...

Ok, so we're a little behind!

Over Labor Day weekend, we were able to go to NC and visit Ryan, Danielle, and Jack. We had a lot of fun hanging out, playing with the baby, playing with the dogs (Abby met Bo), and playing a 2 day long game of poker! :) We spent part of one day in Raleigh and went to a yummy Irish bar/restaurant. This picture was from the bar we went to before that, but we just had to share - this boy knows what's good!! :)



Thanks, Ryan and Dan, we had a great time!!! We hope to see you again soon!

5 year anniversary...

What is there to say, the day after the 5th anniversary of 9/11/01? Neither of us have really been able to talk much about that day even now and it disgusts us that movies are already being made, etc. With this sense of avoidance, I wasn't sure how to deal with yesterday, especially at school. I decided to talk about it a little bit with my classes and realized that most of them had no or very little idea about what had happened. But, you figure they were 5-8 years old when it happened... So, we talked about it a lot, I explained briefly what happened, they asked a lot of questions. What I thought would be really difficult ended up being really important. We can never forget. They need to learn about it so that they never forget either. It was strangly cathartic to attempt to explain it to the students. Their responses were varied, but interesting.

Amy posted this on her site and reminded us about Jon Stewart's monologue at the beginning of his first show back 9 days after the attacks. Watch it if you're interested and when you have the time (it's about 9 minutes long).

(In case the embedded movie doesn't show up, this should be the link... Daily Show clip )

Visits, new baby, superheros! (oh my?)

Busy, busy around here!

We had a fun weekend last weekend when my parents and Grandma came to visit. (and we meant to post right after that, and here it is Thursday!) They came Thursday night and left Monday night. Friday the Sanfords went golfing (at the country club on Barnett Shoals, for those of you who live here - apparently it's not very nice... they say don't go) and Grandma went to school with me. Saturday we made our obligatory visit to Waffle House and then had the draft party for our Fantasy Football leagues (the ones I'm going to win, in case you were wondering...) Mostly it was just a lot of relaxing and visiting all weekend (and a LOT of eating!) Good times!

Josh and Amy have a new baby girl!! Amy delivered Ansley (I think I'm spelling that right) on Monday and we hear everyone is doing great. We only have a cell phone picture so far, but as soon as we have a bigger one, we'll share. :) Yey Josh and Amy!!!!

This weekend we're heading up to Raleigh for a "Coastal Crew" reunion at Ryan and Danielle's. We're really looking forward to seeing everyone again... gosh, twice in 6 months? Is this legal?

We're loving the responses on the Superhero quiz... keep them coming! We'll have a superhero team yet! :)

Mike and Jenn - 36 days, yey! Good luck with Ernesto!

We still like Captain Injustice and Oh Hell No Boy, but...

Brad:

Your results:
You are Iron Man
Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Iron Man - 95%
Superman - 80%
Green Lantern - 80%
The Flash - 75%
Supergirl - 72%
Wonder Woman - 62%
Spider-Man - 60%
Robin - 50%
Hulk - 45%
Catwoman - 35%
Batman - 35%



Stacie:

Your results:
You are Superman
You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.

Superman - 90%
Supergirl - 80%
Spider-Man - 80%
Wonder Woman - 70%
The Flash - 65%
Iron Man - 60%
Green Lantern - 55%
Robin - 50%
Catwoman - 40%
Hulk - 35%
Batman - 35%



Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

Almost Anniversary Post

So here we are, a few short hours away from being married for two whole years. So that's pretty darn cool if you ask us. We have had a pretty low key anniversary weekend. We had some wine during a torrential rain storm and watched the yard flood. Other than that, lots of running around and...

We got a new toy. which is pretty fun! Also, it gets over 80 mpg, so now that it is crazy expensive to fill up my truck, I am going to really dig the 1.4 gallon fuel tank. Ciao!!


The Blythes V1.0 got us an iPod Nano, which is very cool. Stacie is using it for ESOL podcasts, and I'm sure it will come in handy in the car and around the house. Woo Hoo!!

Also, Stacie is already on her third day back with students already, and sooner or later they will actually get all of her students schedules correct so they can stay for a whole class.

Brad is busy working on data...yippee...Hopefully it will all mean something soon...

Ok, night all, type to you again soon.

Brad

Road trip!

Last week we had a last fling trip before school starts again (for Stacie) and headed down to Cocoa, FL to visit our great friends Mike and Jenn. It was so great to get to hang out with them and see their new(ish) house. We had a really great time with them - some beach time, some rum/gin (of course) , and even a trip to Wet n' Wild in Orlando! Yey!!

And, according to our car, it was a perfect trip! This was really the odometer reading as we pulled in our driveway!


We were able to stop off on the way down and the way back at the Blythes (version 1.0)'s house in Alachua... too bad they weren't there!! Hopefully they'll be there full time soon and we'll be able to actually see them when we spend the night at their house! :)

More update soon...

My Present from FL

So Stacie went to the sunny (actually very rainy) state of FL last week with her best friend Sarah. I stayed here and worked all week on data for a poster my advisor is going to present at a marine microbial ecology meeting next week. So my week was productive but boring, while Stac got to hang out at the beach. I did get a present though. Dead sea turtle parts. Sounds strange right? WRONG!!! Stacie called from the beach to say she had found...something stinky and big. Obviously being married to a budding marine scientist has rubbed off on her, as she fearlessly collected dead animal bits from the beach. We are now in the process of cleaning them for display. I'm sure all five or so of you who read this are holding your breath in anticipation of those pics.

So...what else... Oh yeah, the new puffer is kind of a dick. He has killed and eaten two of my new chromis..es... But, hey, he's eating! Dick.

Abby just came over to say hello and farted. Thanks dog.

Anywho... I'm tired, and it kind of stinks here now. Again, thanks dog.

Our connectiong is pretty slow at the moment, so I will upload pics tomorrow...maybe.

Night all,
B & S

Splash!

So, she doesn't like baths at all, but somehow the pool is way more fun!


Pool time!

All puffed up...

Click here to see Brad force-feeding the puffer... (Ignore "King of the Hill" in the background...)

All mimsy was mRNA...

wow... if you're nerdy like us, you'll love this. This is not a joke. It is a real instructional video made by some students at the Department of Chemistry of UCSD in 1971. We found out about it because a "friend of a friend" actually saw this in class recently. The prof said he has yet to find a better way to explain protein synthesis... you be the judge, but we know we'll never forget again! It might help if you're drunk...

Crazy hippies...

New Fish!!

We got some new fish for the 75 gal. tank! Cool!!

Here's the new porcupine puffer:

He's not eating yet, so we're a little worried about him. We're going to try some more tonight, so keep your fingers crossed! :) He so cool!!!

We also got 3 green chromis. We don't have a picture of our actual fish - they move fast!! Here's a picture from the internet... they basically look just like that! :)

Fun!!

In other news, Mike and Jenn have started a website too!! Yey!! Fun stuff!! :) :) :) And only 95 days until Jamaica!!

New York report

We're back online now after some technical difficulties (namely a hard drive burn-out and replacement.) Fortunately, we had just backed up our entire computer on an external drive, and we have a service plan at Best Buy for repairs, so it wasn't as tramatic as it could have been!

So, anyway - last week we spent a short visit in NY visiting family. We got to meet Eli finally and had fun hanging out and playing with him.


Abby had a great time playing with Jess and Rob's 125 rotty mix, Tyson - no, really, she did! We were surprised, but within 2 minutes of meeting each other, they were paling around the backyard and chasing each other!


It was great to be able to spend some time with our families. Unfortunately the trip was very short, which meant no Rochester trip this time... :( hopefully we can see everyone there soon. Josh and Amy were able to come down one day to have lunch with us though, so we did get to see them! Yey!

Now we're back in hot, hot, hot GA. Brad is working hard at school, trying to get as much done as possible though meeting some frustration along the way. I'm trying to enjoy what seems like a very short summer break this year by working on projects at the house and getting in some much needed reading in the sun time. We would love some summer visitors, so please let us know if you'd like to come down. As always, we'd love to have you!

Show time!

Since we last posted, we have seen two really great shows... totally different shows... but two great shows!

Last week, we went with Amy and a couple of her friends to Atlanta to see "Wicked" at the Fox. It was incredible! We were blown away by the performance, the talent, the effects... amazing! If the Broadway touring company comes near you, SEE IT!

Then this past weekend, we went to a Jimmy Buffett concert!! Different kind of fun, but so fun! The weather was pretty good most of the day. Perfect for a long afternoon of tailgating, but then a crazy storm right before the concert and rain all the way through, but we planned on that, so we were fine and we had dry clothes to drive home in, yey! We took lots of pictures and we'll load them soon.

Now, I'm on summer break and currently at a conference "retreat" at Unicoi State Park. It's a pretty good session so far and I'm here with people I like, so I'm having a good time so far. Brad's working hard at school trying to get as much done as possible. He's doing really well.

Well, I should be paying more attention to the speaker, so I should close this post. :) We hope you're all enjoying our site! Those of you in NY, we'll see you soon - we're heading up this weekend for a few days! :)

Maybe little pinch?

Nature Day... I guess

Ok, so Andy and I are running this morning (which sucks, it's hot down here already) and about a quarter mile into the run, Andy does his best "Pitfall Harry" impression. As he is in the air, I think, "what the hell?". Then I see it. Andy was hurdling a cotton-mouth. This snake didn't even care that it was nearly crushed by both of us. It just sat there, doing nothing.

Anyway, half a mile later, giant snapping turtle, apparently laying eggs on the trail. A quarter mile later, there is another one. Not much after that, we scare a deer and a rabbit.

Last week we saw a couple of beavers in the river, and had to run around a bunch of geese.

Nature is taking over I guess. Oh well, I hate running anyway. They can have the park

Oh yeah, I ran over a squirell on the way home...oops. Stupid indecisive rodent.

P.S. "Pitfall" rocks!

ELIJAH LUCAS!!!

Here are a couple of pictures we have of our newest little nephew, Elijah Lucas. Such a cutie! We can't wait to meet him in June! Jess just sent us some pictures in the mail, so we'll try to get them scanned ASAP and get them posted too!

Here is the album where we'll be posting pictures as we get them...

Brad's Turn!!

Hey there everyone, Today is Brad's turn to update the site!!
WooHoo!!

Ok, the big news of the weekend is the opening of "Private Lives", and Chris, Dennis and Grace coming down for the show.

The show went very well, so now we have a few days off before the second weekend to recover. The parent/grandma visit was a lot of fun. We always love visitors! Plus we got mom and grandma to do a "Mother's Day shot" at the cast party!

Other than that, Stac is almost done with school, and my oral comps are next monday (yikes).

Type at you all again soon, Brad

Fun Stuff:
Steven Colbert at the White House Press Corp Reception

P.S. - the Private Lives photo album has been updated with a few pics from this weekend.

Private Lives

If you've seen us lately, you can probably tell by our tired eyes that the show opens this weekend!!! We hope a lot of people will be able to come out and see it! It's really going to be a great show! Check out the T&G page for details about getting reservations, etc.

Also, check out the Snapfish page to see pictures of the set construction and a rehearsal. We'll take more tonight (since the set is closer to done) and try to post them tomorrow.

Congratulations Casey & Matt!!!!

Yey!!
Casey and Matt got married yesterday! It was a really beautiful ceremony and a perfect day. We had a great time seeing them and the rest of the Coastal crew that came into town!

We got to meet Ryan and Danielle's new baby, Jack. He is so cute and such a good baby. :)

Check out the link on the sidebar to see the rest of the pictures we took yesterday.

Weekend report...

We had a great weekend hanging out with Mike and Jenn. It was really great spending time together and we got to go to IKEA, yey!

Brad's parents also stopped through on Thursday and we were able to spend some nice time together. They also brought us the furniture that they had offered us in the move. Thank you!! Our guest room actually has a bed in it now (so come visit and we won't make you sleep on the air mattress!) and our bedroom furniture looks great!

Today, Private Lives did a preview performance of Act I for the volunteers' party at the library. It went well, everyone did well and was able to cover any missed lines, etc. Great show for 2 weeks out! It was fun, good for everyone's nerves to have gotten through it, and good advertising for the show! :)

It finally happened

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. It took 5 months.

I put my "F, the president" sticker on my car in December. Today my principal told me he has had 6 complaints from parents today. (There was a "gathering" here after school yesterday and my car was still here when in started.) It has gone as far as board members calling the superintendant... all over my sticker. Of course, I'm sure many parents are upset about the anti-Bush message, but my principal was nice about it, saying the reason he thinks it's problematic is because of the "profanity" suggested. (I can see that...) He actually told the superintendant - "Maybe she means that she's grading the president and she's giving him an F" - I love it! So, he said I can think about it and decide what I want to do. I don't want to take it off, but I think I'll remove the "profanity" part and put a different Anti-Bush sticker on there tonight... maybe 3 or 4! :) Junkman's here we come...

Cool!

Yey! This blog program is fun!

We've got it set up now so that we can each post ourselves and you can comment too! (I guess that's how blogs work, but we're new at this. :) )

Hope you all had a good weekend! We did - we worked a lot around the house, planted more flowers and trees, and worked on the set. Pretty relaxing overall.

Here's a cute picture of Brad with Abby - one of them thinks she's still a lap dog...

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

Foolish Stacie gave me access to post on the homepage!!!!

Surely she was drinking at the time.

Ben, Abby, and Lena - stealing seats, as usual.

Trying it out...

We're trying out this new blog thing... maybe we'll keep the site more updated if it's easy. :)

This week has been good. We're busy with rehearsals at night for the T&G show, Private Lives. It's going to be a great show and we're having fun with it. for information, check out the link.