Our new home

What began as this hole in the ground:


Is now officially our house in Bloomington:


Some of you know that this has been a long process for us, the fact that we still have our house in Georgia was a bit of an issue. I guess we now have a "winter" house in GA and a summer house in the plains?

still slacking

Wow, it has been a while since I last posted. Sorry, not much going on other than Christmas, a blizzard and me turning 35. Ugh, 35?! Can I blame getting old on why I haven't posted in a while?

Here are a few pictures from the above events, other than my birthday... We decided against a true christmas tree this year and went with this ikea version instead:


We decided to move to Illinois before the snowiest (is that even a word?) winter on record for quite some time. Here is a drift in our yard from the big blizzard at the beginning of February. We're not in Georgia any more!

Thanksgiving and SNOW!

It has been a while, a belated happy thanksgiving to all of you. Karen was out of town for the week before thanksgiving and she flew back to Bloomington on thanksgiving morning. I decided to cook a whole turkey stuffed with citrus fruits and herbs... surprisingly it turned out pretty well for my first try!



We had a "mild" fall (according to all the locals) and winter finally hit last week. We got 5-6" inches of snow last Friday! It was pretty, but it made work not so fun. We spent the whole day removing snow from cars and then moving them out of the way for the snow plow. Here is a photo from when it started:


And here is Karen cleaning off the car later that night:


We'll see how long she smiles when cleaning off cars, we're supposed to get some more snow tonight. Christmas is coming soon!!!

Happy Halloween!

Another month has come and gone. I'm sorry that I haven't posted, but daily life doesn't seem interesting enough to write about. We did have a few visitors here, which was very nice. My parents flew into town for a weekend and Karen's parents followed a couple weeks later. They DROVE from Virginia, a 12 hour trip. We really enjoyed having both sets of parents here, hopefully they will come back again soon.

We also celebrated Karen's birthday in October. I ended up having to work all day on her birthday, but did bring home an ice cream cake from DQ. Yummy. We also went out for a nice lunch on Sunday at a nice Italian restaurant in town.

This past week we drove to the Chicago suburbs for Karen to present at a conference. Afterwards, we spent the day hitting Ikea, REI, and some other stores that aren't here in Bloomington. While at Ikea, we picked up our Christmas tree for this year. Since we didn't want to unpack too much stuff, we're going compact and simple this year. I never thought we'd have a "tree" that fit in a 1" thick box!

september is almost gone

I haven't posted since there hasn't been much going on. We've both been busy working and adjusting to the new routines. We were planning on going to the Illinois State football game last night, but rain ended that plan, AGAIN. We ended up going to one of the professor's house and we watched the game there on tv. It was another high scoring, double over time game, too bad we didn't see it in person.

I missed the first night of ice time in the curling class because I was busy wrapping up the paperwork for a car sale. Hopefully I will make it there this Tuesday night... My parents are coming into town on Thursday night, it will be great to see them!

not much going on

I went for a 20 mile bike ride on Thursday, out towards the wind mills that are east of town. It is pretty amazing how big those things are. We're having company over for dinner tonight, a couple of the professors are coming over. We've been hard at work in the kitchen all afternoon.

We were able to record the Georgia football game yesterday so i could watch it after work, too bad they lost. We were excited to see the James Madison upset Virginia Tech, Karen is very proud of her school.

Tuesday night I get to try my hand at curling, we'll have our first class on the ice. I'll report more later...

SOLD A CAR!

I sold my first car today, a new mazda cx-9! It is nice to have that milestone behind me now!

We had our first visitors over the weekend, my Aunt Debbie and Uncle Steve came up Saturday. Karen took them on a tour of campus and we went to a cornbelters baseball game after I got off of work. Unfortunately, we didn't dress appropriately for the cool evening and we left the game in the middle of the seventh inning. The cornbelters were behind 3 - 2. I was bummed in the morning when I checked the paper and saw that they tied up the game in the 9th and won with a walk off homerun in the 10th. Oh well, that just reinforces the fact that you never leave a game before it is over!

It was nice to have guests in town, ya'll should all come up and visit! Curling class starts tomorrow night, several people have questioned why I'm doing it, but I'm excited to try it.