Thanks for the giving, yo

x-posted from Vox

Wow, I have not updated this old bloggy blog in a while. For that, I apologize.

I’ve been off of work this entire week. Carrie as well – last Friday was her last day as a teacher, and she starts her new job at Morgan Stanley on Monday. So we had a week of leisure. It was glorious.

Friday night was a pre-Thanksgiving feast Kevin and ‘s house – some great food, and good times with the whole crew. We ate pie and watched Trapper teach Julia how to play Gears of War. Then Ray killed a bunch of zombies with a plastic sword while running around with a teddy bear mask on. Seriously.

The weekend was spent up in Holland, Michigan, visiting Angie and Brian and checking out their new house. It was pretty cool, even though it reminded Carrie of her grandparents’ house. Probably the coolest thing was that in his office,Brian has a cardboard robot named Cheez-Threepio. Do you have a Cheezit robot? Of course you don’t. It’s okay to be jealous.

It’s a shame that Brian and Angie don’t live closer – Brian and I are kindred spirits in nerdary. While Angie and Carrie talked about wedding plans, Brian and I had a long, in-depth conversation about our disk strategy for Time Machine in Leopard. I have some more cool pictures from the weekend, which you can check out here.

On Sunday, Carrie and I went for a hike in some kind of forest preserve in Holland – the Sanctuary Woods or something. It was a beautiful morning for a hike, and I got some good pictures of squirrels.

After the hike, we headed back towards home, although we had a stopover in Michigan City to hit the outlet malls. I got a present for Carrie, and she picked up some items as well. During our drive, we came up with a contest, which I will be reporting on – we have set weight loss goals for each of us between now (well, last Monday) and Christmas Day. If a goal is attained, then the person who attained it gets to be taken out on a date by the other person, but the date must be completely geared towards the attainer. So far we’ve been doing pretty well.

Monday I hit my new gym, and really liked it. I don’t know what was up with all the people posting about how the Crunch on Orleans is “dirty” or whatever – it seems to be in fine shape to me, and the people are super nice. I did over-do it on the weights though, and my right shoulder has been giving me problems ever since Monday night. But it’s slowly getting better.

On Tuesday we did a little rehearsal dinner sampling at Costa’s in Greektown – and I think we’ve decided against Greek for the event, just because we’re not so sure that most of the guests will enjoy it.

Wednesday night we drove out to the suburbs to have dinner with my family. Traffic was awful – it took us two hours to get to Villa Park from the city. Ick. We had a lovely dinner at Anyways, and talked about honeymoon plans, real estate, and Tom Waits. Good times.

For the Turkey Day of Turkey Days, Carrie and I met up with her family at her Aunt Rosemary’s house in Deerfield. Before heading out there, though, we went to church (Carrie was lecturing – I think that’s how you spell it – and it was actually a pretty nice service), and then I hit the gym. I wanted to walk around all afternoon with a button that said “I ran two miles today”, so that nobody would give me any crap about my portions, but I didn’t have time to make one.

Dinner was good. It was nice to spend the holiday with an extended family – although Carrie’s cousins crack me up – they all flop all over each other on the couch. It’s hard to explain. But still pretty funny. Scout had a blast – he ran around the yard with their collie, Buddy, for almost five hours straight. That is what I call a cardio workout. Seriously, that dog is nuts.

Carrie and I tried to teach her ten year old cousin Caitlin how to swing dance, which was kind of fun. My favorite part was when I was dancing with her, and she kept saying “No, you have to turn me now”, etc. I informed her “Caitlin, I’m leading. You have to follow what I’m doing!” I don’t think she liked that idea.

We spent the night at Carrie’s parents’ house in Wheaton in anticipation of Black Friday. We figured that there would be less craziness at stores in a posh suburb than at the Target in the city. And we were right. We got to Target about three minutes before they opened – we took this time to stock up on our own McDonald’s breakfast (Carrie rocked the McGriddle, and I kicked it old-school with an Egg McMuffin). There were about 40 people in line at Target, but when we got there the doors were just opening, so we were inside by 6:01. Carrie walked up to the electronics counter, and asked for the camera we were buying for ourselves (her current camera’s battery is being held in with tape). After that, we leisurely strolled the store, and were 2nd in line when we checked out.

We hit Kohl’s afterwards – it was almost 7 am by then, so we did not witness the madness that Angie described. The place looked fairly picked-over, but we got some good deals on Fisher Price toys, and waited in a line of about three people to check out.

The only long lines we saw were at Carson’s – we went to the mall to check out JC Penny, and went into Carson’s to use the bathroom. Every register there had at least 40 people in line to check out – I told Carrie to not even bother looking at any merchandise there :) Apparently they had some kind of computer issue with their POS, so checkout was running super slowly.

Last night we went to Wishbone to check it out for the rehearsal dinner. The food was, of course, amazing – but they don’t have a private room, which concerned Carrie. I am going to call the north side location on Monday though – they have a private room, although it’s not as close to the church as the downtown location is. All this planning is making my head spin.