not too shabby

Our Christmas travels started off with a wonderful experience on American Airlines...yes, I actually said that. We were set for a 10:30 am flight and they announced they were oversold. I love a good oversell opportunity! Usually I've got somewhere to be so it's not really an option, but this time the next flight was only 2 hours later (and our initial flight was delayed anyway so we waited even less than planned). Let the good times roll: we got 2 $300 vouchers; then we discovered our next flight had been upgraded to a 777, which is much bigger than usual (always a better option than some BS express plane or something); then we got to our new seats...right smack dab in business class. Which maybe wouldn't have mattered if it weren't for the giant plane, which meant these seats were AMAZING! Seat 11E had a smattering of awesome things about it - a fully adjustable seat that could recline all the way to be completely horizontal - a personal tv - a great selection of free movies and tv shows - personal remotes - and a coat hook (it's the little things!).

I'd like to add 11E to my list of "Things That Make Me Giggle," because the amount of joy I took from perfectly arranging my seat, Bloody Mary in hand, while watching Horrible Bosses next to Brian on my first day of vacation was pretty unreal. Thanks American!

Since arriving, we've enjoyed a chilly Texas Christmas, with lots of good food (QUESO!), holiday parties, QT with Keely & James, and a haircut for Brian (this was key for people not thinking he's a child molester). We'll have a big meal tomorrow and then Colorado here we come!

Hope you guys have a great holiday as well. Merry Christmas from all the animals!

fried aliens

Slash, onion rings - our Tuesday night homemade experiment tonight. Delish! But creepy looking, huh?

bells will ring

It's the most wonderful time of the year! For realsies! Although I'd like to register an official complaint to whoever decided to cram all this greatness into one month (and right on the heels of T-day, clearly the rival Best Day Ever)...

Jackie's Bah Humbug post actually kicked my butt into gear last week, since we have no excuses for not getting our Christmas party started :) I got our tree up, did almost all of our shopping, and queued up my seasonal Pandora stations - yahtzee!

Day 1

Tree: friend or foe?

Day 3

Tree = friend

Best friend

Michigan Ave is a beautiful on the walk home every day from work, with lights on all the trees and these great (smaller) decorated planters in front of the shops. Then last week we got our first real accumulation of snow - the latest one in history what this means for the long-term winter forecast, I don't even want to know. Anyway Christmas has officially kicked off and here's some of the greatness that December has in store:

*Work holiday outing + secret santas + smaller team party that night at a karaoke bar = me making some inappropriate song choices
*12 days off from work. Santa is a Saint!
*A bout of warmer weather with a Texas Christmas (bring on the tamales!)
*Celebrating Keely and James' wedding in the Fort (more to come on this I'm sure!!!)
*An amazing last-minute trip to go skiing...
*...in Colorado...
*...with Amy & Matt!

Clearly all those last points deserved their own asteriks. I have been majorly suppressing my travel bug because I knew we weren't going to be able to take a trip until next spring (I'd actually cancelled two trips already). Actually this exact day last year was the last time we went skiing in Wisconsin - it's been too long! Then the seas parted and through some major finagling with PTO, vouchers, discounts, schedules etc., a Christmas miracle came true! I absolutely love the mountains, love skiing, and love Amy and Matt...obviously you see the need for all the asteriks.

Bring it on, December!

still gobblin'

Over a week after Thanksgiving and we're STILL working on our leftovers! Once again, our very delicious meal was courtesy of Brian (with some respectable prepwork on my part) - I continue to be amazed by his ability to do things like brine and stuff a turkey, while my greatest accomplishment was designing a dough turkey:

As I referenced in my last post, this year had a lovely twist with our visitors, John, June, & Megan all the way from Tejas! They spent all week in Chi, joined us for Thanksgiving, and then Mego stayed through the weekend. Although this was a slightly less competitive holiday than last year's, I think it was to everyone's benefit :) The actual day was great, and beyond that we got in some good QT, lots of exploring, and a couple of delicious meals. Oh and a pickle ornament. Megan went ahead and bought that as a souvenir.

Here are a few shots from the weekend:

my first trip to Navy Pier with the McAdams clan

the ferris wheel yielded some awesome views of the city

then on Turkey Day...where all the magic happened!

my favorite spread of the year!

So John started asking us ridiculously subjective, arbitrary questions throughout the day like "POP QUIZ: What's the greatest band of all time?" etc. etc. The best one was:

"POP QUIZ: If Brian wants to take a nap after lunch, who else wants to take a nap?"

"You do?"

"That's right. You aced it."

ha.

Beginning to soak in the Christmas cheer at the Christkindl market downtown. Key notable in this photo - there were 39 other cabins like the one behind us, which Brian BUILT over the course of a few weeks. The man cooks and builds. Applause please!

Another great Thanksgiving gets checked off!

the grind

Ugh, I would love nothing more than to have more time to blog lately, but work is SUCH a grind right now! I'm in the middle of a massive project that's 2 months down and 2 months to go, and every week is the same three-step process:

1. Monday and Tuesday I go hardcore.

2. Wednesday and Thursday I've lost 50% brainpower.

3. By the time Friday rolls around, I'm basically a functioning vegetable, so I try to block work out over the weekend to recharge, only to realize that HEY-O it's Monday again and now my work is backed up so I need to play catch-up in the form of #1.

Don't get me wrong, I remember very vividly being unemployed a year ago, and this beats that ten-fold although I could really brush up on my tennis. But man...I'm just mentally destroyed when I get home. Case in point - I can only tolerate mouth-breathing TV shows because my tiny pea brain is too shriveled to comprehend anything beyond "Cabs are here!" and "Next, on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills..."

This particular weekend has been even worse because I just had to keep plowing through after a crazy exhausting week. However, I think I'm not the only one who's happy to be working from my couch...


Happy Sunday! Here's hoping that everyone has some fun Thanksgiving plans coming up this week. We are staying here and will be hosting the MCADAMS family live in Chicago!!!!!!!!! We always cook a full-blown meal and rarely have other people to help us take it down, so it'll be fun to get to share it with one of our favorite fams. Not to mention the fact that Megan's never been to Chi and they'll be here all week, so we'll get to do a little staycation sight-seeing as well - the Christmas decorations are up around town and it's beautiful - so excited!

halloweeeeeen

Once upon a time, our friends convinced us to have a Halloween party. I resisted for about .03 seconds and then spent my week/weekend planning, buying crap, buying more crap, cleaning the house, and then finished it off with some last minute crap-buying. But I can't say I didn't love it, because I always do. And fortunately Brian was on board for "doing it right," as he always does...which meant lots of work, but a great turnout (or so we thought, since the last people left at 5 a.m.). We had about 30 people, scary music, pumpkins, blacklights, red lights, scary movies, beer die, spiderwebs, a delicious punch in a cauldron, food, candy, catchphrase, buckets of beer, and jello shots. (May I caveat that we did NOT make the jello shots, and I refused to pass them around - although they were delicious.) = Photos may do it more justice!

So excited to have Chrissy & Eric in for the night!

Even more excited to dress her up like Brian, late night.

Sarah made the mistake of telling me she used to be a "shot girl" at a bar, so I made her peddle the goods

Newsie!

wahhhhh

no big deal, but that punch was amazing. and it only had 18 ingredients in it - what a cinch!

ah-mazing handmade fascinator, right?!

and last but not least, leprechaun and a pot of gold.

why Brian went for "pimp leprechaun," I don't know.

fourth meals = friendship

Last weekend we got a very special visit from some very special friends: Amy & Matt! (Well Matt was my special friend by association before the weekend, but now we're friends of the real variety).

I'm not even sure where to begin - maybe at the end, when they left on Monday and I went into an MPF (major pissy funk), which was directly correlated to how much fun I'd had over the past few days. Some major accomplishments of the weekend included late night bowling with old drunk people, a house party, a 90s hip hop cover band concert, sightseeing without exhaustion, two group fourth-meals, and running 14 miles at 8 am. Oh wait, that last one was just Matt, because he's insane. (Is there a nice way to say "insane"? Because that's the way I want to say it.)


But more than anything, I just loved getting to know Matt better and getting to spend so much one-on-one time with Amy. She's long distance from both of us, so I hope it was a nice two-fer for her too! So glad they were both willing to give up a weekend of alone time together to share with us. (P.S. If we all ever live in the same city, we are going to dominate.)

I would like to thank Brian for letting me call the shots, Matt for not checking us into AA, and Amy for being endlessly awesome. Please come back in 42 months when it's warm again!!!!