My sweet wife

When I got back from Chicago at 11:00 pm, guess what I had waiting for me at home??? My sweet wife had prepared a nice picnic inside our house with candles, crackers, cheeses (that she had previously researched on google), and sparkling fruit juice. I'm not sure if she was rewarding me for being gone or is just an excellent wife...definitely the latter. :)

The suspense has been held long enough...

It's a hornet! We have a hornet nest right outside our front door. There are nests everywhere around the complex. Every few days, a hornet will fly in our apartment. Luckily, we have a really high window because of our vaulted ceilings, so the hornets usually leave us alone and stay up by the window. They only live for a few days after that. Sometimes they fall to the ground in mid-flight, like they've run out of energy. They'll crawl around and make a few more attempts at flying before they finally die. Poor little guys. They seem to like to suffer in privacy, because we end up finding them in hidden locations. Surprisingly, no hornets are visiting us right now, but every time we open the door, they get their invitation. But we can't complain - we'd rather have them than the cockroaches we had in Houston.

Quess What?

I remember when I was younger, reading a magazine and playing Geo Safari (an electronic educational game) that showed you part of a picture and asked you to guess what it was. It was always fun for me, so I decided to make my own and have you guess. What do you think it is? Post a comment, and in a couple days, I'll post the complete picture. Good luck guessing! Hint- this is something that was in our apartment.

Friday the 13th - date night

Friday the 13th started out a little rough for the both of us. I struggled all morning with the rats, and Jen lay deathly ill from her "strept throat" watching Rachael Ray and the cute Australian chef guy on TLC. So, what better to cure our ills than to take a trip to the local cemetary! The cemetaries here in New Orleans are unique in that they're mostly above ground, and many of them are very ornate. Jen especially loved to 'discover' all of the mysterious tombs with their stained glass windows and creeking doors. After our little excursion among the post-living, we decided that it would be fun to go and get some beignets from Cafe du monde. The doughnuts were good, but it was seeing Jen with powdered sugar all over her face and clothes that made it all worth it. On the way back, we decided to stop in at a store called the House of Voodoo. Interestingly enough, we actually saw some family there. Mike was busy regaining his strength in his 'peaceful place,' and we found Rob busy at the piano, still trying to get down that Hungarian Rhapsody. It looks like it has taken him a bit longer than an hour to get that piece down! :) Well, that's all for now! Thanks for all of the comments... especially those from my side of the family!

First post!

Jen and I decided to start a blog for our family home evening tonight to keep our friends and family updated. It will probably be much more interesting when we can stick pictures of kids, or even of pets, on here, but that may be a few more months away. As for now, we're just trying to keep our plants alive (1 out of 6 dying isn't bad). We spent the weekend trying to get back in shape by running at a local park here and saw "The Guardian" this weekend, which we thought was a great date night movie. Jen is loving her job at the pre-school, and I'm excited to be getting closer to the end of school. Jen's many burns are also healing nicely :) (from her fill-in job as a cook at work). And last Wednesday, LOST season 3 started, which gives us something fun to look forward to each week. Otherwise, we have also been looking at getting two cats, but we will probably wait until we get settled next year, so we won't have to leave a pile of food for the animals when we go on vacation! We're going to attach a few pictures from the past few months since most of our family haven't seen any of these yet. The first picture is of a rabbit that we saw at the Minnesota state fair. We're including it just for Hailey. It looks like an ewok from Star Wars. The second picture is of Jen and myself at Disneyworld at the Scifi Drive-In. It's a fun restaurant where you are in miniature cars watching a drive-in movie. The third picture is at the park where we run occasionally. New Orleans is really pretty this time of year; well, it looks pretty much the exact same year round! And the fourth picture is one that Jen took of me with a statue of the Mayo brothers in Minnesota.