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1:14:27PM on 10/10/2008
5 Comments
| | Summer Summary
WARNING!!! Grab a drink and a snack. This will take a while. I have been seriously neglecting my blogging responsibility. I am attempting to catch up on six months of blogging (or lack of) in one post. I know it's ambitious, but bear with me. I'm hoping the pictures will makes this easier :) So, here goes . . .
Back in April, Mom, Lauren, Tommy and I spent some time in California visiting family and friends. It was a much needed break for me and it was so good to see everyone. My mom and I flew out to San Diego. Melissa picked me up at the airport. We spent the first day walking around La Jolla Beach and catching up. The weather was perfect and the scenary was even better! The next day we took Spryte out to frollick in the wild flowers. The photo shoot turned out beautifully and I think Spryte had lots of fun too :) After that, we had dinner with my mom and grandfather. Then mom, granddad and I headed up to Modesto to meet up with the cousins. Lauren and Tommy flew into San Francisco that day and made the trip to Modesto the next day. That night we all took Granddad to a nice Italian dinner to celebrate his 80th birthday. The food was good and the company was better. We all retreated to Jake and Heather's house to enjoy cake, drinks, gifts and conversation. Once the adults left, the kids had fun playing games and chatting. It was a great night. The next day started out with a mini photo shoot of my cousin Heather's daughters, Mackenzie and Kylie. They were adorable and Kylie is such a little model. We even tried for a family picture! After that we decided to head into old town Lodi. We enjoyed bumming around, shopping and a delicious lunch complete with mimosas. Then we headed back to Jeff and Christina's to enjoy a great home-cooked meal with everyone. Although the visit was short, it was long overdue and I can't wait to go back and visit with friends and family again! Thank you Dan, Melissa, Jeff, Christina, Jake and Heather for your gracious hospitality! We can't wait for our summer 2009 visit :) Please look at pictures from our trip in our scrapbook.
There's still so much more to share! The past few months have been a whirlwind of good times! For those of you who didn't know, we celebrated Newton's 7th birthday in July and Charlie's 3rd in August. And for their birthdays, we gave them a new backyard to chase squirrels around! I think that's pretty generous :)
Over the last weekend in July, most of the Lundry family traveled to Chicago to celebrate the marriage of Mark Shoults to Lisa Shelley. It was a beautiful wedding and we had a blast catching up with everyone. The wedding was planned for Friday with the intention of continuing the celebration all weekend. So Lauren, Kevin, Steve, Nick and I all decided to stay for the whole weekend and do some site seeing around Chicago. A few places we visited were Millenium Park with the memorable face fountains, Grant Park with Buckingham Fountain, the Chicago Art Institute and Shedd's Aquarium. We enjoyed some Chicago-style hot dogs-which I loved! For those of you who've never had one, they have hot peppers, tomatoes, onions, mustard, a spear pickle and some celery salt all on a poppy seed bun. Everyone should try one! We also spent Saturday night at Navy Pier. It started with a little mexican food and continued with a great fireworks cruise with all our friends from the wedding. The weather was great and the fireworks were fantastic. After the cruise we all headed to a bar of Mark's choosing called Dick's Last Resort. We enjoyed some tasty beverages into the early morning with some great friends! Thanks for the memories :) Please view our scrapbook here.
In other news, Kellie (Nick's sister for those of you who don't know) delivered little Kyle Adam on Friday August 1st. He arrived at 11:47am at 7lbs and 21in long. He has a full head of brown hair and I think he looks a lot like Alex. Sam and Alex are very proud big brothers! Mom and baby are doing well. They are all happily adapting to their growing family :) Congrats Schillings! He's adorable! Below is his birth announcement shot and designed by yours truly :) Enjoy a few of my favorite images from his first portrait session!
I also have some of Tommy's portraits to post (I know, they are very late). He's moving everywhere now. He's already a pro at walking :) He's also having fun with food and vocabulary. Nana grandma, as she refers to herself, likes to feed him fudge pops and then give him a bath. He also loves music and loves to dance. He's getting SOOOO big SOOOO fast. As many of you know, we celebrated his 1st Birthday over Labor Day weekend and while he wasn't exactly sure of the festivities going on around him, he was adorable as usual. He loved his cake about as much as the helium balloons. The gifts were fun once he started playing with them, but all the activity made him a tired boy. Below is the Thank You card Lauren sent out and a few of my favorite shots. To view the rest of his birthday pics and one year and 9 month portraits, go to my website and type in userID: thomas password: one and userID: ninemonths password: tommy.
And FINALLY . . . about 10 1/2 weeks ago, Nick and I finally completed our big move. We closed on a Wednesday on the house of our dreams in the best area we could have hoped for. We can't thank all our friends and family enough for all their help over the past few months. It's been a long road but we are so glad to be getting off. We are starting a new journey in our new house with all our new blessings. We just celebrated our move with an open house this past Sunday. Thanks to everyone who helped us prepare. And thanks too, to the over 70 people who came out and enjoyed a GORGEOUS day with friends and family! It meant a lot to us to see our full house become a HOME! Please enjoy the scrapbook tour. Matt and Beth were our first house guests and we can't wait for the next ones!
Well, that's the bulk of our updates. I am halfway through my fall wedding bonanza and looking forward to a much deserved break after my last one in November. Many fun and new things have happened for me in my professional life, but I will share that news in a later blog :) Thanks again to everyone who
helped us and supported us over the past year and a half. We feel very blessed to have the friends and family we do :) This is a whole new life for Nick and I. We are living our dreams and loving our life. God is GOOD!
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12:23:50PM on 07/08/2008
5 Comments
| | Old School Brews
Last night Casey, Steve and I went to a concert at the Pageant. It was the second show I've gone to this summer. The first show was out at the Pop's in Illinois. I mostly went to see the opener Dan Pothast (former front man of my favorite local Ska band MU330), but really enjoyed the headliner, Streetlight Manifesto, as well. It was that night that I got the phone call that we had an accepted offer on the house, so I was on cloud nine all night long. Last night's show featured two of my favorite bands, Less than Jake and Goldfinger. Both put on great shows with some interesting flavor added to the mix.
It is funny how going to the shows made me feel both young and old at once. Young because it reminded me of seeing these guys several times during my high school and college years. Old because I felt like I was one of the oldest guys there (there were literally kids there that were probably not even born when I first started listening to these guys). Back in the day I would have been right in the mix of things jumping around dancing like a maniac, last night I stood in the back and watched from afar, then complained as I walked to the car about how sore my legs were from having stood all night.
In general I try to keep my blogging non-political, but I thought I'd share this observation with you all. Obviously being the evil conservative that I am I expect my views to differ from the artists I listen to, especially in the punk realm. Last night's headliner, Goldfinger, gave two encores to the show. The first they touted as an "anti-war" song. It was a remake of 99 Red Balloons. I love their version of the song, so I was really happy that they played it. They then left the stage and after more applause the lead guitarist comes back and starts to give us this little speech about how Ted Nugent is coming to the Pageant in a couple of weeks and that he wants to fight him. Why?? Because his views differ from the guitarists. Heaven forbid people be allowed to think differently. The rest of the band then came back out on stage and played a song which basically said F--- Ted Nugent and F--- the NRA, etc. I found this very amusing based on how they were up on their "peace" touting high-horse with their first encore and then were preaching hate in their second.
Keeping with the political nature of this blog I'd like to bring up something that is upsetting to me. InBev, a Belgian brewing conglomerate, is taking advantage of our weak dollar and attempting a hostile takeover of Anheuser-Busch. AB is headquartered here in St. Louis, so if this goes through it will definitely hurt the local economy. AB may be a giant evil corporation, but they also do a ton of good for our country, donating millions to charities and I can't think of the last disaster I saw where there wasn't a can of Anheuser-Busch Drinking Water somewhere in the footage.
They also run things like Sea World and Busch Gardens. All this will go away when the money and power hungry InBev takes over. Money is the bottom line to them and if it doesn't make sense financially, it will be tossed. The Anheuser-Busch board has already rejected the buyout offer from InBev and now InBev is taking it to the share holders to try and out the board. Keep our beer American and please take a minute to sign this petition.
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2:33:15PM on 06/20/2008
4 Comments
| | We're Moving To Las Vegas!
After looking at many, many, many houses in the area we have decided to move to Las Vegas. Okay I've had too much fun with that already. We are not moving to the city Las Vegas, but rather, the street Las Vegas here in St. Louis.
House hunting for the past several weeks has actually been really fun. Our agent, Kelly Carbery, is a very entertaining man and has always had our best interests in mind when looking at houses. He is also a saint for putting up with our indecisiveness. He drove us everywhere! And boy do we have stories to tell. My favorite is probably the reptile house. We went into the basement of this house and saw a huge aquarium with a red heat lamp on top of it. I walked up to the aquarium and there was nothing in it! Erin quickly ran back upstairs. We then headed to the second floor and walked into a room of no less than 20 aquariums all with snakes of various types in them. Being the animal lover that I am, I was instantly excited to walk in and check everything out. Erin took one step into the room and all of the sudden we heard a loud rattle start. At the aquarium in the front of the room there were two rattle snakes. Needless to say Erin was out of there like a shot from a gun. I stayed and taunted the snake for another couple of minutes. >:-) It turns out that the owner of the house runs The Reptile Experience (click the link to see pictures of the actual snakes who's home we invaded).
We saw a myriad of houses though, but each seemed to have something (or in a lot of cases several things) wrong with it. Water damage in the basement, price too high, too small, no dining room, backyard you could repel off of, backyard the size of a postage stamp, bad area, house needs major renovation, and on down the line. We actually saw a house that had a horizontally mounted refridgerator that looked like kitchen cabinets!
I bet GE made 10 of these things ever!
After looking at nearly 50 houses over the last month we came upon this
house. It basically has everything we wanted and almost everything we had in Dallas (sadly no turret). The upstairs is three bedroom with two full baths, hardwood floors, a kitchen, dining room and a family room. The door off the kitchen to the backyard opens up to an awesome screened in porch, wired for sound and tons of room for entertaining. My favorite part is the basement though. It has a beautifully finished media room with a bar, a separate office, and tons of storage. There is even an area that is unfinished that we will turn into a studio for Erin. Everything is laid out perfectly.
Closing is set for July 30th and it can't come soon enough. Erin and I are very excited that after 18 months and 7 days (or 555 days, or roughly 13,320 hours, which is roughly 799,200 minutes, which is roughly 47,952,000 seconds, but who's counting?) we will once again have a place to call our own!
Viva Las Vegas!
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1:21:41PM on 05/28/2008
7 Comments
| | The Countdown Has Begun
So today is finally the day when we can write THE BLOG we've been waiting nearly 18 months to write. . . D R U M R O L L N O W . . . we will be closing on our house on June 5th! Applause please! It has been a long, emotional, difficult, bitter, angry, expensive, enlightening, faith building, relationship building, character building road. We are definitely stronger because of this experience, but we don't want to travel this road again any time soon. The new buyers took full advantage of the market and our vulnerability, but we feel very blessed to have found our buyers. On average, there are 7 homes on the market for every 1 buyer; so 6 other houses didn't sell because ours did (powerful way to think of it all). Even though we feel like we put in our time in this nasty market, we still feel very lucky to have sold our house. The only houses in our neighborhood to have sold in the last year have been foreclosures. But NOT ANYMORE!!
We are almost done with this whole process. Nick, his parents and I drove down to Dallas this past Saturday to move the rest of our stuff out. Nick was a trucker for a day with his 24ft Budget truck. All in all, the move was flawless and we feel so blessed to have such great friends and family who all chipped in to help! Thanks everyone! I think we set a record in unloading-24ft truck unpacked and storage unit packed in about 1 hour-Thanks JOE, you're a machine!
So, except for signing the papers, I think everything else for Rain Tree is done. On a more exciting note, to help me cope with all the drama around the sale, we decided to start looking at houses here in St. Louis about three weeks ago. We've been out three times to look at different areas and styles of homes. We still haven't narrowed down our new area yet, but we are coming closer to our next place! Thanks for all the prayers and support and thanks to those of you who have lended space for our endless supply of boxes. This is going to be a great summer!!
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1:04:46AM on 05/16/2008
3 Comments
| | The End Of An Era
Sad News...
Today we had to let go of a long time family friend. Skippy, my parents' pomeranian of fifteen years, hadn't been eating for several days and when they took him to the vet, it was discovered that his kidneys were failing. We really had no choice but to say goodbye. It was hard, but he was in a lot of pain and for the best.
This wasn't easy for me personally. We had gotten Skippy in '93 which was an interesting time in my life. I was heading into high school about to embark on a new road to becoming a mature adult and discovering the person I am today. Skippy represented simpler times, highschool, living at home with mom and dad, my first job, going off to college. When I was told today that he was going to be put to sleep a rush of the last 15 years of my life flashed before my eyes. Things I hadn't thought about for years. I miss the innocence of it all. In some way when we lost him today, I lost a little bit of that.
He was always a happy dog. Always wagging his tail and wanting to kiss you. Skippy my good buddy, you will be missed.
Skippy Chinnici
1993-2008
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