Monthly Archives: October 2008

We’ve arrived in Ohio!

On Thursday, we left the North Shore to drive out to Mount Vernon, Ohio for a visit with my parents! We stayed overnight in East Syracuse, NY, and then quickly headed out to Mount Vernon! We arrived last night, and had a great time getting settled in. My Dad and I both have birthdays in October, so we had a birthday cake. 🙂

birthday cake

We’re looking forward to a week of relaxing and visiting with my parents, as well as some side trips to see friends in the Central Ohio area! We’ll be posting photos in our SmugMug photo gallery, so you can follow along there. Thus far, we’ve got photos from the drive, a collection of Photos Catherine has taken, and photos from our first evening in Mount Vernon.

You can also follow my periodic updates on Twitter.

Frugal Haircut

Sometimes you have to spend a little money to save a little money. This week I spent $15 on an electric hair clipper set. We’ve talked about it several times in the past, but had never actually laid down the money.

So, today, for the same as it would cost for Peter to go to the cheapo haircut place, I cut his hair for him. Luckily he sports a really basic hairstyle so it wasn’t too hard! Even still, taking the first swipe was a bit nerve wracking for me. I think it came out pretty well.


The best part is that we broke even on the clippers with just one haircut and all the following cuts/trims will be 100% free. I wonder when it will be my turn to try another hair removal procedure, though. With summer coming, coolsculpting sounds like a good investment.

Thirty things to like about Peter

1. He’s a hard worker.
2. When he reads stories he always does the voices. *
3. He’s got great taste in music.
4. And knows all the words.
5. And sings along loud in the car.
6. He is very patient.
7. He likes having nice clean spaces.
8. He is always up for an adventure.
9. He’ll make dinner if I don’t feel like it.
10. He keeps up to date on the news.
11. He’s a great source of interesting websites.
12. He always puts his family first.
13. He does his research to get a good deal.
14. He’s learning to ‘do ponytails’.*
15. He’s always willing to try something new.
16. He’s good at planning trips. Even if we don’t really get to go.
17. He’s always working on improvement.
18. He’s a great tower builder.*
19. And never minds them being kicked over.*
20. He’s generous.
21. He’s fun to have on road trips.
22. He takes awesome photos.
23. He always takes the time to sing “Fancy Pants” *
24. He’s very quiet in the morning while getting ready.
25. He thinks George is funny. *
26. His spelling is impeccable.
27. He always fixes my computer!
28. He’s always ready to ‘Run for the Border”
29. He keeps our website ship shape.
30. He is truly a man of God.
*Submitted by Catherine

papa

Happy, Happy 30th Birthday to Peter. The best husband and Papa around!

Greenway

Boston’s Central Artery is a stretch of highway that runs North-South through the city. In the 1950’s, it was built as a mostly above-ground elevated highway, and for the latter half of that century its presence divided the waterfront areas of Boston from the rest of the city. The Big Dig was a project to take that elevated highway and move it underground, and was completed in 2006. Since then, the space where the elevated highway previously ran has been undergoing major renovation, and has now been converted into public parks.

Wharf District Parks

This Saturday marked the official opening of the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and Rebecca, Catherine and I trekked into the city to check out the Greenway and take part in the celebrations. Many Boston-area organizations and companies had booths and exhibits set up along the park, there were performances by musical, dance and cultural groups, and there were presentations by various politicians and other notable figures. We actually saw Caroline Kennedy, Michael Bloomberg and Thomas Menino as they finished giving a speech. Caroline Kennedy was just milling around with folks and stopping to have her picture taken! With bodyguards, of course, but still.

The Greenway is truly a remarkable improvement for Boston. It has created many new public parks and open spaces, so the city will now have some great places to hold concerts and events, in addition to the spaces it already has in the Boston Common and Esplanade. It has also made the neighborhoods around the former site of the Central Artery more accessible and appealing. Never before would I have cared to walk as much around the places that I did yesterday. It really does tie the city together, and I look forward to seeing how it will continue to improve life for Bostonians and those in the surrounding areas.

You can see our photos from the event in the Greenway Gallery.

Slicehost and Smugmug

Almost three weeks ago, our website had an outage that lasted over 24 hours. This was due to the shared hosting server that our site ran on having an outage, and was totally out of my control. Though I suppose this could happen to any server, it was just the latest of many similar incidents over many years of being with this particular web hosting company, and I’ve never appreciated the way they handle these incidents. So, while the outage was going on, I took the opportunity to sign up for a Virtual Private Server (VPS) account with [Slicehost](https://manage.slicehost.com/customers/new?referrer=a1bd033af14de9bcac9d2b6a4f7c97a7).

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Retreated

This past weekend, Rebecca, Catherine and I traveled down to Cape Cod to attend [our church](http://www.danestchurch.org/)’s retreat at the [Craigville Conference Center](http://craigville.org/). We had a great time hanging out with and getting to know the folks from our church. The three of us had a nice little private apartment in the bottom of a large four story cottage that housed a number of other families from the church. We had some workshops on the spiritual disciplines, ate all of our meals together, and had plenty of free time for playing games and chatting. The weather wasn’t the nicest, but we still enjoyed it.

Group Photo

You can see the photos from the retreat in our gallery.