The month of August...

Seems to have flown by! We've been busy, but not everything is always super newsworthy I guess. One benefit of living near NYC is that it's just a little bit more of a tourist attraction than Columbus, Ohio was. So we have had quite a few friends come into town to visit. The first weekend in August, Katie's college friend Shannon came in for a wedding and spent the other night hanging out with Katie. So she was our first non-family visitor. Hopefully the newly-set-up guest room can attract more visitors, though Griffey was again quite skittish in sensing that a "stranger" was in the room next door. We'll have to work on that...

The weekend after that, we both had college friends in town - Katie's friend Maggie and Charlie's friend Ryan were visiting the city that never sleeps, and our friend from Hoboken joined us all out for a Friday night. When I guess we should have been sleeping, we instead visited a Japanese Karaoke Establishment. No, we didn't learn a new language overnight - apparently this and a couple other karaoke bars have rooms where a group of 4-8 can sing without the embarrassment of a whole bar hearing you. Since the latter option was also available, Katie decided to teach the room how to sing her favorite - "Darlin'" by David Allen Coe. Other than that, last week Charlie had a week off work and visited home in Cincinnati and spent a weekend golf trip with Columbus friends in Oglebay West Virginia.

Back to our pooch, this is Griffey smelling the flowers Charlie got Katie for her actual 30th birthday (as mentioned in a previous post, we celebrated the weekend before). Griffey thought the flowers smelled lovely and didn't understand why he wasn't allowed to eat them. Also, he decided that it would be fun to chase a frog in our back yard - directly into our algae-covered pond! Wish we had a picture of that!

Finally, for the more important news - Katie went finished off her interviewing process by landing her top choice, a job in financial reporting at a certain retail toy store. She's very excited, and we're happy to be back to a dual-income family! Griffey, however, is a bit nervous, as he was getting used to one of us being home. However, he is making fast friends at the local doggy day care, where he spends the day a couple of times a week.

Soon we're off to more travels - a friend's wedding in Chicago for Charlie over Labor Day and a girls' trip to Vegas for Katie and her friends.