Coming out of Retirement....

Like Charlie said in the last post, we have been very busy.....and quite a lot has happened in the latter part of August and beginning of September.

First and foremost, I have finally come out of retirement.  I left my job at AEP alittle over 3 months ago and luckily got a pretty nice severance package to tide me over during my job search.  After a long job search, I finally found a good fit for me....I accepted a job at Toys R Us Headquarters in their financial reporting department....yep I basically play with toys all day...ha ha..just joking....it is the same old accounting stuff I have been doing but the company is really neat and there really are toys in every one's cubes and offices.   I started my job on August 23rd and have been working for almost a month now...whew I almost forgot what pushing the big wheel was like....although Griffey would have much preferrred for me to stay at home with him, I am glad I found a position at a cool company.

We have settled into a pretty nice routine...Monday, Tuesday and Thursday Griffey stays at home in his cage and we found a lovely dog-walker who calls herself "The Fury Godmother".   We are working up to Griffey letting the Fury Godmother actually take him on a walk, but for now she just comes and lets him run around in the back-yard for a break during the day.  On Wednesdays, I bring Griffey to Doggie Day-care in the morning and Charlie picks him up in the evening...and he is exhausted from playing all day.  They always send a report card home with him that praises how well of a dog he is and likes to play with all the dogs...we are such proud parents...ha ha!

And then on Fridays, Charlie usually comes home for lunch to let Griffey out.

Weekends have been busy as well.  The weekend of August 28th, we purchased tickets to the Barclay's PGA Golf Tournament which was right down the road from us in Ridgewood, NJ.   It was a nice tournament and a nail-biting finish with Matt Kuchar winning in a play-off finish.

The next weekend was Labor Day weekend and Charlie went to Chicago for friend's wedding.  I really wanted to come along, but I was leaving for my girls weekend in Vegas on the following Wednesday.

My first night in Vegas I stayed with one of my high-school friends who actually lives in Vegas in the suburbs and works as a nurse.  All of my college friends arrived on Thursday and we partied all weekend celebrating our 30th birthdays and trying to pretend like we were still in college.  It was a fabulous weekend with my college friends but after staying out till 5am dancing...I think we all realized we are not in college anymore.

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.

The Big 3-0

The weekend of July 31st was my last weekend of my twenties because the following Thursday on August 5th I turned 30.  Charlie took me on a very romantic and relaxing carriage ride through Central Park (something I have always wanted to do) and then we went to Bobby Van's Steakhouse near Central Park....Charlie got one of the biggest steaks we had ever seen and overall it was a delicious dinner topped off with New York style cheesecake.  After dinner, we walked to McGee's pub which is the original McClarin's Pub from the TV show "How I Met Your Mother" which is my favorite show.   The bar doesn't really look much like the one on the TV show but apparently it is where the 2 writers use to come and the show is loosely based on their lives.  It was a wonderful Saturday in the city celebrating the end of my twenties with my wonderful husband.  In September, I have a girls-weekend planned in Vegas with my college roommates to celebrate all of our 30th birthday's in style.

A Visit from the Cincinnati Mowry's

The weekend of July 24th, Charlie's parents and sister came to visit us in Jersey! We had lots of things planned for the weekend and they even helped us finish some projects around the house too.

After a little bit of drama with their flight, they arrived safely at the LaGuardia Airport Thursday afternoon. I drove in to pick them up, which was my first time driving into the city by myself.... it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. We came across a little bit of traffic getting onto the George Washington Bridge but overall, it wasn't too bad. So Thursday night, Charlie and I took them down to Hoboken, New Jersey for the 100th Annual St. Ann's Festival. The festival is a really popular italian street festival that had lots of food vendors and Jay and the Americans were the entertainment. For those of you that may not know, they were a pretty popular band in the 60's ...probably their biggest hit is "Come a little bit Closer". Strangely enough there were not as many "italian" food vendors as we thought there would be at an "italian festival" but we did wait in the long line for the famous "zeppoles", which tasted similar to funnel cake.

On Friday, Charlie went to a KPMG Volunteer Event for the day. And Tom, Leslie and Abby helped me do some things around the house. We got lots of yard work done and cleaned out the garage. Friday evening, we all went out to a nice steak dinner at The River Palm Restaurant located in the neighboring town, Mahwah.

Saturday, we took the train into the City. We saw The Addams Family Musical on Broadway, which had Nathan Lane and Lillith from Cheers starring as Gomez and Morticia. The musical was really cute and would highly recommend it. After the show, we went to the King Tut exhibit in Times Square. Maybe I should have already known this, but I had no idea that King Tut died at 19 years old. His remains are still in Egypt but the exhibit had lots of burial objects that were found in his tomb including the coffinettes that contained his mummified organs. For dinner, we took a cab down to Lombardi's Pizza near Little Italy. Lombardi's claims that they are the very first pizzeria in America starting business in NYC in 1905. And anyone that hasn't tried this pizza, it is a must. It is definitely my new favorite pizza (move over Plank's! ).

Sunday morning we woke up and went to brunch at one of Jersey's diners. Diners may have become extinct along time ago in Ohio, but Jersey has kept these blasts from the past alive and there are so many too choose from. We chose the State Line Diner which did not disappoint.

After filling our tummies with greasy eggs and bacon, we drove 45 minutes north to the West Point Academy and toured the grounds and cemetery, which had beautiful views of the mountains and Hudson River.

And last but definitely not least, Abby and Tom helped Charlie put together our long over due grill which was a wedding present 2 years ago. We were never able to use it in our condo in Columbus, so we were really excited to find a house with a nice back-yard and porch to start grilling. Once the grill was put together, Charlie enjoyed finally being able to fire it up and we had some delicious marinated chicken and hamburgers.

Overall, it was a great visit from the Cincinnati Mowry's, lots of fun and lots of help in getting us settled.

Momma Carico visits New Jersey

The weekend of July 17th, Charlie and his college buddies had their annual golf trip.  This year they went to Lexington, Kentucky.  I believe they played 90 some holes of golf in 3 days....Charlie will have to update you all later on how the golf rounds went.


So since Charlie was out of town, my mom decided to take her first flight since 2000 and come see me for the weekend.  I had a great time showing my mom around our new area and we got several projects done around the house...which was very helpful having another set of hands.  

A Visit to Chicago

On the weekend of July 10th, Charlie and I went to Chicago for a wedding of one of Charlie's fraternity brothers.  The weekend was a total blast and a big reunion for lots of our college friends.  The wedding was absolutely gorgeous at the Modern wing of the Art Museum, where we danced the night away and of course at the end of the night Charlie had to take a detour to his favorite burrito place in Wrigleyville (Taco Burrito Express #2....I think) 

Happy 4th of July

Hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend (well I guess it was a couple of weekends ago, I am a little behind).  We spent some of the weekend doing yard work and some of the weekend relaxing with friends. This is our first time having a yard and it is already wearing us out.  We hire the same lawn-care company that the owner's used to mow the grass every week, so at least we don't have to worry about tackling that task.  But the yard and landscaping hasn't been kept up in quite a while so to make it more dog-friendly we did quite a bit of weeding, a little mulching and patched up some areas of the fence that our little dog might try to follow a squirrel under.  After doing all this yard work, we had our friends Brian and Adrienne Holtmeier over for drinks, dinner and some yard games.  Unfortunately, Charlie and I lost in "Corn-Hole" to them, but it was still fun to enjoy the back-yard.

On Sunday the 4th, we went with Brian and Adrienne to one of their friend's cook-outs and then back to Ramsey to watch the local fireworks.  When we got back to Ramsey, we were shocked to see that everyone from the entire county was parked on our street and already walking to the fireworks.  Our house was in a prime location, for if it were not for our drive-way we would had been out of luck.  I forgot to take my camera to the fireworks show but believe me they were excellent.

We took a few pictures of the house so that you all can see our abode and how it is coming along.  It is pretty nice for a rental if we could only get rid of that ugly above ground pool...oh well I guess when in Jersey...

Oh yes, our bedroom has a skylight...at first you might think how nice you can lay and look up at the stars...ugh...whoever thought that this was a good idea for a bedroom clearly was a morning person because it gets really bright at 5am and there is no way you can put a curtain up there.