The weekend before Thanksgiving, Luke and Patty came down to visit. On Saturday we met them at Clyde’s the Lodge, a very cool Clyde’s Restaurant that has been redone to look like a Vermont Lodge. I neat conversation place that is a little out of place in Washington DC. After brunch we went out to Great Falls National Park. We walked along the C&O Canal and out to the waterfalls for some great photos. It was a beautiful fall day. On the way out there I showed them the entrances to the abandoned gold mines. And Kevin taught us about the cell tower rules in National Parks, that they have to be built to blend in with the habitat, so it is a tall brown tower with metal pine limbs attached at the top, if you don’t look close you might mistake it for an evergreen tree. After the hike through the park, Kevin and Luke went to the book store and then back for their siesta’s while Mom and I went to the beloved Container Store! That evening we took them to Sushi Go-Round, a sushi restaurant where the food travels on a conveyor belt around the bar in front of you while you pick the pieces you’d like to have. Mom got Chicken Teriyaki. Although, I think she enjoyed the few pieces we convinced her to try! Dad enjoyed the seaweed salad and sushi selections.

This past week we traveled back to Danville for Thanksgiving with our families. We left late Wednesday night in hopes of avoiding the dreaded holiday traffic… it worked! We had a delightful Thanksgiving with Paul, Jill, Karl, Grandma, Aunt Ann, Grammy and Natalie around noon. After visits with everyone we headed up to my house for round two. Kevin, Julie, Kyle and Keyan join us to celebrate with Luke and Patty. Mom fixed the traditional fixings along with Tootsie’s hot bacon salad dressing (?name?). Later that evening Jack and Yvonne came over to visit and Kevin and I went to Kevin’s Uncle Phil and Marilyn’s house for wine and dessert. I had met them briefly before so it was nice to get to meet and greet a bit more. On the way home we stopped at my beloved Dunkin Donuts for a small town fix and visit with Autumn.

Friday, someone in my family had the great idea of going shopping!!!! So, Kevin, Julie, Mom, myself and the two boys went to Muncy shopping, that pretty much cured me of my Black Friday shopping needs! Later, I went to Exclusively Yours, a dress shop in Bloomsburg, with my mother-in-law to be, her personal shopper-Natalie, and Aunt Ann to look for dresses for them. Both Jill and Ann had success! They will both look amazing in the what I am fearful will be tons of photos!

That evening, Kevin and I assisted Jill in making an apple crisp for Patty’s Birthday (It isn’t until December 3rd), which I decided to celebrate this weekend while Kevin & Julie and their family would be there as well as Kevin and I. Additionally, I invited Jack and Yvonne over as well. We had a little scheduling conflict getting the time down, since it was a surprise my families’ traditional non-planing tendencies made planning difficult. But alas Friday evening we celebrated with friends and family, apple crisp and many balloons furnished by Aunt Kelsey and Soon-to-Be Uncle Kevin!

Saturday and Sunday were more of the same, Kevin and I both attempting to get work done. While I tried not to die from allergies. On the way out of town we stopped at The Cherry Alley Cafe in Lewisburg to do some work, A very chill coffeehouse with a good working environment. Then it was home to watch Ocean’s 13 and get back into the groove of work and school.

Ann, Grandma, mom, dad, Karl, and Natalie all came in over the weekend to hang out with us in DC. We all had a great time. Friday night we went out for Ethiopian in Adams Morgan. Karl turned 21 on October 2, so we had a night on the town Friday night. We went to a few places in Adams Morgan:

• Madam’s Organ (awesome)
• The Angry Inch (not so awesome although they had Guinness, grossest bathrooms ever)
• Dan’s Cafe (sketchy as all hell, we walked out as soon as we walked in)
• Tryst (always awesome)
• Some hotdog place (actually quite good)

We walked to Dupont from there, tried to get into the Eighteenth Street Lounge and failed since we didn’t bring any girls with us (jerks), tried to get into the Fly Lounge (no dice), and ended up hanging out at the top level of the Brickskellar. We had some awesome beers off the tap, including a fantastic pumpkin ale. The bartender was nice and chilled out, there weren’t too many people there, we were able to play some awesome music off of the jukebox, and we closed the place out (they kicked us out at 3). We walked the rest of the way from Dupont to my apartment (approx 3 miles). I bet we walked close to five or six miles that night, drinking the whole way. Good times.

Saturday we hit Politics and Prose, Calvert Woodley wine, Union Station, the Archives, and Captial Grille. Sunday we went to Conie’s Cafe for breakfast and went to Dim Sum for lunch with George at Oriental East. It was really nice to be able to spend the weekend with my family in DC.

Today was wear pink day in support of my Aunt Ann’s successful fight against breast cancer. My aunt’s friends and family wore pink today in support of her, and Kelsey and I were no different. The event was Passionately Pink for the Cure, which is a fund raising drive for the Susan B. Komen for the Cure foundation. It takes place on a date of a team’s choosing in October, which is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. My aunt’s team is made up of my Aunt Ann, my mother, and my Aunt Mary, and is called The Sassy Sisters in Pink. They are asking for donations, so if you are willing and able, please donate online:

Go to http://www.komendonations.org/site/TR/Events/
KomenTR?team_id=44370&pg=team&fr_id=1040, which is the homepage of my aunt’s team.

Click on the Make A Donation link (or go directly to the donation page here.

Make a donation in whatever amount you wish. You can enter your name if you want it to appear on the donations list.

You can also mail a check to the Komen foundation at the address listed on the website, or give cash to my mother or either of my aunts, and they will convert the cash into a money order to send to the Komen foundation.

If any of our readers decide to donate, thanks in advance!

We bought our pink stuff at TJ Maxx (awesome deals on good clothing). While we were there, I found a wetsuit that more or less fits me (one size too large, but who’s complaining?) which I bought for $60. It’ll serve us well when we go whitewater rafting on the Cheat in the spring in the 40-50 degree snowmelt waters 🙂

Kelsey and I went to a local Sears Photo Center to have our photos taken professionally. We will be using one of the photos to submit to the local papers in Danville and Bedford for our engagement announcement. I posted four of the best photos on the website, and there are links to the full-size versions of the photos in case you want to burn them to a CD and take them to a CVS to print them yourselves so you can have your own copy.

I also posted the photos from the 4th of July festivities here in DC — there are only a handful, since it was incredibly difficult to get the camera to cooperate. I am looking at Digital SLRs for replacing the busted camera, so if anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

Magical September is over, which means that I’m no longer working overtime with ridiculous deadlines. Back to a sort of normal schedule. The NetStar website redesign has kicked into high gear, so I’ll be working on that pretty extensively over the next few months.

Kelsey and I will be taking a trip to the Upper Gauley river this weekend with some members of the guide staff at Whitewater, the company she works for in Ohiopyle. It’s going to be a great time — camping and running the river Saturday and Sunday. We’ll get back here late Sunday night, and I have off Monday for Indigenous Peoples Day.

The weekend of the 13th and the 14th my parents and grandmother and aunt will be coming to visit. We have a fun-filled weekend planned. Hopefully I can bribe Karl to come up from VT as well. After that, we should be in town for the rest of October, and then we will be visiting Adrian in Maryland during the first weekend of November.

That’s all for now … I need to grab a shower and head in to work. Post comments!

— Kevin, 5:55 AM, Washington DC

At this point, all of the photos from our cross-country trip have been posted. I’ll work on the handful of other photos I have in the next few days and get those posted as well.

Since there are 315 photos on the site at the time of this posting, I need to modify the code for the photos page to limit how many photos are displayed at once. I will take care of that in the next few days also, hopefully.

Nothing much is new here — Kelsey and I are home this weekend (which is somewhat of a first) and without plans for the weekend (which is a definite first). We are catching up on our to-do lists and on our work. We will be going to get engagement photos taken tomorrow so we can submit the engagement announcement to the papers (about five months after the engagement took place, but hey, better late than never).

All for now — time to get back to my honeydew … er, I mean, to-do … list.

I know that I suck at getting the photos up in a timely fashion … and for that I apologize. I’m still alive though, despite the relative lack of postings …

I put up a new round of photos this morning, and there will be more tonight. I will hopefully be getting caught up on the photos front very soon. Then it’s on to other updates, most of which are back-end to help keep Kelsey organized in terms of what we have done and what we have yet to do.

All for now — have to head out to work!

— Kevin, 8:30 AM, 09/27/07, Washington DC