Thanksgiving Day Parade

Our last Thanksgiving was different than probably any of you had it before, we were part of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Working at Macy's I can participate in any of the positions available in the parade, baloon handler, clown, float escort, costumer... and marshall, which is what I was doing. I was a marshall for the parade and Jr was my recruit, so in other words my assistant! We were responsible to make sure the parade went smoothly between our 10 blocks of responsibility. If the parade was slowing down we had to tell people to speed up, if it was going to fast we had to tell them to slow down, if somebody got injured we had to help them and many more very important tasks!!! It was a lot of fun and luckyly nothing big happened in our section.
Alyson and Helen watched the parade from the Grandstands and Ron was hanging out with the pugs back at our apartment.
After the parade we cooked a traditional Thanksgiving day meal, which actually made me sick, I threw up during the night and I didn't want to call in sick the Friday after Thanksgiving because I though that it would look too fake so I went to work, but my manager could tell I was sick just looking at me, so I went back home!
On the Saturday we went to the outlet mall at Woodburry Common and went a little too crazy, it was hard to resist all those "black Saturday" specials.
Overall we had a great weekend and we hope it can be repeated this year.

Me in my Marshall outfit!

Forum Retreat

FYI, the last 2 posts should have been inverted in order!

In November I had my YAF (Young Adult Forum) retreat with people I meet with every month to talk about our personal, family and business lives. Once a year we are supposed to go on a retreat for a few days. I've been in my forum for about 3 years, but that was the first one we did. We went to a house we rented for one night in Pennsylvania. We had a lot of fun even though it was short and we didn't get to go to exotic places like our parents' forum retreats! We haven't decided where we're going to go this year, but we are thinking of maybe going at some point around January or February. Here are some pictures of our night.

One Year later...

Well it has been almost a year since we last updated this thing so I think that it is time to do so. We have pictures that will show things that we have been up to since then. Other than that it is basically the same Jr and I go to work and then take care of the dogs when we get home. I am still working at Macy's as an associate planner in womens coats and Jr is working at Wal-mart as a boy's designer for the brand Faded Glory. Life is good in our careers right now. I guess the big news is that Jr and I are in the process of buying a condo in Brooklyn, NY (its not as scary as it sounds and no, it's not the Bronx) We are just waiting for the building to finish construction before we can close on the condo and move in. We are really excited and can't wait to have a place that is all ours. Other than that life is good and things are going really well for us. So since last year, after we went to Philly, here's what we've been up to...our first set of photos is from last fall in september when Alyson came to visit and we took the dogs up to the Adirondaks to go hiking and pick some apples.

Jr's Birthday and our anniversary

In October we flew to SLC for a week to celebrate our aniversary and Jr's 30th birthday. For our anniversary we went to eat at La Caille which was really nice and a beautiful night for a special occasion. Helen, Alyson, Jr, and myself then drove down to Bryce Canyon and Zions and drove through those parks and see all that there is to see there. We also had a chance Alyson, Jr, and myself to go horse back riding through the canyons at Bryce. We then picked up Ron at St George airport and continued our travel on to Las Vegas to celebrate Jr's birthday. We all stayed at the Luxor and enjoyed the sites and sounds of Vegas. We all went to dinner for Jr's birthday at a really nice Mexican resturant and then Jr's and I went to see the Chriss Angel show Believe at the Luxor. Jr is a big Chriss Angel fan and was really excited to go. It was a good show although he had seen a lot of the illusions that he did before, but the story was really neat and the Cirque Du Soleil performance and costumes were amazing. So overall it was a really fun 30th Birthday week for him and myself.

Philly

Over the weekend Caroline and I decided to take a day trip to Philly to just see the city and go to Independence Hall and Liberty Bell National Park.

It is a 2 hour drive so we were able to go there in the morning and come back at night, the drive is not bad the long part is getting off this crazy island called Manhattan.

Once we got there we got in line to see the liberty bell, it was really neat to see it up close and the fact that it was not encased made it even cooler.

We both were hungry so we could not go to Philly without having a famous Philly Cheese stake. We went to a place that I had seen on Throw down with Bobby Flay. The place was Tony Luke's, and the cheese steaks were great. Really big and tasty, Caroline could not finish hers and I was not going to attempt to finish it off for here there were just too big.

We headed back to Independence Hall, they give you a reserved ticket time to go through the site so that there are not too many people going through. We took the tour of the complex of buildings that are there and learned about the history and the significance of these buildings. It was a really neat thing to finally see some of the history that I had learned about all of my life. Normally as Americans we don't realize our own history because our history is not very old, but it was so cool to see the birth place of the United States of America and to really get a sense of how amazing that history is. I am a big history buff so this was very exciting for me and so much fun to be where the Declaration of Independence was signed and to actually see a "copy" of it from 1776.

Philly was so much fun, it is a beautiful city and had a really fun vibe about it, we will definitely have to go back again and spent some more time there. It was a good day trip to learn about history and eat some good. It is so nice to get out of Manhattan with all of the running around that goes on here and to slow it down a bit. Hopefully we can go to many of the other great cities on the east coast.

The pictures are of Independence Hall, the room where the Declaration was signed. the senate and house chambers. and the Liberty Bell.

PUG

Since it has been awhile since I put pictures of our dogs up here I though that I would now. As you can see Vader has got a lot bigger than before, he is now taller than Yoda, but not quite as big as Yoda. They both are crazy and have way too much fun chasing and annoying each other.

Met's Game

OK so it has been awhile since the last time that we updated this blog.

Here are some pictures of Caroline and I at a Met's game we were able to go down on the field because it was a special thing that Macy's was doing with the heart association. The game itself was a bit uneventful, but it was fun to be there and we had a good time.