A Good, Old-Fashioned Christmas (Somewhat Literally)

One of the things we we're most excited this Christmas season was getting a real tree. After we got married, Cary Anne's aunt was nice enough to send us a hand-me-down artificial tree. But Cary Anne's family used to go out some years and chop down their own tree and my family always had a real tree, too, so we missed that. Towards the start of December, CA, Kelly, and I walked to our local garden center to find the right tree. After winding our way through dozens and dozens of pines, we finally found one that seemed tall and full enough and reasonably priced. The half a dozen block walk there didn't seem so bad, but for some reason felt longer when we were carrying the tree.
"I should have done more push-ups before attempting to carry this thing," I said.
"Then you would've just been sore," Cary Anne replied.
"No, I mean more push-ups in life. Not just today."
When we finally got the thing up to our 3rd-floor walk up, CA and I prepared the tree stand while Kelly removed sap from our clothes using peanut butter. Over the next couple of weeks, we decked the thing out in lights and ornaments and ribbons.

After the tree was up, the rest of the holiday season was exactly what you would expect. Our church Community Group had an ugly sweater party, where we spent the night eating lots of snacks and playing games. We also made a short weekend trip down to Lexington in the middle of December since we decided to spend the week of Christmas in Virginia with Cary Anne's family. It was a ridiculously short trip: 13 hours of driving for less than 40 hours of visiting. But we did at least get see family and friends. I even stopped back in at Krispy Kreme to say hello and get some free donuts.

The Friday before Christmas, we flew into DC to meet up with Cary Anne's parents, along her brother and his wife who had flown in a few days before. The next day, we all crowded into the van and headed down to Colonial Williamsburg.

Ever since I've known Cary Anne, she has talked about how much she loves Europe and desires to move away from America. But that attitude completely changes when it comes to Colonial Williamsburg. Whenever I would make fun of it, she would vehemently defend it like she was the daughter of Uncle Sam himself. Christmas in Williamsburg is a bit of a family tradition for CA's family, but they hadn't been since 2007, so CA was excited...maybe too excited.

We spent the week exploring the rustic, old buildings and meeting all of the character actors: the wig maker, the cobbler, the butcher, the baker, the candle stick maker. Cary Anne enjoyed learning about their sewing techniques, and I enjoyed watching the men fire off the cannons. During the day we would explore the old Govenor's hedge maze, and at night we'd all head back to the resort where we would eat dinner as a family and play games. The weather was pretty nice, too. It was so warm on Christmas day that Cary Anne and I went to play mini golf, which is an activity I never thought I take part in on Christmas day.

Overall, it was great trip and fun opportunity to bond more with CA's side of the family, but it's always nice to come home again.

Do S'mores Go Better with a Red or a White?

About six weeks after we moved into our new place with our friend Kelly, we decided the apartment was finally organized enough to throw a house-warming party. Though the walls were still pretty bare, the furniture was in place and the dishes were in the cabinets, so we moved what was left of our boxes into the back bedroom and invited our friends over.

Since the fall was beginning to transition into winter here in Chicago and since we wanted to make use of now having a working fireplace, we decided to make it a s'mores party. So we went to Costco and bought chocolate and graham crackers and marshmallows in bulk, and in the Facebook invitation that went out, we encouraged people to bring firewood. Whether it was a whole bundle or just a few sticks found on the side of the road during their walk to our place, we figured anything would help keep the fire going for a few hours. But this is how I know we go to a progressive church: no one brought any wood at all. Instead, all of our nearest and dearest Christian brother and sister (who were the bulk of people we invited) showed up with various forms of alcohol. Though I may prefer to pair my s'mores with milk, others apparently prefer champagne or ale. Either way, the party went on smoothly...though with a limited amount of firewood.

A couple of weeks after our housewarming, Thanksgiving arrived. Like last year, Cary Anne and I planned on sticking around Chicago for the holiday, and luckily most of our friends decided to do the same, so we arranged a couple of potlucks. The night before Thanksgiving, Cary Anne found out she would be largely responsible for cooking the turkey, a task she had never before done. So on Thanksgiving morning, she headed over to Nick and Michelle's place (since they were hosting the potluck) to get started, while I stayed back to oversee a couple of casseroles. I am by no stretch of the imagination a cook. I've managed to mess up instant mashed potatoes in the past, so I was a bit nervous, but thankfully things turned out OK. By the time I arrived with the dishes, the table was already full of delicious looking food.

Josh was brave enough to step up and take on the turkey carving responsibility while the rest of us piles our plates high with green beans and sweet potatoes. Cary Anne did a great job with the bird considering her total lack of experience, and we all spent the afternoon eating way too much food, talking about the recent discovery of a meth lab in a Kentucky Walmart bathroom, and watching reruns of "How I Met Your Mother."

Later that night, the two potlucks merged for a night of board games and dessert at our place. Our kitchen counter became crowded with several different kinds of pie as we stood around drinking coffee and talking about our day. Soon, we decided to open up the board games. One of the highlights of the night came when we opened the "Cranium" box and realized that the playdough used in the game had grown hard and was starting to crystalize and mold. I told my friend Ben I'd give him a dollar if he put it in his mouth for 2 minutes. I said it as a joke, but to my surprise he actually did it. Somewhere out there, there's cell phone footage of him enduring a very long 120 seconds of a mouthful of germy clay. I ended up giving him $1.50 for sheer commitment and ballsiness.

Overall it was a great holiday, and the next day, on Black Friday, Cary Anne went crazy at Michael's, buying up all the Christmas decorations she could fit in her cart. Within days she had our place decked with garland and wreaths. But more on that next time...

Anniversaries and Reunions and Robots

Cary Anne and I have now lived in Chicago for over a year.

It's weird to think back on our life in Lexington, wondering what it would be like here and if we'd be able to survive on our own. Making the decision to come here was easily the most exhilarating and terrifying decision Cary Anne and I have ever made as a couple, and has been extremely rewarding. There were certainly low moments, including weeks of unemployment and battles with a bed bug infestation (just to name a couple), but there have also been incredible highs. God has provided us with good jobs, He has given us the opportunity to pursue our passions, and He has brought us into a church that has truly become our Chicago family. Without a doubt, moving here was risky, but it was mine and CA's first real step in becoming our own family, in leaving our parents behind and holding tight to one another. The past year has definitely been the most rewarding time in our relationship.

But that's not our only recent anniversary. Last month, Cary Anne and I celebrated our 2 year wedding anniversary. It was a relatively low key celebration, which consisted of us having dinner at a nice restaurant in Andersonville, then grabbing a movie from Redbox. (We're clearly a very exciting couple.) That night, we also built our 1st fire in our new fireplace. We've become gatherers in that every time we walk home from somewhere, we often collect sticks we find on the ground along the way to use as firewood. We are loving our new place, and it's starting to come together nicely it terms of decorating and organizing.

Fall here in Chicago has also been great because over the past several weeks I've have the opportunity to reunite with several old friends. Last month, my friend Rose, who served as a leader with me in the Christian organization at Pace U during my time in New York, came to town for six weeks as part her medical school residency. She stayed at a swanky hotel downtown and spent time serving in a south side hospital, but luckily there was time in her schedule to occasionally grab a burger with Cary Anne and I and explore the city a bit. It was great catching up with her considering before last month I hadn't seen her in over 3 years. Before she left, we promised to get together again before we're 30.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, I got to spend a little time with some old high school theater friends of mine. Jesse and Casey recently moved to the city, and our friend Sean decided to come up for a week to check things out since he's planning on moving here next summer. So late one night, I met them all at a bar down in Lincoln Square. Like with Rose, before this, I hadn't seen them in years, so it was great to reunite and reminisce. Hopefully, now that we're all in the same city (or soon to be, in Sean's case) there won't be years between visits anymore.

Halloween was also a fun time here in the city. Our church, Community Edgewater, decided to volunteer with the 48th Ward's annual Halloween Festival. Some people painted faces, some people led games, and then some of us wrote and performed short children's plays. It was a bit hectic and unorganized considering there seemed to be little infastructure. In fact, we didn't even see the space we would be performing in until about half an hour before the show started, and when it was time to start, we basically just hopped on stage and started talking, with no cue from any sort of official organizer. But overall, it went as well as could be expected. The kids seemed to have a good time and I even got to wear a giant cardboard robot suit.

Now we're starting to ease into the holiday season and Cary Anne is already busy making sketches of how she wants to decorate, and the girls are talking about us dressing in matching outfits and sending out a Christmas card. Maybe this whole living in community thing was a bad idea...

"It's Gonna Be Legen- Wait For It..."

Back in the spring, about half a dozen of us from CCC Edgewater got the idea to move into a community house together in the fall, once our leases expired. Though we did some looking and planning, in the end, things kind of fell through. Our friend Lisa moved off to Seattle, and our friends Ben and Sam decided they just wanted to room together on their own, as two bachelors on the prow, I suppose. So that left Cary Anne and I and our friend Kelly. Last month, we started looking at 3-bedroom apartments together in Edgewater, and soon we put a down payment on one. 

Back at the start of October, several of our friends from church were generous enough to help us move all of our stuff. For CA and I, it meant saying goodbye to our studio in Roger’s Park and for Kelly it meant abandoning the 1-bedroom place she was living in only a few blocks south of our new place. Getting furniture up the stairs to our new 3^rd floor walk-up was about as fun as going to the dentist, but we did it (with a lot of help) and we managed to only break one bookshelf.

As you can imagine, Cary Anne and I super excited to be living in a place that is more than just one room. Our new place has a dining room, a living room with a working fireplace, a balcony, a sun room, and a washer/dryer in unit. It’s basically a palace compared to where we were living, and we’re very thankful to have the opportunity to upgrade. We’re also thankful for our new roommate Kelly who is the Ted to our Marshall and Lily (for you “How I Met Your Mother” fans). Kelly is a night nurse at a local hospital, so sometimes it feels as though we don’t have a roommate at all, but we’re excited to have her as a larger part of our life when she is around and awake. In fact, she has already started trying to pry us into renaming this blog “Two Gingers and the Things They Do Together…with Kelly.”

There has also been a recent change on the job front for me. As many of you know, since we moved to Chicago, I’ve been working at a restaurant called Cosi, taking orders, making drinks, and serving food. I was also helping part time at Cosi’s corporate offices in the suburbs, taking care of some clerical work that no one else seemed to have the time to manage. Recently, the corporate office lost their receptionist, so I applied, and I now work there full time. It’s great to finally have a “real job” with benefits, and for the first time in our marriage, Cary Anne and I are on the same basic work schedule so we’ve been enjoying our evenings together.

Not too long ago, we spent one of those evenings at our first Cubs game together. Cary Anne bought the tickets off of a co-worker, and I was excited to go because the Cubs were playing the Reds. Though the Cubs fell behind early on (surprise, surprise), they did make a comeback and tied things up by the ninth inning. After that the Cubs had multiple chances to win and blew them all, CA insisted we leave when it was after 11pm and the game was about to enter the 12^th inning. Though I was sad to go without seeing the end, it was OK, because the Cubs ultimately lost by a single run.

For now, we're excited for the future: a new place, a new roommate, and a new schedule. So stayed tuned to this blog...now with more Kelly!

From Chi to KY

A couple of weeks ago, Cary Anne and I had the chance to travel back to Lexington for a long weekend. Though we travelled to Kentucky back in May to spend Memorial Day with our friends Chris and Hannah, we hadn’t been back to Lexington specifically since Christmas, so I was excited…and CA seemed mildly amused.

I was determined to jam in as many visits as I could during our short time there, so on Friday afternoon we headed to my old high school to catch up with my old English teachers, Mr. Egan and Mrs. Wilkinson (though I guess now that I’m an adult, I can refer to them as their real people names- Gary and Tara). We told them all about our lives in Chicago, and they told us all about their continuing adventures in teaching and how Tara taught on a broken foot for half a day when she stepped off a curb wrong, but refused to admit it was actually broken. Apparently she gave her Creative Writing class the exercise of writing short stories explaining how she broke her foot, but soon realized that was a bad idea when half of the stories she got back began with, “Mrs. Wilkinson was so drunk…”

After that, we hopped over to see my old co-workers at Geno’s Formal Affair. It was great catching up with everyone. Since my departure, they’ve hired multiple new people, 2 of which are local beauty pageant winners, so Hunter made sure to inform me I’m not pretty enough to work there anymore anyway. We also caught up with Jordan, who we know from college and who has been the Assistant Manager at Geno’s for a couple of years. She and her husband, Tyler, are planning on moving to the Big Apple next year (unless we can soon convince her that Chicago is infinitely better) so Jordan can pursue a career in fashion, so we shared our knowledge of living in a tiny apartment in a big city. In fact, Jordan recently launched a new fashion blog and you can check it out here.

That night, we grabbed dinner at Waffle House with Sharonda and her boyfriend, Jay. Waffle House is a place of nostalgia for Sharonda and I since we spent many late nights there during the summers I was home from college, and Cary Anne and Jay like greasy breakfast enough to tolerate our insistence that we eat there. Neither Sharonda nor I are great “phone people,” so it was great to hear all about what they've been doing over the past several months.

On Saturday, we drove down to London, because our old college friend, Cam, was getting married. This was the highlight of the weekend because it allowed us to see so many of our old friends from University of the Cumberlands (most of whom we hadn’t seen in over a year). The ceremony was beautiful and simple, and was followed by a reception at a local country club. There were vases of water beads on every table, and many of us UC people sat in the back and tried not to make a scene as we took turns bouncing them and throwing them at each other. The older people around us kept staring and frowning; I don’t know why.

On Sunday, my whole family got together to celebrate my brother’s 29^th birthday. He was a bit predictable in his selection of a Mexican restaurant for dinner followed by frozen yogurt from Orange Leaf for dessert, but I’m not complaining.

Overall, it was a great weekend back in south.

A Life in Limbo

August came to a close with a weekend of partying with our friends from church.

The first was going away party for our friend Lisa. A young couple from our church, Ruth and Jesse, recently had to move out to Seattle due to a job transfer, and Lisa, who has apparently always wanted to move out west, decided to follow them. So Kelly hosted a party where we all got together and made a scrapbook for Lisa and did some awkward dancing in her tiny living room.

The next day, the Hanes and Cannariatos hosted a 1920s-40s party at their place. This is something they had been talking about doing for a while, and it finally all came together. Everyone dressed up, while Nick mixed gin beverages. There was even a small back room for poker and cigar-smoking. Very authentic. Overall, it was quite an exhausting weekend.

In other news, we have found a new place to live. We've been living in the small studio we moved into when we first arrived in Chicago 10 months ago, and for a while we had hopes of creating a community house with some people from church, but for various reasons that idea kind of fell apart. So now, we'll be moving into a 3-bedroom place with our friend Kelly next month. We're very excited, and I'm sure we'll share more details as we make the move. In less exciting news, we have technically already moved to a new place. After some miscommunication with our landlord, we had to move to a different unit within our same building when he thought we were moving September 1^st and proceeded to rent our place to a new tenant. We didn't realize the mistake until late last month, so we had about 10 days to get all of our stuff in boxes. Luckily, when the 1^st of the month rolled around, some people from church helped us carry those boxes down three flights of stairs to the 2^nd floor, and we were able to make the transition in about 3 hours. For now, we are living out of boxes, which is kind of a nighmare, and makes us all the more excited for October.

Also, I recently went and got our car window repaired. As some of you know, last month some coward busted out one of the windows in our car in order to steal our point-and-shoot camera and my backpack (which luckily, at the time, only contained my work uniform). If you're doing the math, this means the glass window was more valuable that the combined worth of our stolen stuff. We waited a few weeks to get the window repaired just to make sure we could afford it without slipping on any of our other bills. In the mean time, we had taped a piece of cardboard over the hole, and, after enduring several rain storms, it was starting to look pretty rough. In fact, the day before getting the window replaced, I had to reach back and grab the cardboard to keep it from flying free as I drove down the street. Fortunately, things are now repaired and the window is good as new.

Tonight, we are driving down to Lexington for a long weekend. Our friend Cam is getting married, so we're excited to celebrate with all of our college friends and visit some of our old haunts in Lexington, since we haven't been back since Christmas. I'm sure our next post will be all about our trip.

Who Wants to Have an Adult Sleepover?

Summer is coming to a close here in Chicago. The past several months have been packed with all the things you'd expect from summer in the city: we had the chance to take in some "Shakespeare in the Park," we enjoyed some local outdoor festivals (where we tried our 1^st bacon doughnut), and we grilled out at the community garden.

A few weeks ago, we even had a chance to see by brother, Jon, and his wife, Andrea...for about an hour. It was rather unexpected. They were flying back from a mission trip in Haiti with the youth group from their church, and they were supposed to catch a connecting flight home to Kentucky from O'Hare. Because of a delay, they ended up missing their flight and made the decision to “sleep” at O'Hare. So Cary Anne and I drove out to meet them, and we spent about an hour catching up and hearing about their trip.

A couple of weeks later, CA's birthday rolled around. After she opened her gifts, we decided to head downtown to eat at an Irish restaurant Cary Anne wanted to try. Sadly, as we were walking out, Cary Anne shut the door before turning to me and saying, “You have keys, right?” I did not. So CA managed to lock us out. Luckily, since it was just the push-lock on the knob, we were eventually able to successfully McGuyver our way back in to our own place. (You can read about the whole ordeal over on my comedy blog.) So we ended up at dinner at The Kerryman about an hour later than we anticipated. It was actually a really nice night, and we got to dine out on the patio. The food was good, and we were endlessly entertained by the people next to us who were far too old to be having a conversation sprinkled with gems like, “In a decade, I don't think people will be getting married, because if I like a guy, I just want to have sex with him, not fight with him about loading the dishwasher” and “You can come over to my place tonight. My wife is out of town. I mean, we're not gonna do anything; just an adult sleepover, you know?”

Around that same time, I had to venture out the DMV to register our car here in Illinois. When I walked in, I was “greeted” by a large, older man on a chair wearing the lifeless expression every DMV worker has in TV sitcoms. He handed me the proper form to fill out. About half way through, I realized that the title was solely in CA's name , and she was supposed to be present to sign the form. I looked down at the fine print and saw that forging someone's information on the form could result in a $10,000 fine and up to 5 years in prison. I walked back to the large man and asked him for advice.

“Couldn't you just sign her name for her?” he said, barely looking at me.

I looked back down at the fine print. “I could...I guess?”

“Well, geez, that's what I would do,” he said, looking off in another direction to inform that the conversation was over. In the end it didn't matter because CA ended up having to fax her ID and written permission to add me to the new car title. Overall, the whole process was about as painless as you can expect from the DMV, and now were legitimate Illinoisans.

Lastly, here's our 5 seconds-a-day footage from July. Enjoy...