Royal Wedding

The royal wedding finally happened and I did not wake up early (4am) to watch it.  Instead I TiVo'ed it and watched later in the day.  However, I did manage to see some of the key parts live, like the William and Kate leaving Westminister Abbey and first kisses. 



For a while I didn't think I would even get to record the wedding at watch it at home.  We finally got our cable and internet back up and running the day before.  Once that was working I immediately set the TiVo to record anything and everything to do with the royal wedding.  Plus, I had been watching everything on the Today show that had to do with it, at least up until the cable went out from the tornado. 

A few things that I did like were the dress, the ceremony, the inside of the church, and the excitement of the British people.  I think it is because we do not have a royal family that I am fasinated by all that goes into a royal wedding and am curious to know why they are even still around when they have no real power.  But the pomp and pagentry of it all is still very fun to watch.

Easter

It was a very relaxing Easter this year.  We had planned to spend it just the two of us but due to the tornado hitting the airport, Scott's parents were unable to fly to Las Vegas for a work conference.  Therefore, we took our food and headed down to South County for lunch/dinner with them. 

First we had to take a quick drive through the neighborhood to check out the damage first hand.  It really is amazing to see what Mother Nature can really do to one house and leave the next completely untouched.  We were also on day two of no cable or Internet so we took the time to do some house cleaning before leaving. 

We had a nice lunch with a lot of our Soulard fruits and veggies that we bought of Saturday and a great ham.  It was a huge meal that I wasn't really prepared for but it was worth having all the same.  Afterwards we played a few rounds of Dirty Neighbor.  I was doing just fine the first to games but one hand in the third game did me in.  All in all it was a very nice Easter weekend...

Now if only Charter Communications would get their act together and fix our cable and Internet.

Good Friday Tornado

 

Good Friday Sky

We were extremely lucky to have no damage from the Good Friday tornado that hit Maryland Heights.  We didn't realize how close we were until Scott went out and talked to the neighbors once the storm had passed. 

Our night was pretty boring.  We decided that we were just going to have a movie night at home since Zipf had a friend coming in and we cancelled on the Fish Fry and then the movie we wanted to see wasn't showing at the Chase.  So a relaxing night at home was planned and then the storms started around 6:30. 

We were just hanging out in the basement and so we really couldn't tell how bad the rain was coming down or the how frequent the lightning was going.  Around 7:45 the power went out for maybe 20 seconds and that's when we decided to turn off the servers and the computers and Scott ran upstairs to get some candles and turn off the other lights.  Once he was upstairs he yelled for me to come take a look at how crazy the trees were blowing.  This was probably not the best idea.  We couldn't hear the tornado sirens going off at the time.  The trees were just blowing in a weird directions and the lightening was creepy.  Reily wouldn't move from her bed in the basement.  Then we could just feel the pressure drop in the house.  We immediately opened the windows to relieve the pressure and went back down to the basement. 

I tried to turn the TV back on but the TiVo was taking too long to reboot so we, stupidly, went up the bedroom to watch the weather report.  Again there was no sirens that we could hear and so the new just talked about possible tornadoes and nothing else.  We sat in the bedroom for 5 minutes and then went back downstairs until the storm was over.  We did hear some more sirens around 9 but by then the storm was well past. 

Around 10, Scott went outside to see if there was any damage in the front of the house and talked to the neighbors.  They said that the tornado went down the street right behind our house.  We couldn't believe it.  So we put on shoes and started walking up the street.  We could smell gas as soon as we got to the top of our block.  We saw a down tree about 3 houses down the main street (McKelvey) from our street.  We then walked down the first block on our left and just saw down trees and some roofs that were damaged and a tree on a car.  We then turned around and went up to the Maryland Heights community center. 

By this time everyone who was on I270 North was stuck there.  It was a parking lot.  There were down power lines and therefore no one was moving.  We could hear people yelling from the highway at each other.  Once we got to the community center we walked over to the wall that overlooked the highway and 2 guys just ran across the Southbound lanes of 270 and hopped the wall and asked if there was a bar close because they wanted to watch the Cardinals game.  They had just left their car on the highway.  It was crazy.  The community center was were the police started the barricade.  No one was getting in to the neighborhood without shopping ID's because of the gas leaks.  People were leaving cars at the community center and walking as far as the could.  They were there till mid day Saturday. 

We didn't really take a look at the actual damage until Sunday and we are amazed as to how close it was to our house and how bad it was.  

Here is the tornado damage from around our house:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOedrXDPQtg

The tornado also hit St. Louis' s Lambert International Airport.  Here is a great You Tube video from Lambert

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQYp3RXkvLw

The National Weather Service has now said that there has been 5 official tornado's that have touched down on Good Friday.  It's truly amazing that no one was hurt.

April Showers

Holy Cow have we been having some thunder storm here.  I, personally, love a good storm.  They make for great sleeping weather, but Reily could do without them.  Reily hides in the closet, under the table or clings to anyone's leg.

This past week we had amazing lightening shows.  We even had Storm Chasers from across the country in the St. Louis area.  It's rare that St. Louis ever gets tornado's, grant it the area did have the freak New Years Eve tornado and it's been a wild April across the country.  So why not, let's have tornado sightings in the St. Louis area.

Nothing big happened by our house, we did have the sirens go off a couple times.  And even with that Reily and I were hanging out on the couch in the basement watching hockey while Scott was in the office (upstairs) working.  We had some small hail, no damage to my car or our house (that we know of ) and I think we were pretty lucky.  Just across the river, there was down trees and tornado's that touched down.

More crazy weather to come and Reily is just ready for a calm May.

Artini

Scott and I attended the first annual Artini this weekend.  It was put on by The Young Friends of Grand Center and was held at the Centene Center for the Arts and Education.  Our friend Kristin is on the board and she invited us to attend.  It was nice to catch up with her and Tom.  However, the building was not the easiest to find, no signs for the building nor the event.  But once we got the we headed up to the roof.

A few of the artists that were there were:  Michael Bolton (abstract painting), Jennifer Hayes (figurative painting), Carrie Hawkins (pastels), and Heather Woodson (ceramic/clay).  Scott had a nice conversation with Michael Bolton (not the real Michael Bolton) about the Nook.



[caption id="attachment_1153" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Kristin & Tom"][/caption]

There was a roof top deck that over looked Midtown, had it been a little warmer (major storms came through STL Friday afternoon), it would have been a great place to hang out throughout the night.  There was live music by Derren Raser, Dawn Weber (I could have done without her playing) and then The Steve Ewing Band played.  Steve Ewing was the lead singer of the Urge, a  St. Louis band that was big when we were in high school and he puts on a great show.

Engagement Pictures

We finally had our engagement pictures taken.  I was a little nervous going into the entire experience since it had been since high school since I had professional pictures taken of myself, so I didn't know what to expect.  But we met our wedding photographer on a Sunday afternoon in Forest Park and decided to just let him guide us through the process. 

We started at the Jewel Box and then moved over to a field near the Muny for some random pictures.  The best pictures came near a bridge that I forgot existed, and is really only familiar to runners.  From there we went to a waterfall and then to a hallowed out tree.  The day was a lot of fun and I cannot wait till our actual wedding day pictures!

You can take a look at some of the pictures on our photographer's blog on April 28th's date.

Are we compatible?

A couple weeks ago Scott and I went down to St. Martin of Tours church to meet with Father Charlie, the priest who will be marrying us to take our FOCUS test.  The FOCUS test is part of the marital counseling that couples have to do before getting married in the Catholic church.

It all started a couple weeks ago when we actually took the test.  I wasn't too nervous about taking it, Scott was a little more so.  The whole test seemed to take about an hour and a half and asked all sorts of questions from communication, religion, children, to finances.  I thought we did fine and wanted to see how similar our answers were.  Scott was really nervous and as soon as we walked in the door he had to ask if we were compatible?

We sat in Fr. Charlie's office and went over the test results.  Who knew we were so compatible?  We had a bunch of 100% in different categories and even more in the 90% range.  The few that we had the most wrong we had discussed after the test because the test made us realize that we hadn't talk about it yet.  Fr. Charlie informed us that we would go over the answered we disagreed with each other and explain why.  The more we disagreed with the longer we would be there.  Thankfully, we had a lot in common and our visit was relatively short. 

I think Scott walked out breathing a huge sigh of relief.  I'm just happy that this part is done, now we need to sign up for Family Planning class and Pre-Cana Classes.

Go! St. Louis Marathon Weekend

It is Go! St. Louis Marathon weekend this weekend.  All the training, or lack of training, has paid off and it's finally over.  Zipf and I decided a while ago that we were going to walk the 5K in Forest Park and Scott had planned to run the half marathon.  Zipf and I did no training or planning what so ever and our time wasn't as bad as it could have been.  We crossed the line under 50 minutes but we didn't exactly start right at the beginning since we were walking.  Overall we were proud of our timing and our pace throughout the 5K.

[caption id="attachment_1136" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Waiting for the race to start"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1137" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Action Shot"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1138" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="And done!"][/caption]

After the 5K we went down to Soulard and did some shopping and then had a great breakfast at Soulard Coffee Garden.   Then I dropped off Scott and Zipf and went to Mathew's birthday party and hung out with the Birch's for a while.  I even was able to catch some of Catherine's baseball game.  Then I went home and relaxed until Scott got home and made some pasta so he could carb load for the upcoming race.

For the half marathon traffic was horrible.  For some reason, MoDOT didn't think that the 18,000 people trying to get downtown on Sunday morning would need to use exits around Scottrade Center.  But smart of them to do construction when the Cardinals were out of town.  We managed to find a parking spot and walk a ways to the start, plenty of time for me to get a front row spot and see the start of the entire race.  I love seeing that!

[caption id="attachment_1139" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Start of the marathon!"][/caption]

I did somehow manage to see Scott actually run past me during the start of the race, I never am able to find anyone during a race but I did see him.  Even though he was on the other side of the street.  After all the runners started I walked over to mile marker 8.  I was able to beat the pace cars and I hung out there till the the 10:45 pace people race past and then walked back over to get a decent spot at the finish line.  I was able to see my friend Tom finish and Scott finish the race and not get push around like last year.

Since it was so hot this year there were a few more injuries.  I saw a few people passing out calapsing with the finish line just in site.  Scott and Ellen both said the heat was a bit much this year and that the hills just seemed to go on forever.  I'm happy I went to cheer on the runners, it really it worth getting up early to watch.

This came in the mail about a week later for me.

[caption id="attachment_1193" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="5K Medal"][/caption]

Fast Eddies

I have finally made it over to Fast Eddie's Bon Air, in Alton, IL.  Since before I moved back to St. Louis I've heard about how much fun Fast Eddie's is and how great the food is so once I've had the chance to go I quickly said yes.

We took a party bus over for a birthday party, there was 40 of us on a bright green school bus headed to Alton on Opening weekend of baseball in St. Louis.  It was perfect weather and a great day to drink some beers and hang out.  Zipf introduced me to some new friends and a few people I had met from other events.



Overall Fast Eddie's did live up to the hype.  It was by far, one of the best places to people watch.  The line for food was long so I stuck with the peal and eat shrimp.  I did happen to see my 7th grade volleyball coach there and had horrible flashbacks of how bad she was as a coach.





On the way back from Fast Eddie's I was the most sober person on the party bus.  I still had to go to Mathew's family birthday party and did not want to show up drunk or hungover so the bus ride home was not a fun experience for me.  It was entertaining to see everyone dancing around and see how fast the driver could get us back to our cars.

I definitely want to go back, now just need to find a time to get back over there.