On Saturday, the entire family (Mom & Dad O, the two exchanges students, Katie, and I) headed out to Washington D.C to see all the Cherry Blossoms. We all were in agreement that taking the Metro would be a much better idea then trying to find a place to park in D.C. It was quite busy at the Springfield-Franconia Metro station, but we expected that. We had an uneventful trip to the Smithsonian stop on the Blue Line of about 35 to 40 minutes (Keep in mind, the Blue Line is the only line for the Springfield-Franconia Station). We stayed for a few hours and took a lot of pictures of the Cherry Blossoms (link provided at the end) then we decided to return home. This is where the fun begins.

As we are standing around waiting for Dad O. to put more money on our fair cards so we can get home, we see a little message about increased police activity at the Pentagon City station and that the station was closed.  We didn’t think anything about it even though that station is on the Blue Line.  I mean the station is closed, but the trains are still running through right?  WRONG!  This is where all our troubles began.  After we boarded the train along with hundreds of other people and we start heading down the tracks, the driver notifies everyone that the train will be stopping at the Arlington Cemetery station and we will all have to get off and shuttle buses will be provided to get to the other stations.  We wait about 5 minutes and the driver comes back on the speaker telling us that the train will now be stopping at the Pentagon (one stop down) and shuttles will be provided from there.

So, a while later we end up at the Pentagon along with hundreds of other people (and hundreds if not a thousand people outside)  and we all head outside towards the bus area.  During the escalator ride up, I discover the reason for the Pentagon City station being closed.  A bomb threat and suspicious package.  So we all hit topside and what do we find?  Not a shuttle bus in sight.  Nope, not a single one.  Just normal buses running their regular routes.  On top of that, there is only one transit work and she had no idea what is going on.  The amount of disorganization by the WMATA was beyond belief.  Hundreds to Thousands of people stranded because of their ineptitude.

We stood around for a good 10 minutes while Dad O tried to see if the lady knew anything, once it was established that she did not, we all made out way towards the taxi area as we felt taking a taxi to a different metro stop past the Pentagon City was our best shot of getting home now.  Once we get down the the taxi stand, Dad O attempts to call the taxi company, but no one was answering after another 10 minutes or so.  At this point we start walking up the street as other people seem to be having luck catching taxis coming off the highway.  As luck would have it, we managed to catch two empty taxis (we had 6 people and needed two), one right behind the other.  At this point we decided to catch the metro at National Airport.  After a very scary taxi ride (I think he tried to kill us at least 2 times), we made it to the airport we an approximate cost of $10 per taxi.

From there, the metro ride was uneventful, but still quite packed.  We eventually made it back to Springfield and with an additional 15 min drive back to the house.  Total travel time:  3 hours.  That is around 4 to 5 times longer than it took us to get out there.  I can’t believe how horribly managed this situation was by the WMATA.  I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like if there was an actual emergency and not just a scare.

Anyway, here are the Cherry Blossom and Easter Pictures as promised.

Cherry Blossoms and Easter 2010

Also, There have been some new pictures of Gimzo and Teddy uploaded.  They are the pictures at the end of the album.

New Pictures of Gizmo

New Pictures of Teddy

And finally, Katie’s flowers have started growing in the back of the house and I have managed to (mostly) complete our paver walkway that goes from the driveway to the door on the side of the garage.  As before, pictures are at the end of the album.

New Pictures of the House

As I mentioned last year, we spent last Christmas in Breckenridge, CO with Katie’s side of the family. It was a wonderful trip and we enjoyed a very white Christmas. Katie didn’t break any bones this time around. But we did have fun skiing, tubing, snowboarding, making snow angels, and just enjoying the company. You can see the pictures by clicking the image below.

Colorado - December 2008

After the festivities had ended Katie returned to her research which did not end quite as early as planned. Chase returned to work and life returned to normal in Richmond until March. In March, we experienced one of those rare winter storms that actually drops snow and it accumulated.  This rare storm gave Richmond between 8″ and 10″.  Richmond will typically start shutting down at about 1″ of snow (yeah, yeah, laugh away all your northerners) Katie luckily got a day off since VCU is primarily a commuter school; unfortunately Chase still had to work. Check out the few pictures we took.

Snow - March 2009

At the end of April, Katie finally presented her research to the Medicinal Chemistry department. And May 1st successfully defended her Master’s Thesis (For your sanity, don’t read unless you really like Chemistry :-p – -Chase). May 16th, Katie graduated from VCU with her Master’s in Pharmaceutical Sciences. Of course, pictures of the joyous day are posted.

Katie's Graduation

In the days after her defense and before graduation Katie interviewed for a position as a Lab Specialist in a microbiology lab at VCU; and in June started her first job. She’s still working there and enjoying the opportunities available to learn new things.

Also in June we celebrated our first wedding anniversary. Some people claim the first year is the hardest. We honestly didn’t notice much of a change other than some added jewelry. We hope the years to come are as equally blissful.

July we bought our first house. It’s a nice 4-bedroom, 2.5-bath, brand new house in the same area of town we’ve been living in. There are plenty of pictures up of it, inside and out, furnished and unfurnished. The dogs seem to have finally gotten used to the house and to going out on their tie-out leashes.

House

We spent our birthdays in Key West with Chase’s parents. We toured most of the tiny island and learned a lot of its history. We even saw some interesting places including the Pelican Poop Shop, Garden of Eden, and the Love Muscle House. If you want to read more of our adventures just scroll back through the posts or browse the pictures.

Florida/Key West - August 2009

We stayed home this year for Halloween. We handed out about 7 large bags of candy to the neighborhood kids. Chantel and Alex even brought over Jay to go trick-or-treating. He was Bumblebee from Transformers. It was really neat to see all of the costumes. Our next door neighbors’ 2-year-old granddaughters were a pumpkin and a lady bug. The one got a kick out of being the same as our dog Gizmo. The jury’s still out on how Gizmo felt. Of course, we decorated the house.

Halloween 2009

Chase, Katie, and friend Mary-Jane, and her boyfriend, Adam, drove down to Florida for Thanksgiving. It was a nice to get away from work for a while and just be able to sit back and relax. We spent the date after Thanksgiving at Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure with Mom.

Florida - Thanksgiving 2009

This year we are hosting our first Christmas. Katie’s side of the family is coming down to visit for a few days. Mom O already made us a gorgeous wreath for our front door. The Christmas lights were up before Thanksgiving. Presents have been bought and wrapped. Now all we have to do is wait for Christmas to get here.

Christmas 2009

Once again, we wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The photo gallery and blog is continuously updated, so be sure to look at it throughout the remained of 2009 and all of 2010 for updates.

Update (12/19/2009): Since this post was originally made we’ve had one of those rare snow-dumping storms hit Richmond. We got about 8-9″ of wet snow in the last 24 hours.

Snow December 2009

]]> http://www.alixblog.net/2009/12/06/another-year-of-memories/feed/ 0 http://www.alixblog.net/2009/11/28/having-fun-in-sunny-but-cold-florida/ http://www.alixblog.net/2009/11/28/having-fun-in-sunny-but-cold-florida/#comments Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:10:05 +0000 Chase http://www.alixblog.net/?p=265 Well, we all have been having tons of fun in Florida.  Thanksgiving day was a great time with the family and friends, and of course the delicious meal most of us helped cook.  Yesterday, everyone except Dad went to the Universal theme parks.  We went on as many rides as we could.  We were never able to get on the new roller coaster, Rock It, because it always had an 1.5 hour+ wait time.  That’s too long.  Today we are heading out to look at any manatees that may be in the river and maybe do a bit of shopping.  Unfortunately, our trip comes to an end tomorrow when we have to head back to VA.

I have uploaded the pictures take so far.  Here’s a link:

Florida - Thanksgiving 2009

On a side note with the blog, we have everything finished.  The pictures are now being hosted on Picasa and are linked through using a couple of plugins.  It makes things very nice, fast, and extremely easy to use (Katie needs that).

Since then, we’ve started our drive down to Florida. Mary Jane and her boyfriend, Adam, are tagging along so Chase doesn’t have just me to keep him company and awake during the drive. We’re currently relaxing at the hotel in Richmond Hill for the night. Tomorrow we’ll finish the rest of the drive.

So far today it’s been nice just hanging around the house relaxing. I’m definitely enjoying the near 80 °F and nice breeze. We just heard that the landing of the Discovery has been postponed an hour and half. We’re hoping to be able to drive out towards the beach and take a few pictures as it lands. It was pretty neat. The wind wasn’t cooperating earlier so they pushed back the landing until 3ish.

After the landing, we came back and relaxed poolside. Then started working on dinner. This evening Chase and I are making West End london broil. Chase found the recipe online a few weeks ago. We tried it out at home and it was so delicious so we decided to bring it with us.

Chase and I are doing well. We’re looking forward to our extended weekend in Titusville this upcoming weekend. I think we both need it to prevent burn out. It looks like we’ll be there for the landing of the shuttle, which I think will be pretty awesome. Plus we’ll get to spend some quality time lounging in/around the pool and not thinking about work or school.

Back to now though, I’m finally working on the last couple of drafts before my thesis is distributed to my committee. To put it in perspective, I give a copy to each committee member. They then have 10 days to read, comment, correct, and review my thesis. Then I defend it–they ask me questions about my work and anything related to it for a few hours. Sometime in those 10 days I’ll give a talk to my entire department on my work (about 45 min). After my defense I’ll have about a week to make any corrections before I submit my final copy to the library, where they’ll look over it to make sure it adheres to all the necessary standards and if it does and I have all my signatures then they’ll publish it and I’ll officially be done. For anyone keeping track I still have to write my table of contents (including the list of figures, list of tables, and list of schemes), abstract, and experimental–and I’m already past 115 pages.

Once again, Happy Holidays!

We usually try to keep the site up-to-date on what’s going on with us; haven’t been but so successful lately. So here’s what’s new (or the same) with us:

Katie’s still working on her Master’s in Medicinal Chemistry. She’ll hopefully be defending late Jan-early Feb. We’re hoping she’ll get a job around here since we’ve gotten attached to all of our wonderful friends here in Richmond. But as any scientist knows, research just doesn’t go the way you expect and always takes longer than anticipated.

Chase is still one of three in the IT department at G.D. But he loves the fact that it’s small enough that every day is different. Right now his department is in the midst of writing a new piece of software for their accountants to use so he’s been quite busy.

In the pet department all of our fish have died, probably due to a fungal infection. But Gizmo and Teddy are doing just fine. Gizmo is just as ornery in the morning as always about going in the kitchen. Teddy has had thankfully much fewer seizures. And this fall they got a new little sister, a little roborovski hamster named Kobito.

But here is a recap from the beginning:

We rang in the New Year here in Richmond with some friends just as we plan on ringing in 2009.

Katie and her friend Mary-Jane spent Valentine’s weekend back in Blacksburg for the fourth production of the Vagina Monologues at Virginia Tech. After working with the second and third productions it was fun change to just be an audience member for Katie.

We spent Easter in Florida with Mom and Dad A. Chantel, her fiance, and his son. We had a lot of fun dying eggs, visitng the grandparents, going to Sea World and attempting to teach Jay (Chantel’s fiance’s son) how to swim.

In May Katie presented some of her research at the Virginia Academy of Science annual meeting in Hampton, VA. And as with most of her family and friends her peers had the chance to be bored with her babbling about molecular modeling and docking of ligands to receptors.

As most of you know we tied the knot in June. We had a beautiful ceremony and reception at Whitehall Manor up in Leesburg, VA. Gorgeous setting in country. One of the pictures Dad A. keeps saying we should photo shop in some cannons and civil war soldiers. Thanks to Mom O’s help everything turned out perfect and like everyone had warned us, it was a whirlwind of fun then over before we were ready.

We spent the week after the wedding recuperating in the sun in the Grand Cayman Islands. We stayed in Chase’s parents timeshare right on the beach. Our room had a view of both the golf course and the ocean. We snorkeled with fish and an eel, swam and fed the stingrays, shopped, went sight-seeing, and of course relaxed. I think the best food I had all year was the food we had there.

Fourth of July was spent up in northern Virginia with Mom and Dad O and saying good-bye to Amanda (since she would spend the next 5 1/2 months in Australia). We drove out and watched the fireworks from the side of I-395 next to the Pentagon.

Celebrating birthdays in August was fairly uneventful. Just spent it here hanging out with friends. Although going out to eat wasn’t quite as funny as is with Mom A when we have to explain to the server that we’re really celebrating three birthdays at once.

Labor Day weekend was spent in Florida. We went out to Homosassa Springs and Katie did not take a hundred pictures of manatees like last time (Jan 2004); instead it was just the fish jumping.

For Halloween we once again went out to our friend Dustin’s uncle’s house. Where we all dressed up in scary masks to scare the kids coming through the haunted walk. Katie went as a ghoul and Chase went as death. I think we scared more adults than kids though.

Late October Katie’s car stopped producing heat. After the diagnosis of a clogged heater core we decided we had put enough money in the car that it wasn’t worth it for us to fix. So early November we bought Katie a new car; a Chevy Cobalt. So now we have a giant orange snowfall and a cobalt cobalt.

Thanksgiving was spent here in Richmond with friends. We enjoyed our first experience of hosting a big dinner as a married couple. The turkey came out perfect despite not having a pop-out timer. All of our made-from-scratch side dishes turned out well too. Although I think everyone’s favorite were the bottles of Copperridge wine (same blush we had at the wedding).

Christmas will be spent out in Colorado with Mom and Dad O, Melissa, her husband, Amanda, her boyfriend, and the two exchange students. Katie isn’t being allowed near any snowmobiles and is only skiing three days so hopefully we won’t have a repeat of Jan 2006 where Katie broke her arm.

And that brings us back to New Year’s. Happy Holidays again and enjoy the pictures!