Monday, December 20, 2010

Happy Merry Seasons!

Happy Holidays...


Merry Christmas...


Seasons Greetings!!!


Due to a strict financial budget, this is our Holiday Card to you (our beloved friends and family)! Hope you don't mind (hey, it's green, too!).



This Holiday Season brings together not only the close of the year, but the end of our first year of marriage, and needless to say - it has been a complete success (well, mostly).

The year began with us entering our third week of marriage, freshly tanned and warmed from the beaches of Jamaica (thanks to our ever-generous parents, Richard and Sam). Stephen was working for Andy in the "Home Remodeling" Business and I began the treacherous semester of student teaching. Luckily for me, Stephen has a lot of patience and understanding - because I was pretty much swamped planning, grading papers, perfecting my "Teacher Work Sample," and trying to find the elusive JOB (as anyone who has ever done student teaching very well knows). That is what we could consider the one "non-success" of the year - I, now nine months graduated - am still woefully unemployed. I mean, sure, I do a lot of substitute teaching, which can be fun, and stress-free (or stressful, depending on the day), and great teaching experience - but it's not a "real" job in most people's opinions. But I did graduate college, which was pretty exciting.

Stephen, on the other hand, has had great success with employment. He loved working with Andy, but we also love health benefits (no offense, Andy - and trust me, there are a lot of days where he wishes he were still working for you!). At Garmin, Stephen sits all of twenty feet away from his best friend, Aaron (dangerous planning on Garmin's part), and gets the joy of helping lost and confused citizens figure out the problems with their GPS units (for more on this topic, see the post titled "Global Positioning System" from September), which provides us with an income and plenty of humorous stories. There's also a pretty awesome job opportunity in the near future for him - so keep your fingers crossed for good fortune!

We took several trips, the first to Vancouver, Canada in May for, basically, a super-awesome-amazing-fun vacation (which involved seeing my favorite band, Our Lady Peace, TWICE in two nights!) For pictures, see my facebook page. The second trip was driving our best-friend/other-half, James, to Graduate School in Denton, Texas in August. It was hot. It was muggy. It was miserable moving all his junk (including winter clothing??) into a stifling apartment with no A.C. But it's love. It's what we do. Unfortunately, that trip resulted in our bestie living 552 miles away. So, we've enjoyed the pleasures of Skype, and the two trips he's made home. (In the future, don't be surprised if we strike up a "Scrubs-like" relationship and end up living together - he's J.D., for those of you who watch "Scrubs").

Our little house has made a lot of progress - we have a new wall in the basement/garage with a new door, a fully-completed main bathroom, a beautiful dining room floor (and even drapes on the windows! - because we did live for almost a month without those. In the grand scheme of things, it was so low on the priority list. For those of you unfamiliar with the "trials and tribulations" of pre-wedding-madness: The deadline of getting this house ready to live in before we got married got pretty tight. In fact, Stephen installed the toilet at 11:30pm the night he moved in (which was the Thursday before the Saturday wedding). Good times, good times...but we're glad we don't have to do that again).

So, all in all, it has been a successful and fun year. We've hung out with family and friends a lot and found that we pretty much rock at being married. Hopefully your year and your holidays are as wonderful and exciting as ours.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year!

Love,
Vanessa, Stephen, and Anya

Christmas-on-the-River Date Night! Dec '10

Anya - always worth a laugh.

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