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by Alli Marshall in Vol. 15 / Iss. 18 on 11/26/2008

Holidays 2008 e-card

I haven't been so good at keeping this bad boy updated lately...and I don't see it getting any better. We've been super busy and I've taken on a temporary position teaching 3 social work classes at Mars Hill College next semester...so work and prepping for that are taking up all of my time! In any case, here's our e-card (try to save: trees, postage, ink, time, money...):

I'll try to at least get the funny stories and pics up on occasion! :), Dawn

Thanksgiving Weekend with the Mendonskils

We started the weekend off by heading to Knoxville to hang out with my brother's family and my parents...we ate yummy food all day long and watched plenty of football inter-mixed with cartoons. Benjamin is army-crawling all of the place and Michael loves to play jokes on everyone! We went to the annual Festival of Trees and the boys got to see Santa...Benjamin was not so sure about that bearded guy.

Mike and Jenny and the boys got to ride the Carousal while the rest of us tried our best to get a good picture of them...as they went around in a circle...I'm sure we were fun to watch.

The best part was that my Mom, Michael and I got to ride on the "spinny thing"...it actually was a lot of fun...we all practiced "no hands" while trying to spin ourselves as fast as we could. I'm glad I wasn't the one taking the pictures :).

Friday we headed back to Asheville to get the girls so that Al and Sue could have some peace before hosting the whole family for Thanksgiving II on Saturday evening. We met LeeAnn, Dorsey and Libby out for the evening. Dorsey and Marcus enjoyed Patron shots...which I was blamed for the next morning! We headed to Barley's with Libby and enjoyed another yummy Cold Mountain.

On Saturday, after Marcus was feeling better from the shots, we bought our Christmas tree...the first in the new house since we didn't have time to get one last year! My parents headed over and we all had a great time with the Meskil/Pedler clan...yummy food again....the best lemon meringue pie I've ever had!!!

We spent Sunday lounging around the house and here we are at Monday again!

One Year House Anniversary!!!

So late in the day...but while I still had my jammies on...I realized that today is the one year anniversary of moving in to this house. Life was extremely stressful for us from October - December: new jobs (crazy timing, but it all worked out), selling a house, buying a house, still owning another house, a nephew born extremely premature...and so on. This November 26th finds us less stressed at home and with a fiesty and healthy little nephew. See the new slideshow to the right for updates....

Clearly we have everything in the world to be thankful for, but I'll try to keep my list to five:
1. An amazing (and much larger) family
2. Great friends
3. Obama is going to be our president
4. We both have jobs
5. The opportunties that still lie ahead...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Crafty Blog

The great Ms. Erica Sage, http://craftyblossom.blogspot.com/, has inspired me to do some crafty blogging. Check out her blog...it's pretty awesome :).

Marcus is out skiing his heart out today (maybe I'll have some pictures of his sore butt later) and I am enjoy another day of sewing in my jammies...I'll have to get some work done soon, but right now I'm crafting-up the house! This morning I got a wild hair up my booty and decided to make my own switch plate covers...cool covers are expensive to buy and I bought some in Oregon recently that are kind of a pain to use with a dimmer switch. I think they turned out nicely...and I took the opportunity to practice a few techniques on my own before trying to sell these on etsy.

The project that started this crafty binge of mine was the tree skirt. This is our first year getting a tree and decorating for Christmas in the new house (last year was too crazy) and I'm super excited about it. We don't have a tree skirt, so I decided to make one from the table cloth fabric we used at the rehearsal dinner. While it turned out okay, I learned my lesson about "winging it" and free handing a pattern...it turnout out more of an oval than a circle. Now, I could claim coolness and that I intended to be trendy with my oval tree skirt, but you already know that I'm not that cool. It was a mistake, but it will do until I learn to slow down and have some patience!

fancy little stitch around the edges...
We'll see what else I get myself in to...after the work is done, of course!

Foosball and 10-year-old Tornados

The weekend started off with some yummy Papa's and Beer, Big Beers and Foosball! Marcus was brave enough to be the lone male on a "Dawn, Libby & LeeAnn" outing, but he survived nicely (and even drove me home at the end of it :)). We had our first sample of this season's Cold Mountain Brew from Highland..it was tasty! With loving and longing thoughts of Phoebe we also forced ourselves to play a few games of foosball...as you can see,

it's just too hard to manage without her!

We spent Saturday hanging around the house...Marcus took the opportunity to hike and mark the boundaries again and I sewed a tree skirt (recycled rehearsal dinner table clothes)...

we're regular riots sometimes!!

We picked the boys up and made the mistake of hitting Sam's and Ingle's...apparently the Saturday before Thanksgiving is not too early for the whole world to go grocery shopping. We headed out to Sue and Al's for dinner and some friendly competition between DeAndre and Al (poor Za just gets caught up in the mix...he's too nice for competition). They started with a game of Blockhead and then moved to a Dance Off...they would have made LeeAnn proud. I have to say that De won Blockhead and Za won the Dance Off...

but Al's a good sport :).

Back at home, the boys were allowed to stay up as late as they want and wake up whenever they wanted...a first around our house. Armed with Strawberry soda and cinnamon jumbos (Sue's famous cookies) they proceeded to stay up until 2am destroying our living room (if you asked them, they were just playing wii). Sunday brought a day of house cleaning, more wii for the boys and chili with Sue, Al and the new neighbors...who have "rescued" our dogs twice before even moving in! Monday has rolled around a little too quickly, as usual, but we're excited about Thanksgiving in Knoxville with Mike, Jenny, their boys and my folks...then Christmas Tree decorating at home and TG II on Saturday with Sue and Al and my folks again!

Hope you all have a good one...

Oregon with the Meskil Clan

Last week we took advantage of a long weekend and headed to Oregon for a Meskil-style family trip. We started with an evening in Greenville, SC thanks to an early morning flight. We celebrated Al's birthday and hung out with my folks for the evening. After the long day of travel we landed in Portland and drove a very impressive mini van (ask Marcus, he loved it) to Corvallis. Once Missy and Andy finished work we quickly started enjoying wine, beer and a super yummy pizza (we loved the pizza so much we ate it three times while we were there, once was for breakfast). Even though we were only there for a few days we packed in a lot of great stuff...thanks to our awesome tour guides. We spent the first day hanging around Corvallis (shopping) and then had a little house party with Andy and Missy's friends...great food and the cutest kids :). The next day we headed to Newport on the coast...we saw the sea loins, visited a few shops, toured the aquarium, visited Rogue brewery (Marcus' highlight) and walked on the beach...I don't know if it could have gotten any better! The Clam Chowder and Nut Brown Ale at Rogue was the best part if you ask me. On Monday, we headed to Portland to shop around town and hang out at Edgefields which was an amazing place...if I'd known about it sooner we might have spent the whole vacation there. It's a hostel style hotel (former sanitarium) with sweet little rooms, at least 10 bars on site, it's own brewery, winery and distillery and tons of gardens to explore. It was absolutely amazing (we'll be going back, no doubt). We loved hanging out with Missy and Andy and get a taste of their stomping grounds...

And, the best part, we can now announce that the first Meskil niece or nephew is in the making....congrats to Missy and Andy!!!