Girlfriends & Role models

What a fun weekend with great friends. We met at My Wine Cellar on Friday night, had a BBQ at Cindy & Jeff's to welcome Paige into the circle on Saturday and a fun visit with Julia on Sunday where Audrey totally stole the show with her fashion sense including a tiera and pink feathre boa. Check out the cute photo of my nieces Hailey & Nora.

Ben and I visited the house too. They have all of the windows, plumbing and HVAC ductwork complete. More milestones!

I also had a unique experience on Sunday with my Soroptimist friends and got to see Sandra Day O'Connor speak at the historical sociery in Tempe. She spoke about struggling to get work as a female lawyer, balancing work and family, and how she became our first woman Supreme Court Justice. What an amazing role model! Her family home was a sun-dried adobe brick house. A foundation was formed to raise $2 million to move the house, brick-by-brick, back to Tempe where the mud originally was taken from the Salt River Bed. The house will be located near the Arizona Historical Society Museum in Papago Park and will serve as the Sandra Day O'Connor Center for Civic Discourse.

Spring Flowers??

I spent last week at geek-fest, Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose. It was fun to show off my demos on USB, QVGA graphics, PIC18 MCUs, mTouch, and many other acronyms that only make sense to geeks like me.

A few funny recent Alexis anticdotes to share:

Ben got me a beautiful orchid plant for Valentine's Day. Usually I kill plants by not ever watering them. In my attempts to make sure it was watered enough, I managed to almost drown this poor thing. It is now in the plant ER as Ben's boss is trying to save it! He has special lights and grows organic veggies at work so we figured he was the expert needed. It did last 2 months which is a new plant record for me (aside from cactus plants which I seem to keep alive just fine)!

Cox Cable made me mad and I've cancelled all of our tv services. It's a long story but basically the moral of the story is that Cox sucks and their supposed DVR is in no way close to my beloved TiVO. After 3 "DVR" boxes have broken down on me in the 5 months we've been in the appt, I got mad and disconnected all of our service. So now, I'm relying on a basic antenna for tv service until the house is finished this fall. Minor shaking from my tv withdrawl symptoms but aside from that I'm doing ok :)

Check out Gus's new napping spot inside our entertainment center... quite the cat...

And the exciting news.... Our house is totally framed - It's so fun to walk through all the rooms and envision the future!

Our house has a foundation

It's really happening. We are building a house. Here are a few photos from this week.

Having the slab down makes it feel more real. They are going to have the frame and walls done next week.

Since the housing market is so slow right now they anticipate a fast build and are targeting a mid-September finish date!

Cookies, pizza, lasagna, wine, chocolate - oh my!

My vacation to Ohio was lots of fun. Happy hour with old friends from high school, college, cousins, & of course sisters. Great pizza, lots of beer! Great to catch up with old friends and with family. Had a special visit with my grandma who has just had a heart attack. The purpose for my visit was to attend a beautiful wedding in Canfield for Amy & Doug. Amy and I have been friends since 1st grade and I'm sooo happy for her and was honored to be part of her wedding party! The wedding was at the Canfield Methodist Church where I was baptized and where I went to pre-school and had tons of girl-scout meetings. The bridal party's dressing room was next to the old preschool and it seemed so much smaller than I remembered :) The reception had yummy chicken parm and 4 cookie tables. Apparently cookies tables are a Youngstown tradition that most of you have yet to experience (learn more). Everything was so much fun I forgot to take any photos!

It's been a busy few weeks at work trying to catch up from vacation and a fun weekend full of house decor decisions (see our design selections in the photo), yummy lasagna & conversation with my favorite women, a wineclub event featuring decadent wine and chocolate pairings, then Ben and I went to see Bill Cosby at the Chandler Center for the Arts (he was hillarious). No wonder I am tired!