Monday, October 27, 2008

Pumpkins!

The girls had a pumpkin carving/scary move watching/ pizza eating party on Saturday night. It was a fantastic- and cheap- Saturday! Here are some pics... lots of pics...
Cheers- pumpkins look better with drinks!

The preparation:

Roasting the seeds is one of the best parts!

Loreto's Pumpkin:
Isabel's pumpkin:

Alessia's pumpkin:

My pumpkin:


Nancy's pumpkin:
Group pic:


Scary!!!

I hope you all enjoy Halloween your own way! As most people know, I hate to dress up but pumpkins are a totally different story! Happy Halloween!

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Happy Birthday to Me!

I wanted to thank you all for all of the b-day thoughts, calls, cards and gifts- it had been a hard week and it was so wonderful to feel loved. Here are some pics of birthday cake at the lab, all of the cards and flowers that came to me at work- everyone was jealous! Plus, Alessia took me out for dinner at Outback and to see "The Duchess" Friday night.



Saturday, October 18, 2008

Bowling and Breakfast

As several of you already know, the Lange Lab has a bowling team for the annual Fisher Sci. sponsored bowling tournament on October 30. Now "some people" in the lab consider this a very competitive event and felt that we needed practice/try-outs so we went bowling Monday night. Here are some pics!
Group Pic:

Christy's Ridiculously Large Soda: Cheerleading Nancy and Todd
Nancy in Action
Nate in Action- no face shots of Nate- even in the goup pic- take a look :)
This past weekend Nancy and I took Alessia out for an "American Breakfast". Alessia is a visiting PhD student from Italy and she arrived in Mpls just about a month after I did and we have become good friends. She gets a huge kick out of things we think are "normal" and it makes us all stop and think about how good things are. Here is a pick of our breakfast (IHOP of course). On the way home we saw a pumpkin stand- now, Alessia LOVES decorations and is especially excited for Halloween as they don't celebrate it in Italy. Given this, we stopped at the stand so she could see all the kinds of pumpkins, Indian corn and scarecrows. Have I mentioned that I LOVE the fall?





Thursday, October 2, 2008

The Bog Blog

A friend, Alessia, and I went to visit the bog in the middle of Minneapolis! It is called the Quaking Bog and it was fantastic! We got a bit lost in the park and wondered around for a bit but it was totally worth it.
Here's Alessia and me:

And here are some pics of lots of the fungi and cat tails in the bog:





I also got some great pics of the leaves changing colors: