A Note

As you can tell I finally got my butt in gear and published some (alright, quite a few) new posts. I think there are 4-5 of them so just keep scrowling down till you see something you recognize! I'll see lots of you soon for Els's wedding and Christmas!

Happy Thanksgiving

I cooked a WHOLE Thanksgiving Dinner this year... Here are some pics and I hope you all had wonderful Thanksgivings wherever you are! Miss you all!

Hakan's Shopping Visit

My good friend, Hakan, from grad school in TX, came for a weekend visit. We spent lots of time in the Mall of America but watched some movies and walked around one of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes. It was a wonderful weekend and I'll miss him!

Ready, Set, SHOP!!!

First Purchase

Round 1

Beverage Break

Inside Coasters

SNOW!!!! Well sort of...

OK, so as most of you know I've been dreaming not only of a white Christmas, but of white EVERYDAY. Sadly, I've been sorely disapointed up to this point but there was a hint of snow- here are the first pics (hopefully there are many more to come).

Alessia, the Italian Chef...

Alessia baked pasta for us on one of the cold November nights! I brought apple pie for dessert. We have to introduce the internationals to as many American foods as possible and what's more American than apple pie? Yummy!

Halloween Burgers

Instead of stuffing ourselves with candy on Halloween, we stuffed ourselves with great burgers from Ike's in downtown Minneapolis!

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!

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.

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?

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: