Christmas at Longwood

Lindsay: A word to the wise: Never go to Longwood Gardens in December without a winter jacket.  I loved this trip, but oh man, did I freeze.  Chris and I went to Longwood Gardens to check out their Christmas display.  We walked around in the brightly lit gardens for hours in the dark. The display was really cool because there were so many Christmas lights.  There is a very famous organ at Longwood Gardens, and the man who plays it ever year at Christmas time played and the audience sang Christmas carols.  I loved this so much.  We also saw an ice skating show which was kind of corny, but still fun to watch.

On the way home, Chris and I tried to stop for dinner at a Japanese restaurant, but everything on the menu looked absolutely disgusting so we left.  It was pretty funny.  I know, we're classy.  I remember stopping at Target because I wanted to get a frame for a present I made Christopher. It was a collage with a whole bunch of ticket stubs and maps from places we had been.  I can't tell you if we actually found something to eat on the way home, but I'm entirely sure that we did not starve.  This was a great trip and I hope we do it again.

Vermont trip

Smashing Looking Pumpkins

Lindsay:  To be honest, I don't remember too much about this one.  Christopher, Jenny, and I were digging the insides out of our pumpkins at the kitchen table at my house.  My sister and Christopher wound up chucking hunks of pumpkin at each other, and Christopher was yelled at by my mother for hitting the freshly painted wall with pumpkin that missed my sister.  We also baked the pumpkin seeds.  I'm sure Chris will have more to say about this one!

late season Baseball

phillies v mets

orioles v yankees

college day on the parkway

Museums

Restaurant Week: Fall '07

This was a really neat thing that Chris told me about.  We went to La Famiglia which was the only restaurant in participating in restaurant week that had an entree that could be made into a vegetarian dish.  Chris picked me up at my house (I was living in North Philly at the time) and we headed downtown to La Famiglia where we both had meals we really enjoyed.  Afterwards, we walked over to Penn's Landing and walked around for a little while before we went home.  It was really a beautiful night between the delicious dinner and weather down by the water.

161st and River Avenue never seemed so far away...

Lindsay: About a month into having mono, I somehow convinced my mother that I would be well enough to go to a Yankee game in mid-August.  I went on Ebay one evening and found 2 seats in the bleachers whose price couldn't be beat.  After some begging, my mother agreed to purchase the tickets for me on her account.  

Chris and I took the train to the city, and then hopped on the subway for the 130 block ride north to THE Stadium.  For some reason, I completely forgot that I would have to battle several flights of stairs before actually making it above ground.  It took me a long time to get up those stairs.  I did about five at a time and then stopped because I was still very dizzy and pretty sick.  Oops.

We got to the game, and it was the sunniest 3 hours of my entire life.  The sun set right in our faces from the hours of 4-7 as the Yankees played against the Detroit Tigers.  It wasn't the most exciting game, but the Yankees did win. 

The best part about this trip was a vendor working in the bleachers who I will never forget.  He was homosexual and had probably been smoking cigarettes since his fourth birthday.  In a voice that I can almost reproduce, he shouted "LEMON ICE!!!" throughout the bleachers.  The bleacher creatures thought this was hilarious, and a few people made fun of him.  Lemon Ice Man heard them and yelled at them...calling them FOOLS.  It was hilarious.

Afterward, we took the subway from the Bronx back to Midtown Manhattan.  We had some dinner and fooled around at the Virgin Records store.  I picked up a Green Day and a Lil' John and the East Side Boys album for dirt cheap, and Chris tried out a new look and even met Spongebob!

Lindsays great disease

Family time: LBI and "Meet the Parents"

Lindsay:  Despite being really sick for the majority of my family's vacation on Long Beach Island, Chris and I still managed to have a pretty good time.  I stayed at the beach for the whole week with my family and waited for Chris to come back on the weekend.  We spent the weekend in LBI and hung out with some of my other friends that weekend, too.  We had some fun going to The Showplace for ice cream.  As you can see, Chris was pretty excited about having both ice cream and a show.

 Everyone was really hungry, but we went to have ice cream before we went to dinner.  I think that this mix up in the schedule made Chris a little silly...

After going to dinner, my friends, Chris, and I walked around LBI for a while.  We had some margaritas mixed by my mother, the bartender.  We walked around outside on the beach and visited Miles, my stepfather, who was fishing outside.  People were setting off fireworks and having a good time.Chris and I stayed until Monday, and I went back to Philadelphia with him to meet his parents for the first time.  Chris had never actually told his parents that he had a girlfriend!  (I did find out more than a year later that his mother suspected he had a woman when she got an email from Chris where he talked about walking on the beach.)  Chris' parents were very nice.  They treated us to a dinner at the hotel they were staying at in Fort Washington, but I was afraid that I didn't make a very good impression on them since I was feeling so sick from having (what I later found out to be) mono.  I can't even imagine how I must have looked!

Chris:  I had never herad of LBI before this, but it was hard to pass up several weekends of partying on the beach.  The first weekend that I went down there, we hung around, and I got the worst sun burn of my life...For the next week at work, I had to wonder  around the office because it was uncomfortable to sit in a chair...The next weekend with all Lindsay's friends was lots of fun as well, with a lot less sunbathing and a lot more random family restaurants in Jersey.  This was also the onset period of Lidsay's mono however, so I don't know if she was having much fun.

Introducing Lindsay to my parents went very smoothly, especially because lindsay was in a daze most of the time.  I rarely talk to my parents, and the topic of Lindsay had not really came up, so she may have came off as sort of a surprise.  The rest of the time I spent with my parents was not as great after lindsay returned home.  We decided to take the walking tour of Valley forge on the hottest day of the year (would have been good any other time), and I cracked the axel on my parents buick driving down Washington Lane, so we spent most of one day sitting in a repair shop in Germantown  ( this was the second time in 2 trips that I had significantly damaged my parents car, and the trifecta was now in play)  

Fourth of July