Five Months (In Brief)

As promised, here’s a brief recap of the last five months for those of you who a) don’t regularly talk to me on the phone b) aren’t friends with me on Facebook.

Shortly after my previous posting last January, Shelly and I flew up to Philadelphia for a long weekend, avoiding (by a scant two hours) an unusually severe North Carolinian snowstorm that dumped 8 or 9 inches around here and would have cancelled the entire trip. However, not having a very adept understanding of geothermatics (a word I just made up), on traveling 400 miles north, we were shocked to find Philadelphia in state of deep freeze, with temperatures hovering just slightly above 0 degrees Fahrenheit. (This would have caused me even more extreme discomfort had Shelly not at the last minute before leaving advised me to change out of the fleece I was wearing and into something more substantial.) Fortunately, we were able to cope, and were even joined the next day by none other than Jason and Erika, who also narrowly escaped the winter horror of the south. Here’re a few pictures:

About a month later, an extremely sad event took place. Apparently, even I am not immune to the ravages of time, the inevitability of aging, the irritation of increasing wrinkles. Pleas to not make a big deal out of this one fell on uniformly deaf ears, as pretty much every Facebook friend felt the need to acknowledge it, and my coworkers trashed my office with confetti, having lulled me into a false sense of security by not teasing me in advance about the coming event, which made me believe that they’d forgotten for once. No such luck.

I speak of course of my 30^th birthday. This picture says is all:

In April, the big news was Matt and Martha becoming new parents. Jason and Erika, Shelly and I all went to visit the weekend after, tracking down the Sacrintys, who had attempted to evade us by moving a half hour further west. After a long trip, during which poor Charlotte was forced to sit between Jason and I (that child hasn’t been the same since)…

…we finally managed to see little Andrew Sacrinty:

No, obviously that picture’s not from April, but it’s better than any of the ones that were.

Also in April, Shelly and I took an ill-fated trip to northern Virginia to attend former-roommate Nancy ’s nuptial ceremony! Here are some pictures of that:

"Why was it ill-fated?” you ask? Ask me sometime to tell you the story about how we nearly ran out of gas at 10 o’clock at night on a gravel road in the middle of the woods with no cell reception. Trust me, I’ll know what you’re talking about.

Then May came, and with it, a burning desire on Shelly’s part to buy a new car, despite the fact that her’s was a solid three years younger than mine already. Hey! Despite a sickening feeling in my stomach at taking on more debt, and a greater desire to drive a nail through my hand than to deal with car salesmen, we searched and haggled and finally settled on a Honda Accord, totally coincidentally the car listed as #1 on Shelly’s wish list. HEY! Anyway, here’s a picture of it:

Moving on to early June, the first weekend, we hosted Mom and Dad...

... and the second, Danielle, Christopher, Julia, and Shawn Thomas:

Finally, bringing us back to the Independence Day weekend, Shelly and I finally, after a nearly five hour delay, flew up to BWI, to be picked up by a bleary-eyed Dad at 1:30 in the morning! The weekend included a birthday party for Shelly, a visit with some old friends (or as I like to call that night, “Fun with Potato Guns and Bonfires”), and the usual 4^th of July Crab Feast, with the extended family in attendance at Danielle’s house! But hey, what am I thinking? You want to see pictures!

Alright, well, there you go! Since they say pictures are worth a thousand words, and, including this paragraph, I’ve typed 714 words and posted 17 pictures, that’s a 17,714-word update on my five months! Not bad, right? J OK, for realsies, I won’t take this long again.