11- 4th of July Weekend

Ahhhhhhh. 4th of July weekend. One of the best holidays of the year, because its always a long weekend, it always draws a lot of family to town, and its a very active fun holiday because many people stay at the house, so instead of being one day its a whole weekend of swimming, basketball, burgers, beers, cornhole (Google it if you don't know what it is by now...). Even the nights are fun cause we sit around outside or play cards in the kitchen.

Here's a wonderful collection of little cousins watching some movie. They're the next generation, and some of them, like Olivia watching the camera, are pretty cute and awesome.

I got to go on an adventure with the kiddies, and their moms (my cousins). We piled in some cars and headed to the Michigan Dunes/Tower Hill- a place I hadn't been in a few years. And who better to go to the beach with than a bunch of little cousins!

And they loved it. And I loved it. Aside from the fact that the sand was scalding on-fire hot, it was a lot of fun. Doing anything fun with kids is fun, and a place like the beach is of course a novelty that hasn't been experienced often so they're usually extra excited. Once they got all sun-tan lotioned up, we had great fun swimming, burying Emily in the sand, that sorta thing :)

We even hiked down the creek to the clay slides and covered ourselves in clay- Emily and Ian thought it was fun, Teddy wasn't digging it so much- he didn't like me smearing it on him :)

I also horsed around with Olivia, who was 2.5 then (now 3) tossing wet sand up on her legs- she would FREAK OUT yelling "I'm messy!! I'm messy!!!!" and then I'd splash the sand off and she'd be fine. That situation happened like ten times in a row. And she never stopped yelling yet never stopped being perfectly fine as soon as I splashed the sand off :)

On the ride home- the kids were pretty well spent. Especially Livy. Done. We had some food and drink on the way home to relax- we had sodas and sandwiches (they even made me one!) while at the beach, which was great because it reminded me of going to the beach as a kid (or a teenager I suppose).

Another great thing that happened that weekend was another friend wedding. I at least had a part in how they met- Jeff was my college roommate, Rachael was a friend from high school but really Chris's friend from high school who I got to know more after college while THEY were in college, and when they started visiting us in Chicago. And then one fall Rachael came to visit and we all went to a party at Matt Dave Gobel and Andy's apartment and Rachael met Jeff. I don't actually remember/know how got together at first but it was definitely by some goading of Jeff by Matt.

At any rate, they got married that weekend, in South Bend, at the Basilica. Fantastic. A great excuse for friends to come in town and hang out. Friends like Josh, Paul, Dave, Rob, Michelle, and David. Rob and Michelle in particular are gems that I don't get to see much anymore cause they're up in awesome Minnesota doing their thing with their two kids. Though I don't see Paul much more than them! We were all at Fiddler's Hearth this night.

The next morning. Did I mention I was in the wedding? Yeah :) My fifth wedding! Geez. The coolest part- Chris was in the wedding party too- so we got to dress up and look awesome together and hang out with the bridal party all day. It was uh, a bit warm for all that black though...

And I needed some sweet sunglasses to go with my outfit.

(I screencopied all these from the photographer but hey I'm not making money or reprinting them...) Here's us waiting for the big moment. I was a little nervous! First time I'd been first (or last, depending how you wanna look at it)- so I hadta wait for the signal from the wedding planner, and hadta GIVE her a signal also, when the bridesmaids were ready behind the door. Geez. The pressure. Second Basilica wedding I'd been in. The guy on my left, Dave, was my first Basilica wedding :D

Looks like someone else was feeling the pressure too a little bit ;) Waiting for the bride to come up the aisle...one of these groomsmen looks tanner than the others. Hmm...

All the rockstars on the altar during the big moment. Father Ken Molinaro, who used to be Jeff's (and Dave's and Matt's and Andy's and Scott's) principal in high school, said the wedding- he's now working at ND in some capacity...

Before you know it, the ceremony is already over and you're marching back out. Here I am making it happen down the aisle with Rachael's friend Megan, the Stowes in tow...

We of course got some more (lots of) pictures after the ceremony. Fun while it was inside... I liked the bridesmaids red accents (good work Rachael).

Here's a great tradition that we had just done for Martha's wedding- the photo on the steps. Again, it was warm. I was standing in the shade every second I had.

All the lady-friends. Katie Christen/Meko Beth Jenny and Ellen.

Us looking awesome. Or cheesy.

A photo in the shade. Thank God. We went around campus at ND and Saint Mary's taking pictures. Here's the grotto.

We had a sweet bus taking us around for the photos while we had some beverages to uh, stay cool on the bus. It was a little tight in there but fun being with some of my best friends, and looking sweet in our tuxes.

We even got to visit Keenan Hall, our old dorm, for some photos. It was under construction. We made it work :) I was holding a giant pine tree branch.

What there aren't pictures of is how hot my feet got in those shiny black shoes, standing in the July sun, taking pictures outside. WOW my feet were burning. Right about here, at Saint Mary's, is when I thought my feet were melting.

Reception time. The best time of the day of course (besides taking a shower and going to bed at the end of the day). They had us seated in groups of friends instead of at a head table, which is nice so bridal party peoples can sit with their significant others and see their friends- though for some reason I was sitting more so with Chris' friends :)

The table I wished I'd been sitting at, but I went and visited them. They were nose-goes-ing for something and the photographer thought it was hilarious, so he had them do it again for a picture...

At some point during the reception we wanted to take a cufflinks photo- Jeff got us all cufflinks of our favorite teams, so we gathered up in a circle with the photographer...and then Dave started doing inexplicable Dave stuff, like doing pushups. Huh?

Here we go. Bears, Cubs, Irish, Sox...

Putting faces to the wrists.

I figured what the heck, lets stick around and do a class ring photo too! Me Jeff Dave Chris and Gobel.

Us having fun during the reception what else can I say. Good picture.

While I could only collect three of us, I thought it was important to document another balding picture. I think the best one we got in college was like 6 or 7 of us. Dave, Me, and Paul- we needed Rob, Hotze, and Justin at the very least...

Right after we finished singing the Victory March at the end of the reception. The way wedding receptions SHOULD be.

The morning after. AFTER, that is, we went to Josh's parents' house and hung out in their garage for two hours after the reception playing cups, while I watched since I was driving my guests Paul and Jenny back to my house safe and sound afterwards :) We had a nice brunch at St. Mary's. Nice to be wearing t-shirts and shorts instead of a tux.

And just as soon as it started, the wedding weekend was over and the friends were gone and it was time to move on with life. Thankfully, I had things to look forward to, like seeing a great band live for the first time, because they hadn't been together in like 7 years. Tonic. I'd seen their lead singer, Emerson Hart, live many times as he toured for a solo album- I even got to see him in Atlanta at a small bar a couple times when I was living their briefly. And now they were playing in Chicago for FIVE BUCKS!!!

So I went with Gobel. It was great. They were great. They sounded great. They played a LONG time. They had a lot of fun. I was standing right in front. It was a street festival on the north side and lots of people didn't even seem to know them or care! Emerson in the middle.

Seriously they were great and having lots of fun. They would meet in the middle of the stage and rock for awhile. Like I said, it was a year of concerts!

10- Brookfield Zoo

Here's a fun event. My grandparents had their 55th(?) anniversary this summer, and my mom and almost all her siblings met up in Chicago, stayed at a hotel, and did some fun things- including renting a stretch limo to drive to some places, including downtown up Lake Shore Drive. I got to meet up with them all at Brookfield Zoo, where I haven't been since I was a kid. I took the train out there, walked like a mile from the train, and met them for a day at the zoo. Here are a few highlights.

Uh this was just a cool plant in the arboretum or something. Looked like a freaky animal.

Speaking of freaky animals. A urchin thing. It was huge.

Uncle KP standing next to a polar bear (picture). WOW that bear is huge. Though they cheated by making his feet like 6 inches off the ground. But he's still 10 feet tall. DAMN.

And we saw the real thing! And the bear was trying to jailbreak! He spent most of the time clawing at the edge of the glass and gnawing on this piece of metal that was framing the glass, like he thought he was gonna get out- it was crazy...

In between though I managed to catch him with his paws on the glass, with all these kids watching him. Pretty amazing.

Though it occurred to me that zoos and TV shows might be teaching kids that animals like this are big and cuddly, even though it would clearly eat any of those kids on the other side of the glass that think they can just stand there and watch him...

Here's a little action shot...ironically of when people were sitting and resting.

And figuring out what to do next.

This. Was. Gross. This zoo...person, was pulling a giant sheet of winter camel fur off the camel's neck helping it shed. Sick.

We went in the aviary, and there was the most amazing colored bird up there...

These are porcupines! They had what looked like blankets on that were all their huge quills...pretty amazing actually, I'd never seen such long and dense amounts of quills.

Uncle Father Bill posing next to a snow leopard. And showing a nice reflection in the glass.

YEAH. We went in this giant monkey place. It dropped waaaaaay down to this forest of fake trees with ropes strung between them for some fun swinging :) The wall and the end was covered with a crazy amount of hanging plants, though I don't know if they were real or not...

Here's the giant jungle of fake trees. Pretty cool actually.

The patterns of branches looked really cool.

Monkeys. Enjoying their fake trees.

That's all. A pretty fun day at the zoo with some family.

9- Stars Concert, Blackhawks Win!

Remember how I said 2010 was gonna be the year of concerts? Here's another. This one was cheap, and the best part is I got a ticket even though it was sold out- my friend Ryan had a ticket and asked me if I wanted to go like two days before. I was gonna go anyway with my friend David (DMF) since it was close by, and stand outside and see if we could find a ticket. So HE still did that, and got a ticket within 30 seconds! For $5 I think it was!

Anyway, it was the band Stars. They're pretty cool. I can't describe them really but they're electronic driven pop, like less electronicky than Postal Service but a bit like that at times...it was a small venue, and we were in the balcony with a good view.

What else was cool was that they played their soon-to-be released album straight through from start to finish, and then played some other favorites. They're Canadian. The girl isn't as hot as her voice sounds. And for some reason I had thought the lead singer guy was black. He was not.

Anyway, after that show we got an extra treat- the band left the stage, the club dropped the projector screen, and showed overtime of Game 6 of the Stanley Cup- so we got to see the Blackhawks win (the most confusing anticlimactic win I've ever seen) and since the club was close to my neighborhood (Wrigleyville) and I knew people would be in the streets, I walked up there and checked it out.

And people were in the streets. Cops blocking off the main stretch of bars near Wrigley, crowds in the streets- pretty tame since it was the Hawks and I think it was a Sunday night (or a weeknight?) but still cool to see the excited (and drunk) crowds.

Some people hoisting aluminum foill and cardboard Stanley Cups. What large idiot-looking guy did a triple take at one of the cups and said "that's not the...is that the-wait, is that...no, that can't be the real one...right?" Wow dude. Really? In the street with a bunch of drunk people?

There WERE a fair amount of people though. But many more when the Cubs clinched the division...partly because the stadium is RIGHT THERE...

Anyway- events like that make me wish I was a big Chicago sports fan so I could feel like I could join in, and be stoked. But the rest of the year I'm glad I don't waste too much of my life, and invest too much emotion, in all those teams. Notre Dame is enough emotional rollercoaster for me thank you. Someday- I will get my celebration.

8- Painting the Pool

I think it was the following weekend after Memorial Day that we took on a monumental task- repainting the pool. Its quite an undertaking, between draining the pool for days, drying it out, whitewashing...and then giving it my final custom touches :)

Down there you can see the old "S" that I painted years ago, I think in 2004 (but don't quote me on that). It was nice but too small, too reserved, not dramatic and bold enough.

The first task was re-whitewashing the pool. We used some old-old paint that took a drill attachment emergency-purchased at Lowe's (because the paint is two part epoxy and has a limited number of hours after you start mixing it before it starts setting up, permanently). We got the paint mixed fine and it went on well, though we used it all up and so some areas didn't get repainted if they didn't need it. The paint was going on thick, despite the reflecting heat from the sun in the pool, which felt like a giant solar collector.

I was hanging onto the side of the pool for hours on end, scooting around and edging it with a brush. Got my calves stretched out real good ;)

I was lucky that my dad offered to help. Since the paint was slowly setting up and it was taking me a long time to do all the edging...

After we'd just about melted in the gleaming white sun, it cooled down in the afternoon and the cousin kids came over and horsed around like it was a skate park. Glad they're not old enough to skateboard.

I used some sidewalk chalk to chalk out the outline of the new S...I wanted it to snake up the slope into the shallow end, to engage the whole pool rather than just be a design on the bottom of the deep end, and I thought the swirl in the shallow end would be entertaining for kids.

It was my mom's turn to pitch in after the white paint had dried, and help me with the S- I painted the edges of it, which I was insanely fastidious about painting in perfectly smooth curves (hard since the bottom of the pool wasn't necessarily smooth) and then she filled in the S. That paint was thick too though which made it tough, and epoxy paint can't exactly just be watered down.

Looking good, pretty cool to paint something on a large scale like this.

The S is done!

I also chalked out a big swirl in the shallow end, but I was running out of paint, and it was starting to drizzle a bit. So I ended it in a streaky tail (right above my mom's head) and then we started edging the steps with the remaining paint...

Here's what I WAS gonna paint. Yeah it would have been cool, but it would taken a lot longer to do. And like I said...paint...drizzle...oh and it was slowly getting dark.

Score!! We finished! Oh wait...what's that in the deep end? Is that... ah yes, a pool of water. It started raining. We tried tarping the S, which just started sticking to the slowly-curing paint, then we tried tarping the steps, and meanwhile the shallow end was filling with water. But it didn't seem to be doing anything to the paint?

Unfortunately, it DID something to the paint. See how the tail is all streaky and faded? Thats what the water did. After I headed back to Chicago, and the rain stopped, my mom painted the S again for me (making it wider in a couple places that I added chalk to because it wasn't quite right). I decided to leave the end of it streaky cause I thought it would look cool. Blue fading to...faded. She did a good job of fixing it.


Looks pretty badass, full of water.

My hope was always that planes could see it from the air- someday I need to fly over our house and look :)

The one unfortunate part of the whole thing is that, over the course of the summer apparently the old white paint wasn't loving life, and started peeling off in sheets. The paint was probably 10 years old or something at this point, but it was two-part epoxy sitting in separate cans. We though it'd be fine. It wasn't. So I think next summer we're gonna hafta drain it again and fix the white paint somehow. Awesome. I'm really stoked. Really.

7- Memorial Day Weekend- Weddings and Sports

Memorial Day Weekend- quite an action-packed time. But the weekend before, Martha and Chris got married- Martha, my roommate and forever-best-friend-Josh's little sister, two years younger than us. Who married a Keenan guy. Who's Italian. So he must be a pretty good guy :) He's from NJ, and they've been out in New York basically since they graduated. Josh and I went to visit a few years ago when it was really cold, and we're going again in March with his fianceeeeeee Andrea. I'm stoked. But anyway, Martha and Chris (who often gets called Roman, his last name) got married. I went. Tiffany didn't because she was in Chicago at another friend's wedding, which was actually in Brown County, Indiana, but she got a ride from Chicago down there. So we went to separate friend weddings the same weekend. Funny.

Here's the groomsmen, including my roommate.

The Basilica looking awesome, along with Uncle/Father Neil looking awesome while saying the wedding mass. I got there JUST in time for the wedding to start because there was construction in the parking lot and I had to go park somewhere else and hurry over!

A picture from the steps of the Dome- its a good wedding tradition to take a group photo on the steps. Everyone was assembling.

This is a great photo because I got a chance to get a picture with my professor from college- she taught me Abnormal Psych and...I think another class but I forget.

She was one of my favorite professors (I think a lot of people can say that), and she was new to ND when I had her. We ended up becoming friends, I asked her for a lot of advice here and there (especially because she was a clinical psychologist!) and the odd coincidence is her husband ended up being Josh (my roommate)'s mom's boss at ND. Then they both moved to Atlanta, so we don't see them much anymore. But she was invited to the wedding and they both came! Which is nice, because they don't have any family in town or anything.

On to actual Memorial Day weekend- my high school, Trinity, always has a varsity vs. alumni basketball game on Friday night and soccer game on Saturday morning- so we went to the basketball game to hang out, watch my cousin coach, and his brother play. We lazily sat in the bleachers. There were a lotta people I knew there from days gone by and it was kinda overwhelming seeing that many old faces...

Saturday morning soccer game. Sweet. As I'd been getting older and less and less people my age were showing up for the game, the recent graduates were hogging the play time on the alumni team every year. So I tried to weasel my way into playing keeper, since I have some experience doing that now. It worked. I played for a quarter of the game (thats me in the back- and the best part is, Nathan is in the shot too!)

And then I basically had the save of the game. The varsity's star player had a wide open breakaway. He thought he was faster that me. He ran around the side of my and I dove full-out and landed between him and the ball right as he was ready to shoot. My sister Jenny got a whole quick series of photos during the save. I made myself proud.

I'm about to belt the ball. It was a little hard to really kick it far cause the grass is always long on this field...

After the game- my dad is always the "lets get a group photo" kind of person- and sometimes he's right :) This was a good picture and its fun that now Nathan and I can play on the same team once a year. My cheeks always turn crimson when I'm hot. And its always hot on Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend.

That's all I got. The rest of the weekend we did what we always do- hung around with family, ate hamburgers off the grill, played basketball and cornhole, drank some cold beverages, went swimming (since we were in SB this year instead of Indianapolis as used to be the tradition...that I hope continues again...) Oops I just realized we definitely DIDN'T go swimming, because the pool was empty (or going to be) because of the next post coming up...