Yet another fun filled weekend and yet another post without photos from our camera. I brought it with me, but we forgot to take photos (and I still haven't found my cable yet, anyways). So, what have we been up to? Well, the next few weeks are going to be very busy, so we decided to take a special trip this weekend to celebrate our anniversary a month early. The weekend of our anniversary we will be on a retreat with our church and the three weekends before that Susan will be in California and next weekend we have other plans. Yep - like I said, we'll be busy.

One of our favorite things to do is go to a nice place and simply enjoy each other's company (and eat food that we don't allow ourselves to eat at home). This weekend we stayed fairly close to home - only about 40 minutes away - in a town near White Plains, NY. Susan left home shortly after noon and checked into the hotel. When Ivan got off work, he took the train to White Plains and Susan met him at the station. White Plains is an area that we were considering moving to when we first learned about Ivan's new job, so we were looking forward to this as an opportunity to check out the area. Although we didn't get in any serious house hunting or neighborhood reconnaissance, Susan has determined - based solely on Friday evening traffic around the train station - that she hates everything about White Plains. That was easy - cross another city off our list! Truly, it is a nice area within an easy commute of Grand Central Station, but everything about the traffic was atrocious - badly marked lanes, unclear turning zones, improperly timed lights, too many cars, and too many one way streets, to name a few. Thankfully, our whole weekend did not revolve around bad traffic, so after collecting Ivan and going to Whole Foods to pick up some of our favorite snacks (although they didn't have Cheez-Its, which left Susan rather disappointed), we returned to our hotel for a relaxing evening.


The view from our balcony

We were pleased to learn that the hotel had a great fitness center and tennis courts, so on Saturday we made good use of those. Tennis is such a fun activity that leaves you worn out (if you try hard enough) but not bored to tears (like riding the stationary bike).

Speaking of tennis, Susan has been playing quite a bit of it lately. Last Wednesday she played with a sweet, elderly woman from church, Alma, who has played quite a bit of tennis in her day and had lessons from Van Der Meer University. She was able to share her wealth of knowledge to help Susan improve her game and they had a great time playing. On Thursday Susan played with another gal from church, Ayumi, and they had a great time. Hopefully a few tennis games a week will become a staple in Susan's schedule to help her jumpstart the need to get physically active again. Today Susan and Ayumi will be playing again and tomorrow she has a date with Alma, so things are looking good.

On another note, Susan has been feeling quite discouraged and confused about her PhD progress (or lack thereof). After much thought, she decided that making a daily schedule would help her squander less time and be more productive. Finally, yesterday she sat down and made that schedule. It actually did help her stay on task yesterday and was a big factor in why she actually did the dishes this morning (yeah - pretty sad when you have to schedule in time to do that, but some of us need more structure in our lives, what can I say?)

Anyways, that's probably way more information that most of you wanted to know, but we don't have much else to blog about, so there you go!

Labels: NY, Quick Trip, Tennis

Are you sensing a theme here? Well, we were *trying* to post an update at least every week - and Monday seemed to be the day to do it, but I missed yesterday, so you're stuck with a Tuesday update. I hope you don't mind. I was also hoping to post a photo of last week's trip to Connecticut, but I haven't been able to find my cable to hook up my camera to my computer (OK - I haven't looked very hard... yet). Alas, another week with no photo.

Our highlights of last week both happened on the weekend. First, on Saturday we visited with Susan's old time friend Liisa and her husband Josh. Susan and Liisa were in 9th grade together at VCS which Liisa's parents were on furlough. A few months ago Susan learned that Liisa was living in the NYC area, so we decided to visit her once we got settled in. We had a delightful time and ate fabulous food (homemade filafels - to die for!) and went for a walk to the river where we admired the NYC skyline (they live across the river in Jersey City).

Our second outing was lunch with the church secretary, Rayna, and her mother, Alma, and a friend, Katie. We had a delightful time getting to know these ladies and found much in common apart from our bond in Christ. Again, we enjoyed more home cooking (meat balls!) and great conversation. Susan found a fellow tennis lover in Alma and they have a play date for Wednesday - hopefully it won't rain.

Labels: NY, Tennis