Here's the big summer update! Lots of travel, lots of great time with buddies, and now I have only one week left before I begin my new job! Here's the list o' travel for this summer...
June Trip #1: 2 weeks spent up in New Hampshire visiting Mom and Dad...celebrated Mom's bday on Cape Cod with biking, sitting on the beach, and treating Mom to a massage that left her sitting in a happy daze for a few hours! Allison (sister) and I developed our HILARIOUS joke that no one seems to find funny...Hyannis, Massachussets became this: Gayle goes "HI!" and Allison goes "ANUS!" We've kept this up all summer.
June Trip #2: visiting Jill, Josh, and the cutest doggy in the whole wide world named "Shy" in West Palm Beach, Florida. I decided that you can make visiting Florida in the summer work really well if you go to a matinee during the afternoon and visit the beach around 6 pm at night! We all had a great time hanging out!
Jill and I on the beach...
Aren't Jill and Josh cute?!
July Trip #1: Ty and I traveled to Houston, Texas for my cousin Mindy's wedding! I also taught all of my relatives to play the game "Mafia" which turned out to be amazing! Imagine 20 relatives sitting in the room accusing one another of being in the mafia and having to vote on who to kill off...one of my uncles was red-faced and protesting while my mom was claiming to know things based on feeling "auras"...I was dying laughing the whole time.
July Trip #2: MOVING! In the middle of July, we moved up to Chapel Hill, North Carolina! We are now living in an apartment about 2 miles from UNC-Chapel Hill and about a 10-minute commute to my job in RTP! I don't have any pictures yet of the apartment...as I believe my digital camera might have been snagged during the flight home from NH. Once I have a camera, I'll put up some pictures! Ty and I are really enjoying a few big changes from our dungeon-fantastic apartment in Atlanta...the new place has big windows, level flooring, no rodent-inviting holes in the walls, and enough room to both have a couch and a kitchen table! These are new things for us and we're very excited. The old place in Atlanta was the bottom half of a carriage house..."quaint" but in need of some major TLC
July Trip #3: Off to Portland, Maine to attend Laura and Craig's wedding!! YAY!! It was amazing. I don't have any pictures to show yet, but once I do, I'll put them up! Craig is in the Navy, so they had a sword arch at the end of the ceremony. It was such a great time. Our travel to and from Portland was unfortunantely not as fun! I could write an entire long post about airline problems we had going to and from Portland...to put it as concisely as possible, we are going to avoid connecting flights like the plague! On our way back home, we ended up deciding to rent a car and DROVE from Philadelphia back to North Carolina after having a flight cancelled for the 4th time that weekend!
August Trip #1: Back down to Georgia for graduation!! I'm DONE! Whoohooo!!! My family came into town and partied it up all weekend. Saturday night we celebrated at my advisor's house, Sunday we had an all-day party up at my in-laws place on Lake Lanier. Here are a couple pics from the weekend...
My dad's cool action-shot of me walking off with the diploma...by the way, if you are going "Woooo...Gayle's hair is so long!" do not worry...happily for me and depressing for Ty, I just cut it all off and all is back to normal!
My advisor, Mike, and I:
Receiving the Willis sister tradition of "adulating worship" for whoever is the graduate...
And, my favorite sequence of pics from the weekend...Ty going down the water slide with the Hagler family dog, Deja...
And then recovery...
There are lots more pictures of family at the event...I think I have the whole batch from my dad and Ty's grandpa...if anyone is looking for photos, just let me know!
Now, Ty and I are enjoying sitting around in the apartment and having some down time! It won't last for long though...in the next month we are heading out for 3 more trips to Michigan (Galen's wedding), New Hampshire (Josh's wedding), and Washington, D.C. (Popick's wedding)! Ty is loving all the weddings since he gets to see me in a dress more often...
Hope all's well in your corner!
