Ann vs. Jason

By Jason

I probably shouldn’t post this – my brother is already convinced that all we do at Google is eat all day.  On Thursday my team had an offsite at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which is a pretty cool old-timey amusement park.  We made a stop there a few months ago with Ryan and Jessi but everything was closed at the time.

In a sense it was bad timing, since I have been very busy at work lately and could have used the hours to do something productive…  on the other hand, it was probably good timing to get a break and have some fun with co-workers.

Here’s a video of our ride on the Giant Dipper, an old wooden roller coaster:

Link to video. Special thanks to Reid for recording and posting it.

We promise to write more about the baby shower soon. In the mean time, I’ve been uploading old papers and notes on my professional blog, so feel free to poke around the archives and see what I was thinking about as long as ten years ago. I’m considering putting up some interesting old emails here as well, like from my first days at college or the trip with Todd and Martin to Argentina.

By Jason

Ann and I hopped back home to Cleveland to spend an extra-long extended weekend visiting friends and family.  The visit was timed around Michelle and Andy’s wedding but we also managed to squeeze in party with friends, a baby shower, and a visit with Ann’s brother’s family.  Ann will write more about the latter a bit later.

The wedding as to take place in a chapel in Olmstead Falls, off in the strange and mysterious West Side.  We drove down for the rehearsal dinner.  The sign outside did not bode well:

The rehearsal went well, despite Ann volunteering me for additional duties like unfurling the runner down the aisle.  We had a nice dinner at a place called Quince.

Here we are posing happily before the desert, which was a chocolate gnocchi.  Yeah, it sounded interesting, but tasted a bit like Play-doh.

The next day we did a bunch of running around, including a trip to our favorite restaurant, Tommy’s on Coventry.  Ann is pretty happy after having her patented seitan reuban sandwich.

On Friday JJ threw us a party at her house, and it was great hanging out with friends.  We’re really going to miss throwing our annual Halloween and New Years Eve parties this year.

Here’s Ann and I the day of Michelle and Andy’s wedding.  Ann’s looking pretty good.  I’m looking stylish in my rented clothing.

Here’s Michelle with her mom and her nephew.  Someone’s hungry.

Chaplain Powers officiated the wedding.  He was pretty excited to see we’re having a kid – I guess that’s probably a good measure of success for all the weddings he does.

We did wedding photos around the creek and covered bridge in Olmstead Falls.

Ann used the local signage to send me a pretty clear message:

Ann will follow up with a report on the baby shower and lots more family photos.  I thought I would include at least family photo:

We flew back Tuesday so we could both be back to work the next day.  The flight back was more difficult for Ann than the flight there, but we did get to watch the sunset over the Pacific from 10,000 feet.

As always, you can see more photos in Flickr.

By: Ann

In the last couple of weeks we’ve been able to visit with a couple of friends, as some of you remember from our youtube video from previous posts. Kyle was in town for a conference and we were lucky enough to meet up with him one evening on Castro Street in Mountain View. We were able to dine at a Greek/Mediterranean restaurant called Cafe Baklava. Kyle tried lamb for the first time. (Yeah, Kyle!) Then Jason and I trolled for some taffy.

A few days later, Jason’s friend from high school Larry (and his friend from NY Corynne) were in town visiting his friend Anna in San Francisco (The City, according to the cool kids). We met up with Larry in San Fran at his friend’s place for a nice little picnic. It was about 20 degrees cooler in the city than in Mountain View, so we had to don sweaters and such. It was pretty cool meeting up with Larry and meeting Corynne. It’s nice putting a personality with all of the facebook pictures. It’s too bad that everyone lives so far away, our friends have such cool friends.

Thank you to all who have been sending baby gifts our way. Our guest bedroom is filling up. It’s about time Jason and I started organizing to get ready for the baby. Speaking of the baby, Jason found a really good deal on Amazon, which made us create an Amazon.com baby registry. Some of these items we don’t really expect people to buy…like the camera that Jason put on the registry. That’s why we had to make it resemble a baby registry just in case to get this amazing deal of receiving 6 months worth of free (7th generation) diapers if a certain amount is spent on the registry. We couldn’t pass it up.

Lastly, we still do not know who sent us the carseat base. Please let us know by sending us an email or calling us if you can. Unfortunately, when bigger items are shipped from Babies R Us, they are shipped in the original box, so there is no return address on them. If you have shipped or are planning on shipping us a larger item, please give us a heads up so we can look out for it. Thanks again, everyone.