Our First Thanksgiving Together!

We are proud to say that our first Thanksgiving together went wonderfully! No smoke detectors were set off and the food was all edible! The turkey was really the biggest stress and we worked together on it...

Rob cleaned the turkey (the gross part!) on Wednesday night before work.

I rubbed olive oil all over its skin before it went into the oven. It was very raw and cold and slimy and I touched it. I was quite proud.

And, Rob carved the turkey!

The other big stress was the gravy. Thanks to some help from mom and grandma Irene it turned out well!
We have only made a small dent in our leftovers. (The only exception being the pumpkin pie, which is gone...we had pie and coffee on the balcony each night this weekend!) Our turkey was 12.5 pounds. Rob stuffed it with his family's stuffing recipe and I made my family's Thanksgiving dressing in a 9x13 pan. We had mashed potatoes, a loaf of homemade bread, glazed carrots and baked apples as well. If anyone has free time this week and needs some more Thanksgiving, come visit! Tomorrow I am planning on making a pot pie with the leftover turkey and pie shells, but there will be leftovers of that too I am sure!

Speaking of potential visitors...we went on quite the adventure Friday morning for you! At some point late Thursday night, I decided that I wanted to buy an air mattress on sale at Kohls the next morning. Of course, my family was planning on going to Kohls in Lancaster Friday morning and I ended up homesick and the next thing I know it's 3:30 am and the alarm is going off. Rob and I (yes, both of us) pulled into the parking lot at Kohls at 4:10 AM! We got the last air mattress, stood in line for an hour and a half, purchased said mattress and were back in bed by 6:00. I thought it was a job well done. Rob admitted that he expected the car engine to still be warm when we got back into the car! To conclude this lovely story, I owe Rob my soul and we need visitors! I have really wanted to blow the air mattress up and sleep on it for the past few nights, but Rob keeps arguing that we have a bed. Now that he's back at work, I just might do it... :)

To wrap things up, Rob's test is this Friday! Someone from the FAA is coming out to the flight school to test him...it will be a full day event...so think smart thoughts for him on Friday! We will keep you all updated on how he does :) We both wish that we could have been with you all on Thanksgiving, but were thankful for each other (mush) and the chance to talk to so many of you. Next year, Thanksgiving can be in Phoenix...we have experience! And you can all fight over the air mattress! Love, Sarah and Rob

Our Apartment Tour!

Let me just start out by saying that the process of posting this video was ridiculously long by any standards. It's now 10:30 in the evening and we recorded the tour about 4:00. Since then, we have cleaned Thomas (our chunkster of a turkey...12.5 pounds for 2 people!), baked a pumpkin pie, Rob's long gone to work and I've been to a Thanksgiving Eve church service. In the background of it all, we were trying to load a video that was about 4 times as many MB (you can figure out what that means) as the blog program would allow. I've spent the past two hours trying to shrink the file size down and finally discovered the Windows Movie Maker program on my computer and put all the skills I used in some educational technology class at Miami to work. Long story short (I obviously rarely do this...sorry!), here is a tour of our apartment!



We hope that you all have a fabulous Thanksgiving tomorrow and wish we could be there or that you could be here! Check back, of course, for pictures and narration of our own Thanksgiving adventures! Love, Sarah and Rob

ps- one important thing to know about our apartment that didn't get taped in the video: the cat poster from Shelly and Adam is hanging in our laundry room, across from the washer and dryer until I have a classroom of my own that it can be transfered to :)

Exciting News All Around...

This will probably be fairly brief (okay, brief by my standards), as I just finished a glass of wine and a Rolly Pollies birthday training video. It seemed a fantastic combination before the sleepiness hit.

Rob and I have had a pretty exciting week. For starters, he passed his test on Monday afternoon! This test was a sort of double check with the school before they schedule his final test with the FAA. And...this afternoon his examiner from the FAA called and his final checkride/test is scheduled for December 5th...just 2 weeks from today! Rob's instructor at the school says the guy he's been assigned is fairly thorough (he tested another student at the school a few weeks ago and it took 8 hours to complete the test!) so he definitely has his work cut out for him in studying the next few weeks. It's definitely exciting to being so close to finished though!

Also today, I found out my student teaching assignment! I am teaching at Hamilton High School. I haven't spoken with my cooperating teacher yet, but I stalked her a baby bit on the school's website and I think she teaches Freshman Honors, Student Government and perhaps AP. Not certain on that last one. The school is about 6 miles down the road...a 10-15 minute drive with all the traffic lights. Rob and I drove over this evening and some of the students were starting to tailgate before a playoff football game! It looks like a pretty neat place. The school has about 3,500 students (and it's one of four public high schools in Chandler! This city is HUGE!) I am really excited to meet my teacher and get started!

A few other exciting notes...I baked bread this week. From scratch/with the whole yeast and rising process. This further illustrates my need for a full-time schedule. Our target.com order came in record time, but I blanked signing the UPS signature pad and used Kaiser...oops! We hung a few pictures on the wall, are getting ready to hang curtains and have a wonderfully cinnamon scented apartment thanks to a fabulous care package from mom :)

I am gearing up for 4 birthday parties this weekend and a trip to the grocery to prepare for our first Thanksgiving. Any tips are welcome...especially in the area of making gravy (this seems to be a McCandlish stress), pumpkin pie recipes from family and not google, thawing turkeys (I think about 2 days for 10 pounds??) and how to fly you all out here to do the cooking and shop with me on Friday...or turn Rob into someone craving the mall the day after Thanksgiving. Eek...we miss you!!

Also, this is remarkably not short. My apologies for the false advertising.

Happy Birthday Rob Weekend!!

Eek! It's been almost a week since I have posted...I can't believe how busy life has gotten out here! To start with, here are a few pictures from our adventures with Evan in Tucson last weekend...


We went hiking this weekend as well, as part of Rob's birthday celebration. We stayed closer to Phoenix this time and hiked part of South Mountain. We drove up to a lookout point where you could see the buildings of downtown Phoenix and the surrounding suburbs, then started hiking on a trail from there. At this point, I'm using the word trail rather loosely. To reach the actual dirt/dust trail of the mountain, we scampered down a lot of rocks. It was nothing to Rob, but to me--my idea of hiking before I came out here was strolling along the bridle trails I know like the back of my hand in the Metroparks--it was pretty intense. My legs (and butt!!) are still sore from all the climbing. I was drowning in the foam pit with all the kids at work this weekend (imagine the ball pit from Chuckie Cheese, but it's filled with foam squares instead--fantastic!) Here are a few pictures of the view and the sunset...

The pictures shrink a bit in the posting process, but you can sort of see downtown near the left side of the picture here.

The lil bits of yellow are actually street signs on the road that led up to the lookout point.

Saturday was Rob's actual birthday (25!!). He had a meeting at work about renting a plane his company just bought in the morning, so while he was gone, I decorated the apartment with crepe paper and made celebration pancakes. (They're just pancakes plus sprinkles in the batter, but I love them.) The pancakes were delicious (hooray for the griddle); the singing of happy birthday was horrendous (I had to sing solo! It's time to make friends!!)

We stopped at Starbucks before running a few errands to finish getting everything we need for the apartment (it's an ongoing/slow process it seems!) and made taco soup/chili for dinner. I think Rob had a great birthday :)

And speaking of birthdays...I officially started work this weekend at Rolly Pollies with a birthday party yesterday and today. I guess it is a short stint of easing me into it--next weekend I work 5 parties! I am really liking the job, which is good because it feels like it's been a while since I have looked forward to going to work. (A $20 tip for working an hour and a half party yesterday didn't hurt the job excitement!) The kids at parties spend an hour in the gym and a half hour in the party room (where they open presents and eat cake). Everything is really structured--it's all broken up into 15 minute increments, which makes the time fly by. (Plus, playing in the blow up moon bounce castle, riding on the zip line and bouncing on trampolines hardly seems like work!) Unfortunately, the bulk of my hours will be on the weekends, which will conflict some with Rob's schedule, but not to the point that we never get to see one another. And, I'm really liking having something for me and my own schedule to stick to.

We are hoping to record a video tour of our apartment at some point next weekend (or ideally at the latest, by Thanksgiving) so you all can get an idea of where we are living! Until then...love, Sarah and Rob

And ps-- thank you all for the comments! We are loving them :)

marriage is a $5 bottle of wine and velveeta macaroni on friday night...

This is the ridiculously intelligent conclusion Rob and I came to on Friday night, after returning from Home Depot to hang a shelf and finally set up lamps in our apartment. Also, we bought a vacuum cleaner on Friday. We live on the edge out here, obviously.

Okay, important things first, then on to our exciting weekend recap. I am an employed member of society again! In the past 4 days, I've managed to get hired at 2 different jobs! On Friday morning, I heard back from a tutoring service I'd applied to and was assigned my first student. I met with the owner at Starbucks on Sunday afternoon and we worked out all the details. Tomorrow evening is my first tutoring session with a 5th grade boy- so far I know that we are working on spelling, basic math and organizational skills. His teacher is already talking about holding him back, so I may have my work cut out for me. I'll be meeting with him 3 evenings each week and will hopefully pick up more students in time--the hourly pay works out to be higher than what I was making hourly at AHA! This afternoon, I also heard back from Rolly Pollies- the children's gym I was stalking for a while last week in hopes of a job. Luckily, they have sorted out their new management issues and I start tomorrow morning in training! I am helping teach an hour long class for kids that just started walking, followed by an hour long class for two-year olds. I also am working an open gym on Wednesday and then 3 birthday parties this weekend :)

Also, an update: later this week, Rob is retesting part of his stage check test that he took last week. There was some crazy failure in communication between the instructor that he flew with for the test and the chief flight instructor and it sounds like he is really looking forward to finishing this portion of the schooling out this week and getting it behind him.

Now, back to the weekend excitement. On Saturday, we drove down to Tucson to visit Evan, a friend from home who has been in Arizona for the past few months working at the Caterpillar test site (he is an engineer for the company). At one point on the drive down, the highway signs switched from miles to kilometers...apparently we were only 20 miles from the border! Evan took us to Mt. Lemon. We did a lot of driving up to the top and stopped at a few lookout points along the way. (Pictures to come as soon as we find Rob's camera!) It was beautiful...you would never think of ski slopes and pine trees in Arizona, but I promise you they were there. At the base of the mountain it was about 80 degrees and at the top about 50. (I think my blood is thinning already...I was cold!) It was about 10,000 feet elevation--and we passed a good number of people biking up along the road. Crazy!! We had dinner with Evan at an amazing pizza restaurant called Frog N Firkin on Arizona University's campus. It was in an area that reminded me a lot of Miami's uptown. Final conclusion to tie back to the title: even though we are cheap, we are still classier than we were in college. College is a box of wine; marriage is a bottle. :)

Pumpkin Cupcake Surprise!

First off, as promised, here is a picture of our kitchen on Friday, when the pod arrived and we attempted to put all the kitchen boxes in it...


I promise things are looking better now! The festive scarecrow dish towels and pumpkin soaps are out! We are also slowly decorating our fridge...send a wonderful picture or note and I bet it will be a fantastic new addition :)

Also, here is a picture of Rob and I on our balcony...relaxing with pizza and beer on Friday evening and taking a break from the unpacking madness. (Also note, it was warm enough to sit outside in the evening in a t-shirt less than a week ago. Now it's officially fall here and in the mid-70's during the day and the 50's at night. We still have the apartment windows open, but I have a sweatshirt on now!)

Now on to the real stories...yesterday morning Rob had a stage check (which basically means big test). It's another step toward him becoming an instructor at the flight school. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we'll find out until tomorrow whether he passed or not...and neither of us are very patient with waiting for the news! While Rob was taking his test, I baked pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting to surprise him with when he came home! It was quite the adventure...from attempting to find a Wal-Mart to pick up the ingredients while he was at work Monday night (turning into any parking lot means u-turns out here with the divided medians, which is nerve-wreckingly difficult, obviously) to figuring out the oven and the timer and all these new kitchen appliances! Luckily, everything came together and the cupcakes turned out wonderfully! (Here come more pictures because I'm so excited to have figured that feature out!)


Regarding the cupcakes...special thanks/shout out to Mom for the baking advice, Rob's mom for the Kitchen Aid, Shelly and PJ for the mixing bowls (not pictured, but quite necessary), Sara Vacha for the beautiful polka dotted paper baking cups...the list goes on and on. Thank you from us both! Love, Sarah and Rob

Everything I forgot before!!

I somehow failed to mention the major development in my life: my identity crisis is over. Between the social security office and the drivers license office (who knows what else to call that place, honestly), I think I spent a solid 3-4 hours sitting and waiting...and sitting and waiting. I did manage to change my name, take an acceptable license photo and get new plates. (Rob was on board for everything but the name change. And the acceptable photo part is up for debate-even he'll admit!) Arizona proved to be a ridiculous state in a number of ways: first, our licenses expire when we are 65. Second, they charge for license plates based on the value/year/other things Rob would know but he fell asleep on the couch of your car. Arizona thinks my beautiful lil Corolla that hauled us out here last week is terribly cheap, which is actually a good thing. They're in love with Rob's truck though. We won't even discuss how much his license plates cost. You'd cringe. I guarantee it. Finally, we discovered a mall. (Best day out here yet.) We went to the mall to check out Pottery Barn and a new hair salon with potential (Rob was elated about this all, believe me...just keep reading) and parked in the parking lot was a helicopter that a golf cart full of people drove up to and climbed into and then it took off. Which means one thing...people fly to the mall. And I thought the Nordstrom's was high class. Crazy state, no?

Settling In

As crazy as it seems sometimes, we've been out in Arizona for over a week now! Though you'd never guess it if you walked into our apartment. (Attempted to open the door into our apartment might actually be a better way of phrasing it.) The pod arrived yesterday in the late morning and made Halloween feel a bit like Christmas...for me at least...after quite a few trips unloading it up three flights of stairs, Rob might have had a different opinion! Everything was out of the pod and into our apartment in about an hour and a half. The unpacking and organizing stage will definitely take a bit longer. At one point, we filled our kitchen entirely with boxes of kitchen gifts from the wedding. In a few days, when I've unpacked/found the box with my camera cord in it, I'll post the pictures we took. At this point, the closet is organized, Rob is still in awe at my ability to fill it up and we've started in on the kitchen. There is still quite a bit to go until it's a real working kitchen! Last night we ordered pizza and ate it on the balcony and this evening we grilled hot dogs and picnic-ed outside (the apartment complex has gas grills and picnic areas throughout it). Tomorrow we are planning on swinging by a bagel shop before church and then hopefully unpacking enough to cook a real dinner. I can't wait to get out all these new kitchen appliances and use them! (Might need to read the direction manuals first...) Thank you again to everyone for all of the wonderful gifts and an amazing wedding. We love reliving it all and remembering who each gift came from as we unpack it and try to find a place for it! More to come...love, Sarah and Rob.