Let the Holidays Begin!

With Halloween on Thursday it marks the beginning of the holiday season. As many people know I love the holidays! Some think I'm crazy as I started listening to Christmas music and my Christmas shopping in September but I just can't help getting excited for the holidays.

Today Arielle and I carved our pumpkins. We still have a few small details to touch up once we have candles in them but overall they are complete. For the last few years we have started carving more fun and challenging pumpkins and this year was no exception. We bought some nicer carving tools at my favorite food-ware store (Williams-Sonoma) this year and they actually made the process smoother and a little easier. We baked some pumpkin cookies and Arielle gave me a hard time for listening to Christmas music after all of my Halloween music stopped.

 

 

Dimitri (Owl, Moon, Leaves) and Arielle (Ariel and Flounder)

Halloween has a lot of fun memories for me as my dad "made" us walk block after block until people stopped answering their doors. When we were little we complained from time to time about walking but as we got older it was fun since we always had more candy than most kids.

Natalya as a clown and I was a cowboy.

As Halloween approaches I am pretty excited to be handing out candy to the neighborhood children. We weren't able to last year due to our class schedules. Happy Halloween and remember to hand out candy.

End of Summer - School Begins

Arielle and I flew back to Seattle at the beginning of August for her cousin, Jessica's wedding. The flights over were pretty uneventful and it was my first time really visiting Seattle for vacation and not work related. We rented a car and stayed with Arielle's aunt and uncle. The rental car was a Ford Fusion and was fun to drive compared to our old car. Seattle was a blast! We visited some of my WSU friends and had dinner with them at MOD pizza (my favorite), went to the first Starbucks and went through Pikes Place Market.

Arielle decorated cupcakes for the wedding and helped to make the s'mores party favors, I helped make some massive amounts of Asian coleslaw. The day of, we helped to set up all of the food and cupcakes. The wedding was really nice in an event center next to the beach. The weather was nice and sunny, which is a rarity for Seattle.

After Seattle we headed back with Arielle's family to Spokane. Arielle went and visited some old work friends, we spent time with both families and the Walkers threw us a party so that we could see the rest of the family and some other friends. I spent a good portion with Mo Money playing FIFA and visiting with his family. I stopped and started my bike before we headed back out to Ann Arbor. Overall it was a fun visit but it was only a few days.

The flight back was a mess with delayed airports, a crazy guy who kept turning off my air, and a huge thunderstorm in the mid-west. Once we landed a friend of Arielle's picked us up and drove us home. It was raining so hard during part of the drive that people were pulling off the freeway to wait for the rain to let up. I do love the mid-west storms!
As the summer came to an end we visited campus and figured out where our classes were going to be. I started my new program in Applied Economics and Arielle is just finishing her last semester. Arielle is still working in the lab finishing up the study. They have one baby still in the study.

Mid Summer

Like everywhere in the US it has been hot here lately but overall it is much cooler than last summer. The humidity can get to you from time to time but you get used to it especially with no AC. The thunderstorms here are really amazing and are larger than have ever seen anywhere else. When we get heat lightening sometimes it is so low that it makes the inside of our apartment flash which is really weird and unexpected.

We took a day trip to the Saugatuck Dunes which was a blast. The dunes aren’t really dunes like we are used to. It was mainly trees with sand and plants until we got near the beach where there was a lot of sand. To get to the lake we had to hike in. They had several different hikes to choose from, we chose the longest one because fewer people would choose to go that far to get to the beach. Total I think we hiked about 5-6 miles. We walked in Lake Michigan and watched some of the sailboats. We didn’t stay on the water very long since we ended up getting attacked by flying beetles. I killed a bunch of them and we ran away from some others but they just kept coming back at you.

Saugatuck and Lake Michigan

 

4^th of July is a lot bigger event in Ann Arbor than Spokane. Fireworks are allowed here but I think you have to purchase a license to do them. We ended up driving down to the same neighborhood that we went to last year. The locals firework display went on for 2 hours as all of the neighbors lit off the massive supply that everyone bought. Even if you are just driving around you will see fireworks going off all over the city. As many of you know mosquitos love Arielle and she got bit about 20 times. I also got bit quite a bit but only on the side where Arielle was sitting. After about twenty to thirty minutes we moved to the car to watch the rest of the fireworks.

As for an animal and plant update, we have a ton of deer and there are some fawns which are pretty cute. We have also discovered the wide variety of wasps, horse flies as long as your thumb, and crawdads. I remember I have googled if blue raspberry is a real thing and it says they aren’t. Well google lied, they have wild raspberries here which are blue and sweeter than a regular raspberry. Basically they taste like the blue raspberry flavor of candy. Arielle’s advisor Bev served them at a wedding shower for the PhD student (Do Kyeong) that Arielle works for. Bev as had a few parties for the kinesiology students and they always have really good food.

A mom deer and three fawns.

I have been working full time as usual and Arielle has been working quite a few hours in the Developmental Neuromotor Control lab. She has taken over visiting a lot of the babies for the smaller at home visits and is being trained to do the larger visits for when Do Kyeong leaves. A baby just recently graduated from the study so they are now down to 4 babies with the last one graduating in March. One of the other kinesiology PhD students is working fNIRS (functional near infrared spectroscopy) and I got to be a participant. They attached some head gear and then had me do basic movements such as grabbing toys and walking. Basically they are watching oxygen flow in the motor control portions of my brain. They are testing it on adults now and in the future will be using it on babies with disabilities.

Arielle’s cousin Jessica is getting married in August so we are going to Seattle for a few days and then we are heading over to Spokane for a few more days. It will be nice to get a small break from the usual day-to-day in Ann Arbor. I know Arielle will be glad to have some time off from work, I’ll get a few days but will be working most of the time.

Also we just bought some Donettes from the new Hostess. I am pretty excited since I love powdered Donettes. Natalya also mention that she saw "Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger" on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives and it is in Ann Arbor. We stopped in and had a burger. The food was good and the restaurant was really small. It was an experience. Well, that’s all for now.

Arielle at Blimpy Burger

 

The Summer Begins

    Arielle finished her classes at the beginning of May and we celebrated her birthday on May 2nd which is usually the start of our summer.

Arielle's 24th B-Day (and yes there are 24 candles)

    Michigan has amazing beauty in the spring and summer as the plants gain their leaves and flowers. There are more critters here than I have ever seen in Washington. So far we have seen a river rat, geese, ducks, three types of squirrels, chipmunks, bunnies, skunks, raccoons, herons, blue jays, cardinals, woodchucks, snakes, spiders, caterpillars, possums, fire flies, deer, turkey, and many other animals which I can't think of right now.

So this squirrel lives around our apartments and
gets really close since other neighbors feed him.
He almost ran inside the apartment when I took
this photo since I wanted a photo not taken
through the screen. I had to close the screen door
really quick.

This is one of the chipmunks that have a burrow
about five feet from our back door. We had one or
two last year and now they have four babies.
Interesting fact, they only live about 3 years.

    We think the variety of plants is due to the fact that it rains in Michigan a lot and it leads to good hiding places for animals large and small. We have been hiking and I have been biking which is where some of these pictures below are from.

A hiking trail that is about a 1/4 mile from our
apartment. I took this while on a bike ride.

    The weather here is also very different but you get used to it over time. Ann Arbor has similar temperatures to Spokane but we are delayed by about a month. For example, spring break here is still very cold compared to Spokane. Michigan also has high humidity (as I am writing it is 72% but it ranges between 58-81%) which makes it hot and sticky. The humidity makes no difference if you have AC but we don't so you get used to being sticky all day. Arielle is lucky and gets to go to work but we also go to Starbucks on really hot days to escape the heat and humidity. Also from April to October we have the tornado season. Last summer we didn't get any tornado alerts since we had a lack of rain and storms. So far we have had one tornado siren which was interesting but the wall clouds dissipated and no tornado touched down. Basically if you are outside you have to run to a building and if you are inside you head to the basements. This last storm missed us in Ann Arbor but I heard there was hail 1" in diameter. It rains a lot in Michigan and when it rains here it rains really hard with loud thunderstorms.

It is hard to tell but it is raining harder than it looks.

    As for the day-to-day Arielle has been working for the kinesiology lab and I have been working for Park and Restroom Structures as usual. Arielle really likes her research and enjoys helping with the babies. She has been working on collecting data (putting babies on treadmills) and analyzing the results. As many of you know Arielle loves to read and has already finished three books (Casual Vacancy, The Hobbit, an Sense and Sensibility). I am reading finance books and studying economics for enjoyment. So far we are off to a great summer and have made some fun plans for the remainder of the summer including a trip to Seattle for Arielle's cousin's wedding as well as some outdoor events here. Look for another post towards the end of the summer.

A hike at Nichols Arboretum

 



A hike at Olson Park

 



These are caterpillars were hatching in the webs.

2013 Detroit Auto Show

Giovanni & Dimitri with a Fiat 500

Arielle with a Maserati

So my friend invited us to attend the Detroit auto show and we got discount tickets from his friend that works at Ford. We had a lot of fun and saw a lot of new cars including some concept cars. I was most excited to the new Fiat 500s as well as some of the high end cars such as Bentley and my other favorite Porche.
 

Fiat offers my last name (i.e. White) as a color option

 

 

 

 

Bentley

Arielle and I also thought the show cars that were chopped so that you could see the insides were cool. Most of the cars were just average cars but there were a few concept cars. It was also interesting to see the auto companies, especially the high end ones had paid models to sell their cars.

Honda Concept Car

They even had the 2013 Honda CBR1000 which I was probably the only one at the show who was excited to see a motorcycle.

Honda CBR 1000R

December

Dimitri and I finished our first semester of grad school in December and were glad it was over. Since I only took three classes my finals weren't too bad (2 fifteen page papers, a take home exam, and a volunteer journal). Dimitri ended up having 5 finals in two weeks. His exams were evenly spaced so he had a little time to study for each exam, but not a lot. After Dimitri received his final grades he had to email them to the Master in Applied Economics program so they could decide if they wanted to admit him to the program. Usually the teachers only have 3 days to grade the final exams and post the final grades, but one of his teachers took 2 weeks so we didn't hear from the econ department for a while.

After school finished we flew back to Spokane to visit everyone for Christmas. We were home from the 22nd to the 3rd. Unfortunately on Christmas I came down with the stomach flu and ended up getting sick that night and the next day (our anniversary). On the 27th Dimitri ended up getting sick, but WAY worse than I did. We ended up having to go to the ER where they gave him 3 liters of fluid and Zofran to prevent him from throwing up. We left the ER at midnight and then had to drive up north to go to a 24 hr pharmacy to get his prescription, so we didn't get back to his parents house until 1 am. Getting sick definitely put a damper on our plans, Dimitri didn't feel very good for a few days after he got sick so we just relaxed.

On New Years day we decided to go snowshoeing, which we were planning on doing on our anniversary. We had a lot more fun than we thought we would. We hiked up a trail at Mt Spokane and were surprised at how many people we saw. We hiked uphill for 2 hours but it started to get foggy so we decided to head back to the car, which only took an hour. After our hike we planned on going to the Flying Goat or Perry's Pizza for dinner, but they were closed for the holiday so we settled on Olive Garden. I can't believe we've already been married for 4 years! It doesn't feel like that long!

Dimitri had asked his grandma for a tree skirt for our christmas tree as our gift. She did a great job! Dimitri put it under our tree when we got back to Ann Arbor to take some pictures before we took down the decorations.

The day after we got back I had a data collection and the family brought us poptarts with the Michigan logo! I brought a pack back for Dimitri.

A few days after we got back Dimitri had an email from the MAE program and he got in! He is officially a dual Master's student in Financial Engineering and Applied Economics. Our classes so far this semester have been good. We are both taking 4 classes and so far Dimitri's homework load is at a reasonable level unlike last semester.

Next weekend we are going to the Detroit Auto Show with our friend Giovanni.