9January2008
Posted by kristy under: Uncategorized
Well, it has been a LONG time since we have updated our blog…..we promise to get better 
Here is a recap of the last 3 months of the year….
We competed in a triathlon in Sept. It was a sprint so we did alright with the minimal amount of training. The 4 week training, with 10 days of that training in Mexico, proved to be enough 
We went to Burlington, Vermont for a weekend in October. It was the perfect time to hit the fall foliage! Matt researched some waterfalls in the Burlington area and we took time to check them all out and take pictures.
I started my new job! Assistant Swim coach at Brown University. It is quite a commute from Cambridge (1 hour, leaving at 4:45 for AM practice) but it is worth it. We’ll look into moving to Providence after the wedding
It was a WHITE Christmas in Boston! It snowed for about 4 days straight…
Matt’s mom came to visit for the holiday. It was nice to have the parents meet for the first time We spent Christmas Eve with the extended family (aunts, uncles, grandparents) and we spend Christmas day with my parents and my brother. It was a wonderful Christmas.
We brought Matt’s mom to Rhode Island for a weekend. We visited the Newport mansions. Newport is a great place to visit, hint hint We laid low for New Year’s. We had a great dinner and just hung out.
I’m heading out to Florida for Brown’s Christmas training trip and will be there for two weeks. Hopefully we’ll have some nice weather while we are down there. It has been SO cold here, I would love some warm weather!
WEDDING UPDATE: We found a great photographer! I purchased my dress…it suppose to be in by the end of Jan! We are now working on the DJ. We are finishing up the Save the Dates and hopefully we’ll get those sent out soon!
We’ll write again soon!
-Kristy
26September2007
Posted by matthieu under: Uncategorized
A couple of weeks ago we decided to try painting… so we went to an art and crafts store and bought a couple of painting sets and 2 canvases. We “warmed up” on tiny canvases that were in our painting kits, and after taking full awareness of our talents (that’s right!) we decided to go ahead and let our wild imagination express on the bigger canvases. And here is the fruit of a few hours of hard work (c.f. picture). The one on the right with the fishes is from Kristy, slightly inspired by “Modern Painting with Fishes” by Roy Lichtenstein sold for $2,144,000. The one on the left is from Matthieu who found its inspiration in “Geometric Shapes 3″ by Prof Dr Ing B Saler a modest $3000 painting 
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If you are already fond of our art works we’ll gladly give you a 90% rebate on those master pieces… that should still be enough to buy ourselves a nice house!
14September2007
Posted by matthieu under: Uncategorized
We went to Mexico for vacation August 11-19th. It was a relaxing and beautiful vacation that was well deserved
We flew from Boston to San Diego to meet Pascal on Friday night. Then, Saturday morning, we took the train to San Ysidro, crossed the border by foot, took a cab to Tijuana’s airport and grabbed a rental car. That was relatively painless and only 1h30 after leaving San Diego we were driving on the road of Baja California.
The first stop in our trip was Tecate. To be honest there was not much to see down there. It is a nice quiet town, people were friendly and the food was good, but we could have skipped that day in town. On Sunday morning we left Tecate to drive south through the Valle de Guadalupe. We enjoyed the scenery and made a side stop to one of the many wine exploitations for wine tasting. It was fun and relaxing after a few hours driving (although we were not too fond of wine itself). We stopped for lunch in Ensenanda and kept driving a little more to La Bufadora, a very touristy little place on the rocky pacific coast. There was fun shopping, small tables set up everywhere with lots of fun things to buy! We also saw a sea geyser made by ocean wave. We made our way back toward Ensenada, checked into a small hotel, then went to Punta Banda beach for a while. To finish out the night we went out to dinner for Pascal’s birthday and we ate a huge (and delicious) seafood platter!
Monday was a long driving day. We spent many hours in the car driving through amazing scenery in the central desert of Baja California. In the late afternoon we arrived at Bahia de Los Angeles and were more than happy to go for a swim in the nice water of the sea of Cortez. Tuesday was a relaxing day: snorkeling, reading (Harry Potter), laying, swimming and even a little bit of windsurf 
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On Wednesday morning we woke up very early to go fishing. It was a small boat with a local as the captain. We got on the boat around 6.30am and spent the whole morning at sea. We fished for a couple of hours in the islands of Bahia de Los Angeles, it was crazy, the fish there were very hungry!!! We did not have towait for fish to bite. After filling half of a cooler with fish we decided to stop fishing and went for a boat tour of the near by islands. Our captain brought us to a small island where a lot of sea lions were hanging out. On our way we saw a whale (from far) and TONS of dolphins! There were hundreds of them and they swam in front of the boat and jumped right next to us! On our way back we stopped for about 30 min to snorkel in some very clear water, full of colorful fish. After we got back to our place the afternoon was dedicated to laziness. We grilled our fresh fish for lunch and dinner 
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We left Bahia de Los Angeles early on Thursday morning. But before heading back to Ensenada we took a side trip to see some cave paintings. Literally a side trip… just a dirt path by the side of the main road. After an hour of driving in the dirt we almost turned around as there was no sign of paintings and no indication how far they were. But as we were getting ready to turn around we reached the site, a big cliff standing in the middle of thousands of cacti. After checking out the cave paintings and sweating in the desert sun, we drove back on the dirt path and finally on the paved road for the rest of the day. We arrived in touristy Ensenada in the late afternoon
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Friday was Kristy’s requested “shopping day” . We all took advantage of Ensenada’s shops to buy crafts, jewelery and souvenirs. On Saturday we started our journey back to the US. We spent some time body surfing in the ocean in the morning, ate good seafood in Puerto Nuevo and drove back to Tijuana where we dropped the car off in the afternoon. Then we grabbed a cab back to the border and crossed to “the other side”. We had to wait in line for a good 30-45 min at the Tijuana border. Last step was to go through the custom, Pascal and I went through easily, no questions asked. Then one of the officer asked a few questions to Kristy, who was taken on the spot:
- Officer: Where are you going?
- Kristy: mmm… I don’t know, San Diego?
- Officer: What did you bring?
- Kristy: Nothing… huh my stuff…
Haha….we spend our last afternoon on a beach in San Diego…body surfing and soaking up the sun!
7August2007
Posted by matthieu under: Wedding
We’ve been visiting a few places in the greater Boston area lately and we finely made a decision on where to do the wedding on August 23rd 2008. We’ll do it at the Wachusett Village Inn.
The wedding will be outside, under a huge tent and there is plenty of accommodations on site for everyone coming from out of state. It’s also a short 15 minutes from Kristy’s parents so the location is perfect. We’ll see you there in just a year from now
Now we only need to find a place in France… still looking.
2August2007
Posted by matthieu under: Birthday; Travels
Part 1 (July 1st): The birthday
On the evening of the 1st of July we went out at the John Harvard’s Brew House in Harvard square and got a few beers, buffalo wings and birthday nachos (no they were no candles on the nachos ) to celebrate Kristy’s 26th birthday.
Part 2 (July 14th): The present
Due to some scheduling constraint, we decided to spend Kristy’s birthday ‘weekend trip’ present during the weekend of July 14th. The location was a surprise, we drove south-east of Boston… and if you look at a map you probably know where we went cause there’s only one thing in that direction: Cape Cod . We rented a little studio apartment in Dennis Port from a coworker of mine, it was a very nice place.
We went out for some lobster and clams on Friday night, and we also got a very good homemade ice cream for dessert. On Saturday we spent our whole day at the beach near Orleans (not the French city that would be a bit far…). We mostly relaxed on the beach, I did a bit of surfing (waves were small and too many people around but still fun) and tried to make Kristy surf as well. She’s not ready to go to Hawaii yet, but we’ll go back in a more quiet place so she can practice with less people watching… that should relief some of the pressure .
We chilled a little on Sunday morning and then headed home early to try to avoid the horrible traffic jams from the Cape to Boston.
23July2007
Posted by kristy under: Camping; Travels
Still doing a bit of back tracking….July 6th-8th….we went camping in Newburyport, MA 
with Jill and Felix. We left on a Friday afternoon and spent the next day and a half in Newburyport. We had a great time cooking over the fire and playing cards! Saturday we drove into Newburyport and spent the day walking around the cute town and had lunch on the waterfront. We spent a bit of time in the afternoon at the beach and then went back to our campsite for a fun night of s’mores and texas hold ‘em.
The camping trip was part of our (Matt and I) wedding gift to Jill and Felix. We planned this all inclusive camping trip and prohibited Mattie (Jill’s dog) from coming with us I went camping with Jill and Mattie once before and it was not a very pleasant evening. He woke us up at 5am by running around in the tent and when Jill put him outside, he proceeded to back away from the tent as far as his leash would take him and run full force into the tent until we let him back in. Needless to say, I think Jill and Felix were able to relax and enjoy this camping trip a bit more than their last one
15July2007
Posted by kristy under: Travels
It has been a while since we have posted anything so I’m going to back track a bit
We went to Indiana the last weekend of June for a wedding. The head coach of BSC, the club team I use to coach for when I was still in Indiana, got married right in Bloomington. The wedding was great but it was not as great as getting back together with the girls! Meg drove over from West Virginia with Pat, Dorp and Lizzy drove down from Indy and Colleen and Cassie welcomed us all with open arms
We did the usual while we were there, went to Nick’s for a little sink the biz, walked to Blue Bird where none other than 17th floor happened to be playing, hit up Mad Mushroom for some cheese bread at 3:00am and of course went to Village Deli for breakfast/lunch. It was just like old times! I was happy that Matt came to experience some of what college life was like for me
26June2007
Posted by matthieu under: Misc
Finally we left Quincy . The place was nice but far from the city, and especially far from our both work places. Well far… not that much but the traffic was so bad that it was taking us forever to go anywhere. So 2 weeks ago we moved into our new apartment at 66 Homer Av in Cambridge. It’s a decent size two bedroom apartment on the 4th floor (or 3rd if you count like a French ) with hardwood floors and plenty of closet space to hide all our junk.
The move was painful, but we got everything done during the weekend of June 9th. Just enough time to lay a bed in the middle of the boxes and rest our sore bodies for the night before going back to work. We spent some times during the last 2 weeks to unpack everything and the apartment finally feels like a cozy home. Well we are still missing a few furnitures but we already spent way too much money at Ikea, so the rest will wait a little.
More photos…
We bought a TV furniture and a coffee table that were ridiculously cheap and very stylish and we would like to get a larger bed so I don’t elbow Kristy in the face during the night, and a nice couch so our butts won’t get sore from sitting on the futon’s metal frame… but all of that is just luxury and we can definitely live with sore butts and black eyes for a few more months 
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This weekend we are going to pick up a table and some chairs donated by the Martins and that is going very useful. As nice as the coffee table is, it is not the most comfortable to eat dinner.
18June2007
Posted by matthieu under: Camping; Travels
During the long memorial day weekend we loaded up the car and went camping for a few day in Newcomb NY, in the middle of the Adirondack Park. We left on Friday just a bit after lunch hoping to avoid traffic if any. The ride was ok except for minor slow downs near Worcester MA and Albany NY. We got there in the late afternoon and started putting up together the tent and the gazebo. Beside all the bugs, the campsite was very nice. It is situated on the banks of Lake Harris, and our site had direct access to a small private beach .
More photos…
Saturday May 26th
The next day we went for a hike in the morning, we climb up to the summit of nearby Mt Goodnow and enjoyed beautiful scenery from the top of the scarily “see-through” fire tower. Once again the only annoyance were bugs… lots of them!!! We got back to the car and drove back to the camp for a well deserved meal.
Read the rest of this entry »
20May2007
Posted by matthieu under: Wedding
We have picked a date! August 23, 2008
Hopefully this will be a good time for everyone to take a trip out to New England! We are also going to have a ceremony/reception in France on August 30, 2008. Hopefully a year and a half will give us enough time to save and plan for both weddings
So take out your plan books and pencil in those dates!
We went to Burlington, Vermont for a weekend in October. It was the perfect time to hit the fall foliage! Matt researched some waterfalls in the Burlington area and we took time to check them all out and take pictures.
