Stratton Family Blog

Doubleplus good

2009-07-11T11:50:00.003-05:00

As you may or may not know, Carrie and I have been struggling with infertility issues for a while now. Over the past 18 plus months we’ve played games with having “relations” on a specific schedule (whether we wanted to or not), injected more needles than Sammy Sosa, and moved genetic material around in all kinds of random ways.

And it’s finally paid off.

Yes. For reals.

We are going to be parents.

But wait, there’s more…

We are having TWINS.

As I told my friend Marcelo last night – it’s not so much a matter of “slipping one past the goalie” as much as “body checking the goalie and whipping two pucks into the net at once”. But it worked.

The Stratton twins will be joining this world circa January 2010.

As you might expect, we are super excited about this. It’s quite a shock to have two for the price of one, although really it’s like double the cost of what we had planned. In the same conversation referenced above, Marcelo told me that we should have our own reality show. I said “Yes. It will be called Matt and Carrie Plus Two Minus Money.” We’re doing research on all things we DO need two of…and what we don’t. Fortunately, Carrie’s cousin has twins, so we’re getting a lot of great knowledge from her. And the internets…bless the internets…

But yeah. We’re jumping ahead and having two at once. They are fraternal, but we won’t know their gender for a few months. But feel free to start the pool – I just ask that you give the house a 5% cut on all bets. We have names in mind as well, but only for a boy and a girl – if we have double-up gender, we need to do more thinking. And I’m not telling you what the names are yet. You can try to guess if you want though.

We want to thank all of you for your love and support through all of this. It’s been a rough road, and our friends and family are all too aware of this. But now, the good news is, you can stop hearing us talk endlessly about infertility.

Now you get to hear us talk endlessly about multiples.

Happy Valentimes!

2009-02-15T10:33:00.005-06:00

Obviously, it's been a long time since we've posted here. Matt tends to post more frequently in his personal blog, and Carrie...well, Carrie keeps threatening to post, but she never does. You should all send her lots of emails reminding her to post here.

Last night was our big Valentine's Day dinner. Since we're trying to save money (like the rest of the country), we decided to stay in this year.

The day began when Carrie woke Matt up with breakfast. She'd made fresh-squeezed orange juice, "real" bacon*, and pancakes shaped like hearts. It was delicous. Even Scout got a pancake. He enjoyed it.

For dinner, Matt made filet mignon in red wine sauce, along with asparagus risotto. We had shrimp cocktail for an appetizer. The shrimp was from Jewel, and while it was nice and big and looked good...in reality it was kind of stringy.

Our dinner...yum!

After we finished our dinner, we took a quick break to "digest" and watch The Soup. This was followed up with the preparation of our dessert, which was white chocolate mousse with strawberries. We made a tiny mistake when cutting the recipe back, so there was too much milk...making the mousse a little runny. And next time, we'd use WAY more strawberries. But it was delicious anyway.

Dessert...yum yum.

We completed the night by watching Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist, which we'd obtained from Redbox. Overall, it was a fun and chill Valentine's Day.

* - the only time we eat "real" bacon, as opposed to turkey bacon, is on special occassions, or when we go out for breakfast. And since we go out for breakfast about once a week, it's not really that big of a sacrifice.

We're afraid of dolphins too, Tyra!

2008-10-19T10:18:00.001-05:00

Carrie and Matt with Joel McHale
Originally uploaded by Matt Stratton.

Last night Carrie and I drove over an hour to Waukegan to see Joel McHale (of The Soup fame) perform stand-up.

It was well worth it.

First, however, we had dinner at the Bavarian Lodge, which is a restaurant pretty close to our new house. I had a pumpkin ale brewed in Holland, Michigan as well as wiener schnitzel, and Carrie had pork loin. It was okay.

On the hour-long drive to Waukegan, we discussed what we would name our children if we had twins. No, Carrie is not pregnant, but this is what we do to entertain ourselves on long car rides when there's nothing good on Lucy.

Our seats for the show were decent - towards the back (but it was a small theater) and right on the aisle. This would prove important later.

I misremember the guy who opened for Joel (Chris something) but apparently he does the voice of a cow named Otis on a Nickelodeon show and he is also on Attack of the Show on G4. He was pretty hilarious.

Then Joel took the stage. The first words out of his mouth? "OPRAH'S VAH-JAY-JAY!"

He started off a little shaky, for about two minutes, but he really was funny. He was his best when he was in his element of skewering reality TV, but even his bits about his kids were funny. He finished up with his old standby, which was to verbally destroy Tyra Banks. I loved every minute of it.

After the show was over, Carrie and I were among the first people out (due to our seats), and we practically walked into the woman saying "the line for Joel's autograph starts here!" So we were first in line.

Unfortunately, we didn't have any cash on us, so we didn't get to buy a t-shirt to have it autographed (I would have loved a Spaghetti Cat shirt), but Joel was still magnanimous. He is a lot taller in person.

Seacrest out!

Our First Place

2008-08-28T08:53:00.000-05:00

Today at 2:30 PM we will be closing on our new house. We may not have been chosen to be on TV, but there was plenty of drama anyway.

Our story really began in November of 2007, when we first started looking for a house. And by "looking for a house" I mean "Carrie started looking online and we drove past some places." Carrie found one house in Glen Ellyn (near COD) that she thought was perfect. She drove past it and her parents even looked in the windows. Of course, when we went to look at it with the selling agent, we discovered that not only was the inside kind of cruddy, but it lacked a basement. Thus we learned our first lesson of house shopping - despite how stupid it would seem, some people actually do build houses without basements.

Flash-forward to March of this year. This is when we started looking in earnest. First we thought we'd be smart and just go look by ourselves. We spent on Saturday going to see houses that we found online and by calling the selling agents. Of course, every agent we saw wanted to be our realtor. We saw a bunch of houses that day, but only one of them did we like. It was in Winfield, and it came to be known as The Blue House.

We got a referral to a realtor through Homegain, and in April went out for a day of "shock and awe" house hunting. I think we saw 10-15 houses in one day. We saw everything from huge homes in Glen Ellyn to run-down foreclosures that would take $70,000 to fix up. We came away from that trip being pretty sure that we'd narrowed things down to three houses - the aforementioned Blue House, a house in Wheaton that had some funky issues with bedroom placement, and a giant house in Glen Ellyn with a bedroom pre-decorated for a young cubs fan. Actually, now that I look through my emails, it seems like in that same day we also saw the infamous Witt House, which was in Lombard. It was a house we really loved, however, it received an offer the day after we saw it. For quite some time, the Witt House was the standard by which we measured all houses, and we were very depressed that we didn't have a chance to try to get it.

While this was all going on, we were interviewed for the show My First Place on HGTV. As it happens, we didn't get chosen to be on the show. in retrospect, we think that they missed a great opportunity, because as you will read, once the offer process started, the drama started coming out every which way.

We spent most of the summer looking at houses and wavering on what we wanted, where we wanted to live, and what were acceptable compromises. One of the houses we saw in the original "shock and awe" day was a pretty nice house in Winfield that we called the East House. It was really spacious, and had a good yard that backed up to a forest preserve. However, the location was a little further out than we wanted to be. That being said, I always thought this would be the house we would end up with. Eventually, we narrowed it down between this house and a house in Lombard called the Pinebrook House. Carrie had fallen in love with that house, but we really weren't sure, as it only had 1.5 bathrooms and a small kitchen.

We were standing in the dining room of the Pinebrook House with our realtor trying to decide what to do, when she said "Hey, remind me...why haven't we been looking in Lisle?" We told her that it seemed too expensive for us. She replied that there were several houses she had listings for in Lisle that were in our price range that she thought we would like. To humor her (and put off making a decision) we agreed to go look at them on Monday.

We looked at three houses in Lisle that Monday, all in the same subdivision. The first two we saw weren't for us. The third house.

The third house will be ours in about six hours.

As soon as we saw it, we knew it was our house. There wasn't a single thing that we considered a "compromise". It was completely move-in ready with all sorts of brand new appliances, new woodwork, etc. We walked out of the house and under my breath (the sellers were in the house) I told our realtor that we were ready to make an offer. So a few minutes later, at Chinn's 34th Street Fishery, we drafted an offer.

Over the next few days, there was quite a bit of drama. The sellers would not reply to our offer until we gave them a copy of our pre-approval letter from our lender. So I faxed the letter to our realtor, and this kicked off all kinds of crazy back-and-forth between our realtor, our loan officer, and the seller. We were arguing with our realtor as well, who kept insisting that our loan officer was trying to rip us off, and that we should go with someone she suggested at Chase. We felt we were in the right. However, once we did talk to Chase, we discovered that our original loan officer WAS a bit of a shyster and that he was charging us thousands of dollars in closing costs that Chase would not charge us. So we switched to Chase.

While this was all going on, we were going back and forth with our offer. We sent our final counter on Friday afternoon, and then never heard back again. Luckily, on Sunday afternoon when we were on our way home from the Ren Faire, we got a call from our realtor saying that our offer had been accepted (actually, she called with a final counter-counter-counter from the seller, but the final counter was actually exactly what we were trying to get to, so it was a no-brainer to accept).

For a while, things were going well. We signed the contract and put up our earnest money and starting going through the process with Chase. Our original closing date on the contract was Sept 25, since everything we'd heard led us to believe that it would take a least 6 weeks for our loan to go through all the process. One of the items in the contract was for the seller to pay all closing costs "up to $8,000" as that was the closing cost estimate from our first loan officer.

Then things hit their first snag. When our lender required a modification to the wording of the contract in order to do our loan, it was sent to the sellers to initial the change. We were then sent the same document to initial - and I noticed that the seller had crossed out part of the change - which would, in essence, mean that they would be paying about $3,000 less of the closing costs. This resulted in a spirited back-and-forth with the lawyers. Then it came out that if we would be agreeable to close in early September, the sellers would give in on the extra closing cost credit. Now, remember - the only reason we had put in the late Sept close was due to the bank. And the bank was now telling us that we could easily close in early Sept. So we agreed, and ended up getting our credit as well as an earlier closing. There was also some fun drama when our house inspection showed high radon and the sellers responded that they thought that was baloney, but they would pay us $1,500 to remediate it anyway.

It gets better.

Last Tuesday, I got a phone call from our realtor's assistant. She was calling to inform me that everything was good to go for our August 29th closing.

Yes, August 29th. Of course, nobody told us about this. A few minutes later, my realtor called me and explained that the sellers really wanted to close in August, not September, and were willing to offer us $1,000 cash to do so. Again, our reply was sure, as long as the bank can do it.

The bank could do it. Carrie and I made plans to take off work on the 29th. We were all set.

Then, on Friday, our laywer tells us that the seller's attorney will be out of town on the 29th...so they want to close on the 28th now. The whole thing was getting ridiculous (especially since every time these things happened, our laywer's bill goes up, so that $1,000 starts to dwindle away). Even though we were upset about all of this, it ended up working out. So we are now closing today.

When I was thinking about what to put in this blog post on the train this morning, I figured it would mostly be about the house itself, with pictures and descriptions. I think that will be a separate post which I'll either do later this morning or maybe this weekend (as soon as we are done with closing we are heading Up North for the whole holiday weekend).

I'm pretty sure that after all this, we're not going to buy a house again ever. We'll live in this house until we die :) Or move to Florida.

Fun Saturday

2008-05-31T23:02:00.001-05:00

Yellow Blues
Originally uploaded by Matt Stratton.

Today Carrie and I rode our bikes up to the Botanic Gardens. Well, we didn't ride all the way; we drove about halfway, parked the car, and rode the rest.

We wandered around and looked at flowers and I took a bunch of pictures. We had an overpriced lunch and enjoyed the beautiful day. Rode home, and took Scout to the dog park. Cooked out hamburgers and attempted to recreate the Glenn's Diner burger.

All in all, a great Saturday. Tomorrow I'm going to the Cubs game with my father-in-law, and that's about it for the rest of the weekend.

Happy Anniversary to Us!

2008-05-27T13:53:00.001-05:00

Carriage ride
Originally uploaded by Matt Stratton.

Yesterday was our first wedding anniversary. Everything turned out pretty much super awesome, although it was a bit of a hectic (but fun) weekend.

Saturday morning, I woke up super early and headed out to Hillside to play nine holes with a couple co-workers. Considering I haven't picked up a golf club (other than at the Bunny Hutch) in about 15 years, I didn't embarrass myself TOO badly. It was a good time, and I'd really like to play some more this summer.

Saturday night Carrie and I rented Juno from On Demand. I barely made it through (because I was tired, not any reflection upon the film). I definitely feel that it did not live up to the hype, but it was a sweet little movie and very funny. I think that Diablo Cody definitely bit off more characters than she could handle, and a lot got lost. But overall, I would give it three stars.

Sunday morning, we woke up super early to do Bike the Drive. Afterward, we came home, got cleaned up, and went to church. After a brief disco nap, we headed out to the burbs for my sister's graduation party, which was a lot of fun.

Monday was our actual anniversary. We slept in (yay!) and then went out for lunch on Southport. Spent the afternoon at the Lincoln Park Zoo and then went to check into the Knickerbocker hotel for the night. We got all fancy-pants dressed up, and had a cocktail at the Signature Lounge. Dinner was at NoMI, which was so very good, although also so very expensive. We exchanged gifts (Carrie got me a Speedlite and I got her diamond earrings) and capped off the evening with a carriage ride.

This morning we had breakfast at Meli and then headed to work. All in all, a great weekend, and I couldn't ask for a better way to celebrate our one year mark.

Bark in the Park

2008-05-03T14:36:00.002-05:00

Scout and Daisy
Originally uploaded by Matt Stratton.

We had a great time at Bark in the Park today. Sadly, it looked like rain in the end, so after the 5K walk, we collected our goodie bags and headed home.

Look at this picture - can you tell which one is Scout? Heh.

The rest of the pictures can be found here.

House Hunting Continues...

2008-04-14T09:07:00.000-05:00

House hunting continues...On Saturday we looked at eight houses in the Winfield, Wheaton, and Glen Ellyn on Saturday. Of the 8, there were only two that we are putting "on the list" for consideration. Our main contenders right now are the Blue House (Winfield), the Marion House (Wheaton), and the Park House (Glen Ellyn). With the exception of the Blue House, they all have drawbacks - the Marion House has two bedrooms on the second floor, but all the bathrooms are on the first floor (so the kids would have to go downstairs in the middle of the night ot use the bathroom). The Park House is amazing, but it is on a busy street and across the street from a school. The Park House also has the extra appeal that one of the bedrooms was already decorated for a young Cubs fan.

Of course, we are still all over the place with the searching. While I said above that we have three "main contenders", that's still kind of inaccurate - there are a lot of houses on our "list" with our realtor that we like. We haven't yet found THE house yet (although the Blue House comes closest), and we're still really torn on location.

Some other exciting news - on Thursday, Carrie and I are being interviewed for consideration on HGTV's show My First Place. Basically, if they pick us, what happens is they follow us around with cameras while we look at houses and as we go through the buying process. So we're excited about it. So think positive thoughts for us on Thursday evening. And if you guys get HGTV, check out My First Place.

What's new?

2008-04-07T08:12:00.000-05:00

Hey Hey
Baseball season is in full swing, and the Cubs finished off their first homestand 3-3. Not too shabby (although they were off to a rough start). I didn't get to Opening Day, but I did go to the second game. It was great to be at Wrigley, but the Cubs put on a shoddy performance. I'm looking forward to going to a lot more games this year (a friend of mine and I bought into someone's season tickets this year, so I've got tickets to 18 games. Whoohoo!). And it's just nice to see a player the Cubs bought living up to the hype. Yay Fukudome!

House Hunters
Our home search for the Suburban Exodus 2008 kicked off "for real" this weekend (we've been looking online for a few months already) with Carrie and myself going to look at some houses on Sunday. We saw a nice little house in Glen Ellyn that we really liked, but we'd probably outgrow it in about five years. We did find a great place in Winfield that looks promising. We're still a couple months away from "pulling the trigger", but it was good to get out and make it real.

So Say We All
FINALLY, Battlestar Galactica is back on. I found Friday's episode a little anti-climactic, probably because I was SO jazzed up for it, and then...nothing much happened. I mean, nothing much that we didn't already know - a lot "happened". I'm hoping beyond hope that they do something interesting with Starbuck rather than just play out a lot of "is she a Cylon? Who knows?" stuff. Mostly, though, it just seemed like it was a lot of setup for the season, which, given the past season premieres, was a little slower than I'd wanted. But still it was frakin' awesome.

Other than that, not a lot to report. So happy that the weather is finally turning around; going to be time to start biking again I think.

Vacation pictures posted!

2008-03-11T23:01:00.001-05:00

Marmaduke!
Originally uploaded by Matt Stratton.

I got all of our pictures from our Orlando trip posted. You can see them all here.

The timestamp on the camera was messed up, so the order is a little janky, but still, enjoy the photos of our travels to two Universal Studios theme parks and Downtown Disney. And also two hotels. And dinner with my grandma.

We're in Florida!

2008-03-07T10:57:00.001-06:00

Gaylord Palms
Originally uploaded by Matt Stratton.

This is the only picture I've taken so far, and it's not that interesting. But Carrie and I are rocking out in Orlando. It's kind of nice here.

Happy Birthday, Carrie!

2008-03-04T14:45:00.001-06:00

Happy birthday to my lovely wife, Carrie! Smooches!

Gotta go back in time...

2008-02-09T12:19:00.001-06:00

Disclaimer - I have nobody to blame but myself for this, and I am fully aware of that fact.

On Thursday, our landlord had an electrician come into our unit to do some work. He (the landlord) warned us several different times in advance that this was occurring, and even pointed out that since the power was probably going to be cut, we should make sure to save files on our computers, etc. Being the professional nerdbag that I am, I shrugged it off with a "sure, sure, of course, thanks for pointing that out, etc."

Well, on Thursday morning, on the way to a conference, I realized I had neglected to shut my Mac down before leaving. "Oh well," I thought. "It's survived power failures before, and I don't have anything open that I am worried about."

Sure enough, I get home that night, and when I boot up my Mac, it powers up from the backup install - my main system drive is offline. I do some investigating, and discover that one of my external FW hard drives is DOA - won't spin up.

This is the hard drive that has two partitions - one that is my main OS X system drive, and the other is my main data drive.

I've just lost my OS, applications, and my iTunes, iPhoto, and all my documents.

Well, luckily for me, I recently upgraded to Leopard, which includes a nifty little auto-backup thinger called Time Machine. So all of that stuff was totally backed up to an additional external HDD (which, fortunately, survived). The internal HD on my Mac (which I was using for a backup OS because I thought that since the external FW hard drive was 7200 instead of 5400 I'd get better performance, etc, etc) would be able to get "restored" to from the backup of my DOA OS partition, and I could restore the data partition to another extra external HD (which I had been using for iterative backups before Time Machine existed, so I didn't need it for that anymore).

Last night I fired up the Leopard DVD, and instead of running the install, I just picked "restore from Time Machine" or something like that. It took a little convincing to get it to see the internal HD, but once I did, it took about an hour to copy all the data, and then voila! I was back in business.

Well, with the system part. The data partition still need restoring.

The first thing I did was immediately turn OFF Time Machine backups - I had read that after a restore, Time Machine was not good about knowing what it had backed up BEFORE. I was able to find my old Data partition in Time Machine, and tried to restore every folder on it to my newly created Data partition.

That did not work well.

I found I had to do one folder at a time (which was no big deal, since there were only about 7 folders at the root of /Data, and some of the smaller ones I could do at the same time). The biggest problem I had was with iPhoto. I store my iPhoto library on the data partition and not in my Home directory. And somewhere along the line I had upgraded my iPhoto. When I picked just the iPhoto from /Data, it did not restore very well. But if I browsed back in Time Machine to before the upgrade, restored the iPhoto Library folder, and then restored the current iPhoto Library over that, everything worked swimmingly.

One thing that I am kicking myself for - I had my Aperture library excluded from the TM backup (because it's notoriously a bad TM-citizen) figuring "well heck, I back up the Aperture library to a vault on a different disk".

Guess what? I haven't backed up my Aperture library (since it's a manual process) since Dec 29, 2007. Oh well. Luckily I have anything important already on Flickr. I hope.

AIM woes...

2008-01-30T08:33:00.001-06:00

Thanks to the POS that is Trillian, it seems like all the AIM buddies I had that were not in the "Work" group have been removed. So please, if you use of the AIM, send me an IM (MattStrattonCV) so I can re-add you.

A techie post...

2008-01-29T13:22:00.001-06:00

This is x-posted from Matt's Livejournal, but I know some folks only read this one, so I thought I'd see if anyone has any ideas over here.

It should come as no surprise to most of you that I fully embrace OS X. I run it at home and I love it. Of course, I make my living supporting Windows systems, so my work environment is all Windows.

One of my major annoyances is that there are a TON of great utilities and tools that run on OS X that would make my life at work INCREDIBLY easier, however, I cannot use them, since my work environment (my laptop) runs Windows. If I had Quicksilver at work, there are many, MANY awesome things I could do. But, of course, I cannot. Additionally, having Automator available to me at work would help.

Yes, there are similar tools - for example, instead of Quicksilver, I use Dash Command (don't talk to me about Launchy; I have used it, but Dash has a bit more use for what I do). And instead of Applescript/Automator I can write VB scripts (I know Powershell is the bomb, but I haven't done ANYTHING with it yet).

The worst offender is multi-protocol IM clients. On my Mac I run Adium, which is probably one of the best applications I've ever used. There are three options I've explored on Windows, and none of them hold a candle to Adium. Here are the products I've tried to use on Windows:

The functionality that I am missing from Adium (that none of these clients can handle) is as follows:

Displaying only online contacts NOT SORTED INTO GROUPS
Integration into Address Book (with Adium, it talks to my Address Book and syncs up what is entered as an IM address and then displays that person's name in the buddy list instead of me having to manually set an "alias", etc, and it even uses the picture from the Address Book)
Actually working with Google Talk (granted, Meebo and Pidgin do this, but Trillian's GTalk integration seems to be old and busted)

Are there any products I am missing? Meebo is definitely been a good way for me to go, but it requires me to have Firefox open in order to get IM's and it needs the Meebo extension in order for me to get notification of new IM's (which is not terrible). My resistance to Meebo is the lack of logging, mostly.

Another baby shower

2008-01-28T10:34:00.000-06:00

At the beginning of January, my sister and I hosted another baby shower for another cousin. Katie is due in March (on my birthday!) and is waiting to find out the sex of the baby. We decided to do a Tea Party theme for the shower. Here is a picture of what the invitations kind of looked like. The actual invitations had a pink background with a blue teacup. The invite details were on the "teabag" that fit inside the cup. I ordered them from a seller on ebay and they turned out super cute!

The shower was at Ellie's house out in Algonquin, which was nice because we had so much more room than we would have had at my cramped apartment. Unfortunately, I totally forgot to take pictures of all the yummy food before everyone dug in, but here was the menu:

Tea Sandwiches (Smoked Salmon with Cucumber on pumpernickel, Asparagus and Proscuito on white, Chicken Salad on mini croissants, and Cucumber with Cream Cheese and herbs on white)
Garlic and Rosemary Roasted Potatoes
Pomegranate and Goat Cheese Mixed Greens and Herbs Salad
Fruit Platter with Strawberry Dip
Hummus with Pita and Carrots
Assorted scones (homemade, by Holly) with citrus curd and strawberry jam
Meyer Lemon Mini Tarts, Raspberry Cream Mini Tarts, Cake

We decorated with several teapots filled with flowers, like this one.

Here is the centerpiece on the main dining room table.We played name that celebrity baby's mama/daddy, which was fun. It was obvious who read People and US Weekly on a regular basis. Katie got some beautiful gifts. Here is a picture of her with a Chicago Kid onesie from Becky.My gifts to her were part of the decorations. Here is the diaper cake I made (don't you love the monkey??!!) and a clothesline full of clothes.

Here is Aunt Jane(Gramma) with Connor, one of the twins. Isn't he adorable? She calls him Yoda! :)
For favors, I scoured local thrift stores and antique stores to find pretty teacups with matching saucers. I found some really beautiful ones! Then we put little tea forte tea bags in each cup. And it was perfect because each little Tea Forte box had an F monogrammed on it, which is the first initial of the new baby's last name!Finally, here is the cake I made. I wasn't crazy about how it turned out, but it wasn't too bad for my first time trying to make it. The main part of the baby buggy was yellow cake with french silk chocolate frosting and the wheels were chocolate cake with french silk chocolate frosting.

Turkey Turkey

2007-11-23T09:03:00.000-06:00

As you know, Carrie and I had a "test run" of our Thanksgiving last weekend. Well, yesterday was the "real deal". And it turned out pretty well. Here's the story, in photos:

As you can see, it's quite chilly for Thanksgiving morning. Snow on the grill doesn't bode well for outdoor Thanksgiving cooking.

This is the prepped turkey. It spent the night before soaked in brine, and then Carrie stuffed it with aromatics, and did a butter/olive oil rub under the skin.

The turkey on the grill. Cooked using the indirect method, with apple wood chips added for smoky goodness.

About two and a half hours later, the final result. Nice and crispy skin.

Here's the carved bird, using the "butcher method". We barely had any leftovers.

Carrie's lovely table.

Carrie's homemade pies - Dutch Apple and Pumpkin

You can see the rest of the pictures here.

Dressing Rehearsal

2007-11-19T13:58:00.001-06:00

Kesiah, Evin, and Kate
Originally uploaded by Matt Stratton.

So Carrie and I are having Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year for my family. Upon the recommendation of my friend Lou, I am going to be cooking the turkey on the Weber.

Given that I've never done that before, and the high-pressure of Thanksgiving, we decided to host a "practice Thanksgiving" (a "dressing rehearsal", if you will) on Saturday. We invited a bunch of friends over to bring some dishes, so that we could practice cooking the bird in this manner.

We brined the turkey for about 12 hours prior to cooking. Carrie made a mixture of olive oil and melted butter, which she rubbed under the skin of the turkey. I cooked it using the indirect method on our Weber, and used apple wood chips on top of the coals. I also sprayed the skin of the turkey a few times with a mixture of butter, turkey broth, and orange juice.

First issue - I used too many coals at the start, which made the grill too hot (causing the bird to cook quicker than I'd have liked). I was still cooking to temperature, so it definitely got cooked. It took about 1 1/2 hours to get the internal temp on the breast to 170. After I took it off the Weber, I wrapped it in foil and it sat inside for about 3 hours (since it finished up way before our guests arrived). When we served it, it was still plenty warm, and very very moist and tasty.

Second issue - this relates to the "too hot of coals" issue above, but the drippings in the drip pan got totally burnt, so Carrie was not able to use them for gravy. If I put the water in the pan BEFORE they start to burn AND not have as hot of a fire, this should not happen again.

Regardless, the bird was a huge hit with my friends, and we learned enough to make it super awesome for the "real deal" on Thursday.

We also had a good time playing with all "younger" generation (Sam, Kate, and Kesiah). We can tell we are grown-ups now for two reasons - a) after a party, there are not empty beer bottles in the bathroom, and b) there are children at our parties.

Halloween

2007-11-02T10:10:00.000-05:00

I love Halloween! Here are some of my favorite pictures from this year.

First, the dogs....
We took Scout and Maggie to the Howl-o-ween party at puptown. Scout was a dashing pirate.

Maggie was the adorable Underdog!
My niece Kate as a flower fairy.Sam in his adorable skeleton cosutme with his mom Tracy.
Sam in costume #2. The cutest crustacean ever!
And Hannah who went as Dorothy, doesn't she look great!?
One more super cute baby. Colin went as an adorable doctor. Aww, he looks like mommy, but is pretending to be daddy!

Julia, Kevin, Nora and Dave went as the Scooby Doo Gang.
Finally, Matt and I went as Beauty and the Geek.

POTF 2007

2007-10-16T11:01:00.001-05:00

POTF 2007
Originally uploaded by thewyckoffs.

This weekend was the 14th year of the annual "guys campout", also known as "Piss Out The Fire"*.

The whole shebang started in the spring of 1993 (our senior year in high school) when Clint, Kurt, Chris, Hay, Schultz, and myself went on a campout to Danville, IL during our spring break. We had such a great time that we've done it every year since (with the exception of 2006, and also of 2005, but that was considered "okay" since the whole group got together for a mass 30th birthday celebration).

The guys who went this year were Hay, Jason, Clint, Schultz, and myself. And that's pretty much been the "core" of this campout. We've had some supporting players along the way (Clint's brother has come a few times, and Jenkins actually made it once), but the five of us have been at almost every single campout (Jay missed the very first one, but that's been the ONLY one he's missed. I missed 2002 and 2004 but that's all). Even though he lives in Austin now, Clint still flies into Chicago for POTF.

Times have changed for all of us. We're all married now, and Clint and Jay both have kids (Hay is going to be a father next month too!) but some things do not change.

This is a group of guys that I see about once a year. Jay and I talk a little more often than that, but otherwise, this group is a once a year occurrence. But the great thing is, that does not matter. Yes. we do our fair share of nostalgic remembrances of campouts past, but we also build new memories every time we go. Our conversations have changed as we've grown older, but we have all grown closer. These are guys who I feel 100% comfortable sharing everything with, and having no fear of being judged, rejected, or laughed at.

As we all grow older, we have fewer and fewer new friends. I just think that's a function of growing up - it's normal and it happens. But that makes it all the more special to have a core group of people who, while I may not call them up on a Thursday night to have a beer, I know that I can trust, depend on, and most of all, eat Swiss chicken out of a dutch oven with.

I can't believe that next year will be the 15th anniversary of this trip.

And I can't wait until the 30th.

* - The actual urination on the fire has only happened about once, and it was a long time ago. And let me assure you - it's a BAD idea.

TWINS! baby shower

2007-09-26T13:22:00.000-05:00

On Sunday my sister and I hosted a baby shower for my cousin Christie who is having identical twin boys. Her pregnancy has been very high risk. She was in the hospital for 2 1/2 weeks and then at home with very restricted activity. So basically, she has either been at her house or the hospital for the past five weeks. Her doctor said it was okay to go to her shower as long as it was local, so it got moved from my mom's house in the burbs to our apartment.

Everything turned out really well. I kinda went a little overboard with the food and decorations, but I really wanted things to be special for her since the past 5 weeks have been so stressful and painful.

The menu was:
Starters--Caprese Kabobs and Hummus and Pita
Ham and Asparagus Quiche
Mediterranean Vegetable Quiche
Homemade Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins
Homemade Blueberry Muffins
Rosemary and Garlic Roasted Potatoes
Green Salad
Fruit Salad
Strawberry Pretzel Jello Mold
and for dessert, Chocolate cake with buttercream frosting (in the shape of a duck) and vanilla cupcakes with french silk frosting(decorated with sugar ducks). It was my first time making and decorating a cake that was a specific shape and I think it turned out pretty darn good! I'm excited to try to make more creative cakes and maybe even take a cake decorating class.

As you can guess from the cake, the theme for the baby shower was rubber duckies. I got my inspiration from hostesswiththemostess.com. It is a great website with lots of neat ideas for theme parties.

Here are a few pictures of the decor.

The cupcakes, cake and muffins

Favors---Shower gel with a tag that said,
"From Christie's shower to yours!"

The table

Decorations

Table 2

Flowers

I am not a nerd.

2007-09-06T14:07:00.001-05:00

Labor Day 2007

2007-09-04T20:56:00.000-05:00

We had a pretty elaborate Labor Day weekend. The festivities started on Thursday - Scout and I dropped Carrie off at her office, and then we went to my parents' house where I worked remotely during the day (taking breaks every 20 minutes to take Scout outside and throw the ball for him). After work, we picked Carrie up and headed to Holland, where we spent the night with Angie and Brian, and their new beagle puppy Maggie. Scout was very tolerant of her, and we had a great time watching the dogs play together.

Friday morning we packed up, and after playing with Maggie some more, we drove the rest of the way up to Elk Lake (with a breakfast stop-over at Rosie's Diner, which I photoblogged about a few days ago). On the way to Elk Lake, we drove past about 500 cyclists, who were apparently on a long ride from Lansing to the UP (530 miles or so). Pretty nutty!

On Saturday morning, Carrie and I went into Traverse City to browse the shops and visit the farmers' market. There are about 5,434 shops in Traverse City that sell cherry-related products. We sample cherry jam, cherry soda, cherry BBQ sauce, cherry salsa, cherry rack of lamb...okay, that last one was a joke. But seriously, they like their cherries up there.

My father-in-law let us borrow his Honda S2000, and we had lunch at a drive-in called "Don's" in Traverse City. It was a really delicious burger (we ate inside, not in the car, because, well, we didn't think Dad F would appreciate us eating greasy burgers in his fancy ragtop).

After lunch, we went out for a "sea cruise" (as Mom F refers to it) out on Elk Lake. Scout very much enjoys riding in the boat. As you can see, he's quite the natural. He runs back and forth from the bow to the stern, barking his head off. He is not a water dog, however - he will go in the water, but only when he can touch the bottom. He's definitely not a swimmer. However, when we are swimming off the dock, he runs down to the end of the dock and barks like crazy, because he's VERY UPSET that we are in the water. We think one of these days he's going to just jump in - he gets close, putting his paws over the side, but he hasn't made the jump yet.

Saturday night we went to see the Lovin' Spoonful perform at the Grand Traverse resort. Becky (my sister-in-law) made the comment that maybe 20 years from now she'll be bringing HER daughter to a concert to see the Backstreet Boys, and "maybe N*Sync.

"But definitely not 98 Degrees."

Sunday was a VERY rough day out, so we didn't take the boat out, but Carrie and I did a little bit of swimming. I had managed to convince the family to join me at a Traverse City Beach Bums baseball game that night. We got great seats right behind home plate, and I think everyone had a good time cheering for the home team (who was getting rocked by a team from the South Side of Chicago) and watching the nutty antics that happen in between innings in a minor league game. We did leave after a few hours, since it was only the bottom of the fifth. We spent the evening eating blueberry pie to celebrated Dad F's birthday.

Monday was "cram everything into the last few hours of summer" day. We helped Dad F with some end of season chores (packing up the Sunfish, mowing the lawn, packing up chairs, etc), and then took the boat out so that Carrie could water-ski (as Dad F pointed out - if she hadn't gone skiing that day, it would have been the first time in 55 years that someone didn't water-ski during a Flechter summer at Elk Lake). After Carrie went for a few runs, we parked the boat (I mean we "anchored" it, except we didn't) and Carrie, Becky, and I went diving off of the side of the boat (and Scout almost jumped in himself). I never learned how to dive, so Carrie spent this weekend trying to teach me. I almost have it - I still belly-flop a lot, but I've come close to a passable dive a few times.

After the boat trip, I jumped off at the dock and took a couple shots of the family in the boat as they drove (is that the right word?) past. Carrie, Becky, and I went for one last swim off the dock, and then we all went back into the house to pack up for the drive home.

We left Elk Lake around 3 PM, and had a stopover in Rockford at Brian's parents' cottage where we let Scout play with Maggie, ate some delicious pork chops, and waited out the traffic for a bit.

We got back to Lincoln Square around 10 PM, and proceeded to crash and sleep like babies. Or puppies.

The rest of our Labor Day 2007 photos here.

Happy Birthday-Doodles, Senior Brianpants!

2007-08-17T06:41:00.000-05:00

Happy birthday, Brian!

Good weekend

2007-07-30T14:15:00.001-05:00

Weekend kicked off with Carrie and myself visiting US Cellular Field to watch the Chicago White Sox do battle with the Toronto Blue Jays. Carrie got us some tickets since it was a work outing, but for the last couple of innings our friend Amanda hooked us up with a couple of empty seats next to her godfather's season tickets:

Yes, it was the first row right behind the dugout. It was very Costanza:

GEORGE: She said first row! Right behind the dugout!
ELAINE: Well, it's the second row. It's just as good.
GEORGE: I was all primed for the first row; I was gonna put my feet up on the dugout!
ELAINE: Would you shut up? These are great! You can't get any better than this.
GEORGE: Oh, there's better, (pointing at the row in front of them) right there, that's better.

Although we WOULD have been able to put our feet up on the dugout if we weren't so scared of someone realizing we did not actually have tickets. The people next to us did it; they also put their bags and stuff up there. I was in mortal fear of being hit by something, but still it was friggin' sweet. At one point Ozzie Guillen threw his gum up on top of the dugout, and some girl snagged it with her napkin. That was a little odd.

On Saturday we took Scout to the dog beach and then to Soggy Paws for a bath. Carrie spent the afternoon napping and I watched my new DVD of GI Joe - The Movie. We had dinner at a new Italian place in Lincoln Square, and then headed to the Davis to see The Simpsons.

Not a lot to say about that flick, besides that I was very pleasantly surprised - it was a lot better than I had thought it would be (since the last five or six seasons have been lacking), but since I'd heard a lot of the old writers were back, I guess I was not terribly surprised. Some of the plotlines seemed to be a revisit of episodes past ("You Only Move Twice", "Brother from the Same Planet", etc), but I was seriously laughing quite loudly quite often. This is a movie I recommend seeing with a packed crowd, as I think it will be funnier with a laughing feedback loop situation.

On Sunday, Carrie and I went for a long bike ride up to the Chicago Botanical Gardens. We drove up to Skokie and picked up the North Branch Trail at Old Orchard Road. The entire trip was about 21 miles, which translated into about 2 hours of riding. We had a really good time. I want to head up there again with the 350D, but Carrie took a bunch of fun shots with our Olympus point-and-shoot.

This week I am working from home all week since I am on-call. Fun fun fun.