New York Pics

Alright, I got time to sort through our pictures so here are just a few.

This is inside of a really cool mall that we discovered, right near Rockefeller Park:


Me eating my Fettuccinie Alfredo that I loved so much:

Grand Central Park:

The Apple store:


Rockefeller Center (the first picture is a glimpse of the people-traffic around Rockefeller center):


The Charmin Restrooms:


The crowd of people trying to get into the train terminal:


Well, that's all! Hopefully you enjoyed these pictures. It's just little bits of our day :)

New York City

Man! Life is Busy! I’m just getting a chance to sit down and write about our day in New York City on Saturday. We had a great time. Nate and Shawna met at our house at around 8:15 am so we could get to the Trenton train station for the 9:08 train to New York. By the time we got to our destination the train was packed with people.

The first thing we did was just walk around with no real direction. We were kind of heading for Little Italy but went the wrong direction and ended up at Rockefeller Park. Jon and I had never been to that park before; it was a nice little park on the water.

After walking around Rockefeller Park we headed in the right direction toward Little Italy. On the way we walked down Canal Street where there’re all kinds of shops and people trying to sell you stuff. I got a Cashmere feel pink scarf, which I love!

We ate lunch at this little Italian restaurant that had the most amazing Fettuccine Alfredo I’ve ever eaten! While we were at the restaurant an older man that was sitting outside of the glass front window, had a heart attack or stroke or something and fell off his chair, hit the window, and was laying on the ground. By the time the ambulance got there the man didn’t have much of a pulse. They shocked him a few times but nothing happened. Then they got him into the ambulance and were supposedly still working on him when we left (which I guess what a good sign). Needless to say that was quite an event to happen. I was shook up for a while after that.

We took a walk in Grand Central Park after Lunch. I always love going there! There must have been a Santa parade that day, because there were hundreds of people all dressed up like Santa, walking through the park (they seemed unending)! It was pretty funny to watch and see all the interesting Santa outfits people had.

Not far from Grand Central park is the new Apple store that Jon really wanted to see. So we walked over there next. It’s pretty cool. The building is all glass with just a glass elevator in the middle of it and an Apple icon. You go down the elevator or the glass stairs and the store itself is underground.

There’s also a Nintendo World store near by that Jon really enjoyed going to :).

From the Nintendo World store we walked to Rockefeller Center. All of NYC was pretty crowded but when we got to Rockefeller center the people traffic got way worse. The sidewalks were so crowded that you inched your way forward, wedged in-between thousands of other people. It was nuts! We got to see the big Christmas tree all lit up (it’s so pretty!), but we didn’t even try to get close enough to watch people skating in the ice rink. It was way too crowded.

Time Square was our last stop before dinner. We didn’t actually spend too much time walking around in Time Square. We were trying to figure out where we were eating for dinner, and of course, everywhere was full with an hour or so wait for the next table! We ended up eating at TGI Friday’s right in Time Square. We were all so glad just to sit and give our legs a rest from walking all day :).

After dinner we were headed back to Penn Station to catch our train home but we stopped at the “Charmin” Restrooms first. What a crazy place! Yes, I’m talking about Charmin as in “Charmin” toilet paper. As a Christmas gift to NYC, Charmin installed at least 10 or more private bathrooms in a building right in Time Square. You go in and there’s a huge line of people in line. “Charmin” music is playing and there’s “Charmin” people running around dancing, singing, talking through megaphones, and all kinds of crazy stuff. After each person uses their own private bathroom with a little sink, a Charmin employee goes in and quickly sanitizes the seat and sprays febreeze. Then the next person can go it. It’s this big, huge ordeal just to go to the bathroom but it was nice and clean and quite an experience!

Once our 30 minute bathroom break was over we took the subway to Penn Station and waited to find out what track our train would be on (they don’t post the track #’s until 10 minutes before the train is supposed to leave). Once the track # finally was posted there was a mad rush of people that were running to get on the train. Once again, we were surrounded by hundreds of people squeezing their way through the doors and down the stairs to the terminal. We had to run all the way to the front of the train to find a car that even had seats! The others barely even had standing room. But we made it on the train and home by like 11:30, not too bad.

It was a really fun day!

I took pretty many pictures throughout the day but I haven't gotten a chance to go through them yet. I'll try to get to that tonight and post some, but there's no guarantee. :)

Passion Fest Video

The link below is a fairly short video clip from the previous Passion Fest. It will give you a little idea of what it's all about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDEx3p3WIU4

Starbucks

My wonderful, sweet husband got off work early last night and came home to take me out to Starbucks for a date!!! I knew he was coming home early ‘cause he had told me to do my errands first because he might be able to get off work early. But then when he got home he said he wanted to go to Starbucks with me. I was surprised but of course, I was glad to go! :)

We had a nice time talking and relaxing together with nothing to do.

This week is a full week for Jon and I. Tonight I’m looking forward to a girls night at Denise Randolph’s house and Jon is probably hanging out with Ian because Ashley will be at the girls night too. Tomorrow Jon works and Sarah is coming over to scrapbook again with me. I’ve got all my pictures organized this time so I’ll actually be able to do some scrapbooking. Then Thursday night Jon works again and I was invited to go out for dinner with mom F! Friday night Jon and I are babysitting our favorite little buddies Hailey, Justin and Sydney. After they go to bed we’ll be packing and getting ready for New York the next day. We’re going for a day trip with Nate and Shawna to see the lights and decorations and to walk around the city. It’s always fun walking around New York City.

So that’s our week at a glance, and next weeks no less busy! What a crazy time of year. But Christmas will come and go before we know it so we’re enjoying the season while it lasts. :)

Here I am Again!

It’s been a while since I wrote but not that much has happened. The smell in our fridge is gone but we don’t know what it was. The guy from LG came out and took apart the whole fridge and couldn’t find anything or any reason we would have had a smell. Hopefully it doesn’t come back since we don’t know what it was. I’m so glad to have a working refrigerator again though! :)

Our wedding album is finally created and in the process of being printed. Here is a link to the digital pages: http://www.allebachphotography.com/customer/jonalana Page #19 is the only one that will be different when we get our album, we asked to have it spruced up a bit more. I’m so excited to finally get our album, everyone is always asking about it :).

This past Saturday Jon had to work for lunch to cover for someone so I spent most of the day by myself. We had my parents over for dinner then Saturday night. That was fun :).

Going back to last Monday night (a week ago) Jon and I had our first Passion Fest meeting. This is the first time we are involved with Passion Fest. It is a big event, originally started by a few people at THP, to reach out to the communities around us in a way that is fun for everyone. Earlier this year we attended Passion Fest in Pottstown and really enjoyed it and thought it was a great way to draw in the youth of the community and then to present the Gospel to them. So for next year we decided to be a part of the Passion Fest team so we could help plan, promote and run the event. Basically it is a totally free, family oriented day with all kinds of stuff going on. There’s activities for younger kids, speakers, bands, food, and action sports - which last year included professional stunt bikers, skateboarders and motorcyclists (all of who are Christians).

July 7th of next year is the event we’re starting to plan for now. It will be in Pottstown again. www.passionfest.org is the website for it but it’s still under construction so there’s not much information yet. I will probably continue to talk about it and give updates incase anyone wants to come or knows people who would like to come or possibly benefit from coming.

Tonight Jon is working again (this week is the only week in December that he’s actually working 3 nights). I’m going to go out and try to finish my Christmas shopping :).

Scrapbooking

Someone from LG (our refrigerator manufacturer) is coming to look at our fridge today!! I hope they can figure out where the smell was coming from. The actual smell seems to be going away but we want to know WHY it was there in the first place. If it’s something that died I don’t want the remains of whatever it is, stuck somewhere. And if it wasn’t something that died, the smell could return…

Wednesday night when Sarah came over to scrapbook we had a great time! It was a lot of fun talking and scrapbooking together. When I pulled all my stuff out, that I haven’t touched for probably a year or more, I had a lot of organizing to do. Miscellaneous pictures were everywhere and things were just all out of order :). So between talking and organizing my stuff I didn’t get much actual scrapbooking done, but it got me motivated and I had fun. I also discovered that I was out of blank pages for the album I am in the middle of, so last night, while Jon was at work, I went out and bought a few things I needed and then came home and continued to organize all my things. I have everything organized accept two stacks of pictures. Sarah invited me to go to a scrapbooking retreat that is the last weekend in January. I am really excited about going! I need to get everything in order before then and have enough pictures/albums to work on so that I can stay busy while I’m there. Jon thinks I’m crazy for going to a scrapbooking retreat, but he’s glad I have something to enjoy doing with friends! :)

Tonight I think Jon and I are driving down to some place near Philly because one of Jon’s friends from school is having people over to play video games for his birthday, he invited us. I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do but I haven’t been able to spend much time with Jon this week so I’m just going to spend time with him.