Monday, October 26, 2009
Oops.....
A few of the big stories from the past couple of months:
We saw Greg and his men off for their deployment on 9/18. Earlier he gave us a cool tour of his ‘home’ for the next 7 months, the USS Rushmore. It was cool to see where he will be doing his pull ups, sleeping, and drinking French vanilla coffee with his fellow officers. He also got to show off his bad @$$ vehicles as we watched him lead them into the water and out to ship. Along with the other families there, we ran out on the rocky jetty to follow them. Only 1 cut toe resulting was pretty successful. But in all seriousness, big thank you to Greg and his comrades, and we’re looking forward to their safe return in April.
We had another trip back East, this time to NJ/NY for cousin Danielle and Anthony’s wedding. Of course Gevarters and Rengstls could not sit at a dinner table without some form of ‘food fight’ occurring….FYI if you’re going to have Good N’ Plenties at your wedding, you may want to think twice about inviting a family like us. Great time was had by all.
Matt then stayed in PA for the next week, and then went down to OBX for the annual DiGiulio men’s golf trip. There was a lot of golf, beer, and a mild case of the Irish flu for Matt. Amber, we need to get started on the girl’s weekend – I’m thinking Adam’s birthday?
There was actually some “gloomy” weather for about a week, where it was a tad overcast (a few clouds here and there) and was barely reaching the high 60s. But that streak is over and its been like perfect summer weather again.
Downtown San Diego is a great place for football. Since it’s such a transplant city, you go out and it’s like a commercial for the NFL with fans in every jersey. It’s nice to go out in our Giants and Cowboys jerseys and not get stares like we have a death wish like we do in Philly. We also went to Pacific Beach for our first PSU game with the San Diego Alumni chapter. Now we’re gearin’ up for a World Series clash of loyalties in our household. While Franny has adopted the Phils as a “home away from hometown” team while in Philly, true loyalty will always lie with the Yankees.
Birthday Shout-outs:
Welcome to the world to Jackson Joseph Gilmore! We are so excited to meet him and can hardly wait. Congrats to the Gilmores.
Happy Birthday to Phil – we hope you were able to peel yourself away from the computer (that includes your iPhone) long enough to do some celebrating.
Pics from everything: http://picasaweb.google.com/fmdigiulio
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Quick Update
Lot's of traveling these past few weekends...so we'll just sum it up and let the pictures do the talking blogging
PA: Jimmy & Lauren's wedding, Tara & Matt's wedding, Great Grandma Carmella's 99th bday, and brunch with the Gilmores (all in 72 hours!). When we landed in Philly, a very astute little boy said to his mom in a big huff "I think I should have packed an umbrella for Philadelphia".
Big Bear: Horse back riding, zip lining, and general relaxing to mark our 1 year anniversary.
After a couple of weekends away, we have a 3 day weekend in San Diego that will be filled with golf, football, and of course sunshine. Birthday shout-outs: Happy B'day Cindy, and all the rest of the large quantities of Virgo's out there (afraid to list more than just the immediate sibling or else I'm sure we'd end up leaving someone important out...but you all know who you are!)
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Tahoe
Kavanaughs:
Tahoe:
Everyone survived the weekend unharmed, surviving some ATV jumps, a trip to the 'grocery store' by the boys that involved ammo and targets, and a freak choking gas that was emitted from slicing some cooked jalapenos that nearly suffocated Matt and Trev in the kitchen.
We finished the weekend out with a quick stop at Riverwalk in Reno before our flight back to San Diego.
Thanks again Trev, Tara, and Sean for a great weekend (and for loaning us your camera when ours decided to stop working). For lots more pics: http://picasaweb.google.com/fmdigiulio/Tahoe#
Thursday, August 6, 2009
July Fly By
We also partook in an iconic San Diego event - Comic Con! For all the non-Geeks out there, its a HUGE convention of nerds, gathered to dress up in crazy costumes, check out comic books, and preview some TV shows and movies that relate to comics, super heroes, sci-fi, and general nerdiness. One of those is LOST, and Franny couldn't stand being 4 blocks from the convention and not going to see the last of the annual Lost panels, so we made some last minute arrangements and got in. It was amazing, probably one of the coolest things we've attended out here - got to see Michael Emerson aka Ben up close and personal....I could go on and on about this, but to spare those who have never heard of Dharma, I'll move on. But if you want to know more about that, let me know - there are still MONTHS to speculate about the final season.
Other activities have included seeing Body Worlds at the Natural History museum, golfing, hiking in Torrey Pines State Park, checking out the Glider Port, a few more Padres games, a shopping(economy boosting) trip to Fashion Valley mall (thanks Mom/Dad), a new-found addiction to the Food Network (thanks Mom D) , LOTS of good food in Seaport Village, Downtown, La Jolla, and Little Italy, beaching it up (intense games of Bocci Ball and continued surfing), and lots more. Matt bought MLB network so he's been enjoying catching the games every afternoon with the time difference.
We'll do our best to do these a little more frequently so that it's not just a big recap. Lots of exciting weekends coming up - next weekend we're doing a West Coast (Gilmore-less) Team Conshy BBQ at Trev and Tara's (and meeting little Sean!) in Tahoe, then we'll have our first trip back East the end of August for a wedding double-header (thanks Jimmy, Lauren, Tara, and Matt for planning so effectively for us!:) ), and we just booked a trip to Big Bear Lake for our first anniversary / Labor Day.
Lots of new albums up: http://picasaweb.google.com/fmdigiulio
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
If a picture's worth a thousand words....
Sunday, June 21, 2009
"I'm a MARINE" (da-da-da-daaaaa)
Friday was actually kind of cloudy here...we know, everyone back East is saying "oh poor you". It was our first full weekend day of June gloom. So we went shopping at Horton Plaza, and then went down to Seaport Village for dinner. There were some cute little shops in the area, and we did what everyone else was doing in the hat shop - try on goofy styles and take pictures. Dinner at San Diego pier cafe was pretty good, although the price is definitely more about the location than the food. The setup reminded Franny of a mini Clam Hut from NJ.
Happy Father's Day
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Farewell Tonic and Monkeying Around
As they always say, as one door closes another one opens, and in this case, we’ve been opening many doors…particularly ones that lead to lots of good food, because we’re still eating out every night. We’ll end up throwing in some restaurant reviews in these blogs, but since we’ve already tried so many we’ll just report on our first favorite find for now: Ciro’s pizza . Right across the street from out apartment, it became an instant favorite when we grabbed a few slices for lunch our first day here. One bite in, and we knew San Diego had Philly beat in the pizza department….definitely NY style. We’ve since made a number of returns, with one of our favorites being the veggie-boli. And after years of having to consciously think before ordering, Franny can now return to her natural tendency to order a “sub” or “hero” instead of a “hoagie”.
Our 3 day weekend was jam packed. We kicked it off with a building happy hour Thursday night at Stingaree where we met a bunch of other transplanted East Coasters. Friday, we picked up some office furniture for Matt so that he is no longer laying on an air mattress all day. We’re counting down the days until the rest of our stuff arrives.
Then we took the 20 minute walk down to Little Italy for dinner - it reminded us of our honeymoon, walking a ways to get some good food, only at least this walk was flat and not up and down a steep mountain. We’ll do a restaurant review of Trattoria Fantastica soon, but for now we’ll say it is appropriately named.
Saturday we drove over the bridge to Coronado for our first beach action. It’s gorgeous and the most amazing beach weather. Everyone here keeps apologizing to us for the “crappy” June gloom season, but seriously if it was like this year round I don’t think we’d ever realize this was “not the best” weather.
Sat night we had some Tapas before Allie and Greg met up with us for some drinks, and then they became our first over-night guests by literally camping out on our floor. Greg enjoyed some people watching from our large windows, we’re pretty sure he could sit there all day completely entertained.
Sunday morning we got some brunch with some of Allie and Greg’s friends, and were entertained by stories of older women playing match maker at Hotel Del Coronado. Then, it was off to the zoo! Greg found out he gets free admission to the zoo in exchange for his service to the country – we all agreed the least they can do for guys/girls who put their lives on the line is let them see some silver back gorillas at no charge. Zoo picture - they told us to pretend there were spiders in our hands, and if we bought this at the stand they superimposed the spiders, but it's just as funny without them.
All the rest of the pics from Little Italy, Coronado, and the Zoo are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/fmdigiulio/Week2LittleItalyCoronadoAndTheZoo#
One other fun story of note – there’s a frozen yogurt place out here called Yogotango , about 2 blocks from us. They give you the yogurt, weigh it, then you add your toppings. If you guess the exact weight after adding your toppings, it’s free. Sure enough, on our first venture there, Matt won his fro-yo…or in this case, free-yo. Of course, the fact that Franny went first served as a litmus test, but still impressive.
Next time we blog we hope to be doing it from our couch! Tastes of Gaslamp is coming up this weekend as well, so yes – there will be a lot more blogging about food in the near future.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Welcome Philly Fans
For anyone who doesn’t know, or hasn’t figured it out yet from the blog title, we moved to San Diego for a 12 month job rotation Franny got with Lockheed. Matt will be working part time remotely from our awesome new apartment downtown in the historic Gaslamp district– and promises Franny will come home to a fresh cooked dinner every night. But for now, while we wait for all of our stuff to arrive next week, it’s picnics on the floor.
Our flight out was pretty nice - lack of headwinds made for a 30 mins faster than usual trip. Although the Captain kept saying it’d be smooth sailing, and then sure enough we’d hit a little roller-coaster patch. Matt made the mistake of using the bathroom during one of these “smooth” parts, and nearly inducted himself into the mile-high-golden-shower club. We also got a nice view of the Grand Canyon as we passed over it. After we landed, we couldn’t help but overhear a guy trying to run some game on the girl in the row behind him. She was into him at first, then when she asked what he did, he gave a 10 min long explanation about the research of forrest fires. “Smokey the Bear”, as we started referring to him, must be good at his job though - he successfully killed any of those sparks.
Our first night in San Diego was filled with something familiar form back home – the Phillies!
Something you wouldn’t see back home though, is a sign in Philly welcoming an opposing team’s fans (unless it was a trick to lure them somewhere they’d never return from).
Utley and Howard fulfilled Matt’s request for back to back homers in the 5th inning, and the Phil’s locked up the start of their sweep of the Padres. We went back for the final game on Wednesday too.
(Check out more pics at: http://picasaweb.google.com/fmdigiulio )