My best friend’s wedding!

Good Morning!

I have a blog. Ha. It’s been about a month. Every time I would think about possibly writing a blog post, I would think about how long its been since I have and get overwhelmed with how many pictures I have and things that need to be caught up on since I last posted.

Well, in reality I only had 67 pictures on my camera and really we’ve just been trying to survive this last semester of school for Aaron and his crazy job. Plus we’ve been shopping for a new house… It’s been a busy time around here.

However, most of those 67 pictures I mentioned above were from my bff Gina’s wedding in October. Great wedding and here’s a little recap:

Here is the bride and mother of the bride:

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Gina’s super awesome shoes:

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Party bus.

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Party bus.

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PARTY bus. Bride and groom after the wedding ceremony.

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Me & Aaron at the reception:

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We did some dancing:
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Me and the bride!

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Claire doing her duty as a member of the bridal party:

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And that’s probably enough pictures for this blog post. I wish I had a photo of the whole bridal party but the photographers took some interesting pictures so I’m looking forward to seeing those soon. It was a great wedding! We had so much fun and Gina and Jason are an awesome couple. ❤

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A little life update plus random wedding photos!

Good Morning!

I haven’t really blogged much about my life lately. It’s pretty early right now and Aaron is still asleep so I thought I would write a little update. I may or may not get up, find my camera and see if I have any relevant pictures for this post. Leaning toward not. WORDS my friends. Typed words. But still words.

Let’s see, I’ve been running a bit more lately. My little training schedule started for the half marathon last week so I actually went to North Park and ran outside. The last time I ran outside was November 11th! I did 5 miles around the lake and it was beautiful!

I started coaching Girls on the Run last week also. I’m an assistant coach at Pittsburgh Dilworth which is a Pittsburgh Public School in East Liberty/Highland Park. I don’t really have much experience interacting with elementary school girls but it’ll be fun! My office is letting me leave early every Tuesday until the end of May to go and coach too.

Aaron and I went to dinner at Pho Van last night in the Strip. I had a Groupon so we went there right after work. We were both starving and traffic gets ridiculously bad in Pittsburgh when it rains…

Anyway, the place is right on Penn Avenue in between 20th and 21st street. It’s a pretty small dining room and was almost completely empty when we got there (it was only 5:20 pm…)

Our waitress was great and asked us if we had any questions about the menu. We ordered a kettle of Oolong tea and shrimp spring rolls to start.

The tea came out in a little cast iron kettle. We both oddly love cast iron so thumbs up with the kettle and cups. The spring rolls came out a few minutes later and were beautiful and delicious! We wanted to eat the dipping sauce with a spoon.

For dinner, I ordered Pho Ga (noodle soup with chicken) and Aaron had the combination fried rice. Everything was delicious! My noodle bowl was great! It came with a small plate of bean sprouts, bell pepper, basil and lime to add into the soup. I also added Sriracha and made it SPICY. The chicken in the soup was great too. There were big pieces of all white meat pulled chicken that was cooked perfectly. Aaron also really liked his fried rice. He said it was the perfect amount of food too. It had the fried rice in the center and then grilled vegetables, shrimp, pork and beef around the edges and served on a pretty square plate.

With our $20 Groupon, the meal only came to $3.21 + tip!

We’ll definitely go back to Pho Van and take pictures next time. Great service, great food and like a mile away from our house!

So this blog post sort of turned into a restaurant review… back to what’s been going on!

We got home from Pho Van around 730 last night and decided to clean the house a little. We ended up organizing the dining room. There were a million boxes of stuff to take into the basement. Anyone looking for old Br’er Fox albums??

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Aaron sorted through all of the boxes and I sorted through our piles of mail and papers. I sorted everything into piles and then created new file folders for each for the filing cabinet. We also put all of our “important documents” into a little locked box. It’s nice to have everything organized and now we can actually find things! Thank goodness I now know where my Delta Frequent Flier card is.

At 9:15 I started to get tired and fell asleep on the couch. I must have been REALLY tired because I didn’t move until Aaron woke me up at 2 AM to get into bed. So I slept from 9:15 until about 7:30!

Not sure what is going on for the rest of the weekend. Tomorrow is my birthday!! Then we’re leaving for Tennessee early Wednesday morning! My brother and sister-in-law rented a cabin in the mountains for the week so we’re going to stay with them for a few days. My two little nephews will be there too!

Parker and Addison (right before my wedding):

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My sister-in-law and Parker:

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And some good ones of me…

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Tying the bustle  

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I wore purple shoes! My boss actually also owns a shoe store called Bond Street Shoes in Shadyside and gave me shoes for the wedding!

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Our ceremony was outside by the gazebo in the background and then the reception was in the big barn also in the background.

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Serious faces…

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And my favorite picture:

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This concludes the most random blog post ever. Have a good Saturday!

Bermudian’s really do wear knee socks. Our honeymoon recap!

Time to blog about the honeymoon! MOIP is currently having practice downstairs in the living room so I’m up in the bedroom with a bowl of yogurt and my laptop.

Aaron and I went to Bermuda for our honeymoon for 5 nights. Our flight left at 8:30 AM the day after the wedding so we were pretty exhausted by the time we got to Bermuda, through customs and taxied to the hotel — around 5 PM or so. The first night there, we had dinner at a place near to the hotel but every other evening that week, we took the water ferry over to Hamilton, the capital, and ate at restaurants over there.

Bermuda sunset:

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I was out on our balcony here:   

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This is the view from our room. The resort was called the Newstead Belmont Hills Resort and Golf Club. It’s a small 45 suite hotel that was awesome! The rooms were beautiful (though we had air conditioning problems and had to switch rooms) but they had whirlpool tubs and little refrigerators! We pretty much had the resort to ourselves the first couple of days because there was a big sailing event in Bermuda the week before. Some of the staff got to know us and called us things like “the happy honeymooners.”

Infinity pool:

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Hamilton across the bay from us:

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Random fact about Bermuda, the average home cost is something like $1.4 million! I’m not quite sure how people afford to live there. We were told that the salaries are similar to NYC salaries.

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We were waiting for the ferry here:

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Our hotel from the ferry:

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Check out that ring!

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Bermuda is a British territory. You drive on the left and only residents are allowed to drive cars. Tourist can’t rent cars but can rent mopeds. They’re trying to kill us. Seriously, the roads don’t look treacherous here but in other areas of the island, they’re crazy narrow with a million wild taxi drivers.

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Sorry for the million pictures we took of ourselves.

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Our hotel’s water ferry:

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Two of the days we were there, we went to the beach in the morning. Our hotel had a shuttle to the beach and they provided us with beach chairs, bottled water and umbrellas. It was awesome! There were NO shells or rocks on this beach:

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Aaron eating a hot dog:  

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Modeling our Target bathing suits….

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Aaron was into peace signs on this trip. Not sure why…

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Of course the first day we were in Bermuda we tracked down a grocery store so that I didn’t go crazy. Everything was pretty much twice the price it is in Pittsburgh but of course everything except for onions is imported. We bought Bermudian coffee and peanut butter and jelly imported from England! The grocery store was AMAZING! I was anticipating finding a tiny little store that just carried basic food items but this one was big and had everything that I could have possibly wanted. Even wheat bran and soy milk cream as evidenced below. They also had SO MUCH SQUASH. I about had a heart attack. If we had had an oven, I would have roasted so much squash.

I spotted Fage at the store and couldn’t stop smiling. Aaron laughed at me. Anyone else get that excited over grocery shopping??

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For some reason, I was into the side french braid on this trip…

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Yeah I wore the same dress twice. I love that dress! I wore it to my bridal shower too.

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The cruise ships rolled in Wednesday or Thursday and the beach got wayyy more crowded.

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We took a water taxi the very last day to a different part of the island, Dockyard, and saw some old forts and a bunch of cruisers.

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Annnnd that’s the honeymoon. It was a great time! I would definitely go back to Bermuda again. It’s not anything like a Caribbean island. It’s much more European I guess. Reminds me of Italy more than anything around here. Everyone is very proper and dresses neatly. They also seriously wear Bermuda shorts. Hilarious. Men with shirts, ties and sport coats, shorts and knee socks. Aaron fit right in with his boat shoes.

These were also the groomsmen gifts for the wedding. It’s pretty hard to find 3 pairs of size 12 boat shoes.
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And one last picture on the final day!

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