So Chad and I have fabulous pictures of our Christmas here, but they are scattered between a camera and a phone so I'm sure someday we'll post pictures of our action packed, exciting Christmas, but for now all you're getting is an update on our lives.

I'm sure most of you know, I had a dog before Chad and I got married. His name is Batman and I adopted him from the shelter when he was 3. I love dogs in general and Batman in particular. When we were first moving to New York I didn't think I would get to have him here and it made me incredibly sad. Whenever I thought about him while I was here I would cry because I felt so horrible for abandoning him. So when I got him here I was so excited.

Turns out Batman is not a small apartment or cold weather dog. Also, it has been a very long time since he's spent any time alone, so he was not happy when Chad and I weren't around. And he showed it by whining really loudly the entire time we were gone. Our landlord told us about it and warned us that we needed fix the issue or he had to go. So we went into training mode.

The good news is that you can teach an old dog new tricks! He has his Bat Cave (kennel) that he sleeps in while we are gone, and we've found it really helps him to chill out if we play him a bit of Adele or a movie. On Sunday we recorded him while we were at church, and he whined a bit, but for the most part he just enjoyed his movie and relaxed. YAY! Mission Accomplished.

We also just had our first (and only??) snowstorm here recently. We are ignoring what happened in October because that wasn't snow, that was gross slushy mess. We had about 4-6 inches of beautiful snow blanket the city. It's really true what they say. New York looks MAGICAL early in the morning after a snow storm.

It was Batman's first time in the snow, and as you can see he was not much of a fan. In fact on another walk that day he decided he was done walking in that cold wet stuff and was fine just going home.

The weather has been quite weird here this winter. It has been incredibly mild. In fact, currently it's warmer here that where my parents live in Southern California.My problem is I just don't trust it. I think I'm dreaming. I think that there must be a horrible storm lurking just around the corner ready to bury me alive in snow and freeze me to death. I'm probably too nervous about the weather to even enjoy it.

The final bit of exciting news is that I am working again. Yay! Well I've been working, but not full time.I went in to meet with a temp staffing company on the 20th and then on the 24th they called me with a 3 month+ receptionist job. It's been nice to have a full time job and a consistent paycheck. I can't say that being a receptionist is my dream job, but it does allow me to keep my consulting gig, and it should work with the other part time job I picked up. So hopefully I'll be nice and busy and Chad will have plenty of Michelle distraction free study time.

We did decide to go out and celebrate my consistent employment and go on a date that actually required us to go somewhere and we went to a yummy Brazilian restaurant. I took pictures of the yummy food we had.


I can not for the life of me remember the name of either of these dishes, but it was really good. It was like a seafood soup, it had shirmp, oysters, mussels, scallops, and lobster and a very yummy red sauce.




This had monkfish and shrimp. I guess it's a food they have all the time in Brazil and if you've spent much time there you would have seen it sold everywhere. It was really good as well and it had a bit of a Thai curry flavor going on. We also went and saw Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows and I really liked it. I won't ruin it if anyone out there hasn't seen it yet, but at the end I was getting upset thinking, "seriously? no one felt the need to spoil this movie???"

Anyway, this is a long post now so I'm going to leave you with the picture that is currently my wallpaper on my phone. It just makes me so happy to see them getting along, it's been a slow go, but it's happening!