O Christmas Blog, O Christmas Blog...

Hi Everyone and thanks for an amazing early Christmas! It was so great to see everyone.

Family...

Friends...

And of course, the snow...

Naturally, there were some minor issues. Emergency home repairs for inspection. A minor fender bender. The realization that our lawn guy disappeared with $150 our our money for supposedly cutting up this tree and hauling it away.

I will not miss that damn trampoline!

But ah well. Overall it was a great trip.

Glenn and I arrived home, after a wildly turbulent and frightening flight, to beautiful sunny 80 degree weather and happy, well-behaved pups.

Glenn's boss sent us a pretty evergreen wreath, which you might be able to see on our door here ...

Yep, pretty darn festive!

We spend an un-traditional Christmas Eve having Spanish tapas and sangria at a restaurant called Ceviche, which was lovely.

 It was rather dark inside, but we did try to take a selfie.

Glenn's phone doesn't take very good pictures in the dark. But fear not. He was inspired by the fact that both his dad and my dad got new cameras, so he purchased a new one with some Xmas money that is on the way. Hopefully, this improves the quality of this publication. :-)

On Christmas day, the dogs got their new beds from Santa and seem pretty happy with them.

Glenn did a great job buying me some wonderful and unusual gifts. I got some coveted Nike gym shorts, a new Swiss watch, and a frog we've named Roger.

The face is mother of pearl...

This shows how the top is faceted. So pretty!

And here's Roger...

I got Glenn a fire pit with palm trees on the sides, some firewood, fire starters, a piece of cement board to put under it to keep the grass from burning, and some sort of roasting stick for marshmallows or hotdogs.

It made for a cute little set up.

We attempted to take some night shots with another camera...

Blurry, but you get the idea.

I made us a regular old fashioned Christmas dinner: a roasted turkey breast, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing...the works. But for dessert, we had s'mores instead of pumpkin pie.

Not to be totally obnoxious, but please note I am wearing short sleeves, outside, on Christmas night. Crazy!

So anyway, I think that's about it for this special holiday edition of the Callihan blog. Hope you all continue to enjoy the holidays and Happy New Year!

Let There Be Light!

Hi Everyone!

Will be up to see you all in a flash, but being the festive trooper I am, I still shall bring you a brief blog post.

Last week, I went to Lisha's for her holiday cookie party / gluten fest. She annually turns her kitchen into a sweatshop and makes all her friends cut and decorate about 400 cookies. I did a bit of decorating, after steering clear of the flouring and rolling out of the cookies.

For some reason, it didn't occur to me to take pics, but some of the girls there did and posted these on Facebook.

Anyway, it was very nice. Some of the girls even brought me little Christmas presents, despite the fact Lisha didn't tell me there would be any kind of exchange. Sigh! Oh well, I brought fudge and buffalo dip.

All this Christmassy spirit even convinced me to put up a tree.

Just a little guy on the mantle

Glenn celebrated the season by putting obnoxious pictures on Facebook, showing people how warm it was.

We had a pretty quiet weekend. On Saturday, on our way to dinner, the sunset was so pretty, I couldn't resist taking some pics from the car.

And Hyde Park also is decorated for Christmas. Here's a peek down one street.

Anyway, after a nice dinner at Datz, we went back to hang out at the Sail Pavilion. There was hardly anyone there, but before long we noticed a slew of boats that were decorated with Christmas lights. Turned out, it was their holiday boat parade.

You may recall we watched the fourth of July boat parade and gave it very poor ratings. This one was much, much nicer, but the photos don't really do it justice.

So that's it from Florida! See you all soon! Merry Christmas!

December in Florida

Hey Everyone!

Happy Holidays! Time is flying down here and I can't believe we'll be back in the burgh soon.

Last week, Glenn was in Orlando all week. During that time, there was all sorts of craziness. As some of you know, we discovered that our plumber had failed to properly winterize our house, and one of our radiators froze and burst, ruining the carpet in my old dressing room.

Yeah, I'd say that's ruined.

Anyway, fortunately Glenn was able to coordinate between several companies to get the radiator removed and capped, the heat system back up and functioning, and the carpet removed from the dressing room, all in time for the home inspection. Yikes!

And, because stuff always happens when Glenn is away, I also had the excitement of letting the dogs out one night, only for us all to discover that there was a surly raccoon in our yard. I have no pics of this, but I am guessing you all recall what a raccoon looks like. Anyway, we had been warned when we moved here that the raccoons down here are vicious and have been known to kill dogs, so I was a bit nervous that I was going to have to break up a raccoon / dog fight with a broom. Fortunately, the dogs screamed and yelled at the thing, but kept their distance. I was later able to lure them back inside with some ham.

Glenn returned to a beautiful weekend. We are actually having unseasonably warm temperatures here - this weekend was in the mid-80s. Darn right hard to believe it is December.

Friday night, we ate at lovely restaurant on the water called Jackson's in downtown Tampa. We got to sit outside on their porch and had a delicious meal.

Nice view!

 Later, we walked across the bridge to the Sail Pavilion. Really pretty night.

On Saturday, we went to St. Pete Beach late in the afternoon so we could take a walk along the beach, catch the sunset, and then have dinner.

Four Pelicans a' Floating

We stopped at a little beach bar where a live band was playing and hung out for a bit, watching the sun go down.

Please note in this next picture that a man is dancing with his bird.

Here...I'll make it easier to see...

I think it's nice the bird gets to go dancing.

Anyway, Glenn got some really pretty shots of the sunset.

So anyway, those are the highlights from the weekend. Sunday we mostly stayed in and read on the porch, took naps and got a pizza. Those kind of days are pretty nice too.

Love you all and hope you are doing well!

Thanksgiving Blog Spectacular!

Hi all and welcome to this special edition of Adventures in Florida!

Because we had a long and busy holiday weekend, this blog entry will be bigger (and possibly better) than ever. Everyone is just agog with excitement!

So let's see. I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving. Glenn and I started Thanksgiving Day at the gym, and then took the dogs out for a long walk. Al Lopez Park was closed for Thanksgiving but we parked nearby and walked on in anyway. (Such rebels!)

Sneaking in! Who's gonna stop us?

Anyway, it was a lovely walk in the park and made us feel less bad for leaving the dogs alone later that evening and eating approximately 10 million calories.

Such a pretty day!

We also spotted some sort of large black and brown striped snake. Can you see him?

That night we went to Chad and Lisha's for a lovely and filling Thanksgiving dinner. They had originally planned to go to Texas to spend the holiday with Lisha's brother Rob and his family, but Rob had to cancel due to some family issues. So it was just Glenn and I, Lisha and Chad, and Lisha's mom, Merylyn.

We had a wonderful time, even though the Steelers lost. I asked Glenn to fully document Thanksgiving in photos but he only took one photo of me and Mrs. Hogue. (It's nice though.)

Lisha and Chad have sold the beautiful house you see us in and should be closing on Dec. 19th; they are not sure yet where they are going to go. For those of you who have not heard, we also got a Thanksgiving miracle and found a buyer for our house in Pittsburgh. If all goes well, we should be closing January 9th. Fingers crossed!

Thanks to Glenn's staff, we got to go to see the Pens play the Lightning at the Tampa Bay Times Forum on Black Friday. There were a lot of Pittsburghers in the crowd.

We had very good seats.

Jokinen scores!

Pens won 3 - 0! As they say in the burgh --Woo!

Saturday, we let the pups catch up on some sleep and went to the Farmer's Market in Ybor City.

The Farmer's Market was rather lame...and actually more of a craft fair than a farmer's market. Very little produce, lots of macrame plant hangers.

Still, we had a fun little walk around Ybor (in the light of day). Here is a streetcar.

And here is a chicken.

Saturday night, we headed back to Jimmy's Crow's Nest in Clearwater to watch another sunset, despite a somewhat cloudy, cooler evening.

Sunday, Glenn and I decided to take a little day trip to the Sponge Docks in Tarpon Springs. Glenn can't pronounce Tarpon for some reason...he calls it TarPOONor TarPAWN, instead of TARpen. It drives me crazy. :-)

Anyway, it is a rather touristy area, but again it was a sunny nice day to walk around and look and sponges and Greek pastries that I could not eat.

They had lots of tours that said you could "watch a diver go down and bring back a real, living sponge!" I had some fun picturing the sponges screaming bloody murder and punching the diver in the face. "Nooooo! I have a family!!! Leave me alone!!!!"

We also had some fun in a boot shop.

On the way home, we took a quick detour to go see Lake Tarpon, which was very pretty. We didn't stay long though, as there were swarms of gnats everywhere.

So anyway, that's about it. I meant to tell you the story of Lobster Boy, but I shall save it for another time.

Can't believe it is December already! Looking forward to seeing everyone soon!