The Last Three Weeks in Boston

Chuck graduated from MIT on Friday, June 6th. The three weeks leading up to that day were CRAZY. A lot of "end of the year" activities happened and we were busy non-stop. If we weren't at a school activity, party, dinner with friends or some other fun thing, we were at our apartment trying to pack. Sleep was always the last thing on our list of to-dos.

Some days we had so many activities, we had to run (or I should say "Uber") back and forth between events. Like the night we went to Sloan Follies because Chuck sang and played with the Rolling Sloans, then went to Fenway Park for a retirement party for Don Rosenfield, the LGO director and then back to Sloan Follies because Chuck had to sing with the a capella group. Phew. I'm exhausted by it all over again just thinking about it!

The view from the room where Don's retirement party was held.

While the rest of the MBA class flew to the British Virgin Islands for a graduation trip, we flew to Louisville over Memorial Day weekend for my cousin's wedding and our friends Shane and Liz's wedding shower and bachelor/bachelorette parties. My cousin's wedding was AMAZING. Most of us cried through the entire ceremony because it was so sweet and then the reception was awesome too.

As Matron of Honor, I was in charge of the planning for Liz's bachelorette party and had to plan most of it from Boston. Thank God for my sisters and cousins who helped me pull it off! That weekend was way too much fun.

Liz's parents and mother-in-law accidentally crashed a part of the evening. So we took a picture with them.

When we got back to Boston, I finished up my last week of work and that's when the lack of sleep really began. Chuck's dad came in that Sunday to stay a night and then head to Foxwoods for a few days. My sister and her boyfriend Austin arrived in Boston Monday to spend the week sight-seeing and exploring both with us and on their own in the city. Tuesday we got a break from driving to the airport, but Wednesday we were right back there to get Chuck's mom and sisters, and on Thursday we picked up my parents, Laura and my Grandma!

With Gold at some Sloan party on the Harbor.

My last sailboat picture. :(

Besides the actual graduation on Friday, Thursday of that week might have been my favorite day. During the day, Sloan held a convocation just for Sloan graduates (the graduation Friday was for ALL MIT students- undergrad, graduate, etc.) at a theater in downtown Boston. The Dean spoke, a student speaker gave a speech that made everyone laugh and cry and want to change their lives, and there was pretty music.

Chuck and his classmate/friend Marcus

Selfie in the T station

After the convocation, we ran back by our apartment for a short bit before heading back into downtown Boston to the Prudential Center to go to a Sloan reception at the top of the Pru. Besides the top floor of Eastgate apartments, the top of the Pru offers some of the best views of Boston. It had been raining all day so I didn't get many good pictures, but did snap one of MIT's campus from the top.

Like all good Sloan events, there was tons of free food and of course, drinks. Oh and this sweet ice sculpture.

After the event at the PRU around 10:30 (told you, sleep was always last) we headed to one of our most frequented spots in Cambridge, the Asgard. On Thursday nights they always have live band karaoke. So naturally we had all of our visiting family meet us up there where we caught up on our day and enjoyed some karaoke. Of course we participated, too.

All the siblings!

Around 2 am when the restaurant closed, our ginormous group wreaked havoc on the streets as our family felt inspired to create the human MIT and then human LGO in the middle of Central Square.

Yep, that's my Grandma- enjoying watching our crazy antics at 2 in the morning.

Can't stop laughing at Austin as the L.

Then we walked home and quick anecdote:I decided to take my shoes off and walk barefoot through Central Square and then spent the following 3 days convinced I had contracted a disease from it. I do not advise walking through Central Square barefoot, ever. I think Chuck and I finally crawled into bed around 3am and set our alarms for 6am because he had to be somewhere a little after 7 to get in line for Commencement. 

I'd say we made the most of our time in Boston in the final weeks.

Reverse Bucket List

***I wrote this post on May 1 and intended to post it sometime towards the end of our time in Boston, but obviously never got around to it. So here it is now, just for fun. 
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I just invented the term Reverse Bucket List.

Moving to Boston for MIT was an amazing decision and experience for us for several reasons. Yes the two degrees Chuck will have soon are awesome. Yes the people we've met are wonderful. But on par with those two things I'd say are the experiences we've had just by living in two different parts of the country. Chuck and I were both born and raised in Kentucky and while we had both traveled some before we moved to Boston, the amount of traveling we've done in the past two years is more than we've done in our entire lives. I tried to count the number of plane rides we've taken and can't because it's so many. I've tried to come up with a list of all the cities we visited and can't, because it's too many to remember. So what I did come up with was a list of basically "things we probably never would have done in our lifetime but did because of where we lived." It's almost like a Bucket List, except written AFTER the fact. Hence: the Reverse Bucket List.

So here's the list: Things We Probably/Maybe Never Would Have Done But Did.

- Skipped rocks on Lake Champlain
- Ate lobster rolls in Maine
- Practiced dunking at the Basketball Hall of Fame
- Fed horses at a farm in New Hampshire
- Drove the Sea to Sky Highway from Vancouver to Whistler, Canada
- Went to a beer festival in Portland, Oregon
- Listened to live music in the park underneath the Space Needle
- Took jumping pictures in the middle of the Badlands in South Dakota
- Cheered the Red Sox on at Fenway Park in the same season they won the World Series
- Saw the Battle of Little Big Horn site, Mt. Rushmore, and the Crazy Horse monument all in the same day.
- Hiked on Mt. Rainier
- Took our car on a ferry to the San Juan Islands
- Rode bikes around Stanley Park in Vancouver... twice.
- Visited NYC twice in the same month.
- Went white water rafting on a river in Washington State. (Chuck, not me. No thanks.)
- Had Easter Brunch on a boat on Lake Washington
- Toured the Vanderbilt family summer "cottages" in Newport, RI.

Life happened

Well. It's been 3 months since my last blog post and I have no other excuse besides I've been busy living life. Not that I wasn't living life the past two years, but I at least had 30 minutes every now and then to sit down and write a blog post. It may sound crazy and you may be thinking "yeah right" when I say this- but I honestly have not had a free 30 minutes to sit and blog since my last post. Our lives amped up that weekend and have only just begun to slow down a little.

Here is a recap of what we've been up to since May 17th.
- My cousin's wedding in Louisville
- Elizabeth and Shane's wedding shower and bachelor/bachelorette parties
- Final celebrations and end of school events at MIT
- We hosted our entire families in Boston
- Chuck graduated (I don't think he and I slept more than 4 hours a night the entire week of his graduation)
- Chuck was in a wedding for our friends Clayton and Christen on the Cape
- We road tripped to Louisville with our UHAUL, Chuck's parents and my sisters
- My BFF Elizabeth and Shane got hitched and we were both in the wedding
- I flew to Minnesota for my best friend Lauren's bachelorette weekend (and made $1800 in Delta travel vouchers from taking later flights both on the way there and the way home. Cha-ching!)
- We drove to West Virginia for Chuck's classmate's wedding and stayed at a resort all weekend
- We spent 4th of July with family and at the Lake
- We drove to Minnesota for Lauren's wedding, which I was in
- We took a vacation to Playa del Carmen for our delayed honeymoon/yay Chuck graduated/we better take a vacation before we start working again
- We finally moved into our new apartment and got settled
- Chuck started work at Amazon
- I interviewed for jobs and recently accepted an offer

Add on top of all those things: cookouts with family, dinner dates with friends, church, church meetings, shopping for things for our apartment, setting up insurance, cable and electric, Gamenight friends events, and probably a bunch of other stuff, and that's been our summer.

I begin work on Monday and hopefully we will FINALLY have our new routine in place. As a person who thrives off itineraries and lists, I am pretty excited to get into a routine again. Not to take away from our summer of craziness though- it was the best summer ever.

Hopefully over time I can share some pictures with you of all of our summer fun. For now, I will leave you with a few pictures from our resort in Mexico, where I daydream about at least once a day.