Happy 2006! & NE Ohio (Wooster & Cleveland) Holiday Pictures: 12/22-12/25

I think that New Year's is my favorite holiday, followed closely by Thanksgiving. A new year, full of promise - a blank slate. As my great grandmother Nona Amerio would say, "turn the page." I love that!

New Year's Resolutions? To continue losing weight, get my fabulous brass quintet into full swing, get really into arranging music for the quintet. I also want to make more time for reading, yoga, and exercise.

Last night David and I had a low key celebration of our own. We ate shrimp coctail and had a festive champagne toast with our wedding crystal. Because we're an hour behind Times Square, none of the local stations were airing a countdown, so instead we watched one of the latin channels airing from Acapulco, which is apparently in the same time zone (?). We didn't understand a word they were saying, which was kind of nice. They sure were happy and energized, salsa bands pumping out great latin music and mariachi guys gyrating and flailing to beat the band. Feliz 2006, indeed!

I thought I would add some pictures to this post of our wonderful trip back East to Ohio to visit our families! First, we traveled to Ohio to see David's family who lives in Wooster. (Anne, David's sister, doesn't live in Wooster, but she'd flown in from Florida to visit.)

Here's the Lewellen's living room. Notice their festively decorated tree!

Mimi, David's mom, had decided that it would be a lot of fun to host an "open house" party (open house, I only recently learned, means you can come and go as you please within the time frame given) for the Lewellen Family! Even though I choose not to be a Lewellen by name, I am definitely a Lewellen in spirit through my marriage to my sweet David. It was the Friday before Christmas (the 23rd) from 4-7pm.

Here are some pictures from the open house. This is the spread of goodies on their dining room table:

Here's Mimi, my fun and fabulous mother in law, busy at work in her kitchen!

The open house party was a LOT of fun. I hadn't met a lot of these people, friends of David's parents or people David had gone to high school with who now of course have their own families. I was enjoying interacting with so many new people (and valiantly trying to remember all the new names!) that I didn't take more pictures that night. But the one I did manage to get was an adorable one of Pamela, David's sister in law, reading to the children present that evening:

Now this next one requires a bit of explanation. David's Dad, Dick Lewellen of Lewellen Design, is an industrial designer. So he's always inventing these really neat things, like this window suet bird feeder. You just fill old tuna fish cans with suet and this feeder holds them in place for the birds, which flock to their window from the woods that surround their beautiful home (which, I might add, Dick also designed and had built!). I think the nice little roof and perch were kindly ergonomic for the birds, don't you?

Mimi requests that Dick remove the tuna fish can labels before he puts them in the feeder. I would agree with her aesthetics here. :)

I caught this fun picture of a little titmouse sitting on the feeder happily munching suet:

Here's a really cool action shot I managed to snap accidentally as this little titmouse flew away from the feeder:

I really want Dick to build us one! Can you imagine how entertained our cats would be?!! Here's the kitchen area where that picture window is located:

On Christmas Eve, I took David's car up to Cleveland to visit my best friend Karin! She and I have been friends since 1993 - 13 years of hugs, tears, shopping, sidesplitting laughter, and all of the other countless facets of our friendship. I think this picture of us, taken by her beloved hubby Paul (also an Oberlin grad!) may well be my favorite picture taken on this trip!

Everyone who sees pictures of us together always asks if we're sisters. I think that's a compliment to both of us! {*modest smile*}

I got to see Karin & Paul on Christmas Eve, which was a huge treat for me. They shared an early Christmas Eve dinner of this incredibly delicious pumpkin casserole, which was sweet and cakey like a pumpkin pie, as well as apples, clementines, and sparkling water. It was so yummy! Best of all, we all talked and talked for hours. It was so great!

Paul & Karin are blissfully married and will celebrate their 3rd wedding anniversary next August. Here's an adorable picture I took of them by their tree, which looks just spectacular from their bay window outside of their Chester Parkway apartment in Cleveland:

This concludes the Northeast Ohio (Wooster and Cleveland) picture tour! I'll add some more posts that will include the Southwest Ohio (Cincinnati and Waverly) portion of our trip.