Laurie in Alice: Home, Homecoming and Ms. Madison

Our stuff is here! Friday was a good day. All our things from home arrived and we got our broadband Internet set up on our laptops so we are no longer sharing one computer. However, it's not working on the iPad. We'll figure it out. Eventually.

Now it feels like home. Among other things, we've got our family calendar (thank you Veena, who creates a calendar every year), our wedding photo, our Starbucks Singapore pen holder and Halloween card from Pam.

Shoes I'll never wear here. This isn't even all of them ... I may have a problem.

Mountains of paper and this was from just one box! All the boxes have been unpacked, now we are arranging and rearranging.

Even more exciting news this week is that Katie has been nominated as one of the contenders for Ms. Madison! Click this link to see the Facebook page to support Katie. She is one of four nominees for the honor, with the winner being revealed at the JMU Homecoming game this Saturday, Oct. 26, in Harrisonburg. AND, Megan is coming up from Virginia Tech to escort Katie on the field. Katie was nominated by the Student Government Association for all her service to the University, including her work on the SGA, as an Orientation Peer Advisor, an upcoming leader for Alternative Spring Break and for just being awesome. We so wish we could be there ...

Our Aussie friend Emma invited Greg and me to come with her to the closing ceremonies for the 2012 Masters Games to see the free concert by the famous Aussie band, Icehouse. Emma knew every song and inched us all the way up by the stage! Greg and I didn't last for the whole concert, but had a lot of fun.

With sweet Emma at the Icehouse concert.

Can you see how close we are to the stage??

Iva Davies - lead singer for Icehouse.

In unfortunate news, Greg's hotmail account got hacked. Don't open any emails from stolpgd@hotmail.com. Greg is going to shut this account down and switch over to: stolpgd@gmail.com. Please make that change in your address books.

On the cooking front, there has been one fail and one big success. A little while back I made three batches of a cabbage/ramen noodle salad and ended up with one and a half leftover cabbages. I really didn't want to throw them out, so I found a recipe for roasted cabbage and thought I'd try it. Yuck.


yucky roasted cabbage.

On the plus side, I made an awesome dish using a crockpot for the first time. Greg LOVED it! Balsamic marinated beef and onions with potatoes, carrots, fresh green beans and garlic. Click here for the recipe.