Sam and Lis spent a few moments enjoying nature yesterday… then they killed a spider.

We think she’s poisonous?

She’s dead now

Sam, along with a bunch of his friends from JPII, ran his first 5k race today.  The event was held in Greenville and was for a charity to support Pediatric Cancer.  A couple of Sam’s friends were pushing jogging buggies with handicapped kids.  Sam was just running on his own with some other friends.  The BIG news is that Sam earned a 1st place medal in the 16 – 19 year olds range.

On Saturday, Sam and a bunch of his classmates spent the day helping friends and family in New Bern, NC clean up after the hurricane from a couple of weeks ago.  Many people have just been getting back to their homes and starting the clean up process this week.  Photos below were from the school’s Facebook page.

Also just another fun fact, JPII Men’s soccer team lost on Thursday night  3-2.  The game was away so there aren’t any photos, but the exciting news is that Sam scored his first goal!!  Apparently a shot from the left side of the goal that he extended out to the right side of the net.  We were very excited to hear the news and we are very proud of Sam as he continues to improve each year.  Hopefully the coach will give him so more time at midfield as the season progresses.

Sam had a cross country meet tonight at Saint Gabriels Church (Home Meet).  The meet was 3 laps around the Rec Center Socccer/Football field and then around the baseball field, while each lap was 1 mile in length. Sam finished somewhere in the low 20’s out of 38 boys so not too bad.  His first mile was just over 8 minutes which was pretty good.  There are only 5 boys on the JPII team and all of them are also on the soccer team, so when the Meet was over they went over to the soccer field for practice.  Weather permitting they should have a game tomorrow at home.

Sam  and  the JPII Saints were out on the pitch today after an almost 2 week delay due to the hurricane.  Sam played some pretty good defense as JPII picked up 2 goals in the 2nd half to win the game.  Today’s game was played on the Greenville Soccer pitch as the most of the fields were still saturated from the hurricane – this is a pretty nice complex with several fields and really good drainage.  One of Sam’s friends, Blaze, didn’t even make the game today because he was down with his parents trying to clean up/repair their house in Morehead City.  Hopefully things will dry out by next week and we can make up a couple of games.

Since we missed the last 2 years, we thought we might go ahead and pick one topic each Thursday that happened since then and post a couple of photos.  Today’s Throwback Thursday is from October 8th of 2016, when we decided to make a trip up to New York to pick up Lis’s car, stop by Comic Con and grab some NY style pizza.  Ohh, and on the way back we had to stay in a hotel in Richmond, VA due to Hurricane Matthew… quite a trip!

Almost immediately they drove our old car off the lot 🙂

Jaguar/Land Rover of Huntington, NY (Long Island)

Since it would have been her birthday today, it would be a good day to remember a couple of great trips to Elkton, VA to see Lillian.

Sam has been keeping pretty busy so far this year as he joined the Cross Country team and the Soccer Team.  So far the soccer team has won a couple and lost a couple – seems like it is either feast or famine as they either win big or lose big.  Sam has also already had a couple of cross country meets – each race is a 5k event and he has placed pretty well in both.  Sam is also running in a 5k charity event in a couple of weeks.

On Monday, September 10th, Hurricane Florence was billed as a Category 4 hurricane that was supposed to blow straight up through Raleigh by that Friday afternoon.  However, as we got closer to the weekend it was obvious the storm track was changing and the hurricane was slowing down.  If you had watched The Weather Channel even as late as Thursday, you would have seen forecasts for our area of anywhere from 10-30″ of rain and hurricane force winds on Friday.  Well, luckily for us they completely missed the forecast for our area and we ended up only received about 10″ of rain spread out over a few days.  We still had to prepare though, with lots of trip to the grocery store, Sam’s club for water and the Academy Sports at the last minute to get a cooler for ice in case the power went out.  We were lucky as almost 1 million people were out of power at some point, 13 deaths have been reported so far and for those people that did evacuate the area they are having a hard time getting home because of all the flooding.  Anyway, here are some before and after photos – again it turned out to just be a minor annoyance for us so we were lucky.

Ok, so maybe it hasn’t been that long and hopefully our old posts holds up better than that movie did, but we are finally back.  It’s been 2 years and 1 day… we just missed the 2 year anniversary as we have been having problems with the ‘Follow the Blog’ button.  😓  Anyway, just to give you some background information as to how we got here, this whole thing started when our faithful Mac mini was corrupted, most probably by a virus and completely crashed on us.  Luckily we did back up all of our photos before it crashed, but not before all the folders were completely jumbled, duplicated and the dates were mixed up.  So a few months later we bought a new Mac desktop and a new photo library/editing program (Adobe Lightroom) and we started to rebuild our library.  Of course when you have 2 terabytes of photos that process can take some time especially when you work as much as we do.  Finally a couple of months ago we finished that project and started to look for a new blog hosting site.  Of course it’s really never finished as we still have some digital files to go through and a lot of photos that need to be scanned, but that can wait a while longer.

The old site, Blogger, was Free but very limited by size, the number of email followers (only 10) and the amount of storage as well as general design features.  We also needed a site that could import all of our posts.  The best site for all of that was WordPress, it’s relatively inexpensive, has unlimited number of email followers and has some great design potential.  Of course it took us a couple of months to get all that figured out and up and running, but we are finally ready.  The initial design we chose is very minimalist and clean – we will probably mix it up after the holidays and try some new themes, but for now this looks pretty good.

Now that we are up and running you are probably wondering what all you missed??  Well for starters, Alex got a new car right after the blog went down and has been doing well in college (Pitt Community College) studying Health Management Technologies.  He also got his 1st job, Toys R Us and then his 2nd job at Best Buy.  Sam has also been doing quite well in school and last year transferred to Pope John Paul II High School.  He also attended his first prom and he got a new car for his 16th birthday.  Lis has been working as well at Academy Sports, Lidl and currently Publix.  In between all of this there was a vacation to Europe and a vacation to Niagara Falls.  Hopefully that should have you at least a little caught up on our lives.  Phew… the last 2 years have flown by!   We’ll try to get you more caught up with some throwback Thursday posts/photos each week until we have gone through most of the big events.  Don’t forget to sign up for the email list in the top right border and let us know if you have any questions.