Stillborn daughter

Whatever it may be - blessing, curse, strange and
terrible gift. We carry this treasure, this deep
sadness, in jars of clay. Already
cracking and held together by
grace.

QOTW: American Movies

Okay, so I need some help coming up with a list of classic/quintessential American movies. Our friend Vittorio, who is Italian but did all his school in England, is coming to teach at Notre Dame, and he asked me if I could think of American movies he should watch before coming so he can start to acculturate himself to the US, especially the Midwest. Europeans probably are already familiar with the "great" cinematic films and the major Hollywood releases, so I'm trying to think of films that are somehow particularly American that he might not have run across. Here's my list so far - can you add to it?

1. Field of Dreams
2. Gone with the Wind
3. Dances with Wolves
4. Hoosiers
5. It's a Wonderful Life
6. Forrest Gump

Dublin

In Dublin - St. Patrick's Cathedral, at the Guinness factory tour, an interesting public notice concerning dogs, a historical marker

Apartment Update

We got it!!!!!!!!!!!! (Please note that I use multiple exclamation marks very rarely.)

Final price: 237.5K - we are very happy with that. Mortgage rates are also around 4.7 right now, so it's an amazing time to get a mortgage too.

Anyway - it's all just happened so quickly, yet we feel very peaceful about it. Christian goes and attends the home inspection tomorrow morning while I do my last day in the lab, and then we fly off for Dublin on Saturday. Pretty wild.

We're very much looking forward to showing it off once we move in! Closing date is April 30. We're probably going to keep our Hyde Park apartment through the end of June. I do my radiation oncology rotation in May, so we don't want to be doing all the work of moving at that time. This way we can be relaxed & hopefully do it with less stress.

Belated St Pat's Day Video (hilarious)

Muppets do "Danny Boy"

More real estate news

Christian and I just made a bid on an apartment tonight. It's been an interesting ride the past week or two. Many of you know we had been looking at places in Hyde Park. There were a couple that we were thinking seriously of buying, but we never got the feeling of a place being 100% right. Then we got the idea of looking in Printer's Row, a fabulous little historic neighborhood that borders directly on the Loop to the south of old printing house buildings from the 1890's and 1900's converted into lofts . It's near a stop on the train from South Bend, and is positioned within a couple blocks of every single El/Subway line in Chicago, and many buses, including great bus connection to Hyde Park. It's really right at the center of everything. So, we started looking just this past weekend at places there.

So we found a wonderful place that felt completely right to both of us, and we're going to try to buy it, and probably move at the end of April. Here are some links if you want to check it out:
Virtual tour
Listing information

Liverpool Station dance

Slumdog Millionaire doesn't have the only train station dance. This commercial was shot at the Liverpool Street Subway Station in London on 15 Jan 2009. Only the dancers knew what was happening
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ3d3KigPQM

A little piece of cool news...

The article that I was working on in the fall and presented as a poster at the radiation oncology conference has been accepted by the best-known radiation oncology journal!

Jakie-pie

Our exciting news: Jake slept through the night last night -- 9:30 p.m. to 6 a.m.!

House Update

OK, so we heard back today that we've been approved for our home equity line of credit on our current house - which means that we have enough dough now to put down a 20% downpayment on our new house -- thanks in large part to parental figures on both sides of the Mississippi floating us temp. loans. The loan approval also means that we can now put our current house on the market. The sign is in the yard starting today. The economy is terrible, but our Oakley neighborhood is apparently the best one in Cincy for real estate, so we're hopeful it won't sit on the market for too long. If you know anybody who wants to buy a sweet house in a cool neighborhood in Cincy send them our way. The new house is pretty cool. A good mixture of things done nicely, ready to move in, and future projects to make it more personalized and homey. Blowing in insulation in the walls, re-siding the house, and finishing the basement will be some of the major projects over the next few years. A big basement playroom and sleep over area! There's lots of room, and lots of bedrooms (5), so come visit often and bring a friend, or your children. We're pretty sure we aint having any more of those anytime soon, except for this September. We close on the new house March 16th. We're moving on the 17th. Abbie leaves for Dominican on the 18th. I'm taking vacation starting the 19th and going to do some work on the house to help us move in (needs lots of shelves in different places). The new address is 4321 Brownway. This whole experience feels like 4-3-2-1 Blastoff. Quite a ride.