Happy Birthday to Josh! Thanks everybody for helping us celebrate his birthday, even from so far away!
Josh’s actual Birth Day. (Not really, this is a few days later… after the blizzard of ‘78 was over and Josh & Judi could go home.) So this is George, Big Brother Thadd & Josh:
Baby Josh & the Fam:
Here Josh says, “I am 4!” (I wanted to put a pic with Shan in! Jackie & Grandma & Grandpa Mates are helping to celebrate the big FOUR.)
Here Josh says, “I am 4 (x 8)!” Ha.
Becky got this awesome Celtics green tee for Josh!
And now Josh won’t be so cold with these great gifts from Mom & Dad!
And these South Africa guidebooks will be so useful! Thanks again Mom & Dad!
Watch out Dave! Josh is going to beat you in shuffleboard now! (Thanks Mom & Dad Allen!)
Manhattan is thrilled for Josh’s birthday.
As is Magellan.
Thanks again for the gifts and cards and phone calls and texts and Facebook wall posts. It was a great birthday. We finished it off playing Josh’s new Wii game (the shuffleboard and darts are our new favorites!), and cooking a great dinner that was made even better thanks to a Christmas gift from Shan – Argentinian wine, carted across the globe in her backpack! A great way to celebrate 32 years.
These are the Macaroni & Cheese Taste-off & Overnight Coffeecake pictures (Thanks Gary!!) from our super fun NYE with Gary and Daniel.
All 4 of our homemade kinds, and the low bar set by the 5th, Kraft.
Kraft, "It's the Cheesiest" - supposedly.
Mama Judi's, the creamiest.
Gary's, really the cheesiest! SOOO much cheese. Blocks of cheese!
Gary & Daniel's, the most gourmet!
Grandma Brown's, the sour creamiest/zestiest. Still Jeannette's fave.
Ready for the Tasting part of the evening!
An orange color themed dinner!
So excited!
Overnight Coffeecake has risen, baked and is ready to be flipped!
Yummy!
Flipping and scraping out all the gooey goodness!
So good, so good, so good!
Woohoo! A crazy, weird, fun win! No Pierce, no KG, no Rondo, still no Quis and yet, the Celtics pulled out a W (96-103)! We got to see JR Giddens first NBA start. He was so excited! TA was awesome. All the kids, including a healing Baby, played like little colts (or like baby rhinos), still all wobbly yet gallumping along, trying to go strong to the basket. The young Cs created havoc with all their gangly, chaotic play. And this game felt like it was the longest game ever. The amount of whistles didn’t help. It was crazy slow. Interesting game… and a great win.
We rang in 2010 with our good friends, Gary & Daniel!
We had amazing fun with a Macaroni & Cheese taste off (Jeannette still likes her own best, but Josh was swayed by Gary’s supreme levels of cheese content!), Pinochle game, old school Frogger video gaming and then waking up with Mama Judi’s Overnight Coffeecake! After all that the four of us headed out for a suburban adventure to watch Avatar: An IMAX 3D Experience. We loved it!! It was a great way to celebrate a great 2009 and usher in 2010! Happy New Year! (Pictures to come when Gary gets them to us! – PICTURES HERE NOW)
Shore Leave concert and Boston’s First Night prep on our way to see Sherlock Holmes (loved it!).
Another Friday Night Home loss (97-98) for our Celtics. Good Lord. We’ve attended 5 Friday night home games of the 6 they’ve played. They’ve lost 4 of the 6. Lucky for us, we attended their only 2 Friday night wins (Bulls and Raptors).
And our WAP (Win Attendance Percentage) took another hit. The Celtics have now played 25 games, 5 of which they have lost, and 3 of these we have seen. We are barely keeping our WAP alive with 4 wins (4/7) attended of their 12 home games.
No AI tonight either. We were excited to watch him play. We did see some other exciting things though. Some good, some not so good. Sheed got two super quick fouls, was upset that the ref was standing so close to the bench during a time out right after that and kept talking at him, got T’ed up and quickly tossed. From our vantage point it looked like he had to be held back from the ref. So that wasn’t great. But then, a regular Joe hit a one-try, half-court shot for $50,000 then act that he knew he was going to go in the whole time – he wasn’t surprised at all. Just bowed to the crowd. It was AWESOME. Truly.
We brought the nice camera to the game tonight and took some fun pictures. Can you tell there is a Garnettophile in our house? The pics are after the jump.
» Continue Reading…
We made it to a Friday night win (116-103)!
This was our 6th game (we’ve missed 4 now) and now our WAP is up even farther at 4 and 2. Even better, the Celtics are a respectable 12 and 4.
The game was a bit strange in parts. It was the first time we’ve ever seen “the wave” at the Garden. Not impressed. That is great at Fenway, but weird and out of place at a Celtics game. Maybe OK at Staples, but weird here. And another thing, Sheed is shooting 3s so poorly, but still taking so many, it’s starting to feel the same as when Cassell would just jack them up. But at least there is hope for the future with Sheed that it won’t always feel this way. Tonight we also saw our first huge fight in the balcony with the cops coming to escort the offender out. It actually lasted a LONG time before security got involved. It was a nice introduction for our friend who had never been to an NBA game.
We went to this game with four of our friends from MIT. We had a great time! And, of course, we all went to Beerworks afterwards. But beforehand, the two of us finally made it to the Grand Canal! In order to get so many tickets together just a week before the game, we used StubHub. We had to go to their pick up location wicked early before the game to get the tickets. Apparently that is at the Greatest Bar. Which is not, in fact, the greatest bar. It is SUPER meat head. But we had never been there before and are on a quest to try out new places around the Garden, so we had a drink there after picking up the tickets for the crew. Then feeling emboldened, we continued on and headed to the Grand Canal and had some dinner there. It was great! Really good food. Good ambiance. Good people, both working there and customers.
We didn’t feel like shelling out the extra cash to scalp Magic tickets. But, we wanted to still watch the game with other fans near the Garden. So we decided to branch out from our favorite, Boston Beerworks, and give some other Garden local favorites a try. We know that The Fours has historically been a favorite. We went, we tried, it was really, really lame. The food was barely adequate. No one was paying the slightest attention to the game. It is mostly empty. We decided to leave before the second quarter. We had meant to move on to the Grand Canal, another local great place that we had wanted to try for awhile, but we had to walk past Beekworks to get there. The draw was too great. The TVs, the fans, the great food and smells wafting out, the brews! We couldn’t pass it up. Maybe next time we’ll head over to try out the “new” place straight from the T so it doesn’t require passing our favorite place to get there.
So, Beerkworks? Awesome.
Celtics? Not so much.
Another Friday night Home loss (78-83)! The C’s are killing us! That is three Friday night home losses in a row!
This fall (winter?) we had our dear friends, jOnny and Mel, visit. We didn’t get many pictures, and no great ones. We had so much fun going to Mike’s Diner, hanging out with Gary and Daniel at the Grand Dorchester House playing frogger and having Karaoke battles, and watching the showdown of the Colts and Pats (poor Pats, but Yay Gary). We had a great time and miss our friends greatly!
We missed our first home game of the season Wednesday, but are going strong with a 5 of 6 home game attendance record!
Unfortunately, we also have the poor fortune of seeing what is their second loss (97-86) of the season so far. The C’s are now 8-2 and we have been in the Garden for both of their losses. We are going to start tracking our Win Attendance Percentage… of 5 games, we’ve we’re 3 and 2. Still above .500 so far.
Also, FYI, Ray Allen hates Diabetes. We got some posters and info about it. He is a good man.
