Keeping up with the Kurkowski's: July 2012

Hi friends! I apologize for being so M.I.A on this blog the past month, but life is starting to slow down so I hope to get back to my regular blogging schedule!

Andy got a surprise week of free leave time last week, which is always great! It was perfect because my dad's side of the family was having their annual week up north in MN and we were actually able to go! We thought we'd never be able to have the time to join in on the trip, so we were beyond happy. It was such a last minute choice to go up but man oh man did we need a little relaxation time! It is SO nice to be only a 6 hour drive from home for when these things come up! My mom was nice enough to watch Layla for the week too :) We spent a lot of time in the water, on the boats, eating and golfing. My uncle recently bought a "sit-n-ski," which is a pair of skis with a seat on the back. It looks ridiculous but we had so much fun goofing off on it. We had gorgeous weather, just patches of rain here and there.

Golfing one of Madden's courses

I will NEVER get sick of jet skis....

Pre-Storm coming over the lake

Post Storm over the lake

Other than that, we've just been settling in to a new life here in Great Lakes. I've been applying for lots of jobs and already had one interview (I didn't get that job but I have faith there will be more interviews to come). Andy has to be in an in-doc process for the next 5 weeks to "learn more about the command" and then they'll have him start in the lab. We still love our house as well :) I've been living in so many dorms/apartments the past few years having a whole house is like a dream! I still LOVE walking the dog through our beautiful neighborhood too. We have noticed that there is definitely a family of skunks in the neighborhood...yuck...one was even on our neighbors driveway the other night. Andy also spotted a wolf/coyote last night too...eeek! Guess we're going to be extra careful of the critters in our area :)

Some of my best friends from high school were visiting Milwaukee this weekend (where my lovely friend Mara lives) and I made the 1 hour drive up there so we could all have a night of fun! We went to a street festival and saw a drag show. I've always wanted to see a drag show and not only was this one HILARIOUS but it was just such a blasts! It was a fun night with good friends :)

For some reason the bartender put this bottle in the picture? Ruined a great picture! :(

Well I'm hoping life settles down bit now :) it's been an absolute crazy month and I'm ready to slooooow down! Hope you all have a fabulous week and I promise to start blogging more! I'll leave you with a picture of our obsession (the dog of course...):

Well hello everyone! I finally have time to get back into this blog! I'll give you all a run down of the past few weeks, and hopefully by next week I'll have some pictures of our house ready to show you all.

First off, we are back in the Midwest! Living in San Diego was such an adventure and such a beautiful place to live but I must admit, it feels pretty damn good to be back in the Midwest. I'm sure come winter, we'll really be missing beautiful San Diego ;)

The move went fairly well! It did take 11 hours to pack up all our stuff and help the movers get it on the truck. We were exhausted to say the least, and it was the movers who did most the work...ha! We hit the road the next day and drove for 3 days, but did stop to rest at night. Traveling long distance with a pet wasn't too horrible, we did manage to find nice hotels that accepted pets, except for the first night...man oh man that was a NASTY hotel (we're talkin' no hot water, dead ants all over the bathroom, bugs in the bed...). Layla hated the drive. She was nervous and a bit car sick but got better each day. We drove straight to Great Lakes to get the keys to our new house, then hit the road towards Minnesota!

We made such great time driving from San Diego, that we had 2 weeks at home! We didn't get much chance to rest/relax after the big drive because we spent our entire time at home racing around trying to spend as much time with all our families as possible! We barely managed to see any friends too, but hopefully being closer to home will change that. Our little belated honeymoon up to the North Shore of Minnesota was wonderful, but we spent so much time outside enjoying the warm weather up there, that it wasn't a very restful vacay :) (I'll post some pictures of the trip at the end of the post!)

Now we've been back in Great Lakes since Sunday evening. Our friends who also live in our neighborhood brought us dinner that night, they are awesome!The movers brought all our things the next day, and Sears delivered a nice new washer and dryer for us! It's been quite the tiring week: unpacking, painting the house and trying to get everything organized. We are almost done, thank goodness. We're giving ourselves the weekend to rest up then it's back to work for Andy and on to job hunting for me! It's a stormy and rainy day here today so it's been a great excuse to relax a bit finally!

We have managed to have a little fun. We found a YUMMY ice cream place with our friends..I can tell I'll be visiting that place quite often :) We also went back to the place we had dinner at after getting engaged here!

As for our new neighborhood, I LOVE it! It's all active duty, retired veterans or government contracted workers who work at the VA hospital. It feels like such a safe neighborhood, especially with all these military people around :) There's various types of houses in different areas of the neighborhood depending on family size, and your military rank. We live in the cutest little rambler. But there are also duplexes (which our friends live in) and bigger houses as well (for officers and bigger families). Within our community there is a NEX (military) gas station/car wash, chapel, thrift store, hotel and community center...all for the military members living here. Pretty awesome right! We're also across the street from Andy's VA hospital and super close to the commissary. Since this is more of the suburbs of Northern Chicago, it's easy to drive around wherever you need to be...much different than living downtown San Diego!

I'll stop rambling for now and show you some pictures from the past few weeks. And I'll work on getting the house nice enough to take pictures of ;) (sorry they are out of order!)