Friday, August 7, 2009

Never a dull moment!


Life has certainly been interesting here lately : ) Let's see, since my last post I turned 23 and for my birthday, David took me to DC for the first time! We rode the metro in and spent the afternoon in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. It was an amazing experience. I saw the White House and the Washington Monument for the first time.

We've also found a church we both love attending. Pastor Stephen is still in seminary, but his sermons are truth filled and give us much food for thought each week. His wife, Kelly has quickly become my best friend up here. They have an 8 month old daughter and are also transplants from the South : )

This past week David and I travel to Las Vegas for a 2 conferences. The first was Blackhat. This computer security oriented conference was held at Caesars Palace. When we checked in (at 9pm Pacific time), they told us they were out of Non-smoking King rooms, they did however have a King bed in the Penthouse for us! We were upgraded to a room with a great view and jacuzzi tub. Yay early 2nd honeymoon : D

The next conference, DEFCON, was held at the Riviera. No luxury suite here, but this conference had a much smaller entrance fee and I was able to attend with David all 3 days. I learned enough about computers and hackers to know I should probably never turn on my computer again.

Las Vegas itself is not a nice city. While we did find "family friendly" things to do in the evening, if I were choosing a place to visit, it wouldn't be worth all the smokey casinos and inappropriate images we had to wade through to get there. My favorite part by far was watching the Belagio fountain. I could stand there all day...if it wasn't 107 out...David got a big kick out of the M&M Store where we saw the history of M&M's and got to try coconut flavored M&M's for the first time, YUM!


Finally, it was time to head back home. I was ready to go home and actually glad that all our adventures were coming to a close. On the flight David and I were seated with an older gentleman who noticed we were reading a book called "Financial Peace" (highly recommend it! Great for learning finance basics) he asked if he could give us some advice as someone who has been married 40 years. Of course we said yes. He then explained how he and his wife had divided financial tasks and had never had a cross word about money. Later, as we watched HGTV, he recommended we also look into buying a house. Since he was interested in giving input we started sharing our concerns with him and picking his brain for more great advice. He talked to us about resources to help assess what mutual funds to get, advised us what to look for in real-estate and even explained to me why PA is a commonwealth, not a state. Realizing this man had an uncommon depth and breadth of knowledge (and that he now knew where we lived and worked) I decided to find out a little about him. It turns our we had been receiving financial advice from none other than the Chairman of the Stimulus Package board, Earl E. Devaney! I would have never guessed he would have been sitting in coach or be interested in giving pair of newlyweds advice.

So now we are home, but our adventures haven't come to an end! I tried a new chicken a rice recipe that was super yummy (and super easy!) last night and today I locked myself out of the house...Fortunately I had a helpful neighbor who was able to fix that with a wiggle from his credit card in the door jam....and that's why I usually lock the deadbolt!

And that concludes the latest chapter in the "Gainey Tales" : D