B-E-A-U-TIFUL

Hello friends! Greetings Family! It's been a wonderful spring so far. Far better than Fall and Winter! Todd conducted a Folk Song Suite with his students at Columbus North. The school has been great as a partner in education, Mr. Stultz and Mr. Burton are amazing mentors! See more pictures of the April 23rd concert here! See my trip to the Bloomington Farmers Market on April 25th. We did the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure a few weekends back! Pics to be posted shortly. See Todd's Feb 27th Dodgeball game with his band kids! A few pics from Easter. Basic highlights of our spring break trip to Sioux Falls, SD. And fun in the kitchen in early March. Busy as bees, more to tell soon! Love, Cait and Todd

I won!!

Free Chipotle for the office. Well, the marketing department. Instant hero :-) Thanks, Chipotle! And thanks printing department for equipping me with free lunch raffle tickets others call business cards! Cait

Extra, Extra!

(note, something has gone funky with the code for the site and I'm working on it!-CM)
Hi all! There's plenty of fun news in our world and we couldn't wait to share it!
NEW BABIES!!
Aiden Healy, born 12/31/08 to Todd's cousins Angela + Josh Healy, live near Chicago.
Lucas Derenski, born 2/16/09 to Cait's cousins Suzanne + Mike Derenski, living in St. Louis area.

WORK
Against all economic odds, Cait was offered a position at Indiana University as a Graphic Design Specialist in the Residential Services and Programs department. She accepted it late last week and Todd is thrilled for her. She starts on March 2nd and has no idea what she'll use to decorate her office as most of her knicknacks are Purdue memorabilia. While she loves Indy, she really looks forward to gaining 16+ hours back of her life that she spent commuting weekly.

Todd is having a great time student teaching at Columbus North High School. He's had great success with students he is teaching privately and loves the program. He conducts their high school basketball pep band and will be involved in their school musical this year. He did luck out with 4 consecutive snow days, producing a 6 day vacation and a 1 day work week. Graduation is so close we can smell it (and it smells like spring and freedom!)

Cait has been elbow deep in fabulous freelance design with wedding and marketing clients. Todd has sacrificed the kitchen table for use as Cait's desk until we move into a bigger place. Bless him. She will launch her business' website in early March. The focus will be accessible, personal, wedding and baby related design of invitations, formal stationery, announcements, etc. She has several brides currently on board, including her girls Sarah and Carrie! Cait loves helping others create what they're looking for while educating them on how not to get taken advantage of by the industry. If you know of someone who might be interested in any type of design work for hire, pass them along to my website after March 2nd, there's nothing there now. Friend and Fam discount and a chance to be featured on the site as an example of a successful client! Or they can email me at cm.holdthecheese@gmail.com

FAMILY
*Chrissy, Cait's sister, got into Dental School!! She's headed to Arizona this summer to attend Midwestern University's campus with the dental school (there IS a campus in Illinois, hence the school's name.) We're super excited for her!
*Max, Cait's brother, got into Indiana University and will attend beginning this Fall! We are thrilled to welcome him to southern Indiana and can't wait to help him move!
*Lauren, Todd's sister, is doing great at Ball State University in her first year. She's studying Nursing!
*We can't wait to head to Chicago this weekend to see Max and Sam, Cait's brothers, in the annual GBS V-Show! A true family legacy :-) It should be a quick turn around weekend but well worth it! Bonus visit with Cait's aunt and uncle!
*Our family friend, Carolyn, who has been battling cancer has had great reports come back and is doing super! We continue to pray for her and her family and will be walking in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure (with the AIGA Indy Team) on April 18th to honor her and other friends who have had cancer. You can make a donation here or join our team if you'd like! Our joint goal is $300.

We're planning our summers and trying to make it to the 8 weddings we're invited to. Hooray for love, egad for airlines and the economy.

That's it for now. Glad we have so much good news to share- it's been long coming. Take care and let us know what you're up to!
Cait and Todd

Happy New Year!

We celebrated New Years in style with bubbly and Cait's parents. Thank you Carson Daily for counting down the seconds for us. INCLUDING a leap second this year... what the heck is that! We enjoyed our thawed out wedding cake topper (7 months prematurely but the baker didn't wrap it in a seal for it to stay good(?) for a year plus it was taking up 1/4 of Cait's parents' freezer- much needed space with two teenage boys at home!) The cake tasted pretty good for coming out of a deep freeze and looked nice too. It's been a great, challenging and exciting 5 months so far, almost 6... We're excited for all that 2009 will bring and are thankful for the amazing family and friends that we have. 2008 was a great year to get married. This year we'd like jobs, to stay healthy and to see more of those people we hold dear! Oh and Todd would like to survive driving 2 hours round trip for student teaching daily... off to his first day at Columbus North! :-) Love, Cait and Todd

2008 'Unorthodox' Holiday Newsletter

Greetings, near and far!

Welcome to our first Holiday update letter! We're going to simply fill you in on what's happened since our last post with a brief recap and links to each of our postings from earlier this year!

June-

Welcome!

July

Boxes, Boxes Everywhere!

Harnessing the Power of Craigslist + Fam News

August

We got Maui'd!(+ links to honeymoon pics!)

September

Strike up the band

Chicago Flooding

Caution: Professional Drivers, Do not attempt

October

A liberated weekend

Another One Bites the dust - Mike's Wedding

November

2008 Marching Band Season is DONE!

A road trip north brought us to Purdue for tailgating and trying to stay warm during the annual attempt to wallop the Hoosiers. The final score was 62-10. I think the Boilers stayed warmer in the stands with all that cheering!

 

Megan, James and Cody were good sports and tolerated our novice tailgate- what happens when all you know of game day is waking up early and reporting to the band drill field? No clue how to tailgate. We cooked up egg dishes the night before enthusiastically and doctored some hot chocolate. A great day was all wrapped up and packed back into the Jeep when we went to start the car and, click. Oops, we left the trunk open, the light stayed on and the battery died.

 

Hooray for friends who jump the car in the cold! We headed home happy, tired and with 2 i.u. fans sleeping in the backseat. Todd tried a new Starbucks energy drink on the way home. It worked, but yuck.

We wrapped up November with Thanksgiving at Cait's family's home in Glenview, Illinois. We played plenty of games with the family, mostly game system based (see glazed eyes battling with fake guns!) 

Cait's grandpa, Boppa, headed into the hospital the day after the feast with some complications from an "indoor climbing" accident a few weeks earlier. Some broken ribs and complications kept him over night and we're still hoping that he'll make it out of the hospital before Christmas. Hard to keep that octogenarian down. Good times were had meeting Cait's sister Chrissy's boyfriend. Then a jolly 5 hours road trip home landed us back in Bloomington.

Todd played his Senior euphonium recital on the 6th and had a great turn out! His parents drove down and Cait's family stayed over night. It was great to see our families and to enjoy watching Todd cap off his studies with an exciting and challenging performance.

Then we shared the news we'd learned of after Grand Nationals let out in November: Dec 2 was Cait's last day at her job. In a wave of layoffs, she was thrown a surf board and told good luck. A non-profit has to do what a non-profit has to do in a down economy with budget woes. She's thankful to have family and friends that care and feels lucky that at least she has experience working the system and job hunting from when she was laid off last May. How did people job search before the internet, or before Careerbuilder and Monster for that matter?! We're optimistic but with hiring freezes and layoffs surrounding us, a little part time work will go a long way until a full time creative position comes along. Cait's looking at places with LARGE in-house creative/marketing teams or design agencies/studios where her position is valued and not the first to take a budget cut. Hopefully she can stay in Indy but we will have to see. We'll keep you posted on search leads and results but it looks like nothing big will happen before the ball drops in New York in a few short weeks.

In other news, just today we came home from church to find a light haze of smoke in our apartment. Our olfactory skills told us it was plastic, maybe even electrical and we scanned the vicinity.  We opened the dishwasher and located the culprit. 

We can no longer measure 1/4 cup of anything, thanks to silly slots on the top rack that don't hold onto things. Then MUCH to our surprise... after countless loads in the dishwasher and living in our apartment 5 months, we discover another heating-element victim: a cutting mat that we've never seen before. That's right. 

Someone who was in the apartment BEFORE us had done this and never knew... It had dropped to the back of the washer, was clear and had been burned through the element so that it just sat in the back. We're so glad it never started a fire!!!

And to end on a happy note, we made some awesome chocolate cookies 

(email me for the recipe!) just yesterday and have a ton to enjoy and cover up the smell of melted plastic with. Todd has finals then we head to Chicago land for a reprieve. Tell us what you've been up too?! We're dying to hear from friends and fam that we rarely see!

God Bless and keep smiling!

Cait and Todd

(Leave a little message if you stopped by to read this! We love our friends and family and would like to know if it's worth keeping up our public banter...)

2008 Marching Band Season is DONE!

Shout it from the roof tops! Our crazy fall with marching band centric life is over! The final commitment for both of us happend over the past 5 days at the same event! Music for All hosted the Bands of America Grand National Championships at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis for the first time. Columbus North, the high school where Todd is on marching band staff, placed 9th on their day of competition and advanced to the Semi-Finals. A very competitive event, they did not move further but had a very successful season of growth and improvement, their reputation for being a great band getting stronger. (see Cait's take on the event: Tales of On-Site Event Graphics Production)

As Todd begins his midterms, Cait slips back into the pattern of pseudo-sanity, creativity and perhaps some freelance work before the holidays.

To get everyone up to speed, much has happened since Mike's wedding in late October!

Cait traveled to St. Louis from October 16-18th to help put on the Super Regional Championship for Music for All. Fast paced, unforgiving and again, highly rewarding. Quick turn around straight into more prep for the Grand National Championships in a week or two. Attempts to see local family were thwarted with the aggressive event schedule and left Cait wanting to see her St. Louis family even more!

November 1 : We headed to Purdue to witness a hard earned Boilermaker victory over Michigan at Ross-Ade Stadium! We caught up with Cait's mom and brothers and saw some friends. It's hard when you get very little time to talk and really visit but enjoying a game will tide us 

over until the next time. Pictures from top right, Sam greeting us at Slayter double fisting Dr. Pepper, Todd hugging Max and the Purdue Band gets to turn their hats around for a Big Ten win!

We were also lucky to get to hang out with Libby Gephart at the game while her dad was busy. I'm a pushover: totally caved to her request for cotton candy. And boy was it good! She shared some but ate it like she hadn't been fed in days. One behavior we left in our youth.

The following weekend was spent actually being in the same place for once! We cleaned, and went to see the movie "W." and ate a meal together! Simple things really but out of the ordinary for us right now yet. Planning for Thanksgiving in Chicago with Cait's family, Todd's upcoming Senior Recital at IU on euphonium, and Christmas in Indy & Chicago. Wrapping up his coursework, Todd is looking forward to student teaching this spring!

Next weekend is our trip to Purdue for the game against Indiana with some friends. After that, the holidays come fast and furious but we'll share our adventures as the season progresses.

Have a great week!

Cait and Todd

 

Another One Bites the Dust

Mike and Steph got married on Saturday, October, 25, 2008. Congrats, you two!

More pictures here!

Cait drove to Chicago, celebrated, stayed the night and drove back home. Todd went to a band competition with the marching band he is on staff with. Neither can wait for marching band season to be over :-)

That's all for now!