Europa!

Nolan and I leave for Europe in 4 days, so I thought this would be a good time for an update! Europe is pretty much the big news for us, and we cannot wait! We both desperately need a vacation, and 2 weeks in a place far away is exactly the key! We'll be visiting England, France, and Holland, and I'll try to post some pictures when we get back! I bought a couple of ponchos, since I plan on quite a bit of rain (but who knows!), and so we'll be looking super-attractive in those in all the photos.
In case you're wondering, Milo will also be well-taken care of. We have a short-term houseguest living with us until he finds an apartment, and he will be Milo's best friend while we're gone. They've already bonded while watching Pride & Prejudice on the loveseat together, and he seems to not even hear Milo's crying in the mornings, so I think it's a match made in heaven!
Nolan has been in Fresno for 6 weeks, on a mandatory rotation down there. Fresno is severly under-staffed, and so UCSF requires each third year to spend a rotation there helping out. This was Nolan's turn! He comes home today (woohoo!), and let me just say that from talking to him, there is less than a 0% chance we'll EVER live in Fresno. I hope I didn't just jinx myself.

That seems to be it for now--I'll post more after we return from Europe!
-A

the point

Since I obviously don't write in here as much as I should, I'm just going to go ahead and post my personal blog link on the top right corner of this blog (go see), and direct you there in between the months that I do actually write something in here. That one tends to be a little less family-oriented, but it will give you an insight into our lives still. If you can't find it on the sidebar for some reason, it's also here:

http://www.thatneighbour.blogspot.com

However, the point of having this site is to update on our sub-family, the San Francisco Caldwells, so here it is. Nolan's knee-deep into his third year of medical school. He's still trying to decide on a specialty, but he's loving each different rotation. So far he's done OB/GYN, Anesthesiology (a favourite!), and is halfway through his internal medicine rotation. Next up: Pediatrics in Fresno. So yes, he'll be gone in Fresno for about 6 weeks in August/September, but we'll be making roadtrips and such to pass the time apart. Fortunately, they provide housing and food, so we don't have to worry about that.

Something else that is still relatively new, is Nolan's new hog. We got our first motorcycle awhile ago, and we're loving it! Nolan takes it to the hospital every day, and he will have that down in Fresno to get around, as well. One of the hugest perks is the parking situation--a motorcycle can fit on any curb in the city! So now we can go to Bi-Rite for ice cream after work, and not worry about finding parking :)

As for me, I'm still at my job at McKesson and loving it! It's a really great place to be right now, and I love my coworkers and feeling challenged in my job :) I've gotten my adult learner for the literacy tutoring I am doing, and she is a really neat girl. She is super motivated, and we're loving working through Twilight together once a week.

N and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary on July 21, and it occurred to me that time is going by way faster than I'd bargained for. I wrote a little bit about all that in my personal blog, which you can see here.

Right now we're busy planning a vacation trip to Europe (our present to ourselves for our anniversary!)in October, but of course there won't be much to write about that until we're there!

For now, that seems to be all I've got. I'll try to be more diligent about my posting in here.

-A

Hello again

Well, it's certainly been awhile, but you come to expect that now here, don't you? Here we are in (almost) May, I am almost 3 months into my newish job, Nolan is done with his boards and is officially a third year medical student, and Milo is learning to keep his mouth shut in the mornings so that we can sleep longer. There is certainly no huge news in our lives, and that is probably why I have been terrible at keeping this up, but if you are interested, we have been up to the usual: me singing at church, Nolan going on a motorcycle trip with my dad, me having jury duty, Nolan taking his huge test and now learning the hospital ropes...we got new furniture? We got iPhones? See what I mean? Nothing exciting, just the day-to-day stuff...I guess this will just have to be my update for now until there is more to say :)

A

newness

It's been awhile since I last updated, so here we are:

I'm officially almost done with my 4th week at my new job--I can't believe time has flown by like this! I love it so far, although I feel like I am definitely being challenged and still trying to wrap my head around learning everything. There is SO much to know here! But I definitely am loving being in a huge corporation as compared to a small business. Oddly enough, I feel more taken care of here, and like there is more room to breathe and more opportunity to grow. It's fantastic. I am extremely busy all the time now though, as a result, so that is why I have been writing less and less! I also have been hitting the gym hard to keep my energy levels up, and am even working with a personal trainer, who is great! I am exhausted after the gym, but after an hour I feel fabulous again and am already seeing results! I have also been perfecting another habit: getting up early to spend time with God. It's something I have never had the motivation to do before, but finally I decided I would just start committing to it, and so far it's going great. Nolan appreciates it too because it means there is already coffee for him by the time I wake him up for class. He is really hitting the books hard for his boards at the end of March, so I rarely see him home before 9:00. That last hour of the day and waking up with him are my two favourite parts of the day, and I cannot wait until he is done and has at least a little bit more time! He starts on the wards with his rotations in April!That is about all I have to update with us. Next week I start orientation for my volunteer work with Project Read and Bay Area Literacy. It is a program that has volunteer tutors teaching adults to read a few hours a week. Illiteracy is something I feel strongly about, and Nolan finally told me that if I care about something, I will ACT on it...and he is totally right. So, I'm going to! Milo is still kicking and wandering around the house, in case anyone is wondering. He gets into trouble almost daily and we recently decided we are going to try and toilet train him (almost as a joke), like in Meet the Parents! haha! My mom got us a kitty toilet training kit, so we're going to launch that sometime soon! Pictures to come :)
-A

an even NEWER adventure!

Well, that ride is over. I accepted an offer to work at the McKesson Corp. as an HR Admin./Project Coordinator, and will start in a week! What a huge blessing! It is SUCH a great opportunity, and I am thrilled to be a part of their team.

I am trying to live up my last week of freedom, and enjoy every moment in the january sunshine...which has been SO nice. I was biking around today getting a new passport wearing only flipflops and a t-shirt (and pants of course), and was still too warm! How nice!

Nolan is still busy studying for his boards in March. April is when he will start his full-time rotations, so until then he is finishing up classes and studying ALL the time. He is working really hard and so far his work is paying off--his practice test scores are coming back great!

Nothing else new here. Next week we'll be back to normal life, but until then, feel free to call or email me or leave comments and let us know how YOU are doing!

ps-we also love snail mail :)

-A

A New Adventure

Today I was laid off from my job. Yes, I will be sad to leave my wonderful coworkers and everything that is Magley & Associates, but I am trying to see this as a new adventure. I had a great run there and learned a TON, and am now ready to take the next step, whatever that may be. We laid off almost a third of our workers, and so those of us who left, went out at noon, ready to take on the world. I then spent the next hour of my life putting my business cards to good use with Nolan:

I then set about finally getting some Christmas pics on here...
This was what happened when Nolan was WAY too into Twilight and tried to "suck my blood" right over my vein -- can we say hematoma?

Here is my Opa reading up on the finer workings of the opposite sex:

And here are the men of the day, doing what I would assume to be man things outside.

And my lovely (matching) cousins!


~A

2009!

Happy New Year! Sorry about the lack of posts...I am still waiting for our christmas pictures to migrate from Nolan's camera to our computer so I can post them on here! Disclaimer: the following may all look familiar to some of you. Sorry I'm not more creative.

Last night we went to my aunt's house in Livermore to visit their family and Oma, who is still visiting from the East Coast. She made a delicious all-German dinner, complete with Knoedels and Gluehwein! Nolan was broken in to delicious German food and drink, and we fought over the last Knoedel, which is a sort of potato dumpling that you MUST eat with gravy or it's a little...well, look:

Apparently my dad calls them sinkers because they sink right to the bottom of your stomach, haha! And the Gluehwein was fantastic too! Hot mulled wine is a tradition at Christmas in Germany. Literally translated it means "glowing (as in heat) wine", and it is delicious!


I guess that is all for today. Still no pics. I actually HAD the camera in my hand this weekend while I was sitting AT the computer. But alas, no cable to be found. Sad, too, because we have an EXCELLENT video of my dad hula hooping on the wii fit. So close, yet so far...
Also, I am just about done with this cold weather. For Christmas, Nolan got a Brookstone alarm clock that does all sorts of things, from my dad, whose name is Bob. Normally that has nothing to do with anything, except the alarm clock is also called the "Bob". See for yourself here. His reasoning would be so that now, Nolan can take Bob everywhere with him. Bob will wake him up in the mornings. Bob will sit in his office with him. They both thought that was pretty hilarious. ANYway, so we check Bob every day to see how cold it is in our house. Yesterday when we woke up, it was 46 degrees INSIDE our house! There's something we need to fix...
~A