One Week

I think the worst part of a field expedition is waiting for it to happen. (In case you're confused, Landon is heading to Antarctica for 6 weeks of hard-core thesis research. It's a great opportunity for him!) We've been busily preparing, buying things, packing, and gearing up for Landon's departure for months. When it came down to only a few days left to spend together, we decided to put them to good use. House cleaning, church responsibilities and friends were neglected shamefully. Instead we spent the time together. Here's what we did with our last week together for awhile:

Monday & Tuesday
These days were spent purchasing wood and Landon spending a whole lot of time building this spectacular masterpiece:

It's custom built to hold everything in our kitchen that previously did not have a place. It makes our kitchen look so much less ghetto, and gives me a lot more space to move around in. It's also about 1,000 times easier to keep clean. It will make my life that much easier while Landon is away. I can't wait until we get it painted (sometime in the spring when we can go outside with it again), it will look even better!

Wednesday
Was dinner at a favorite restaurant, "Craigo's" AKA: The Pizza Pie Cafe. Landon had really been wanting to go here before he took off (I guess he thinks he'll be eating freeze-dried meals for the next 6 weeks or something?) Also, this little baby arrived on Wednesday:

I see more blogging in our future! We finally bought a new camera after my old one was damaged (I won't say by who, he feels sheepish enough). I had been putting it off because I really loved the old one, but I just couldn't send Landon off on the adventure of a lifetime without a decent camera. We're excited because it handles video a lot better than the old one (Epic penguin films may be in our future), and has a large optical zoom, which my old camera did not. So far we like it. Our upstairs neighbors are starting to wonder if we're in some kind of drug ring, since we've been getting TONS of packages lately. What can I say? It's hard to resist free 2-day shipping from Amazon when you're in need of a lot of equipment and are short on time.

Thursday
This was our day off. We stayed home and tried to get the sawdust from the previous days out of the carpet. I'm happy to report that we were mostly successful.

Friday
We both took 1/2 day off work/school to get a few last-minute things done and to spend a little extra time together before the big day. We ran errands to Wal-Mart, 2 libraries, a used bookstore, and DI -- cleaned up the house and watched 3 episodes of Dr. Who. We also made a little detour to "La Carreta" for this tasty morsel:

Chicha Morada - a favorite drink of Landon's from his mission to Peru. I think this is the first time he's had it since he got back.

Saturday
This day was spent mostly loading movies onto Landon's iPod so he won't go crazy over the next 6 weeks. We slept late, then started transferring video files, made breakfast burritos, and in the afternoon treated ourselves to a little outing:

        

Cute movie. Gotta love the dollar theater. Then I made Landon one of his favorite dinners, we glanced at our Sunday school lesson and went to bed.

Sunday
After church and a lengthy nap, we had the culminating event of our farewell week: Thanksgiving!

Landon will miss the real thing, so we had our own delicious Thanksgiving feast complete with turkey, stuffing, and green bean casserole. It was delicious and we had a blast preparing it together. Not to mention I'm set for dinner for the next 2 weeks...leftovers rock!

We also had a mini Christmas celebration that spilled over to Monday. I bought Landon "How to Train Your Dragon" and gave it to him early so he could put it on his iPod. We spent the rest of the time making this:

Love it! Gotta have our little Christmas time cheer, since the month of December will be a bit of a blur, for both of us, I think.

Tomorrow is the big day. I think we're ready. Landon's got all the gear he could ever possibly need, we are both armed with calling cards and lots of contact information, and we started the countdown long ago (41 days!). Bring it on!