Tolleson Tapestry

Hello Family!

We're counting down the days to Christmas break! As always, October and November were packed with many fun-filled events. We made a trip to Bedford, PA for our friend Karen's wedding the weekend of October 17th. You may have met her at our wedding. She married a wonderful man named Kyle in a beautiful Jewish ceremony. Bedford is a historic small town with ties to President Washington and the American Revolutionary War. There are a lot of covered bridges, and being there in the fall meant that the leaves were stunning. We did manage to be there during a cold spell, so we experienced rain, sleet, hail, and snow all on the wedding day :). 

The supposedly haunted 1760s Jean Bonnet Tavern. Excellent ambiance and food a short distance from Bedford!

Our Fall Concert was scheduled for Friday, October 30, but the weather had other plans. We spent over an hour in our tornado shelters that morning and  experienced flooding in the orchestra room (thankfully no damage). The district canceled all after school activities which meant our concert was canceled. We will be playing some of the pieces on our Winter Concert, Monday, December 14. November 3rd was our annual Fall String Festival, which fell on the only sunny day between two bouts of rain and floods.

Austin ISD's Fall String Festival 2015 at Zilker Hillside Theatre!

Thanksgiving marked the end of the very busy Fall semester of recruitment events for James. Applications to the University are up again, which leads to an always-busy season of application file reading. His class, Organization and Administration of Higher Education, will meet for the last time this Monday and then require a final paper. 

A 360 view standing by the creek at the ranch for Thanksgiving.

For Thanksgiving, which also happened to be our 4th anniversary, we drove out to James' relative's ranch outside of Blanco, TX. There was a bridge destroyed by the floods and a few other detours along the way. His relatives were not able to get into their property for over a week due to flooding. To get to their house, you have to drive through a creek, which makes for access problems when the water is high. The house is up on a hill and safe from the floods, so thankfully there was no damage to buildings, just the dam, rocks, and trees around the creek. After a nice lunch at the ranch, we drove back to Austin for the UT football game. It's a good thing we had ponchos! It rained on and off the whole game even during the half time show which featured Jimmie Vaughan (including him famously playing the guitar behind his head).

Pretty good seats! We were on the 55 yard line. Thankful for ponchos!

Before we head to Kansas for the holidays, we have our Cedar Park Winds Concert, which will include a Sousa march, Grainger's Molly on the Shore, the Leroy Anderson traditionals (Sleigh Ride and A Christmas Festival) as well as a few other nautical themed pieces. I will perform with our choir on their concert and conduct on two band concerts in addition to an orchestra concert. Let the concert season begin!

Duncan posing with the pumpkin.

Rimsky helping with Christmas decorations.

Many Blessings to you all this holiday season!
Hannah and James

Exciting Events Passed and Coming Soon!

Hello everyone!

My apologies for the tardiness on this post.  My life has been nothing short of crazy due to the schedule I've been keeping.  Fortunately, I seem to be maintaining my health through all of it which makes me feel much better about my ability to continue to work and function with my disease taken in consideration.  

My fall has been the busiest I've experienced for quite some time.  First, in August, after I took a trip with Mom, Dad and Grandma Johnston, I auditioned The Fox on the Fairway and haven't stopped since then.  Immediately following Fox on the Fairway, I went into the Follies.

The Fox on the Fairway

The Fox on the Fairway

The Fox on the Fairway

The Fox on the Fairway

The Follies for those of you who don't know is a community event that is done every five to ten years and organized to help a local non-profit; this year that was the Reno County Veterans memorial which was raised $85,000 by the event.  It is organized by high society and due to my connections developed through Stage 9, I was tapped to assist with this year's version.  Unfortunately, it was an extremely rough go for me because I was assisting in development and planning of an event that had not taken place in 15 years.  Any institutional awareness of how The Follies typically "worked" was gone and so it was re-inventing the wheel.  I served many roles during the production (even though my title was Assistant to the Artistic Director): production adviser, scenic designer, vocal coach, properties designer, co-lighting designer, stage manager, managing director and finally, actor.  It was a process that I will never forget and am told by many who are "In the Know" that I was credited with rescuing the Follies.  High compliment indeed.

The Follies

Auditions for the Follies

Follies' Opening Number

Mimi and I at an early rehearsal at Memorial Hall

Did I mention I was a star of the dinner theatre?

Of course, I'm not one who can just sit and do nothing.  In the summer, I agreed to take on a project with the Hutchinson Symphony.  We'll be collaborating on a pantomime version of the Milhaud ballet "The Ox on the Roof".  The presentation will happen during the December 3rd symphony concert. Think of it as a mix between a Charlie Chaplain silent movie and Cirque du Solei's Ka which is a production that is done with jibberish. Our version will of course have no flying involved.  

I've also been leading the promotional effort for the 2016 Season.  This has been a particularly difficult task because the Hutchinson Theatre Guild is now Stage 9 and we have a brand new brand which I am solely in charge of maintaining and executing.  Its been a challenge but one I have sincerely enjoyed.  We finally stuffed the season brochure yesterday and it should be hitting the mail tomorrow and people's mailboxes on Friday assuming all goes well.

And speaking of the 2016 Season, the first production, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [Abridged] auditions on December 5th and I'm already in full prep for this.  Its going to be a fun ride especially since in this production I will be in the director's chair.  I acted in this production in high school during my sophomore year at HHS.  Check out more information at stage9hutch.com.

So, I've got a busy year that doesn't show any signs of slowing down until May.  But I wouldn't have it any other way. Hope all of you are doing great!  

Love muchly, Charles

Fall Things

For those of you not living in Kansas, I hope you have enjoyed fall as much as we have.

The trees have been exceptionally beautiful this year.

We attended the Hutchinson Follies which was a fund raiser for the Veterans Memorial for

all the veterans in Reno county.  Charles had a big part in this and it was an excellent program.  

Perhaps you recognize the veteran below:

Halloween was a busy one.  We had our usual amount of trick or treaters (approx 100) but these

beauties and the beast were special.

We are looking forward to Thanksgiving and of course Christmas. 

 

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

At last, the new house!

As usual, I'm starting with an apology for my tardiness.  Sorry!  As you can imagine, our lives are continuing in a state of transition as we move from wandering grad school students to fully employed, home-owning adults.  With this move, into a home we intend to stay in for years (plural!), it's been fun to review where we've been.  In the last 10 years, since I graduated from East High and my address changed from 457, I have lived at addresses (or PO Boxes) 312C, 512, 410, 290, 5155, 5404, 2138, and now 5232.  That's a total of 8 moves in 10 years, in 5 different states in 2 countries.  Katie follows closely with 7 moves of her own.  Even Scout, who celebrated her 3 year adoption anniversary a week ago has 3 of her own!  So we are quite ready to not make any changes to our address numbers for a while, and thereby avoid the DMV too!

We've enjoyed looking at houses for years, thinking about what we'd want and what we could afford.  But it became a real endeavor kind of by accident when we were walking through open houses and found an agent we liked.  For the geographically minded, we were looking at mostly inner-ring suburbs on the north side of Chicago.  We probably saw around 50 homes, in 7 or 8 different cities, however we couldn't shake Skokie.  We initially met our agent just over a mile from our current house and the home we put in an offer on but lost was 2 blocks from there.  The very first house we walked in to during open houses on our own is less than a block away from our current address.  I don't know Hutchinson's housing stock too well, but Skokie compares well to Wichita just east of College Hill.  It was begun in the early 1900s, grew steadily through the second World War, and then was built out quickly during the postwar era.  It's a fascinating development pattern as some 1930's 3-flats sit next to 1960's ranch homes in places.

The architectural diversity is complemented by really impressive social diversity.  While Skokie used to be known as a hub for Chicago's Jewish culture (and still is institutionally speaking), it has become known as a city with a mix of everyone.  Across the street, we have a family who lives in the house the mother's grandparents grew up in, while next door on either side are a first generation Indian family and a Hispanic-Asian couple and their kids.

We're about a 7 minute walk to the downtown core of the suburb, which has an exciting restaurant scene, and about a 12 minute walk to the Yellow Line el stop.  It's also an 8 minute drive to my work, which is across the parking lot from the hotel everyone stayed in for the wedding.  Needless to say, we're really excited about the location.

But that's not what you want to see, is it?  Well here you go, pictures!  We're going to do it in a before -and-after style, with the original pictures from the listing followed by ones I took today.  Apologies for some of the rooms being less than ideally presentable, we do live here after all!

 Let's start with the front of the house (Google Street View):

Screen Porch off the back of the house:

The basement family room:

3rd Bedroom/Office:

The kitchen is pretty much the same:

And without further ado, here's what took so long! The living/dining room:

Check out behind the mirrors!

And our biggest addition of all:

Our address is 5232 Madison St. Skokie, IL 60077.  If you're in the Chicago area, we have 2 extra bedrooms, so bring your friends!  We're hosting Thanksgiving in a couple weeks so it's our first run as hosts of a big family gathering (14 people!).  Hopefully we can share some photos from the holiday!

Love to all!

Andrew and Katie