Just a brief update!

Hi, all!

Yes, we are still alive and kicking out here but we have been super busy. We should have some more updates coming soon, but wanted to give a quick list of what has gone on, and what's coming up:

1) In September, Jen was given additional clients to add to her workload. Overall, she has enjoyed the additional hours, but the driving is getting to be a lot for her. Her three regular clients were within a few miles of us but the newest are in San Ramon and Pleasanton, both of which are drives, especially when you factor in traffic. She also works long days back to back on Thursday and Friday, but lighter ones Tuesday and Wednesday, so that can add to the stress. So far she's handling it, and it appears to be temporary, so for the time being she is enjoying her clients.

2) Both of us have been working pretty hard at school. Thankfully, the term is almost over for us both. Jen ends around December 6th and Jeff will end sometime in mid-December.

3) We had Halloween at our house, which consisted of having maybe a dozen children get candy, and we enjoyed classic Halloween movies. This year it was Garfield's Halloween and Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

4) Speaking of Hitchcock the Saturday after Halloween we went to the San Francisco Symphony to enjoy the live Hitchcock concert, where movies were played with live music. It got us more into Hitchcock films, so once school is over, we are adding more to our growing list of to-see movies!

5) On November 17th, we reached a milestone: 9 years of marriage. This would have been great, except that Jen was recovering from a cold that kept her out of work the entire week, and Jeff was in the middle of getting sick. We did manage to survive a run to Jamba Juice for smoothies, and Jen's sister was kind enough to make us some dinner, but we decided we will have to have a do-over, so we're planning to go out next month.

6) We celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday with Jeff's parents, but cooked for a small army! We made three pies, mashed potatoes, stuffing, yams, corn, salad, green bean casserole, and a 17-pound turkey. So there's plenty of leftovers at the Perry house!

7) We skipped the mayhem of going out on Black Friday and did some online shopping instead. We got a few good deals, so the next few weeks we'll be getting some nice packages in the mail.

We have a lot to look forward to in the next month including:

- Our annual photos
- Our anniversary do-over
- Christmas
- A few surprise outings
- And a lot more!

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving as well!

I'm Getting Better at Updating!

Last Thursday was Jeff's birthday. Although we took a lot of photos, they are in the middle of being uploaded, so look to the side for a more updated slideshow soon!

Because Jeff's birthday was in the middle of the week and it wasn't a "big" birthday (one that ends in a 0 or 5), we decided to have an easy day.

If you don't know, one of Jeff's favorite things to do is go to San Francisco. Despite both of us having grown up in the bay area, there's always a LOT to do, even for us locals! So the first stop we made was to the Ferry Building. There was a farmer's market going on, so we wandered through that, as well as eat our lunch there at Gott's. It's a diner-style burger place that we went to for Jeff's birthday a few years back, but because he was under the weather, he couldn't eat and enjoy the food, but this time we made up for it. We had a great lunch of burgers, fries and shakes. YUM!

After that we decided to walk down to Pier 15. This is where they moved the Exploratorium (click here for their website) originally located in Golden Gate Park. The Exploratorium is an awesome museum with a lot of hands-on exhibits. We went a lot in elementary school and one of the most unforgettable exhibits was the dissection of a cow's eye, but there are also weird motion experiments, things with magnets and more. Although it's been a long time since either one of us have been, the new site actually felt bigger than what we remembered during our youth. One of the funniest games was a fishing game. The object was to catch fish by texting, and make sure that you caught enough fish to survive, but allow enough in the water to maintain sustainability. At first we just stood there and then we figured we could walk around the museum and still text the program, thus making our high score (the time we were alive) even higher. We actually have a pass we got from Groupon, so we can go back again!

The fishing game we "won".  I think our record ended up being about 90 minutes!

On the way home, we stopped off at Palo Alto to pick up one of our favorite pizzas, Patxi's. It's a deep-dish pizza place right off of University that has a huge variety for everyone, including vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options. Originally we had considered going out to eat there, ubt because it was warm and we were getting tired, we opted to pick up a pizza and take it home instead. That worked out because Jeff got to open a few nice presents: A Halo charger in his signature bright green from my folks, and 2 sets of tickets from me: One for the Star Wars exhibit at the Tech Museum, and another set of tickets to go see John Williams and Steven Spielberg at the San Francisco Symphony. The tickets for the symphony are for next Monday, and the exhibit is open-ended, so we will have to plan that day out.

In other news, Jen's "staycation" is over. She enjoyed having the week to relax and unwind without having to worry about work, and tomorrow she's going back to the trenches. On the plus side, a good bit of the house was cleaned while she was home and we ate more at home (except for Jeff's birthday of course!)

Also, the Perry Farm is continuing to provide us with more goodies. Today we were able to pick more squash and cucumbers (and FYI: The Spanish and Tagalog word for cucumber is "Pepino"!). They are actually quite large, and very fresh and fragrant. When we picked the first cucumbers and cut them up, the smell carried throughout the house. Pretty impressive for something that's mostly water!
 

The "Pepinos"!

A rather large squash. In fact, it's bigger than the microwave it's in front of!

Well, hopefully we will be posting more photos of our recent adventures, and what we have coming up soon. Until next time!

Summer Madness

Hello, world!

Yes it's been a while since the blog has been touched, BUT a lot has gone on. It's been a busy summer for us all, so let's just take it away!

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At the end of May, Jen returned to her schoolwork full time. She won't get to graduate until December 2015, but she's happy to be back in school. Now she is in the process of locating a site to do her externships at. She has approached her employers at Easter Seals, as well as other sites in the area, so it seems she may have some options.

Speaking of work, Jen is still doing well at Easter Seals. She had a cut in hours when a client went away to India for over a month, and it wasn't certain that she would have a new case. Her bosses have been giving her hours with administrative tasks, so it's been okay for the time being.

Her office also changed locations. When Jen was hired on in June of 2012 there was talk of them opening offices in Fremont. Unfortunately that fell through but they located a place in Hayward that was supposed to be opened October of last year. There were a lot of structural setbacks, and moving in kept getting delayed, but finally on August 1st, her team moved to the Hayward offices. Her commute went from almost an hour to 15-20 minutes at most, and no more paying for parking. Plus, the office is down the street from two of her clients so she can go in the morning and hang until her sessions start!

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Speaking of school, Jeff has just enrolled in two classes at Ohlone, the local junior college. He will be taking business classes, and ultimately his long-term goal is to get his BS, his MBA, and his Series 6 and 63 tests. In the meantime, he is going to try to see if he can get his AAs done.

New York Life is continuing to grow, and Jeff is now licensed to practice in four states: California, Idaho, Utah and Arizona. He has a few deals that he is working on and is still trying his best.

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Just prior to the 4th of July, we acquired a new little friend! While cleaning out the garage, a chihuahua wandered in and decided to stay here. At first we thought that he escaped from a house and his family would eventually come claim him after the holiday, but it never happened, so we kept him, thinking we would find him a home. About 3 weeks in, though, he started to have seizures. We suspect that our new friend was epileptic and so, instead of taking care of him, his family just kicked him to the curb to fend for himself. Fortunately for him he wandered to our home. He's been a great addition, and is a cuddly little guy. We were calling him "Puppito" because we couldn't think of a name, and it eventually morphed to his current moniker: Pepino, which means "cucumber" in Spanish (and apparently in Tagalog too!) We have him on meds to control the seizures, but he had another one yesterday, so we are looking for a good vet for him!

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Speaking of dog news: Chris has finished his chemotherapy. We were lucky that he went into remission after his second dose of chemo, and treatment went well until the very end. A week after his last treatment, Chris seemed to be off. We took him to our regular vet, who recorded his temperature as being 105.7 (normal is about 101) so we took him to BAVS, his oncology team. Chris ended up having to stay overnight and they struggled to get him to eat. For a week, Chris had a hard time eating and had to have the bland chicken and rice diet. He soon was back to his usual self, and about 2 weeks ago he had his first post-chemo visit, with an ultrasound of his spleen. The doctors told us that Chris is not only in clinical remission, but his spleen, which was dotted with cancer, was actually clear, and he was officially in COMPLETE remission! The only caveat is that he will need to visit BAVS once a month for the rest of his life to monitor his lymph nodes, but hopefully we are out of the woods for a long time!

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We have our garden up again in the front yard again, since the dogs are too tempted to  pull at the plants and eat the veggies. We've had a lot of success with tomatoes this year, and even grew one that weighed a pound and a half! Frank (short for Franken-mato) is going to be made into something very delicious! We have some corn in a row, as well as zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, pumpkins, eggplants, and some random peppers and herbs. The only fruits of our labor so far are the tomatoes, but everything else is slowly getting planted into the ground. It looks weird to have the garden out there but it works for us!

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We  have a few things to look forward to this fall. Jeff's birthday will be in a few weeks, and Jen is taking a week off of work to do some "fall cleaning". We also have preparations for the holidays, including the annual photo shoot for the Christmas cards. This year, Jen's also taking photos for a friend's wedding, so that will be fun! We hope you are all having a great summer and would love to hear from you all. Until next time!

May Day!

May - July is always craziness at the Perry's and this year will be no question. Mother's Day, Father's Day and the 4th of July are obvious, but we also have several birthdays: Jeff's brother, Ryan; Jen's dad; Jen's brother-in-law, Mike; our nephew William and then Jen's mom and sister.

Add to that some VERY fun things we are doing, and that adds to the chaos.

Jen signed up to raise funds for work, and as a result, she received two tickets to the Easter Seals Gala. We will get to go to San Francisco for another black-tie party, and this time there is live music by Javier Colon, the winner of The Voice.

Before we party, though, that day is also the Autism Speaks walk. We sign up every year but something always happens and we don't get to go. This year we took the day off, and so we will do the walk first, come home, clean up and party in the city.

Also that weekend is the big Cooking for Solutions celebration at Monterey Bay Aquarium. Every year there are a ton of cool celebrity chefs there giving cooking demos. Last year we went and heard an awesome lecture by Alton Brown. Not sure who we might see this year but we want to try!

This ought to be the last "free" month for Jen. Her summer semester starts June 3rd, and she is taking 9 units (a lot for summer session). We will hopefully get some fun in before the work starts.

Yeah, we fell behind...

... But we are still here!

It's been INSANELY crazy here in Perry-land. We have had a lot of little things going on and here's just a brief update on everyone:

In January, Jen celebrated her birthday. It was fun and we spent the actual birthday celebration in San Francisco, going to museums, hanging out, and just taking it easy. She also had a "girls day" where she hung out with her friends and just relaxed, which was what she wanted.

February seemed to be an interesting month for us. We took Chris in to his vet visit and they told us that he lost a lot of weight and to give him some pills to help his liver. The numbers were very elevated, and despite the medication, he lost weight even faster. We opted for a scan, and the vet found cancer in his spleen. It turns out that Chris has lymphoma, and we have been taking him to a specialist for chemotherapy. So far he has done well. He put on all his weight (and then some), his diet is back to normal and after the first two treatments he was considered clinically in remission. We hope to get another scan of his spleen soon to see if there's any change, but for now he's still our happy boy.

Because of this, we decided to have a "family trip" with the dogs, and so we drove up to Donner Pass together to have a snow day. We had always talked about going to the snow with our sort-of huskies, and we thought now would be as good a time as any. We didn't think that Kandi, at 14 and highly arthritic, would appreciate the cold, so we left her with Jen's sister while Chris, Fox and Jake came with us. We were sure that Chris would hate the snow; after all, this is a dog that can't stand dirt, getting wet, or anything remotely dirty. But he LOVED it! We posted a video on our Facebook pages of him galloping through the snow like a puppy. We took plenty of pictures so the day is documented, and we hope to go again next year with a cancer-free Chris!

Jen also started back in school... sort of. She was not able to get a clinical site to do her externship, so although she is enrolled, she hasn't started actual classes yet. This will change in about a month when she will have to take 3 courses. Her graduation date is set for December 2015, which feels like a long way away, but it'll be here soon!

Jeff is continuing to progress at New York Life. He has expanded some, and can now do policies in California, Arizona and Utah, with other states on the horizon once his business grows. He is also looking into taking the Series 6 and Series 63, so that he can continue to expand his services.

Jen's work is continuing to expand as well. In February Easter Seals broke into regions and now Jen has only clients that are close to home. They have changed her schedule around a little but she is now set with four clients and continues to work Tuesdays-Saturdays. Now that there are more staff members, she can look into taking days off as needed, something that was a problem for a while there!

Just as work started to have a normal routine, Jeff was given a calling at church to be the branch clerk. Basically, this means he helps out with the finances with the Spanish branch (congregation) that shares our building. This means that Jeff, after meetings and everything else, spends around 5 hours at church on Sundays. This puts a little kibosh on the one shared day off we have, but we have managed to get in fun date nights or dinners here and there. Also we have finally joined a gym after trying to figure out which one to join for the past 6 months. City Sports hasn't opened yet (they are planning on it sometime this week) but it'll be fun to hit the gym together to swim or play raquetball.

We hope everyone else is doing well and hope you enjoy hearing about our updates. Hopefully more pictures and fun adventures will be posted on this blog. Stay tuned!