Thank You Shannon

Friday afternoon, I was down at Tony’s Big Easy for their annual customer appreciation holiday party, when the owner, Tony Sapia, called me aside. He had an envelope in his hand and told me the following story.

He said

I got a phone call the other day and this girl asked me “Do you know Uncle Larry?” My response was “Sure, everybody knows Uncle Larry”. Her answer was “Well I’m his niece”. My answer to her was “Sure” and she replied “No really. My name is Shannon and I’m his REAL niece.”.

With that Tony handed me an envelope with a gift certificate in it and said “Merry Christmas from Shannon”.

So thank you very much Shannon and Merry Christmas in return.

I hope to hear from others what they received in the Secret Santa exchange.

Happy Holidays!!

This is our Xmas card this year, but we’re so far behind I thought I’d put it up here. You will get the photo eventually, so don’t bother trying to print this one.

Hope everyone had a great holiday, and if you’re not back to work yet, hope it stays great.

I-Xmas!!

I-Xmas comes to The Legends of the Falls!!

Beginning Christmas Eve, after the kids go to bed (maybe late) link from the image below to spend some time with your NJ I-kin. Who knows, you might see Santa Claus!

Santa Crawl 2006

We had our third annual State College Santa Crawl last Friday. I was so busy trying to keep the group organized that I didn’t get my normal quantity of photos so I had to wait a few days to collect photos from others on the tour before making this post.

We started at out normal spot – Hooters. Hooters is located on the east end of the College Avenue, the main drag in State College. For those who haven’t been to town College Ave is actually the divider between the town on the south side of the street and the University which is on the north side of the street. Most of the downtown bars are located on or between College Ave and Beaver Ave which runs parallel to College. We traditionally start at Hooters and “crawl” our way westward ending the evening at Cafe 210.

This map should give you an idea.

The bars that we hit on our route and their block number on the map are as follows:

Hooters – block #12
The Lions Den – block #9
Gingerbread Man aka G-Man – block #24
Adam’s Apple at the Tavern – block #5
Shandygaff – block #5
Bill Pickle’s – block #3
Allen Street Grill – block #3
Cafe 210 – block #2

Here’s a photo taken at Hooters as we started

and here’s one of the group onstage at the Cafe at 2:00 am.

I was particularly proud of how many managed to make it to the end. I usually lose control of the group as we cross Pugh Street (that would be between the Shandygaff and Bill Pickle’s) as people decide to branch off to other bars not on the planned itinerary.

We probably had upwards of 35 people participate at one time or another and seven people actually made it all the way through.

To see more photos of our crawl, try this link.

To see photos from past crawls, try the links at this page.

To see photos from SantaCon events worldwide, try this link or this link.

More Thanksgiving




Not much more, really. Basically just some photos. Not enough time to compose an eloquent essay of our trip. We had a really great time. The kids did too. They seem to appreciate seeing family. (Maybe Shannon or Marilyn will tell about Lex’s spontaneous hug of Shannon.)

And we loved checking out Shan’s piece of America. Nice choice, Shan.

BTW, Sorry for the long loadtime on this post. The blog isn’t working correctly (making corrupt resized images) and I had to tweak the html manually to get these posted. If I have time I’ll fix it.

Not quite a zombie but close…

Since I still haven’t been resurrected by the PSU Alumni Association, I thought I’d get some life out of it. My original idea was to be a zombie but I couldn’t find any costume that I really liked. Then I stumbled across this one:

Here’s one of those freaky strange moments that happen every now and then (really odd that it should happen on Halloween). When I stopped into the Tavern, Pat told me that he had just come from listening to Natalie Berrena sing at the Allen Street Grill (on Tuesday’s she sings at the Grill in a duet separate from her bands – actually I should say bands since she’s singing in two of them). Pat described Natalie’s costume (see photo below) as “a cowgirl riding a horse”. I decided to head up to hear a couple of songs and on the way thought that I’d walk in and jokingly ask her to sing “Wild Horses” by the Stones. I didn’t even know if it was in their repertoire but thought it would be funny anyway. Sure enough, when I walk in, she’s singing it. Downright eerie….

Here’s Nat and her Tuesday night singing partner, Ted McCloskey.

For more of my Halloween photos, check out my Flickr account.

Happy St Patricks Day

While I know that State College can’t hold a candle to either NY or Chicago when it comes to celebrating St Patricks Day, we do quite well on our own.

I took these photos tonight as I left the Phyrst, probably the most Irish bar we have in town. I apologize for the quality but they were taken by my phone on a semi-lit street. The first photo is tomorrow’s band line-up. The bar opens at 7AM and they have bands continuously until they close at 2AM.

While I do know Scott Mangene (8AM-9AM) and Tommy Wareham (10:30-noon), I am probably going to hold off on starting my St Patty’s Day celebration until JR and Natalie play from 3PM-4PM.

But I just might be in the minority. This is a photo taken at 2AM of the line that has already started forming to get into the Phyrst when they open at 6AM. You can’t tell too much from the camera photo but there were about 25-30 people already in line.