Willises, wine and wagging tails....my first blog.

I have never had a blog of my own before. I am an avid blog reader and obsessively check for new updates of my favorite blogs. In fact, I often wonder what I did before I had blogs to read. I so enjoy reading what other people have to say and do, even if it is just every day stuff. So, even though I am slightly intimidated to write about my own life, I thought I would give it a try if for no other reason than to have a record of our families life! And with that.....here we go.

I'm not sure exactly what this blog will be all about but one thing is for sure, it will about willises, it will be about wine and it will of course be about wagging tails. I hope to sneak some other stuff in here too like cooking/food, crafting and baking.

Ok well I guess I'll start at the top with a little bit about the Willis family. My husband Matt and I met when we were undergrads at Cornell University in the Spring of 2002. We were so in love with each other that we decided to go to grad school together and moved to Champaign Illinois in 2004 where we currently reside. Matt proposed in 2006 and we got married the following summer at Cornell. My smarty pants husband received his PhD in chemical engineering in December and we are currently waiting for this slow poke to finish her degree in Microbiology before entering into the big bad working world.

Here we are on west campus of Cornell University where we met.
And walking together at Cornell!

These are two of my favorite wedding pics. The first is during our ceremony in Sage Chapel. And the second was taken inside the AD White library inside Uris Library. All credit for the above images goes to our awesome photog, Frank Dimeo!

Along the way we have acquired two beautiful but naughty dogs. We rescued Ivy (can you guess where her name came from??) in the summer of 2005. She is a rottweiler/coon hound mix. We like to call her our special needs dog because she has various issues ranging from severe noise phobia and anxiety to a general dislike for most people. She has a shortlist of about 10 people who have security clearance to enter her personal bubble. She also detests any kind of delivery person, UPS, USPS, fedex, she hates them all. But she is a loyal and loving baby and we could not love her any more. We love her so much that we didn't hesitate to spend thousands of dollars getting her "doggie ACL" repaired and rehabilitated last year.

Me and the big puppy, Ivy!

Dog number two we rescued shortly after we got married with the theory being that Ivy needed a playmate to keep her entertained. Sage (bonus points if you can figure out how she got her name) is a basset hound/spaniel mix and has been described (not by us) as the cutest puppy in the world. While Sage is adorable she is also very stubborn and a highly skilled destuffer and destroyer of toys. She is also a bit of a drama queen. When she was teething and getter her adult teeth she would cry and whine. We asked the vet if this was normal and he informed us that he had never ever heard of a dog doing this. My dad affectionately calls her "treasure" for ability to cause mischief and wreak havoc on the house. Again we adore her and treat her like our child! Matt and the little puppy, Sage.

So I guess that covers the Willises and the wagging tails, so what about the wine. Well, Matt and I are self-professed winos. The people at our favorite local wine store wave to us when we come in the door and no longer need to ask what our last name is when we go to check out. Our love for wine started shortly after we started dating. We started trying some how shall we say, bargain wines (aka bad wines though not all bargain wines are bad wines!) and eventually our love for wine was sparked by the fab wines of the Finger Lakes region where Cornell University is located. We would go wine tasting and some of our favorite memories have come from visiting those wineries together. Since we have moved out of the Finger Lakes region we have grown to love all different kinds of wines with emphasis on the sparkling wines and sauvignon blancs of New Zealand! So, over time our love for wine kind of grew like our love for each other. It is something that we both absolutely love and we will be writing and reviewing some of our favorites.

Well that's it for now I suppose. Just a little intro to us!