Birthdays and Snow

So for Glenn's birthday last weekend I tried to make a cake. He had requested chocolate and decadent so I found a baileys chocolate cake recipe I thought would fit the bill.. Oh what a disaster. Pretty much every single way it could go wrong, it went wrong, including not tasting good. I blame the recipe. ENTIRELY. Look at this work of art. I should have just stopped at the first inkling of disaster but I kept going..



Sooo the second attempt went A LOT better. Chocolate Reeses cake. Yummy.

Glenn's parents and family friend came up on Saturday and fortunately helped us eat it. They also brought us our wedding anniversary 3rd anniversary gift. It was a long time coming but worth the wait! Beautiful handmade mahogany china cabinet. Gene is quite the woodworker!



This past weekend we headed out to Asheville for one of Glenn's brother's 40th birthday party. Unfortunately we were snowed in and weren't able to see the sites but we made the most of it and had a good time playing board games and playing in the several inches of snow.















Once we got back home and discovered we had as much snow as Asheville, Pasha had a grand time running around and checking things out. You can see a video of her here. The snow has been pretty but im glad its melted off the streets today and life can go back to normal.

Happy Birthday Glenn!

Just a few of the reasons why I love you...

you've been a cat and computer lover since the beginning


you know how to succeed



you are willing to dance through this life with me :)


you smile and you laugh with me


you drink rum punch....with 2 fists


you can proudly wear glasses


you create scale models



and you look great standing in an Irish pasture

What more could I ask for?


Happy Birthday darling! I hope this year is a good one. :)

Xmas and New Years, 2009

We had an absolutely wonderful Christmas and New Year's vacation in 2009. The bulk of our time was spent at St. George Island on the Florida panhandle, but we also stopped in Charlotte, North Carolina and Conyers, Georgia. We got to spend a good amount of time with both of our extended families, plus experience some unseasonably nice weather at the beach. All in all, it was a great vacation — perhaps our best one yet!

After first leaving the Triangle, we drove to Charlotte and stopped there to have a Christmas get-together with my brother Mike and his family. My parents and brother Paul drove up from Athens and met us there as well. We caught up with Mike, Martha, and the kids, toured their new house, and later shared a delicious Christmas dinner with a traditional Scandinavian feel. (I found out that I actually rather like glögg and pickled herring - I guess it's something in my genes!)

Soon it was time for us to leave Charlotte and continue on our southward journey. Our next stop was in Conyers, where we stayed with Heather's parents and were joined by the rest of her family. We celebrated Christmas morning there with the family tradition of "monkey bread" for breakfast, followed by opening of gifts around the tree. Later, we headed to Heather's grandmother's house to celebrate with the extended family, and a good time was had by all.



Next came the great journey down to Florida, which we drove as a caravan of vehicles united by walkie-talkies and guided by not one but three different GPS units. It turns out that Garmin and Tom-Tom either use different data or different algorithms, because we had some confusion when different GPS were telling us to take different routes to get there. But we sorted it out and made it safely to our destination, a rented beach house named Eye Catcher. The house was absolutely huge (four stories, seven bedrooms, even an elevator!) which was good, as we had quite a crowd coming — 14 people all told. It was located all the way at the end of the island, so while it was quite a drive to get there, the ocean views were absolutely spectacular and we had a corner of the island beach basically to ourselves.



Our stay at the beach was filled with non-stop activity yet highly relaxing all the same, if such a thing is possible. We played board games, card games, party games, and video games until we'd all had our fill — even Heather's cousin James had had enough Rock Band by the end of the week. We walked up and down the beach, collecting shells and watching the dogs run and play in the waves. (Pasha and Red both played to the point of exhaustion, to where they would all but fall over the moment we got back inside the house.) Other members of my family came down to stay in another beach house, so we got to visit and play games with them, and we brought both sets of family together one evening for a big dinner. Heather and I went jogging to keep preparing for Heather's upcoming triathlon, and found that a barefoot walk on the beach makes for a lovely "cool-down" at the end of a jog. In short, it was a wonderful time.



We stayed at the beach through New Year's Day (and yes, we managed to make it to midnight on New Year's Eve, if only just), then on January 2 we had to make the long drive back home. Google Maps and our GPS told us that we could save several hours by driving up the coast along I-95, but that turned out to be a mistake. I can never understand how I-95 manages to have total gridlock out in the middle of nowhere, miles from any city of any size, but this time was no exception. After several hours of frustration, we ended up taking state highways across South Carolina to rejoin our usual route along I-85 instead, and eventually made it home, tired from the long drive, and sad that the vacation was over, but happy that we had the vacation and that it was such a good one.

We hope your holidays were wonderful as well!

Something New to Tri

I have been thinking about doing a Triathlon for several months now but had not committed to it for fear that I would end up not doing it or not being able to. I wasnt sure it made sense given that I hate to run, didn't own a bike (and have barely ridden one in years), and had no place to go swimming, plus the fact that even though I've been working out regularly for most of a year now, I'm far from in shape. Nonetheless I still just wanted to do it - and that counts the most in my list of pros and cons. So I've signed up for a super-sprint triathlon in Raleigh on May 23rd. Super-sprint is the shortest distance tri's come in so its no Ironman event but still something that will require much training on my part. Glenn and I bought bikes last weekend, I've found a beginner's training program (and started the first week!) and even convinced a couple of friends to sign for the the tri as well! So really that only leaves a couple of steps right?

1) Figure out how to jog for more than a couple mins at a time without dying
2) Find a non-gross-me-out pool to swim in
3) Figure out a bike route that wont get me killed by passing cars
4) Don't quit
5) Train for many days, weeks, months
6) Don't even think about quitting
7) Figure out what the heck you wear in a triathlon
8) Lastly, don't die while attempting to complete the triathlon

Not much left at all! :) I'll let you know how its going.

Christmas decorations

Just thought I'd share a few pictures of our holiday decorations. It's hard to get good pictures without the camera flash, but with the flash turned on, I just can't capture the way it actually looks and feels... so my apologies for the blurriness!

CSA

We joined a winter Community Supported Agriculture a couple weeks ago. I had heard about it back in the spring from some friends and it sounded like a really neat idea. You pay a lump sum up front to a participating local farm and then every week you get a certain amount of fresh produce/eggs/meat for a period of weeks. I believe ours is ten weeks and we are two weeks into it. So far it's been great! We are getting to try a lot of veggies that neither of us have eaten before or pretty much strayed away from. So far we've gotten a hubbard and acorn squash, kale, collards, spinach, kohlrabi, variety of lettuces, Italian sausage, breakfast sausage, and whole wheat flour. The kohlrabi was the weirdest veggie we've gotten so far, followed closely by this baked hubbard.. green alien egg anyone?


I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with it yet, you are supposed to be able to use it like pumpkin.. we'll see. The acorn squash was really yummy though. I found a recipe in Joy of Cooking and it turned out really well. This was definitely the first time either of us had acorn squash and Glenn who is leary of winter squash, loved this combination of baked squash stuffed with apples, dried cherries, orange zest, apple cider, a little brandy and some cinnamon and nutmeg. I think my favorite thing so far has been the kohlrabi, probably cause it was delicious simply sauteed in a little butter. I think it would be good just plain raw too.

Another reason to love fall.. strange veggies!

MACE 2009 (warning, geekery)

This past weekend I went to MACE (Mid-Atlantic Convention Expo, a backronym if ever I saw one...), the "largest gaming convention in the Carolinas." I have no idea if that claim is true, but it was certainly a good-sized event, with a whole lot of gaming going on. My past gaming convention experience consists of only two extremes - Dragon*Con, attendance about 30,000 (!), and a one-day event put on by the UGA Gamer's Association, attendance about 30. So this event was, obviously, somewhere in the middle size-wise - I'd guess about 300 people were there, more or less.

As I see it, a con like this is a chance to try new games that I've never played before, so I consciously avoided any games that I'm already familiar with. As a result, I got to try five different game systems: Call of Cthulhu, Dark Heresy, Changeling: the Lost, Kobolds Ate My Baby!, and Savage Worlds. Conveniently, this also let me play in five different genres as well: 1920s supernatural horror, science-fiction Spanish Inquisition, modern urban fantasy, silly fantasy, and weird Wild West.

I quite enjoyed all five games - the people running the games at this con were clearly very good at this, and everyone I met seemed easy to get along with, which was a pleasant surprise. (Obviously, when you sit down at a gaming table with five strangers to play a game that half of you haven't ever played, you're taking quite a gamble...) The most impressive by far was the Call of Cthulhu game - the game master had detailed floor plans of the haunted house we were investigating, plus individual "newspaper clippings" that he handed out as we did our research in the town archives, and the journal entries from a madman that we found genuinely gave me chills, which I wouldn't have thought was possible in a convention environment (i.e., sitting at a table in a hotel ballroom with a half dozen other games going on around me.)

There were a few minor glitches - the gaming areas were all massively over-air-conditioned, while the hotel rooms themselves were overly warm, and two of my games were double-booked with other games at the same table - but that sort of thing is to be expected. All in all, I had a great time, and schedule permitting, I will definitely try and go again next year.

Anyone still reading this? Wow, brownie points for you! Now, go and read something more interesting! :-)