Charleston, SC

One of our favorite wedding gifts was an awesome gift certificate to a B&B in Charleston, South Carolina. With all the craziness of consulting, work travel, moving and wanting to wait until the weather was good in SC, it took us a while to take advantage of the gift certificate. But we finally did this past weekend and it was awesome!

Charleston is such a beautiful city - in some ways it actually reminded me of Antigua, Guatemala ... Beautiful architecture, kind of a quaint, colonial feel to the city, fun colors on the houses, gorgeous flowers, some cobblestone streets, etc. It really is beautiful and a great city to walk around - especially when the weather is so beautiful like it was this past weekend!

Not only did we do a ton of walking but we also took a fun horse carriage ride which took us around downtown Charleston and pointed out a lot of the interesting history of the city. Like the fact that Charleston was originally only a 60 mile sandbar and the rest of the city was "man-made"! The city is right on the waterfront - we actually saw dolphins the first morning! - with part of the city actually below sealevel.

And one of the other stops on our tour was actually our B&B (we felt kinda famous when the passengers on our tour ohh'd and ahh'd over our B&B!!). Our B&B was a wedding gift from a father to his daughter - she woke up on the morning of her wedding with a $75k check pinned to her pillow and a note telling her to build the house of her dreams on the B&B's lot. What she built is now sometimes referred to as the Wedding cake house (and happens to be 3 houses away from her dad's house - guess daddy wanted to keep his little girl close by!). The B&B was awesome ... Always nice to be pampered and to have afternoon tea and crumpets on the veranda ;)

We also went outside of Charleston one day to take in some of the sights outside of the city. We toured Magnolia Plantation (another wedding present from father to daughter!) where there are some gorgeous gardens - unfortunately, the magnolias were not in bloom, seeing those reminds me of my grandparents - but there were lots of other gorgeous blooms and Brad and I enjoyed some photography.

The other major activity of the weekend was definitely eating! I guess Charleston is known for some great restaurants and we certainly enjoyed ourselves in that department. We ate some awesome meals at FIG (Food is Good) which is focused on locally sourced and sustainable ingredients, Cru Cafe (a lunch cafe whose main chef was trained at Le Cordon Blue, and note that "Cru" Cafe is on Motley Ave .. hee hee), SNOB (Slighty North of Broad - definitely our best meal, just outstanding Southern style cooking) and finally Hominy Grill for southern style b'fast including grits, of course! I'm pretty sure Brad and I aren't going to eat for another week!



All in all, it was a great weekend and well worth the wait!!

Some much needed time off

As many of you have heard, I recently quit my consulting gig and accepted a new job with Duke. More to come on the new gig but in the meantime, folks keep asking me what I did while I was happily in between jobs so I figured a blog post was in order!

So, besides just recuperating from consulting - which was desperately needed - I tried to recall what else I did for ~2 weeks. Besides the trips to Myrtle Beach and Williamsburg for Easter, the rest of the time seemed to slip by without me knowing it ...

- maybe it was those HGTV marathons or made for TV movies that I kept on getting sucked in to?!

- Maybe the shopping sprees which eventually caused Brad to say that I needed to go back to work asap so that I would stop spending money and start making it again?!

- Perhaps it was finally having time to deal with my car - new brake pads, safety inspection, quality time at the DMV transferring my title and plates to NC and getting my NC license (umm, which may have taken 2 separate trips to the DMV .... new NC drivers have to retake the written test and that is NOT easy to pass without reading that pesky DMV booklet about points and random traffic rules!)

- perhaps the opportunity to finally do some crafting (which I love!) .... A new birdhouse and lamps ensued from that exercise :)


Who knows. All I know is that I LOVED the time off and it went way too fast. Can't wait for retirement ... Only another 30+ years to go!

Happy Easter

Happy Easter everyone! Brad and I spent the holiday with my family in Williamsburg. It's fun to have Natalie around because it gives all the adults excuses to do "kid" activities like decorating Easter eggs and hiding plastic eggs outside. The weekend was a blast - enjoy some pics!

Thank goodness for actually having a security system and not just the sign!

Someone tried to break in to our house this morning! Who knew that we moved to the ghetto (and that the ghetto has street names like Curriculum Court, Scholastic Drive, etc!)?!

Anyway, we awoke this morning to the dog barking bloody murder at the foot of our bed. Unfortunately, we told him to shut up and go back to bed (what can I say, he's the dog that barked wolf! Let's just say he's woken us up many other mornings to point out the passing cars or squirrels in the trees!)

Anyway, a few minutes later our security alarm starts blaring and that we couldn't ignore. We jump out of bed, turn off the alarm, look at each other and then are like, "what the heck do we do now?" .... Seriously, what do you do? Apparently, in our case, you yell "is anyone there?", hear some dude breathing really heavy downstairs and then hear him scurry off through the backyard.

Crazy! We went outside and were greeted by half of the neighborhood (especially the ladies around here who love some gossip!) Turns out that one of our neighbors had seen a man on our front porch, called the cops and drove in to our cul-de-sac to get a closer look. At which point our apparent burglar became all helpful and took out garbage can out to the street (I guess, trying to appear that he worked for us or something) and then headed to the backyard where he busted open a window in our kitchen. The window is what set the alarm off, it doesn't appear that he got much - just my iPod which was by the window (and which I am PISSED about but it certainly could have been worse and now its a good excuse for me to get a new one ;)

Anyway, it's nice to know that the neighbors were looking out; the alarm company called immediately (which was funny to listen to as Brad told them "I don't think anything is missing, nothing seems disturbed ... well, except that it looks like someone took out the garbage." I'm sure the security company was like, what?! Ha!); the Durham cops came quickly; a very nice forensic CSI-type guy came and dusted for prints (no joke! he talked about ridge detail and everything and then determined that the culprit wore gloves).



All in all, it made for an exciting morning!