Just a preview

We have just returned from vacation - an awesome roadtrip from New York to Tennessee. We saw great friends, great music (6 amazing Phish shows) and had a blast (although got a little wet during some of the outdoor shows!) Brad is going to post some more pics and a review of the shows but I wanted to put a little teaser out there ...

Proof that we just drove 2300 miles in a week!

Brad, looking hot as always, and joking around with his rain gear during another very rainy tailgate!

We're loving Durham!

So, Brad and I moved to Durham about 6 months ago and so far, we are loving it down here! For whatever reason, it just feels like home - we loved the DC area (and still do - can't wait to go back and visit) but that always felt like a temporary place for us. So now that we are in NC, we're trying our best to explore the area and do as many random things as we can find (and trust me, random things are in abundance down here in the South!)

Anyway, our first fun activity was going with our buddies Beth and Jason to a local brewery - Trangle Brewing Company. Triangle Brewery is basically run by 2 local guys who bought some brew tanks, set up in a warehouse in a kind of run down area of Durham and have managed to make it all work. They recently added 3 new fermenters to the mix which was neat to see and good to hear that they will be increasing their beer production - hopefully we can find their bottles in the store soon. For now, we have to settle for getting it on tap at some local restaurants and for the (free and all you can drink!) beers at the brewery tour. Fortunately, Beth and Jason are expecting (congrats you guys!!) so we had ourselves a fabulous designated driver allowing us to partake in all the free beer we could drink while we were on the tour or hanging out afterwards playing ping pong or cornhole in the warehouse. Super fun and I think we'll be back in the future for more free tours!



We've also started to check out our local farmers' markets ... the one in downtown Durham is great and has a neat community feel. We'll have to check out the Raleigh market soon - it is supposed to be enormous and brings in farmers from all over the state.





(Check out the lady's shirt - it says "Namaste Y'all". Awesome.)



We also went to the annual "Taste of Durham" where local restaurants come and set up in tents in a big open parking lot. You buy tokens and can go around and sample the various cuisines - the number of really good restaurants is one of the things that we have been pleasantly surprised by here in Durham.


Back in college, the only cuisine we sampled were the food options on campus or Cosmic Cantina (still my favorite burrito joint in the entire world!) But turns out that Durham is actually considered a good food town (Bon Appetit magazine named Durham/Chapel Hill "America's Foodiest Small Town"). So, Taste of Durham is intended to showcase some of that local flavor - plus some live music, a beer and wine garden, and (randomly) a snow sled run!






And finally, topping the random things to do in Durham - we recently went to the Great American Duck Race (rubber duckies that is!). The event is an annual fundraiser for the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle which picks up unused foods from local restaurants, caterers, and the aforementioned Raleigh farmers' market and redistributes to hungry families in the area.

We donated some money to the program and were given 2 rubber duckies in return which we could enter in the race. The whole thing was kind of hysterical - imagine a whole lot of people running around with rubber duckies, decorating them and then letting them loose in the little river (complete with event staff wading behind the ducks with tennis rackets to move the ducks along if they got stuck). Our fabulously decorated duckies (ahem, thank you very much) didn't win but we had fun and loved the randomness of it all!




Hopefully many more fun local Durham area activities to come!!

We made the front page of the newspaper!

Ok, I admit it - that headline was a bit of an exaggeration for dramatic effect ...

We did indeed make the front page of the newspaper but it was only the front page of the Chancellor's Ridge (our neighborhood) community newsletter. Not quite the front page of the New York Times but probably about as close as we are going to get!

Anyway, guess not much excitement happens in the 'burbs because our recent home intrusion made the headlines:

Crime Alert: A house on Curriculum was recently broken into while the people were home. A burglar rang the doorbell, heard the dog barking and then went around the back of the house. The burglar opened (or reached into an open) window and stole whatever was in reach (iPod, cell phone, loose change, etc.)....

Ha, we're pretty much famous now, right?! I'm impressed that the neighborhood gossip machine is working so well -- the details of our little event made it in to the very next issue of the community newsletter (and even had the requisite gossip mill exaggeration - or maybe my cell phone (and loose change!?) were stolen and I just didn't know it!?)

Time for a Duke photo shoot

It's been a while since we've posted some photos of our cute pup, Duke, so here they are!



At this point, I was torturing Duke by making him sit far away from his favorite red squeaky toy so I could get some perspective shots.



Right as I was about to snap a close-up of the octopus, Duke decided to take matters in to his own hands. Or mouth, I suppose.



Just a few more shots (love the tongue sticking out in the first one!)

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!