Life in Radford

Radford's White Christmas

2009-12-19T09:27:00.000-05:00

Where did I wake up? I thought I lived in Virginia, and no longer lived in a land where one actually had a white Christmas. I apparently was wrong. We got about a foot of snow (w/ drifts of 2 feet near the front of the house) yesterday. They say we could get another 5 inches today. It's the most snow I've shoveled here since I moved here in 1999. Hello white Christmas!!!

Trip Report: Hood River to Portland

2009-06-07T18:34:00.008-05:00

This is posted in reverse order of the trip. I recommend you scroll down to the first Trip Report and read up from there. Sorry :(

Hood River to Portland

Our flight didn't leave Portland until the afternoon of the next day. So our original plan was to stay another night in Hood River, and camp one last time. But somehow that night in the hotel spoiled us. That and logistics and practicality reared their silly heads. So instead, we went into Hood River to a coin laundry and washed the suitcase full of "civilization clothes" - everything we packed for Texas. Then while they were in the wash, we went next door to the UPS store (with PLENTY of loading and unloading space) bought a box and through our camping clothes into the box and mailed them back for only slightly more than it would've cost in luggage fees from American. Then we re-taped and shored up the poor box that we had sent our camping gear out in (but had arrived looking like it had visited an industrial blender) and mailed our camping gear back. Really, just thinking about that nice shiny UPS store standing next to the coin laundry like a beacon of hope and adequate parking - we couldn't bear to say we were camping one more night and going to try to fight our way to the UPS store in Portland to mail things back and still make our flight to Denver the next day. So with our house in order, we headed back to Portland to get a hotel room for the night in the city.

First we stopped by the local cemetery. My father's mother's ashes and his sister who died as an infant are buried in Hood River. My grandma was buried at a time when the VA side of the family couldn't make it out for the service, so Brett and I went to pay our respects at the plot. A pleasant surprise was finding out that I have family in the area and they keep the grave up with flowers for the holidays, so they had put some flowers on for Memorial Day since it's also my grandfather's marker and he was a vet. It was all around a really nice visit and time of remembrance.

On our way back we went back on the historic highway and stopped at the Bonneville Dam (check out the movie here). They're open for visitors to come and look at the salmon ladders and they have a lot of educational information about what they do to conserve the environment. One of the more obvious is that the salmon in the area need to swim upstream to spawn when the time comes, so they've build a series of platforms that they have to fight over (they always pick the hardest way to go) that will get them around the damn. Then they replaced the turbines in the dam so the little "Fingerling" fish that are the product of the spawn can make it back to the sea without getting hurt. You can sit, as we did, for hours and just watch the fish swim by in underwater viewing areas. One guy even sits by everyone and counts the species as each one goes by. There were quite a few fish while we were there - and it wasn't even peak spawning season. I'm sure that gets to be a hectic job during those months.

Unfortunately the old power house was closed, so we didn't get to tour that but we did get some fun pictures of giant sized circuit pieces for Brett to show his Electricity and Magnetism class.

After touring the damn and watching the fish, we headed over to the Bonneville Fish Hatchery. It's a project run by the hydroelectric company as a way to help the environment. Native Americans still have fishing rights along the Columbia but because of human intervention the fish populations have never fully recovered. In order to help with that, the hatchery takes some of the spawning salmon out of the fish ladder and uses them to make nurseries full of fish that they can reintroduce. They do the same with the rainbow trout when it's not salmon spawning season. For a quarter you can feed the baby trout a handful of fish food - which we did. But having seen "Dirty Jobs" I can say - I washed my hands immediately afterward. I know what that stuff is made of! :D They also have a pond where they keep a few prize specimens including Herman the 11' 70-year-old sturgeon and a couple of 3' rainbow trout. Talk about crazy! The trout were so large their bodies were arced and they couldn't hold their tails up. Mostly Brett just licked his chops and wondered if they would still taste as good. :D

Links to pics here

Trip Report: Mt St Helens to Hood River, OR

2009-06-07T15:39:00.009-05:00

Mt. St. Helens to Columbia River Gorge Historic Highway to Hood River

Hold on tight this is a long day packed with lots of things we did, so it might get a little long.

Before we left Heart of the Hills, we finally gave up on our pan. Among the other camping gear that we bought at Walmart on the first day, we bought a pot and a pan. That pan was the worst excuse for Teflon the world has ever seen. Even bacon, with all that grease, stuck to it! We decided to just do an easy breakfast of poptarts instead of trying to clean it for camping. So we got up and ate poptarts. I had forgotten that I don't really like those. :) So we went to an espresso shak before we got back on the interstate in Castle Rock and had a nice liquid caffiene filled breakfast instead. :)

We stopped at the Mt St Helens visitors center for a short hike and to get a stamp. It's not a national park, but as a national volcanic monument, it does have a "a" stamp that they gladly put in my book. We also found a couple of cool tees while we were there. Alas, much like the Tetons on my trip to Yellowstone, I was doomed to not actually see the mountain from the vantage point because of all the clouds. At least the weather was nice.

We drove down I5 until we got outside Portland and then made our way to I84, jumping off it as quickly as possible onto the Historic Columbia River Gorge Highway. It's the old highway that 84 now runs parallel to and as far as I can tell was meant to be scenic more than anything else. The start of the road is the Crown Point Vista Visitors Center. It's a rest stop like like a diamond is a rock. It was beautifully made and lived up to its name with a great view of the gorge area. After the rest area, the road has about 70 waterfalls within a day hike of it. Many of them are less than a mile from the road. So we went waterfall questing the rest of the day.

The first falls we got to were Latourell. It's a short hike that technically makes a loop, but would require walking on the road, so we went to the other end and turned around. We did get some nice pictures of the concrete bridge that the highway went over. We also laughed when I hadn't set the GPS on the right mode and Sarah (our GPS guide) kept demanding that we turn left on the road - which was 50' over our heads!

Bridal Viel Falls were next on the list. It's a fairly short hike, but the steepness isnt' insignificant. Unlike most falls hikes, where you hike upstream TO the falls and that keeps you motivated, this was downhill the whole way - leaving the less excited hikers in front of us wondering if it the falls would be worth the climb back out. Sadly for them, they turned back and gave up, not knowing they were just around the bend from the falls. Literally, 10 feet more and they could've seen them. It was sad. But the falls themselves live up to the name with good volume and lots of splashing.

The next falls were Wahkeena Falls. They were donated by the same family that donated the Latourell falls along the trip. It was just a mile or so hike to see the falls and they were beautiful. The next day, when we looked up from I84 on our way back into Portland we could see how much larger the falls were! But from close up, you only get to see part of them, but it was a lovely hike. After doing the loop we see that the next falls on the list are only half a mile away, so we get on that trail and leave the car parked at Wahkeena. After a half mile, we reach Multnomah Falls. The most famous of all the falls on the road. Actually after half a mile we reach the gift shop, restaurant, cafe, and all the goodies that come along with the falls. The falls are further up a paved path. Once we were there Brett talked me into a hike to the top. It was a one mile uphill-the-entire-way hike. I had seen a shirt in the bookstore that said "Got Oxygen? I climbed 260' to the top of the falls" so I figured, no biggie. We headed up. It was very, very steep and unrelenting. The farther up the trail we went the fewer people there were heading back down - people peeled off like flies. At one point, hopping over someone else's vomit in the trail I gasped for air and wondered why I was so incredibly out of shape. We finally made it to the top when Brett said "Congrats! You just did 15% grade for 1 mile and walked up 620'!" Uh yeah. Apparently I had a moment of dyslexia when I read the shirt. If I had to struggle up 15% grade, I'm not embarressed - if it was 260' - well, then that'd be another story. :D No matter how you dice it, it was a long hike and after walking back down, we still had another half a mile back to the car. We took our time getting back and got in the car and drove straight back to Multnomah Falls and made a beeline to the cafe and got ourselves soft serve cones to celebrate! Then we went in the gift shop and bought spoons and tees to further celebrate. :) All told it was about our 8th or 9th mile of hiking that day so even though there were 2 more falls to see within a mile hike of the road, we called it a day and packed it in and kept driving to Hood River with no more stops.

For our anniversary my parents had generously bought us a room at the Best Western - Hood River Inn for the night. We got an amazing room on the water with a fireplace. We went out for dinner at Full Sail Brewery in Hood River and watched the wind surfers on the river do tricks while we ate and drank and topped it off with a chocolate stout brownie with Tillamook vanilla icecream on top. Then we went back to the room and I slept for about 12 hours. Brett apparently called family and did early check in for our flights and all of those things that needed to be done. :D I just couldn't resist the comfortable bed and fluffy pillows!

Link to pics here.

Trip Report: Mt. Rainier

2009-06-07T15:11:00.005-05:00

Hurricane Ridge to Seaquest State Park

In the morning while we were breaking camp I looked across the loop at a group camp and saw their dog edging very close to a skunk! It was behind the picnic table, but I could see the black and white tail. I grabbed Brett and said "What do we do?!" - in a few seconds that golden retriever would be soaked - and the whole group was piled in one SUV. EWWW. Before we could decide if we should try to call the dog and wake up the whole campground doing it, the skunk came out from around the table. It was their rat dog! They had a black and white dog with a poofy tail! LOL so glad we didn't try to intervene. :D

We decided to skip some of the towns on the east side of the 101 loop and just get on the road back towards Mt Rainier. Unfortunately the Hood River Canal Bridge was out for construction. So we had to drive through those towns whether we wanted to or not. :) It wasn't a bad drive but it did extend the driving time by several hours and force us to skip Seattle. We did stop for coffee in the general area at a couple of those espresso shacks and Brett thought they were excellent.

When we got to Mt Rainier, where we had planned to camp after the long day of driving, we found that pretty much the entire park was closed except for the one road leading up to the brand new visitors center. When we drove by the campground, the reason for the closure was fairly obvious - there was at least 3 feet of snow in the camp area. In the meantime, we went to the visitors center and I got a stamp. While I was in line to talk to a ranger about other stamp opportunities (can't miss any, you know?) a guy in Tevas and jeans walked to the counter and said "How do I summit?" The park ranger blinked a little and they went back and forth until the ranger realized that the guy was seriously wanting to know what path/route to take to get to the summit. The ranger should get award for being patient and kind. He pulled out a topo map and tried to gently show the guy that there are several mountaineering routes up and that they all cross glacial fields with VERY high chances of avalanches this time of year, hoping to dissuade him. The guy instead got upset when the ranger wouldn't GIVE him the topo map. The ranger said that he needed to buy his own, since that was the office's copy. He said he'd head to the gift shop to get one and the ranger told him that they don't sell the topo maps with the routes on them. He demanded to know why and the ranger - at the very limit of his patience, took a deep breath and said "because people who are going to mountaineer to the top of a 14000' peak plan their route long in advance". I died laughing. I think he heard me because he finally left the counter. If he hadn't I was just about to say "look buddy, the peak is up there. Start walking." It was so funny.

Since we didn't have a place to stay in Rainier, we stopped and saw a fall that the one open road went by (but the trail to actually view it was closed due to snow) and then headed out of the park towards Mt. St. Helens.

There are 3 visitors centers for Mt St Helens. We just wanted to stop at the one closest to the interstate and grab a spoon and a stamp for the NPS book. We made good time and found a WA state park right across the street from the Silver Lake Vistors Center and stayed there. It turned out to be a great choice because unlike all the other campgrounds on the trip, these had showers! After that many days without a shower, it was GLORIOUS even if my tokens for hot water didn't actually get me the full 3 minutes they were supposed to. :) Note to self - next time pack the no-rinse shampoo. :D

Links to pics here

Trip Report: Hoh to Hurricane Ridge

2009-06-07T15:07:00.004-05:00

Hoh to Hurricane Ridge

The next morning we got up and broke camp and headed up to the northern side of the Olympic Penninsula. We first stopped at Soleduck Valley to visit the Sol Duc falls (yes, I spelled both of those right). The falls were beautiful as was the morning light in the forest. While we were there we overhead a convesation where a college age looking girl announced to her boyfriend "I'm really disappointed with this. They said it was a rainforest. I thought it would be like the Amazon but it's just plain ol' trees here!" Wow. We laughed until our sides hurt. Apparently she needs help with geography...the whole temperate verus tropical distinction seems lost on her. LOL.

After Sol Duc falls, we stopped for a short mile hike through some forest. In the later months it goes through a section of river that is a spawning point, but for our trip it was all just very beautiful scenery.

After Sol Duc we headed towards Elwha Valley, stopping off at Marymere falls, on the coast of Lake Cresent. The water in Lake Cresent was so beautiful and blue - I would be sorely tempted to spend a week at a rental house up on the shores there one summer. It looks like heaven. Once we got to Elwha Valley, we stopped just inside the park ticket booth. Madison Creek Falls is a waterfall that's only 200' of hiking on a handicap accessible, paved trail. It's not far from 101 and well worth the turn off.

With Elwha behind us, we headed on to Hurricane Ridge. It's a ridge-top drive through the Olympic Mtn chain. At the top is very nice visitor's center where one can even rent skis for what seems to me like an insane day of hiking up hills to ski back down them in 2 seconds. But then, I don't ski, so I don't expect to understand the appeal. :) What we did see were several cyclist riding the long steep uphill to the endpoint so that they could turn around and descend the next 8 miles back. As we were driving by we even saw Tyler Hamilton, the retired pro rider that we named Tyler our cat after - but didn't recognize him in time to holler his name as he took off downhill. Brett took an amazing panorama at the top - and I scored a spoon. :) We spent the night at Heart o' the Hills campground, halfway back down the ridge.

Link to pics here.

Trip Report: Day at the beach

2009-06-07T15:03:00.005-05:00

The Pacific

With campsites at a premium during the holiday weekend, we decided to stay at the site for two nights, instead of just moving on the next day. This afforded us that much much needed "chill out day" and we got a late start after pancakes and headed back over to the beach. The beaches are numbered from South to North 1-4 with South Beach and Ruby beach on either end of the numbered ones. The farther south, the less sand beach there is and the more the "beach" is just large logs and rocks at the bottom of a cliff. We started at Beach 1 and went up the beaches, checking out the sites and hiking down from the cliff onto the beaches proper to look around. Each beach was different all the way to Ruby Beach where the glacial rocks gave way to real sand (which according to the guide book is sometimes pink because of crushed garnets, though Brett is skeptical). Beach 4 has a lot of rock formations at the water's edge. We were there earlier in the day and after going to Ruby Beach, we back tracked and went back to Beach 4 closer to low tide to get a better look at the tide pools. They were, in a word, amazing. The waves crashing against the rocks would retreat to show 50 starfish at a time - the sea anemones would push out their lime green tentacles when the water came over them and then ball themselves back into their pink innards as it flowed out of their rock bed. The little black mussels were on the rocks by the millions - opening and closing with the water. I love aquariums and it was like 5 major exhibits in one place - a place we could freely walk through. It was unbelievable. To celebrate the wonder of the day we went back to camp for a roaring fire and coal burgers with Tillamook cheese and bacon. For those not in the know, coal burgers are another Taylor camping tradition. Very slow cooked burgers with cheese melted inside the patty - I'm a huge fan. :)

That night I woke up to the sound of nothing. Really and truly nothing. It was disorienting but comforting at the same time. When I focused I realized that the "white noise" was actually the river right outside. I thought "I should lay here and listen to the river in the middle of the nothingness because I'll never hear it again like this" and then the river lulled me immediately back to sleep. Go figure. :D

Link to pics here.

Trip Report: Quinault to Hoh

2009-06-07T14:55:00.004-05:00

Quinault to Hoh Rainforest

Our plan had been to spend the next night on the Pacific but since it was Memorial Day weekend, the campgrounds were all full so we headed inland to the Hoh Rainforest and stayed at the much less crowded NP campground there. We even got in early enough that we got a spot on the Hoh River. After setting up camp and sitting at the campsite watching the glacial river flow by and listening to the breeze whistle across our beer bottle necks, we went for a few miles of short hikes around the visitor's center to see the much greener rainforest and had a laid back dinner and FINALLY some s'mores. :)

Link to pics here.

Trip Report: Tillamook to Quinault, WA

2009-06-07T14:45:00.005-05:00

Tillamook Cheese Factory to Quinault Rain Forest

The start of this album was our trip to the cheese factory. They had samples out that were delicious and we bought a block of smoked white cheddar, peppercorn cheddar, and garlic cheddar and had cheese and crackers, cheese burgers, cheese and hashbrowns - and pretty much put cheese on anything else we could think of during the trip. :D It was delicious! The other delicious thing about the cheese factory was their selection of 38 freshly made flavors of icecream! We had a 5 scoops sampler at 10 in the morning: marionberry, chocolate peanutbutter, vanilla toffee, lemon blueberry pie, and udderly chocolate. They were all amazing and our biggest regret from the entire trip was not going back for a second bowl to try more flavors! :D

After checking out Tillamook (see video of cheddar being made at the factory here), we drove up the coastal highway of 101 to Canon Beach where we stopped to take pics of Haystack Rock. It is the most photographed site in Oregon (according to some literature) but since it was windy and cold , we snapped some pictures and remained generally unimpressed. But it was nice to stretch our legs before starting the long hall up to Washington. The coastal highway was beautiful. We left the plains and water of the Willamette Valley (I felt like I finally won that silly Commadore 64 game from my childhood - Oregon Trail) and headed in towards the rainforests of Washington.

The most southern rainforest is Quinault. The plan had been to camp along the south shore of Lake Quinault in one of the several campgrounds. Unfortunately, I had not been clear enough in my preparation - the campgrounds were all National FOREST service, not NPS - so they wouldn't open for one more day. But owners of an RV campground took pity on us, gave us a discount, and let us pitch our tent off to the side of one of the gravel drives. The site had no picnic tables, so Brett used the concrete parking block as a table and we had our first camping beers (a Taylor tradition) while sitting by the world's largest spruce tree and eating hamburger with mac and cheese and bemoaning the "no campfires" sign. After dinner we went for a short hike to one of the nearby waterfalls. The rainforest doesn't get as much rain as others but I still spent the entire hike marveling at the size of the trees.

Link to pics here.
And the movie here.

Trip Report: Portland to Tillamook, OR

2009-06-07T14:42:00.002-05:00

Portland to Tillamook

After we left Dallas we flew into Portland and picked up our rental Ford Edge. For anyone in the market - this is NOT a good choice. At 30k miles it sounded like it was about to fall apart. Lucky for us, it never did. It also had bad spacing for the cup holders - ill designed cup holders are a deal breaker for me. In Portland we ate at the Rogue Brewery with a friend. After circling downtown Portland for a while looking for parking (HELLOOOO what kind of UPS store doesn't have a loading zone out front?!) We finally nabbed a spot and picked up the tent and camping gear we had mailed out to the UPS store and went to Walmart to buy a cooler, chairs, and food for the trip before heading on to the town of Tillamook, home of the best cheddar cheese in the West.

Unfortunately by the time we got in to Tillamook the cheese factory was closed for the night, so we went up the road to Garibaldi and stayed in a hotel while we sorted out our car. The last roadtrip/camping journey we took of this magnitude, we really had worked out a great way to pack the car. Our time rearranging our gear in the parking lot at the hotel proved to us that this trip wasn't going to go as easily. Another strike against the Ford Edge - there was no way to situate the cooler so that I could turn from the front seat into the back seat and fish out the jelly to make PB and Js while Brett drove. Instead, lunches consisted of a warped Chinese-fire-drill of Brett pulling over somewhere and me running to the other side of the car and digging out the jelly before hopping back in to find the bread, paper towels, and PB. I woud also complain at this point that the dashboard wasn't flat enough for adequately jelly-ing two sandwiches at once (strike 3 against the Ford Edge). :D But of such are memories made!

Trip Report: L B Johnson Ranch

2009-06-07T14:40:00.005-05:00

Lyndon B. Johnson Ranch NP

Bray suggested that we take a roundabout way back to Dallas via the LBJ ranch, which turned out to be a great idea since we got 3 stamps and it broke up the long drive nicely. Hill country in TX is really beautiful and with all the wildflowers blooming along the roads, it was easy to see how Lady Bird Johnson was inspired to plant wildflowers around the country's interstates.

One of the coolest parts of the trips was the Sauer-Beckman Farm. It's on the LBJ park land and it's a historic German farm (again with the Germans in TX :D ) and the people there live and work on the farm. They don't sleep there because it might hurt the antique beds, but they do everything else there. They showed us how they made lye and yogurt and we wandered around to see the working farm. The garden was very impressive, they have a lot of farm waste to compost and the TX weather really serves them well. Their canned goods pantry put even Dodie's overstocked kitchen to shame! :-)

After checking out the farm, we headed over to LBJs Ranch house. The original driveway called for people to drive through the creek under a waterfall. Very cool in my opinion, but these days visitors are routed down to a bridge. The ranch was beautiful and his office inside the ranch was open to walk through. The guide pointed out the 3 TVs in the room - one to watch each channel! LOL. The beautiful saddle displayed was a gift from the president of Mexico.

Link to pics here

Trip Report: San Antonio

2009-06-07T14:34:00.006-05:00

San Antonio Sightseeing

On Sunday we drove down to SA to visit my sister, Bray. The traffic wasn't bad but to make it even more fun, Brett bought me a GPS for my birtherversary (sound it out, you'll get it). It has a lifetime subscription to traffic info. It marks current traffic problems, areas of congestion, and anticipated delays. You can choose to avoid them - which we did a few times in TX, making the trip even more enjoyable.

On Monday Bray took us into town. After the wedding, the goal of the trip became "how many NPS (National Park Service) stamps can Megan collect?" and "how many collectible spoons can she score?" Lame, perhaps, but I really enjoy both and Brett puts up with it like a champ. So in honor of that, Bray first took us to the San Antonio Missions. Four missions comprise the single National Park, but each park had an additional stamp to make sure I had to go to all of them. :D

The first mission was San Jose. We went on a tour with a volunteer guide who told the history of the mission from the point of view of the Native Americans who lived in the area. The missions were built primarily by them and for them. In exchange for the loyalty to Spain while acting as colonized, claimed land, the Spanish missionaries taught them how to go from a hunter-gatherer society to farmers who lived in stone houses. The San Jose Mission is one of the premier places for weddings in San Antonio and a quick look at some of the architecture makes it pretty easy to see why. Speaking of architecture, one of the really interesting things we found about SA was the German influence. It was in town names and street names - all over. Certainly not what we expected from some place so close to Mexico. It turns out that Germans came to for a variety of reasons, even early on, and left their mark even in the building of the church in San Jose. In some of the pictures of the outer arch ways you can see the arches change from big round archest to Gothic pointed arches - the work of German Engineers in the early 1700s.

The second mission was Espada. All of the mission churches still have regular Catholic mass celebrated, but Espada is still a monastery as well. The monks who live on the grounds keep beautiful plans around their doors - as well as a "Please keep out" sign.

The third mission we went to was San Juan. It's a beautiful mission with a lot of information about what it takes to restore missions like this. Around there the ground is very unstable. Marks on the building showed major movement from siesmic activity, and solving the problem of how to run electricity in the gift shop without destroying the walls took some creative thinking!

The last mission on our tour was Mission Concepcion. It's the least restored (almost completely untouched) mission and the church is still in fantastic shape (though the rest of the mission walls and living quarters have been lost to war and nature). Inside the church some of the original frescos are still visible. One in particular that is in the ceiling of a room in a sun shape suggests that perhaps not all of the artisans were Spanish or German, and that the natives may have added some of their own stylings. The rope hanging in the picture is the rope to toll the bells before mass.

After 4 missions in BEAUTIFUL 80 something degree weather, we drove to the Tower of the Americas and parked (shout out to Bray's hook up who got us free parking!) and headed to the Alamo. The Alamo isn't a part of the NPS; it's owned by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas but they have a nice stamp for the passport and it seemed like a "must see" for a visit to San Antonio. It was nice, and the ground are beautiful, but visitors aren't allowed to take pictures inside the building, which makes for a short section of the photo album.

From there we went on a little cruise along the Riverwalk. Again, one of those "must see" things. It's very beautiful. Bray and I both daydreamed about getting a room on the "river" and spending the weekend shopping sometime. :D There were some neat things to see along the way, including a "mural" on one of the buildings that is actually a giant mosaic of the development of western technology and culture.

Check out pics here

Trip Report: Dallas

2009-06-03T17:49:00.016-05:00

Dallas - Gina and Brock's Wedding

To start off the journey, we headed to Dallas for Gina's wedding. Gina is a dear friend of ours - so close that we even let her babysit Calvin back in the day! :D It was good to see her again. On Friday we went to her parents' lovely house for a people-from-out-of-town hanging out time. It was really nice to be able to spend a little time with Gina and to eat the delicious chocolate-covered cherry groom's cake - though I'm still not sure about this "Texas BBQ" thing :D. We have a few pictures from the wedding - most didn't come out because we didn't know how to work the brand new camera that I gave Brett for our anniversary. By the end of the trip, Brett was a pro with it, even making use of the manual settings - but our first attempts to use it were thwarted by my taking it off the "dummy setting". I finally realized that the camera really is just smarter than me. :D

Oh, and the first picture in the album is from lunch before Gina's wedding at a place called Uncle Bucks. It was attached to the Bass Pro Shop - I had never been in one of those. Let me just go on the record and say WOW. There were camping things I didn't even know I NEEDED. :D So after a giant hamburger and 8 hand crafted beers for $10, we walked around the store and limited our purchases to a knife-spoon-fork combo set and clip on LED flashlights. But wow, the camp kitchens were calling me. LOL.

Picture Link.

Catching up

2009-04-24T20:23:00.004-05:00

I thought I'd post a couple of pictures from the beautiful flowers in the yard. Once again our yard is a show stopper - people take walks down the road by our house just to stop and admire the tulips and daffodils. Some neighbors a few doors uphill from us put a deck on their house last summer and told us that they did it just so they could watch our backyard bloom while they drank their morning coffee each day! :) I'm just pleased as punch because this is the first year that we can smell the lilac blooming from inside the house. To think we planted it the week of the wedding... :D

We haven't been very good about updating this, but since a few people wanted to see pictures of the ongoing wine cellar project, this is the best place I know to post them. For those not in the know, when our house was built it was originally a florist, the building was dug out into the side of a slight hill and the natural cool temperatures from dirt insulation were augmented by cooling equipment. Fast forward some decades and the shop is now the basement and the room that was created to be the coolest is the place we store our wine. It holds about 55 degrees year round, but fluctuates more than we'd like. It also has no real useful shelving for the wine storage. We made a few cubes and bought a wine bottle storage rack, but they were all filled up fairly quickly since we only had room for about 40 bottles. So after the coldest part of winter was done, but before the heat of summer sets in, we're gutting the two rooms and making it into a real wine cellar. (Shout out to Brian for buying Brett that very, very helpful "How and why to build a wine cellar" book.) We started the project during spring break, vastly underestimating the amount of time it would take for demo, but are making headway on it now that the demo is done. As you can see the pictures the old room was put together by someone who might've been a little OCD when it comes to nailing - and goodness knows there wasn't a screw in sight! That would be too easy.

Currently the walls are down and the studs are up. We opened up what had been two small rooms into one large room (9'x9') and should be finishing the wiring tomorrow and starting with the insulation. We're pretty excited because we found out that the room was already keeping a fairly steady temperature with very minimal insulation and when it's done right, the room should be pretty close to exactly perfect for what we need. After it's insulated and the drywall is down we'll add flooring and finally get to start on shelves. But the main thing is that we can get the wine back into the room as soon as the walls are up. Yay! I'll keep posting as there are picture-worthy milestones.

Happy spring all.

Turtle Midwifery and other news

2008-08-14T17:12:00.004-05:00

We just got back and settled into the pile of laundry that seems like our house after the week at Carolina Beach with my parents. It had been a couple of years since we had made it on vacation with the whole family, but this summer I'm not working and Brandy flew in from Texas, so it was a no-brainer.

We stayed at a different condo than the usual place, as the "usual place" has been demolished and completely revamped. The new place was a few blocks farther from the downtown/boardwalk scene but it couldn't have been more perfect. Brett and I arrived first and walked down the boardwalk to the beach and right to the side of the boardwalk to the ocean was none other than the telltale orange tape marking a sea turtle nest! Not only was that exciting, but the trench had been dug! Basically, there are groups of volunteers that monitor the sea turtle nests. At some number of days after they were laid, they dig a trench out to the sea, to ease the hatchlings' journey. If there's a trench, it means the nest can hatch any night.

The first night we checked a few times for the turtles, but no such luck. The volunteers called it a night at around 11, and so did we. The next morning the trench was covered in tracks! Clearly we had missed a big hatching. During the day, while we were out boogie-boarding in the awesome waves, 3 more hatched. Sadly 2 didn't make it, since hatching at low tide at 3 in the afternoon isn't really what they're designed for. But we did cheer on the one that did make it! That evening we met up with the volunteers and told them what we'd seen and were heroes since we had witnessed the first one get to the sea (well the first one that could be officially recorded by the aquarium representative). The family all drug our chairs out to the trench and lined up to watch the next hatching. After a while of sitting in the dark whispering (turtles need to hear the ocean and see that it's night time to come out of the nest in best circumstances), everyone but me and Brett bailed. A while later a volunteer took a red light up to the nest and announced a hatching in progress. I quickly roused the troops back at the condo with a phone call and we all got to witness the hatching. Brett and I were given gloves to wear to assist in the hatching and proudly claim midwifery honors. :)

Basically what happens is that the turtles fight their way out of the underground nest and will wander around trying to find their way to the ocean. In order to get them pointed in the right direction and in the water as fast as possible, a trench is dug in the sand. A Nest Mother holds a bright lantern at the end of the trench, simulating the full moon that wasn't at all out that night and drawing the turtles in that direction. Then, midwives (as we like to call ourselves) crawl along each side of the trench and push sand towards the turtles when they try to climb out of the trench. Sometimes they're confused, or one flipper isn't as strong as the other, so without help, they could end up going in circles or parallel to the beach, but our babies made it safely to the water! I'd love to show pictures but there was no light to get them.

A few evenings later the volunteers and aquarium reps dug up the nest. They do this to keep track of how many eggs hatched and because occasionally some stragglers will have hatched and gotten stuck in sea oat roots. Once the turtles hatch they have up to 3 days to make it to the surface and sea before they die, so NC law says that on the 55th day after being laid, when everything should've hatched that was going to, the Aquarium has to dig up the rest and try to save any that were stuck. We of course showed up for that show as well. And what a show it was! Usually a nest will have 2 or 3 live babies and a couple of dead ones as well. Ours had 16 live turtles and no dead ones! They counted the egg shells and there was about a 50-50 hatching rate which is also apparently impressive. Each of the turtles was carefully put in buckets and dropped at the water line to the silent cheers of the crowd that had turned out. Even the one that had just hatched and had one flipper that weak and not yet functional made it successfully to the sea. It was very exciting to watch and even neater to be a part of!

In other news, the waves were perfect for boogie boarding most of the trip. Brandy even tried it for the first time and loved it! It *is* addictive once you get the hang of it. Erin was happier at the condo's pool. I have to agree it was amazing. It was salt water. Not ocean water, but clean water with salt in it. It apparently breaks down the salt into a chlorine and keeps it sterile that way, but without the harsh chemicals that burn your eyes and make my hair green! It also had jets in it. There were seats in corners of the pool, like a hot tub, and general gets around the walls to keep you moving in the water. I found that if I could manage to stay on my floaty raft it made for an excellent lazy-river experience...until Louis turned the pumps on high and dumped me! :D I've never wanted a home pool until now. But wow. Maintenance is nothing and it's so relaxing! I told Brett all we had to do was remodel the entire back end of our house and re-landscape the yard but he didn't seem convinced. :)

Anyway, here are the pics from the trip. Enjoy!

Pictures from the porch party

2008-08-02T07:00:00.002-05:00

Before heading down to the beach in NC, we stopped at Dave and Marty's for a little pre-party with Marty's side of the family. It was a good time and we had way too much food.

Front Porch Facelift

2008-07-13T18:26:00.008-05:00

Before and After:

So here we have the much anticipated porch renovation pictures. You might recall that we took out bushes and put new landscaping in before leaving for Jamaica. It was clear after being gone for 2 weeks of straight rain here that our gutters weren't draining in the right direction. Water was pouring out of the endcap, instead of heading towards what should've been downhill to the downspout. This had turned our post-stump dirt into a quagmire. In order to fix the gutters, the roof of the porch had to be raised. It turns out that the gutters were hung correctly, but the huge slab of concrete that is our porch had sunk over time, taking with it the roof. This coincided with my parents coming up to visit. For our birtherversary they gave us a new storm door with the promise of installation help. While the storm door was being put in, someone leaned on a column of the porch (we blame Calvin) and what we thought was a bad situation became more immediate - the columns were completely rotted. So the day after they left we went to Advance Auto and bought two car jacks and set to work raising the porch roof in preparation for new columns. We had hoped that the outer casing of the column was rotten but that inside there would be a strong beam of support. Alas that was not to be so. As we jacked up the columns they fell apart into rotten piles. Now, after the project being stalled almost daily by more rain than any place outside of the Amazon should get, we're finally finished: new, stylish columns that opened up the feel of the porch and adequately support the now level roof, a new storm door, new paint on the interior door, pressure washed walls, new paint on the trim, new lights and doorbell switch, and new paint on the porch floor, and we couldn't be happier with the results.

Of course in the pictures it's to be noted that the landscaping is going to be an ongoing project that will span into Fall, as we continue to remove stumps and a bush or two, transplant things, and add edging and borders. We'll keep you posted on all that too!

The pictures that Chronicle the Journey are here.

Also I've posted some pictures from a hike we did to Bottom Creek Gorge. The waterfall didn't come out at all in the pictures because there wasn't much water, we were far away, and there's nothing for scale, but the wild blackberries were in bloom and abundant. There was a lot of wildlife along the hike, though only the snakes were too lazy to run before we could get the camera out! Enjoy.

Jamaica Mon!

2008-05-25T19:52:00.008-05:00

The past three weeks have been busy but fun. Here's the low down.

3 weeks ago, Brett was suffering from end-of-semester crunch stress to which we added a major landscaping project. While yard work and gardening can be de-stressing for us, this wasn't so much. :) Pictures will be added soon, but for those who remember, we had 4 large bushes on one side of our front porch (and none on the other side). This winter a black rot finally took one of the bushes leaving 3 bushes in a questionable hedge formation - all of them were different bushes. It was more than I could take and Brett hates mowing around them anyway, so out they came. We chopped down the 4 bushes and uncovered 2 more stumps of other bushes that had been covered over by the bushes. Long story short - after a week of work digging up stumps, we now have 3 matching bushes on either side of the front porch and some nice ground cover flowers planted in front of them. (Again, pics will be added shortly).

After this, we headed to Richmond to meet up with my family and we all headed down to NC for my sister, Erin's graduation from Mt. Olive College. After graduation, we went back to Richmond and continued the weekend long celebration: Mirthergraduversary. That Sunday was Mother's Day and Monday was my dad's b-day and my parent's 35th anniversary, not to mention Wednesday that week being my birthday and Saturday our anniversary. So we started celebrating with dinner out on Friday night in NC with Erin and didn't stop until Tuesday when we drove up to Dulles to go to Jamaica - oh wait! we didn't stop then either! :D

Tuesday we headed for a week of fun in the sun and relaxation in Jamaica. We got an unbelievable deal on a resort that we had wanted to try since our first visit to the country, Grand Lido Negril. It's an all-inclusive with food, drinks and activities included. The food was ok, but the service was great. They had several different restaurants to choose from - for my birthday we ate at a tepanyaki bar - one of those places where the chefs do knife tricks and toss the food in the air. The restaurant had been told that it was my birthday and they brought out a cake for everyone at the table and sang - it was really cool. For our anniversary we ate a fancy French restaurant - white gloved waiters saying "what would madam like for an appetizer?" I mean seriously rocking! :) The food there was amazing and the evening was perfect. When we were finished eating, there was a local folk dance troupe preforming traditional dances with a drum circle. It was great. Pics are here.

We both managed to have a cold for alternating days on the vacation. If one of us was sick, the other was well, go figure. So mostly we didn't use the provided activities. Somehow the idea of free scuba lessons was appealing until I thought about scuba and snot ... hmm. Instead, we could just lay on floating pads in the swimming area and look down at all the amazing fish - bright colors, huge starfish, and sea urchins that earned a few people (not us) trips to the nurse. It was awesome. By the end of the trip we were feeling much better and went on a glass-bottom-boat trip one morning. That was great (again, more pics) and the next day we went out for the most perfect day of snorkeling ever. The weather was calm and wonderful. We had been warned not to get too close to the island we were near and Brett and I both managed to accidentally do just that - the reef gets very shallow and very covered in sea urchins the size of your head very quickly. Luckily we both made it out ok and after getting back to the 5' deep section, we stopped swimming around following every flash of color and started just floating and looking - once we stopped moving we could see even more. It was amazing. I didn't even know starfish came in so many colors - or that some of them are 6 legged! The pics from the underwater camera were developed and most look good but the scans are less than attractive. Sorry for the low quality.

The weather held out for us the entire trip. Every day except the last had a small shower in the afternoon, which was great for getting us in out of the sun for a little while, and a great excuse to order a middday room service snack of fruit, cheese, and crackers. The days never got really hot, and there was a nice breeze on the beach. The only unfortunate part was that the shade on the beach was provided by several large trees - which were just in season for dropping their seeds during the breezy bits. We had to be careful to cover our drinks lest they become too gritty! But really, other than that the beach was wonderful and the water was warm and calm, so all was perfect. I have to say, if you're going to have a cold, on a warm beach is a great place to recover! :)

The trip was great and now we're back and trying to catch up on weeding the garden and laundry. It's kind of sad how after a vacation, real life gets to smack you in the face. :)

Valentine's Day Dancing

2008-02-18T10:27:00.006-05:00

I generally think of Valentine's Day as an hyper-commercialized Hallmark-created holiday. So we usually stay in and I let Brett cook for me. Actually, I let him do that a lot anyway, but God bless Hallmark for making an excuse for it. :-) And instead of buying over priced flowers that will die in a week, we buy each other seeds for the garden and start them. This year we are not starting seeds, having given up on finding a solution to the problems appropriate lighting and temperature in a cat free zone of the house, but we did buy seeds to sew when the weather turns warmer, and thus commit ourselves to a summer of gardening, even though at the moment the summer looks like it could be quite busy with travel! We're most excited to be planting a new blackberry bush. After a year or two of fantastic growth and awesome blackberry glazed ham (didn't even need a Hallmark holiday to talk Brett into making that a few times!), this past year it died. The leaf buds had opened last March and we got a sudden snow here. Nothing that didn't cause some frost bite and set back fruiting and flowering by a week or so, but for some reason, it completely killed the blackberry plant. We waited and waited and it never did put any new leaves on. So we'll be replacing it and looking forward to a few fruit this year, and more to come next season - Happy Valentine's Day to us!

This year we decided to break with tradition and went out for a fantastic night at the local ballroom. They had a nice event with private dance lessons, catered dinner, and of course dancing the night away. We learned some new moves, had great food, and met new people. Oddly enough, of the two tables of 8 that were next to each other, at least one person in each couple was working in the field of physics! I figured that would put the kibosh on the romance for the night :-), but everyone carefully turned talk away from "those" topics - though it was fun to share the evening with people who got Brett's jokes!

Happy Holidays from the Taylors

2007-12-22T18:01:00.000-05:00

Happy Holidays! We hope that you are having a refreshing, joyful, and full holiday season!

Brett, Megan, Calvin, and Diana

Fall Foliage in VA

2007-10-28T19:11:00.000-05:00

This summer we've suffered from a drought in the region. This explains the lack of posts all summer where we usually show off our garden produce. The tomatoes barely made anything, the peppers suffered from gross malformations that invited fungal infections, and the corn never did make a single edible ear (though the deer scat in the lawn indicates something found the ears edible), despite our efforts to water religiously. Luckily the grapes are fairly tolerant of the heat and dry conditions, so we have made one batch of "great grape" jelly again.

Because of the drought, the trees were shedding their leaves in July. People were raking green leaves up off their lawns all August, as the trees tried to stave off the water loss. We didn't expect anything special this fall, since according to the experts, excellent fall color is determined by good genes and lots of water during the year.

Apparently they still have some things to figure out. The peak was a little over a week ago, and it was one of the most colorful years in memory. Here's a few pics from a walk we did in Jefferson Nt'l Forest, where the trees looked more like fireworks than trees.

For those of you interested in camera stuff, the walk was towards midday so the pics washed out in some directions. I used the "boost color" option once to make those more true to life. I think they were more vivid than that, but I didn't want to be accused of making up stories about how amazing the colors are! :-)

A new pretty pretty princess....

2007-07-23T20:19:00.001-05:00

Diana has always been a pretty pretty princess - just ask her! However, she's also always been a princess with a problem, namely hairballs. She has been, this summer, getting hairballs out at least 4 - 5 times a week. Repeated attempts at home grooming have led only to lots of bites and scratches and not much reduction in actual hairball number. Preliminary calls to the vet suggested that the only solution - since we've done hairball treats, hairball food, hairball exorcisms - was to get her hair cut. It was going to be more expensive of course than any haircut that I've ever had (this is Brett obviously!), mostly because normally I don't need to be sedated while Diana would need to be. However this cost should be more than offset if we can cut down on the number of hairballs. So early this morning Diana headed out for her day at the spa (that's what we told her anyway). We went back this afternoon and picked her up. I think the pictures below speak more than any words I can possibly write so I'll stop talking and you can start looking.

Paradise with powder white sands

2007-05-28T20:32:00.000-05:00

Continuing in the long standing American tradition beginning with film and at-home slide projectors, we are passing along our vacation pics for your perusal. At least with the electronic version you don't have to eat a casserole and listen to every story and anecdote that is mildly related to each image. We stuck to short titles and pics that we hope inspire you to drool over our great time and wish you were in paradise.

We headed down to Mexico and spent the first 2 nights in Tulum at a cabana on the beach. It was fantastic. The cabanas are situated on a limestone cliff (very short) above a sparkling white powder beach with mature palm trees offering cooling shade. We didn't have electricity, but the candles added a special glow. Everyone went to bed at sundown and got up at sunrise and the sound of the surf and the feel of the ocean breeze made sleeping a joy despite the unbelievably hard mattress. :) We also got to eat some local Mexican dishes, which were fantastic. It was absolutely amazing.

After that we went up near Cancun for the remainder of the trip and stayed in an Americanized all-inclusive. It was also wonderful in exactly the opposite ways. Electricity meant the disco and dancing went on all night and the food at theme restaurants was anything BUT Mexican. We celebrated my birthday while there, at a Tepanyaki grill, but because of some miscommunications with the waiters, we were seated with only half the party there and some other people who only had half THEIR party...so we went out again the next night (and remembered the camera this time) and ate there again. I'm not a fan of Asian food, but the food was good and watching everyone attempting to use chopsticks was worth an encore performance!

For our anniversary, we went to a bio-preserve theme park "Xcaret". It was a really fun day. The highlight of the day, and trip, for me was learning to snorkel. The park is built on limestone riddled with caves and cenotes (sink holes). So they have underground snorkeling (pics here and here). It was amazing. Easy to learn since there are no waves to fight. At first it was so dark there was nothing to see, but in parts where the caves opened up into cenotes, there were fish around. As we swam closer to the sea, the water became less brackish and more salty and the fish got more colorful until we emptied out in a cenote connected to the lagoon and it was filled with neon striped fish of all sorts of shapes and sizes. It was amazing. That night we watched the show "Mexico Espectacular" put on by the park. We had decided this was not to be missed because they recreate the ancient Mayan ball game (a game like soccer played with hitting the ball with hips, not feet, and on a slanted court). We watched that game, and it was less than impressive, but afterwards the Uarhukua game really was the most fun. It was field hockey with a flaming ball. Brett got a video of a great play. It was a great, close game...no acting there.

We got back and the next two days it rained each afternoon, which worked out to give us time for an afternoon siesta and there was a beautiful rainbow outside our door both afternoons!

Tragedy at Tech

2007-04-18T15:32:00.000-05:00

We just wanted to thank everyone for your calls and emails of support. It's been a terrible few days here. While we don't know anyone personally involved in the massacre, we have friends we are trying to reach out to as they face terrible losses. I'm sure everyone around here is connected to someone who died by far fewer than 7 degrees. The NRV community has pulled together in that dumbstruck way that people do when something tragic and unexpected happens. The streets yesterday were deserted and for anyone not in attendance, all eyes were on the broadcasts of the memorial and vigil services. Today RU heads back to classes , but I don't think people's hearts or heads will be in it. The most we can hope for is that some good will come of all this. It's hard to see where that might be now, but maybe, given time, it will manifest itself.

Spring has Sprung

2007-04-05T16:02:00.000-05:00

In Radford the past week, the temperature has been nice and comfortable - around 75 each day. This has suddenly awakened all of the early tulips that were oversleeping while the daffodils were already up and about their business of blooming. Daffodils are a nice sign of spring, but like crocuses, they can be blooming beautifully in crummy weather. For me, it's really a sign that spring has sprung when the first tulips make their appearance en masse. They're like cats. They sleep through the cold snaps and when the ground warms and the sunbeams light them up like spotlights....then they bother to rouse. This weekend is redbud winter for us. That means that winter is officially over. This weekend will have a chance of frost, but after this we should be pretty free and clear. There's still a cool "dogwood winter" to come, but it's usually just jacket weather. In the meantime, I took some pictures of the gardens over the past week.

God Bless Texas

2007-03-22T15:18:00.000-05:00

Two weekends ago, while Brett was in CO for a meeting (and to sneak in some family time), I was up in Richmond helping my sister, Brandy, pack for a move to Texas. It seems to me like it's all happened kind of suddenly. The company she works for asked for volunteers to move to San Antonio and take cushy, regular-hour jobs in a place with a lower cost of living and much better weather. She volunteered. Today, she's pulling into SA. It's been a crazy ride for all of us. We all see great opportunity in her "uproot and transplant" but it certainly shakes up the family dynamic. In the meantime, I wish her the very best and wanted to take this occasion to post semi-embarrassing pics from the day that we packed her. For those of you not in the Elder Clan, you probably won't find this all that entertaining.

Dad and Casey Jones working hard:

Mom explores the wonders of bubblewrap:

Sorting the stuff. Brandy took this opportunity to whittle her life's belongings down to a mere 2200 lbs.

The stack of boxes grows and grows and grows:

Erin. Sleeping on...what's that? oh yes...it's rolls of toilet paper:

The send off:

Falls and falls

2007-02-27T13:43:00.000-05:00

The weekend after V-day, we were lucky enough to have some friends from PA down to visit us. They were only here for a short time, so we wanted to pack in some fun "local" things to do. We didn't make it to the icecream parlor in Roanoke, but we did decide to go for a quick hike to the Cascades. It had been snowing on and off here for the week prior, and the Cascades are always most beautiful in the winter (not something that can be said of most attractions around here; they seem to be all summer-season-specific). So we grab our boots and head out. It's a simple 2 mile up and 2 mile back hike. The way up is somewhat technical and the way down is an old logging road. I've seen trail runners take this hike. The hike took us four hours. I've been there a million times in the snow, but this was the first year that I've EVER seen it like this. Instead of the crunchy packed snow along the trail, this was a treachorous journey on a solid layer of ice, conveniently hidden under a milimeter of snow until you had gone so far that it seemed unreasonable to turn back...then it just turned to flat out ice. It was unbelievable and not at all in a good way. Even with all our caution, we took turns falling. I'm still somewhat amazed that we didn't end up with a broken wrist or collar bone out of the whole thing. I will say, however, the actual water type falls were amazing. Had I not fallen hard on my hip two steps before getting to the lookout point, I might've been inclined to even walk on the iced over pool all the way over to them as some people did.
In the meantime, I have nursed all my puce colored bruises to attractive shades of martian green and regained most of my mobility allowing me to head up the stairs and download the photos. :) Ok. So I wasn't that bad off, but it makes a good excuse for taking so long to post. :)

Love is in the Air

2007-02-14T13:07:00.000-05:00

It's Valentine's Day. I generally think of this as a Halmark holiday supported by restaurant and chocolate lobbyists. We're not any more in love today than any other day of the year, but apparently people decided that Lincoln's birthday wasn't going to get us from the post-holiday blues until spring. However, today MUST be something special. Calvin and Diana are hanging out together. Yesterday, I stumbled upon them sleeping on the same end of the couch! I took photographic evidence. Sorry it's blurry and grainy. I swear it's not because I doctored the picture! I was just so afraid they'd get up and resume fighting (well, resume Diana complaining and Calvin poking at her and then both avoiding each other) that I took the picture quickly, before the batteries died and by the time I went to get a new battery, Calvin had jumped down to investigate the camera. And today, they're both sitting in the office with me (on Brett's chair of course). It's like the cupid of brotherly love shot them both in the butt...or maybe they signed some kind of peace accords. Whatever it is, I'm not knocking it and it kind of does make me believe a little in the magic of the holiday.

Happy Valentine's Day, All!

Look at how close they are! Diana had been sleeping with her head on Calvin's tail even!

The princess stole Calvin's usual spot on a pillow
on Brett's chair. He didn't seem to mind and cozied
up on the back of the chair.

It's madness, I tell you!

Happy Holidays

2006-12-22T02:05:00.000-05:00

We are lazy. Yes, we admit it. We intended to send out Christmas cards this year and just never got around to it. So, this is our Christmas card. Hey, at least postage was cheap. :-)

We are now in Loveland at Mom's house. We got to Colorado the day before the big blizzard. We were supposed to be in Jackson Hole tonight, but the blizzard prevented that. All of the highways out of the state were closed, so there was no way we were getting to Wyoming today even if we could have gotten out of Mom's subdivision. While the owners' association pays for snow clearing, it was not clear when they'd get here and if we were going to get to Montana to see Dad and Lori, we needed to leave tomorrow (12/22). So we started shoveling out the car. It took us quite awhile. Of course, the road itself wasn't plowed, but a neighbor drove his Tundra back and forth, packing down a path. Below are a few pictures of the snow.

Here's Megan behind a huge drift out front of Mom's house.

Here's Megan tromping through the snow.

Here's Megan making a snowman.

Here's Mr. Snowman trying to get his snow cat out of the tree.

The pile of snow on the driver's side of our rental car.

Family, Friends, Feasting, and Forced Labor

2006-11-30T17:43:00.000-05:00

This Thanksgiving we drove to Richmond to celebrate the holiday with my family. We left as early as we could get packed up on Wednesday and, two cats in tow, made the 4 hour trip in reasonable time. We were out early enough to miss most of the horrible traffic, though it seemed that those on the road were trying to make up for that fact by driving like idiots. Once there, the cats all got along well (Diana took a few days to actually come out of our bedroom), but in the end everyone learned to play and sleep in the same room, if not exactly "together".

Wednesday night, Brandy came over and Erin got in to town and we opened up a package of beading supplies I had ordered. We went through some of my dad's mother's jewelry and restrung, repaired, and reused beads and components to make some up-to-date additions for all our jewelry boxes. My grandmother had gotten into beading before her passing, and there were even some great strings of "never been strung" gemstone beads that we shared around. It was very cool.

Thursday was rainy. Because Brandy had to work that afternoon and couldn't be there for dinner, we figured that was excuse enough to have 2 Thanksgiving feasts. I mean, what else are you supposed to do?! So we had a huge spread for Thanksgiving breakfast and repeated the process for dinner that night. :) It was great. Some friends of my mom and dad came over with their son and we gorged on all sorts of yumminess.

On Friday morning, for the first time in years, Brandy was able to join us for the annual American hajj to the mecca that is a shopping mall. It worked out even better because she recently moved to an apartment adjoining the shopping center of our choice. So we had a place to go back to and have breakfast, regroup, bandage our wounds and such. Very cool. We managed to get in and out of several stores on our lists and scored some GREAT deals. There's nothing like being drug out of bed at an ungodly hour by a screaming alarm clock and then driving through traffic and wading through brawls of soccer moms for the chance to wait in that far too long of a line with the holy grail that is that perfect Christmas gift (on sale for half price) to put me in the Christmas Season Mood. I like to think of it as doing my part to relive the trek of the Maji. It seems like it takes 2 years of traveling in a slow line, following the yonder star...or is that the light over the check out ringers' aisle? Either way, once the morning sleep gets out of my eyes and I have some good breakfast, I have acquired gifts that need to be wrapped. And the wrapping DOES put me in a good mood.

After the morning activities, we came back to my parents' house, at which point I laid down for a nap. That 2-year trek took a lot out of me. And all the stores seemed plum out of camels to help carry my load. After the nap, Brett and I headed outside to help my dad on the deck. My dad has been building a new deck on the back of their house for several months. The time it has taken is in no way indicitive of his motivation. He's just doing it by himself and it's hard to do even the simple tasks (measuring, screwing, etc) without someone else there to hold up the other end of the board. He had all the beams and posts secured, so we got out there that afternoon and got the joists for the upper level put up.

It was hard work, but we had a great time (and it didn't hurt to at least attempt to work off some of our two feasts from the day before). The next day we stayed later than we had originally anticipated so that we could get the lower level joists up as well. It has all the makings of a deck now!

Brett in the News

2006-11-21T11:44:00.000-05:00

This morning I was talking on the phone and flipping through the online version of the local paper and who is on the front page? Brett. Last week he had been called by the RU PR people to have his picture taken at the campus studio, but never actually found out why. I guess now we know. I even think it's a nice picture. Unfortunately the link is broken, so when you try to enlarge the thumbnail, you only get part of his face. But still, this is pretty cool. :)

Beer making

2006-11-14T13:08:00.000-05:00

This weekend, Megan and I made some beer.... 10 gallons of beer to be exact. We haven't made any beer since before our wedding and we have over 4 cases of empty bottles downstairs. So, we sat down and tried to work out what beers we should make to fill those poor lonely empty bottles. We decided to make a cherry stout and a kölsch. For those not in the know, kölsch is a pale beer made only in Köln (Cologne) and is sort of a mix between ale and lager. It's fermented at fairly cool temperatures, but not really lagered. Our local homebrew supply store closed down, so we ordered some kits for these beers from Northern Brewer. We've ordered from them before. (In fact, it was from them we got the Belgian raspberry puree to make the mead we had for our wedding.) The kits came late last week and we made the beer on Saturday and Sunday. Using our big propane burner that came with our turkey fryer sure makes things go faster than on the stove top!

Fermentation has just started, but I'll move these to the secondary fermenter probably tonight or Wednesday night. I imagine we'll be bottling the kölsch in maybe a week and a half and the stout after another 2 weeks or so. Then they'll have to bottle condition for another 3 weeks or so. Should be ready right about Christmas or so! You can see more details about the beers at my homebrew page.

Trick or Treating - Jerry Springer Style

2006-11-03T12:58:00.000-05:00

Brett's Pumpkin.

Megan's Pumpkin

So this Halloween, we decorated far more than we ever had. This wasn't driven by some desire to really "do up" the holiday, but rather, I have, each year, become increasingly annoyed with the kids that run from door-across-the-lawn-to-door. The sidewalks around here go straight out the front door to the street. So the logical path of well mannered kids is from the door, down the sidewalk, down the street, down the next sidewalk, to the next door. Our sidewalk is lined with flower beds. There are spaces to sneak through them built into the design, but they certainly aren't obvious to the sugar-crazed kids stampeding around in the dark. So this year, we waited until Walmart had orange and purple lights on sale, and bought a couple strings. I put some stakes in the ground to mark off appropriate paths, and now our azealas still have the same number of branches after Tuesday than they did before. It's amazing. :)

With all the decorations, I thought we'd get swamped with Trick or Treaters. I mean, if I were ToTing, I would assume that people who put up orange and purple lights would also have good candy (which we did). The night started later than usual, but the number of small herds of wild creatures was increasing to a peak when suddenly, a woman started screaming in our front yard. We stopped what we were doing and listened, to make sure everyone was ok. Well, everyone was...sort of. The screaming was intense and frankly, scary. My first thought was "oh no, someone's been hit by a car". I reached for the phone to call 911. Then I heard what the screaming was about. A woman was ToTing with her 3rd grade-ish son and her 2 year old daughter. The son was excited about the festivities, and had ran ahead to our sidewalk (it was his first house he was going to hit). The mother thought that extreme verbal abuse was the way to deal with the child for his insensitivity to his toddler sister's leg length. Yes. You read that right. She was having a one-sided throw down with a 9 year old because he got excited and left her to walk with her 2 year old up the hill to our house. The child was sobbing during all this and finally his mom insisted he go take his tear streaked face up to our door and get some "#$@*# !#%#* candy!" Bless his heart. The kid had literally messed himself. It was horrible. I gave him some extra candy, since I figured ours would be the only door he'd go to all night. Needless to say, NO ONE would come NEAR our house for a half an hour after that (the houses are tightly packed and kids 2 blocks away identified what corner the screaming was coming from). It was like we had been infected with the plague. We watched hordes of kids come towards our end of the block, then do an abrupt about face.

In the end, we were happy to give extra candy to anyone who bothered to come to the door. This included more than one group of high schoolers. I actually gave candy to a guy with a mustache. A real one. Not even peach fuzz! And I'm so ok with that if they're escorting little kids, but these were honest-to-God groups of 17 year olds out for free candy. Then again, when a masked kid with a baritone voice says "trick or treat", I think I take the threat of the trick part more seriously. :)

Marty and Dave's Newest Addition

2006-10-25T15:43:00.000-05:00

Two weekends ago, my mom and dad came down to help us scour the Floyd Fall Craft Festival for handmade treasures. We got a spiffy leather belt, a few Christmas gifts, and had a nice time. My parents found an inspirational sign (this sign is going to inspire my mom to make up her mind about the curtains that will hang on the window the sign is now posted above), very dark applebutter, a pretty necklace, and some other odds and ends. In one particularly crowded section of the fair was a woman selling paintings on behalf of a local art gallery. She also is the "Feline Coordinator of the Floyd County Humane Society." You can just imagine the pictures plastered all over the side of her stall. Every cat featured looked like something out of a calendar. But one kitten was hands down the cutest thing you've ever seen. Mom immediately fell in love. The lady told her that the kitten was, indeed, unclaimed and wouldn't be weened and ready to leave her mother for at least two more weeks. Mom said she'd "think about it" and wandered on. As we were leaving the fair hours later, my dad said "Why don't you go back and see if the kitten's still available? If no one else has claimed it today, we could find a way to get it back to Richmond."

And so, on Saturday, with baby Emma curled in a towel, snug in her cat carrier, we met mom at the halfway mark between Radford and Richmond. She's absolutely adorable and her middle name should be Spunk. She'd only been at my parents' house a day before she pushed Star (their aggressive, moody adult cat) away from her foodbowl and ate Star's food! Marcy and Emma are still feeling each other out. Emma's not afraid of anything and Marcy...well, despite being 8 months older...is. So eventually Marcy's not going to run when the kitten tries to play with her, and until then, my parents are just careful to give both cats tons of love and attention.

The adventures of Diana and the plastic litter

2006-10-20T13:07:00.000-05:00

Okay, it's been awhile since we've posted anything new. It's not that there's been nothing going on, but that we've been too busy to post.

For example, for the past week we've been trying to get a urine sample from Diana. Note that as a cat, Diana doesn't understand "Could you just pee in this cup, please?" This has led to any number of "situations" that would be hilarious if they were on TV and not so funny when you're actually there...trying to, say, slide a bit of foil under a cat's butt while she urinates. Uh yeah. Funny to picture someone else doing. Not so funny to be the person (or to smell it).

Long story short (and edited for the non-bodily-fluid-lovers out there)...Diana had symptoms of bad, possibly life threatening and very expensive UT problems. The vet tech explains to me in small words how one gets a cat's urine sample. This consists of locking the cat in a room with NO textiles (she'll use the towels/sofa/clothes/whatever instead of the box) with a litter box filled with plastic pellets. Diana is a skittish cat. Plastic pellets make loudish noises. This was NEVER going to work. Every time, bless her heart, she TRIED to think about using the plastic pellet filled box...she put one paw in and scared herself with the noise of them rolling around. After days of this very pitiful, locked in the bathroom existence and still no usable sample, we broke down and bought aquarium rocks. It feels more like litter and it's still nonabsorbant. Here's the thing. You have to wash it. And dry it. And then be ready to strain it the instant it gets used. UGH. I washed aquarium litter. I think I'm going to put that on my resume. And, after all this hooplah...she's just fine. Apparently we just needed to change cat litter brands. Go figure.

Calvin's New Friend

2006-10-02T12:39:00.000-05:00

It's been a while now since Diana joined us and she now seems comfortably settled into her routine and place in the household. This routine, however, doesn't always suit Sir Calvin. Diana is a princess: high maintenence like you wouldn't believe. Everything is her way or the highway, bucko. Diana is nocturnal in the strictest sense. She wanders around the house at night, cat napping. During the day, she's taken "beauty rest" to a new level. I think "beauty coma" would be a better description. No amount of trills and purrs and pokes from Calvin can rouse her for a game of tag. Heck, forget Calvin, she hardly shakes the cobwebs off to get up for her favorite treats! Calvin, on the other hand, is less of a cat and more of a human. At least he thinks so. He thinks normal "people" are awake and active during the day and sleep soundly during the night. So this means that early morning and late night, when both cats are awake, there are rousing games of tag and kickball as well as foot races that could be mistaken for elephant stampedes by anyone who can't see the participants. We're encouraged that D and C get along so well when they're both awake, but during the day, Calvin seems to be a little lost. Diana is happy to come wake us up at 3am to have us entertain her. (I swear she thinks we're her personal valets and jesters!) Calvin, however, gets bored when Brett's at work and Megan is working on the computer and has been forced to make a new friend to keep him entertained.

Calvin has adopted a leopard print mouse that is a handmedown from Emma, Gina's princess...I mean cat. Emma is particular about her toys and the mouse didn't interest her at all, so it made its way to our house when Gina moved to TX in the summer. At first the mouse was in a drawer with other cat toys. If we left them all on the floor we'd never be able to sweep, so we rotate through the toys in the drawer and when they haven't played with one in a while, it goes back in the drawer and a "new" forgotten old one comes back out. At some point the leopard print mouse made an appearance in the house and hasn't be able to get back in the drawer for a moment's rest since. Calvin now carries the mouse around the house with him like a little kitten. He brings you the mouse when he wants to give you a gift, but quickly takes it back again. :) He cleans it and naps with it and takes it to the food bowl with him and of course he talks to it to keep it occupied during the day. Yes, I'm sure he's doing this for the benefit of the mouse. He keeps it away from Diana at all costs. I suppose he's afraid she'll give it cooties like girls often do.

Eventually the mouse needed a name. It's clear that he's adopted the mouse as his own pet to take care of. Calvin had already given it a name. A distinctive, if somewhat mornful, "meeewww" and sometimes he calls it by a nickname, a short chirping "mew". We translated it for him: "Hobbes". (Be sure to check out the link here.)

Why didn't I have a basketball scholarship?

2006-09-29T14:32:00.000-05:00

One of the true joys of being a professor of physics is that it's my job to throw, smash, shoot, and otherwise have fun with things that, say, an English professor would never get to do.

Wednesday I was swinging a wooden ball tied to a piece of string (about 400 grams ~ 1 pound) around my head to demonstrate centripetal acceleration. I then realized, while whipping this around in front of the class, that the string I'd used was some old kite string I'd found in the lab. I quickly calculated that the likelihood of the string breaking and the ball flying through the air and smacking someone was high. Since we had also just calculated that it was moving about 6 m/s (~13 mph or so), I quickly stopped swinging it around. Later in Help Center, I couldn't resist playing with it again (spinning it vertically this time). Of course, the string broke! Fortunately it broke near the floor and it rolled harmlessly into the back of the room. Disaster averted!

Today I was talking about how gravity can act as a centripetal force. (Side note - centripetal means almost literally "center-seeking" - it's the force/acceleration that changes the direction of motion of an object.) Usually we talk about this in terms of orbits. But, I wanted to show them that we'd already talked about this earlier in the semester when we did projectile motion. In my zeal, I threw an eraser across the room. This is a big lecture hall. I was like 30 feet from the wall. Against the wall was a trash can. I just threw the eraser, aiming only enough to avoid hitting students (which I've nearly done this semester already). After throwing it I started talking again, but out of the corner of my eye I see I have just made a perfect swish into the trash can with the eraser!!!!! I actually got an ovation for it. Okay, it wasn't standing, but hey this is a physics lecture, you can't ask for too much! It was so clearly a miracle that I almost called it a day there. I probably couldn't do that again in a 100 years even if I tried.

I'm now going to be extra careful as I've clearly used up all the luck I was alotted in my life. I found and married Megan, and then I made a 30 foot shot with an eraser without trying.

Might as well close up shop - show's over. :-)

Camping

2006-09-24T20:04:00.000-05:00

Megan and I went camping this weekend at Rocky Knob, one of my favorite campgrounds on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We had a nice time barring some minor problems.

It was windy. Really windy. Really really windy. We got virtually no sleep on Friday night as we laid there waiting for the airplane to hurry up and take off. Or a tree to fall on us.
Tied with the wind for fun was the air mattress. Yes, when you're car camping you can really camp in what is probably an overly luxurious manner. So we have a queen size air mattress we bring with us and inflate. And in this case, inflate again. And again. Yep, about every 3 hours. Fortunately, we were already awake from the wind or it would have really been a downer. Later Saturday, we spent some time driving to buy a new air mattress.

We did learn another thing. If you have a pound of hamburger and are planning to make coal burgers, you should really just make 4 and not 2 burgers. The cheese/meat ratio is all wrong with 1/2 lb burgers. Oh, and that's also a lot of meat.

Other than that we mostly lazed around, swinging in our hammocks (thanks Brian and Teresa - those really add to the luxuriousness of the camping experience).

To finish up our luxury camp, Erin, Megan's sister, bought me a small camp espresso pot. This was its first outing. I didn't follow directions (duh - I'm a guy) and I apparently wasn't supposed to tamp the coffee in (like one would for every other espresso maker in the world). Let's just say it was a little bit strong.

Thanks Megan

2006-09-19T20:58:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to thank Megan for:

posting the pictures of the new appliances (the dishwasher, which no pictures were taken of, looks just like the refrigerator and stove, only more dishwasher-like);
posting pictures of the jelly making process;
posting pictures of me making jelly, while sick; and
posting pictures of me making jelly, while sick, and in my "comfort" clothes.

At least she did so on "Talk Like a Pirate" day as in the last picture, the glare on my glasses makes me look like I accidentally poked my right eye out with my hook! Arrrgh ye' matey!

:-)

Shiny Objects

2006-09-18T10:51:00.000-05:00

All girls like shiny objects, and I suppose I'm not any different. In this case, stainless steel makes more of a general glare than a sparkle, but in the form of large kitchen appliances, it's shiny enough to qualify as an "oooh pretty" in my book. The new appliances look great and we christened the stove and fridge by making yet another batch of grape jelly. I haven't had the jelly yet, but the italian ices Brett made have been to die for!

This time we got the process right. In case anyone has any questions about grape jelly making, let me stop here and say:

1. You CANNOT make a double batch of jelly. Just because you have a pot big enough to hold it doesn't mean it is meant to happen. This also applies if you think you can make triple and quadruple batches because you have large pots from beer making like, say, we do. You can only make a single batch at a time or the jelly comes out as syrup because there's no "jell" to it.

2. Jar lids are destined to enter a parallel universe. Apparently they are somehow related to socks. You know how you just "knew" you put an even number of socks in the wash and still ended up with one short? Yeah. Same with jar lids. I mean, it's not complicated...you have X jars and X screw on rings and X lids. And somehow we ended up with X jars, X-1 rings, and X-2 lids. Where DO these things go and are they actually useful when they get there?

3. Given that "jell" was lacking, we started adding more pectin this time around. This is good. You can dip a spoon into ice water and then into the boiling mixture and then back in the icewater to see how much it jells and get a feel for when you've added "enough". You really can't add too much pectin. Some of our jars of jelly can actually stand up, salute the flag, and vote Republican. They're jelling more than those Dr. Scholl's inserts. And that's just fine by me!

Now, with lessons learned, we continued on with our jelly making on our new stove...even having a quick scare when one pot boiled over with no notice and we had grape syrup boiling on the stove top. Luckily we had lots of Ceramibryte and no permenant etching or discoloration of the cooktop resulted.

And here's what you've all been waiting for...the pictures!

Our tree - a photo of the trunk

2006-09-15T18:43:00.000-05:00

Today I remembered to take the camera to work. When I got there, they were busy cutting down the the pieces to a small(er) size and hauling it away. Actually, they were hauling away pieces still when I left work at 4:30 today.

Anyway, here's a picture of the trunk. It's hard to tell, since I failed to get anything in frame that could give a sense of scale. So, I'll just tell you that that trunk is at least 5 feet in diameter. Does that look like a tree that's gonna come down soon?

Our tree is gone...

2006-09-14T19:29:00.000-05:00

Okay, it's not really our tree, but the gigantic oak we took our engagement pictures in front of was just taken down yesterday. Today, there's nothing left but a stump. I wish I'd had the camera with me, but I don't regularly carry it with me to work! Apparently they (whoever "they" are - I'm guessing some university-employed risk assessors) decided that the tree was unsafe. Okay, yes it's between two buildings, mine and the library. Yes, if it decided to fall over, it would probably do some damage to the library. So, was it at risk? I saw the trunk, in pieces, after they had cut it up into manageable sections. The core was rotten. By core I mean about a 1 foot diameter section. There was a thickness of significantly more than a foot surrounding this core the whole circumference of the trunk! If we were to model this tree as a straw, you would have an opening less than half the radius of the straw!!!! It clearly had lots more life in it (no, it didn't have any obvious diseases - it was healthy in appearance over all its branches - I am just a layman though).

We'll miss having that tree around. It was a reminder of the start of our lives together and we liked the idea of having something so old and great at our beginning. Farewell tall oak!

PS - We'll have pictures of our new appliances up soon, if we can bear the embarrassment of how bad our old cabinets look with the new appliances. More incentive to get the kitchen done I guess.

PPS - Megan has some good pics of Calvin and Diana around the house I'm sure she'll post at some point. Probably when she gets over the cold I gave her.

What I didn't think I'd be doing today

2006-09-07T21:21:00.000-05:00

This could be a strange blog. I mean, there were lots of things I didn't think I'd be doing today. I didn't think I'd fly to the moon today. I didn't think I'd be driving a Ferrari. These are nice daydreams and they're not what I planned to do today (unfortunately), but in a million years I wouldn't have come up with what did actually happen today.

When I woke up this morning, I thought I'd go to work, do my office hours, get some stuff accomplished and ready for the weekend. I was feeling a little sick today, but nothing too terrible.

I come back from lunch with Rhett (who's recovering nicely from his bike accident thank you very much), sit down and my phone rings. Huh, that was good timing. I pick up and the conversation goes like this (with Megan).

"Hello."
"Hey, how's it going?"
"Fine, what's up?"
"Um, you know how our refrigerator is making (new) noises? And how we can't use the energy miser setting any more? And how we were sure that it was going to be the first appliance to die in the kitchen?"

At this point, you should now insert groans and a sudden increase in my brain activity as I try to determine how much it's going to cost to fix or replace our frig which has been acting up. Now back to our conversation.

"Here - listen to this." The phone is quiet for a second, and then I hear a loud motor (pump I think, but it's over the phone so I can't be sure - I should embed a sound file or something). Megan gets back on. "That was the dishwasher."

At this point, my brain again starts to spin. See I had already calculated things based on replacing a refrigerator, not a dishwasher. While there was some relief it was the dishwasher and not the frig, it wasn't so great that I felt big warm fuzzys or anything.

"Wow - that sounds bad," I said.
"Yeah - there's no water in the dishwasher either."
"So, you wanna go to Lowe's tonight?"
"Yeah, I guess so."

See, we hate our dishwasher (we hate our frig too, but that's a separate issue.... or is it?). It's bisque. Why is it bisque when everything else in the kitchen is white? That's a darn good question. We don't know - someone else put it in and the darn thing (used to) work and we didn't bother replacing it just to get the right color. Oh yeah, did I mention neither of us like white appliances anyway? No? Okay - we don't like white appliances.

I got through the rest of a long day (who knew students would have so many questions). I headed home just as it started to rain (if you haven't been keeping up lately with the weather, we've had a lot of rain here). Great - no mowing the lawn today. Guess I can focus on the dishwasher. After arriving at home, we decide it's time to head over to Lowe's and see what's what.

At this point in our story, I suppose it'd be helpful to note that Megan and I would like to redo our kitchen. The cabinetry is original and not of the greatest construction for one thing. For another, there's nice hardwood floors in the kitchen. Unfortunately, they're underneath a layer of plywood and some really great sticky tiles. Yes, you know those foot square tiles you peel the paper off and stick down. The ones that stay stuck down for, oh, at least 5 months if you're lucky? Yeah, those are the ones. Yep. The problem of course is money. How does one pay for a total kitchen remodel even if one does most of the work yourselves? Um, we're not sure yet, but it's on our "to do" list.

We head over to Lowe's. We do some wandering around, purposefully staying away from the appliance section. I, at least, was scared to look at the appliances because they have big price tags and we were clearly going to have to pay for one of those price tags. It's fun to look at big ticket items if you don't have to actually buy one! Anyway, we eventually wander over to the appliances and look at the dishwashers. Megan and I both like the stainless look, but we were willing to look at black as well. Remember, while everything's currently white, we'd like to switch out of that. We found a nice dishwasher in stainless though from Frigidaire. We decided that is was both of our favorites and had pretty much decided to get it.

When we looked up, Megan spotted a matching refrigerator that was marked down 35% (yes, you read that correctly). Um, what? We ran over and, trying not to drool too much, gave it the once over. It has a small dent in one side (barely noticeable). We're trying to figure out why on earth it's marked down so far and are running around comparing it to all the other Frigidaire models to see if we can spot some obvious difference. Nope. While doing so we notice a stove like ours (our stove is only 4 years old, but white). It's convection like ours. In fact it's exactly like ours, except it's stainless and matches the dishwasher and refrigerator. And it's marked down $100. Thoughts are tearing through our minds! Would it be crazy to just go ahead and start our kitchen remodel by getting new appliances now? First stop - talk to Lowe's sales guy. We ask said sales guy why the frig is marked down. "It's last year's model and it's the last one - we gotta clear it out before we can put out the new ones. Oh, it's the only one left." We asked about the stove. "Same story - it's the only one left." Oh lord. Now we need to make a decision. Megan points out the dent in the frig and he agrees to take another $100 off! He also points out that if Megan gets a Lowe's credit card (I have one already) that's another 10% off and then we can get 12 months/no interest too. We look at each other. "Sales guy, will you hold these at least until we get some dinner and talk about it? We'll be back tonight." He says sure so we run off for a bite to eat and some serious money talk.

Long story short... we got it all. On Saturday afternoon, we'll be getting a new refrigerator, new dishwasher, and new stove. Matching. In stainless. And I'm still certain I would never have considered this happening today when I woke up. Anybody want an almost new stove (it's white remember) for real cheap?

A new hobby

2006-08-24T14:41:00.000-05:00

I've recently started a new hobby (more by chance than anything). Awhile back, Megan and her mom (Marty) went to California to help clean out Megan's grandmother's house. When they were out there Megan called and asked if I was interested in any of the beer steins and barware that was there. I said sure. Steins have always been cool, but all I had up to now was a stein my dad gave me for Christmas one year. Megan said she'd try to take any that no one else wanted and also said she'd get some beer glasses (a mix of tumblers and stemware) out here too. A week ago I guess now, it got to Richmond and we went up there to help unload the truck and get things organized. I pulled the boxes that had the steins and stemware aside and only glanced in them enough to determine that none of the steins were broken. One piece of stemware was but overall I thought it was amazing that it was the only casualty.

Once getting home, I opened up the boxes and went through the steins as Megan watched. They are, in a word, cool. We know for certain that one of the steins is from circa 1896. One stein holds 2 liters. As Megan said, "it's always good to have a stein you can keg in." Hey, I might need that much while grading exams! :-)

Rather than put a limited set of images up here of the steins and glassware, I've just created a quick web page with images of the steins on it. Check them out! And now I don't wanna hear anything about "what does Brett want for Christmas?"!

Grapes - a postscript

2006-08-13T16:48:00.000-05:00

This will be quick as it's really just a postscript to the previous post.

We mushed up our grapes and extracted the juice. If you recall, I said we had about 1.5 - 2 bushels. We got 1.5 gallons of juice out. We've done the initial filtering so far. Now you let it cool in the refrigerator, then filter out any solids that made it through the first step, then we'll freeze it or use it immediately to make some popsicles and/or grape sorbetto. With this much juice, we might even make some grape granita (italian ice).

Grapes

2006-08-09T21:48:00.000-05:00

So, we have been pretty quiet in terms of talking about the garden this year. Really. Go look at previous years! It's not that it's not going well - it is. But, does everyone want to hear about our garden really? Again? Sure we have tomatoes, peppers, beans, potatoes, (really really wonderful) garlic, basil (coming out of our ears), and corn. Sure we've had carrots, radishes, lettuce, and squash. Yeah - been there done that.

What's new this year? Well, number 1,we've severely cut back on the number of tomato plants. Last year we had around 25. This year we're down to around 12. It's made our yard look more like a real garden than, say, a field owned by Ragu. What's really new is our grapes. Sure, you've seen pictures of our grapes before, like the one below. The grapes are the ridiculously large mound at the left side of the image. See that mound of green? That's them going over the arch we were supposed to use at our wedding. Megan's since cut the vines back so going through the arch isn't a limbo contest.

We started these mostly as a privacy barrier for summer. We thought they'd look nice and in addition provide a visual barrier for dinners out on the patio etc. And, if we happened to get a few grapes out of the deal, we'd be more than happy. We bought 4 types of grapes and let them run over the fence surrounding that part of the yard. They've done an (obviously) excellent job of doing so. Last year we had a few grapes, with few being the keyword. This year, it's a little different.

As Megan pointed out to me, that's not such a great picture. One, you have no cue for how deep that container is. Well, to give you some visual help here, the corn is about 8" long. So, because I was too lazy to measure this, that container is about 24" x 16" x 14". It's not filled all the way to the top and these measurements aren't real, but even being conservative gives that as being at least 1.5 bushels of grapes right there. Now, that sounds impressive. It does. It's way more than we thought we had till we started picking. What's more impressive is we haven't picked all the grapes yet. Recall I said we had 4 plants? Yeah, of the total vine length we have, we've picked off maybe 1/3 of the total distance. Seriously.

You know, it takes a while to de-stem and wash that many grapes! So, what are we gonna do with all of these grapes? First off, we set some aside (and gave some away) for eating. The rest we are going to mash up and make juice out of. What will we do with the juice? Oh sure, I suppose we could make jelly. We're the Taylors though, not the Smuckers. (That and I don't have any canning gear). Instead we're going to take the juice and do a few things with it:

Make popsicles. Yummy! We have some Edy's brand real juice popsicles already, but we want to make our own!
Grape sorbetto. Again, could it be yummier? Is "yummier" really a word? It is now.
Grape italian ices.

Everything we've read says the juice freezes fine so we'll have plenty for all winter long. Jealous yet? You don't have to be - come on over and have a popsicle.

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned how great the raspberry/dark chocolate chip ice cream was I made a little over a week ago. I guess I'll have to save that for the next taunt, I mean blog entry.

The crypt is gone

2006-08-06T19:23:00.000-05:00

When we moved in to the house, we inherited what soon became known, to us anyway, as the crypt. It was supposed to be a picnic table, but it really looked like something a dead body would be found in. Or Dracula's summer home.

Anyway, it was useless as a picnic table unless you were (a) a child, or (b) had femurs that were less than 30 cm long. Just great... If you, as a normal human being, sat it in it and managed to get your knees under the table top, your butt would have been setting about 4 inches back from the far edge of the bench. But, we never did anything with it as it was a family "heirloom" that our old neighbors had shared with her family. She had grown up in our house and moved in with her husband next door to us. We just couldn't bring ourselves to ask them if we could take it out when they lived here. Once our new neighbors, Zack and Charlene moved in though, we immediately decided to take it out. Megan and I were thinking of waiting until cooler weather prevailed as it's been hot and humid here. Zack and Charlene had different ideas though. We came home one day and Zack had started breaking off the top of the table (a 4" thick piece of solid concrete, with rebar) and the base (lots and lots of cinderblocks). We were severely disappointed that it was not a crypt!!! The whole base was solid cinderblocks except for maybe a 1.5 cm gap between the two long rows of blocks. Pooey!

Here you can see the power sledge team at work. Bunk and Mary (neighbors from across the alley) have come over to supervise. Supervising manual labor is always a specialty of Bunk's. :) Charlene and Megan decided she needed to adopt some of the volunteer basil overtaking our garden, so they made a home for it in last year's tomato patch.

Megan and I spent a lot of time hauling off this initial debris. It eventually took us 14 loads in our "truck" (please read Brett's LRC here) to the local dump to get rid of it all. The last piece to get rid of was the base. Again, it was solid concrete, about 4" thick, but this time very little rebar in it. The problem was it was flat on the ground. Smacking it with the sledgehammer didn't do much since it was well supported. Megan and I decided to see if we could pry it up and put some cinderblocks underneath it and then hit it. We knew that would do the trick, but the prying it up was gonna be the hard part. We used the pry bar and slowly levered the whole pad up. Then it was time to take out some aggression on the concrete!

There it is - all broken up. I wish we'd had more pictures of the destruction process, but we didn't know Zack and Charlene were going to start on it so soon! And then we forgot about it in the excitement of the destruction. We're going to fill it in with some dirt for now and put grass over it. Megan and I are looking forward to, hopefully, next year taking out the rest of our concrete pad out our back door and putting in a brick/stone patio that extends around the corner here, out to our property line, to make a nice summer evening retreat. And yes, I'm pretty pleased to have it gone.

Summer gardening

2006-07-21T20:41:00.000-05:00

It's summer and the garden is in full swing. Please ignore the mess on the driveway! We were in the middle of putting some additional supports in for the tomatoes when we took these. Yes, that doesn't explain the apple tree piece sitting there - tough!

We've almost completely finished up our harvest of berries for the year it seems. We've got a very few blackberries left, but the raspberries and strawberries are done. We didn't get nearly as many blackberries this year as last, but we can't complain as we have more than 3 gallons of raspberries frozen right now! And that's not counting what we picked and gave away or didn't pick while we were on vacation. When Megan gets back from CA (she's there with her mom currently), I'm going to make up some raspberry chocolate ice cream. I guess I just spoiled the surprise, so if you see this before you get back honey, just pretend you didn't! You might also notice the grapes in the background (okay, seriously, how could you miss them?). We might get some edible grapes off them even.

As you can see in the image above, we've got a few slightly healthy squash plants. Ugh. There are 4 mounds there and you can't even hope to see the 4th in this image as it's a pasta squash and not nearly as tall as the others. The tomatoes are off to the right here as are the various peppers (some of them hidden by the squash). We had ripe tomatoes on the 4th of July, but haven't had any more until today. I guess it wasn't hot or sunny enough?!?! Whatever, we'll have plenty this year, but not as many as last year. That's fine though as last year we were just overwhelmed with them. Apparently this year we chose to do that with squash. Off to the left of this image, is our row of beans. We have 2 kinds of bush beans and also some black beans - the bush beans are about ready to start being picked. We've already harvested all of our potatoes. For the first time ever, we're getting a really good carrot crop. Previously we've had very poor luck with them, from just getting the seeds to germinate to having the few that did grow reasonably. This year has been much more successful for some reason.

Here's our corn. We have two types growing here. One is a new hybrid and supposed to be the sweetest corn in the world. The other type is the same as we've grown successfully before (sugar something...).

Finally, the flower garden is growing well in the back. One problem we had was stuff seeding into our path (or growing really tall and falling into and blocking the path). We've put in a fence on the right-hand side of the path to keep the California poppy out of the way, but we clearly need more! The stuff in the path is particularly obnoxious this year because while we were gone in June, lots of stuff (non-weed even) came up in the path. This should be painfully obvious in the above image. Most of what's growing in the path is basil. Yes basil. I transplanted probably 6 plants when we returned but some of them were just too big to easily transplant elsewhere. And I'm not joking when I say that there were 20+ basil plants in the path even after transplanting. We've somewhat given up this year on getting it out and are just planning on having lots of pesto. This isn't bad as we have lots of garlic. I've used one garlic bulb from the garden (center tall things) and it was great - spicy and about the size of my fist. We'll get some more to overwinter again this fall as that seems to be really key.

Well, that's it for now. If anyone needs basil, beans, or (PLEASE someone) squash, let us know. Or just come take it from the garden. Seriously.

It's a girl!

2006-07-12T13:03:00.000-05:00

Since we lost Tyler, we've been trying to evaluate whether Calvin would need a new friend. It was hard to watch him initially as we were only around a few days before leaving for Mexico. He seemed to enjoy his time in Richmond with Louis and Star (Erin's boyfriend and the family cat respectively) while he was there. When he got home though, he just seemed a little lethargic and depressed and just didn't have anybody to play with. We decided we'd have to get him a pal, but wondered whether he would be better off with a kitten or an adult cat. If you've seen Calvin with his "hedgehog", you'd know, as we decided, that a small kitten is probably not a good idea! We decided to look for a cat about his age. Our vet had just found a young cat at their door. She was very skittish, but they eventually caught her on a Friday and we met her on the following Monday. Adult cats don't always get along, so they allowed us to take her home for a trial period (one week) with Calvin. Calvin immediately took to her, but she was a little stressed to deal with him. See the picture of Calvin to see what he's like, even with us!

See, Calvin's a wee bit talkative. Okay, he's a lot talkative. He is friendly though. He brought her toys to play with and makes happy trilling noises when she's around. He's been nothing but nice to her. She, so far hasn't been so nice, at least to Calvin. She also doesn't seem very playful, which is what we were really looking for as a buddy for Calvin. She is a super-cuddler though. When Monday came, we had to make up our minds about whether to keep her or not. She wasn't really exactly what we're looking for as a play buddy though. That said, she's a gorgeous cat and we hope she will mellow out some and be willing to play with Calvin, especially since we decided to keep her. Apparently she heard about this though, and since we paid the adoption fee for her, she's been a bitch toward us, not only not cuddling but actually hissing at us when we reach down to pet her. She is putting up with Calvin more though and did play a little bit today, but not with Calvin. We named her Diana after the Roman goddess of the hunt (and also the Moon). The vet says this may just be that it's taken her a week to catch up on her sleep and food (she was very hungry and exhausted when we got her), and now she's feeling independent enough to go find her place in our world. We're still optimistic that she'll come back around to her super-snuggly prior self. In fact, we're betting that if nothing else, when winter comes and we have the heat set low she'll *have* to get snuggly again.

We are pondering the possibility of getting a kitten to 1 year old cat in additon to Diana and Calvin. We're becoming more and more convinced that Diana is never going to be very playful, and Calvin is still moping around. He really needs someone to play with and we just don't have time to play with him as much as he'd like us to! And let's face it, Brett's just not fast enough to race him several laps from the basement to the second floor. I can't believe we are thinking about getting 3 cats...

Mexico - The Return

2006-07-01T17:51:00.000-05:00

We just returned from Mexico, again. Yes, life is difficult, but we struggle through. If it makes you feel better, this trip did not go nearly as smoothly and was far less relaxing because of it. We had some problems with the hotel in Charlotte when we arrived to fly out. We had even greater problems when we arrived in Playa del Carmen. We stayed at the Wyndham Viva Azteca and we would not recommend it to anyone. When we arrived we were told that they didn't have the requested rooms for us (us being Megan's family - Dave, Marty, Brandy, and Erin - and Megan and me). Instead of 3 rooms, we were given 2 doubles and had to share them. As compensation we were offered a spa treatment of our choice (limited by money and time required). The massages that at least Megan and I received were hardly worth a dime, less yet as compensation for a hotel not able to count the number of rooms they have and compare that to the number of reservations that have been made. The resort also had significant problems with seating at the beach and pool. There was a general lack of chairs and guests would claim the chairs overnight even to get the palapas or other preferred (sometimes any) spot. The resort seems completely uninterested in doing anything about it either. It's completely ridiculous. They also had very poor food. I got food poisoning from a dinner at the Viva Cafe in Playa del Carmen proper. Most everyone else had digestive problems of one sort or another during the trip and Megan's still fighting to get hers cleared up. The reservation system for not eating at the buffet was ridiculous and we wasted over 2 hours total over 2 days trying to get reservations. When we did get into the specialty restaurants they were never anywhere near capacity so we have no idea why it was so hard to do. Finally, one of our bags got left at the resort when we left, containing the iPod, and we had to scramble and get a hold of the resort and send it up in a taxi to the airport. It made it to us, and we got to the gate, by the skin of our teeth.

What was good about the trip? The ocean was great as usual. It was warm and there was some surf as well. I just wished we'd had more time at the beach. We also got to go to some of the ruins in the area. We rented a car and drove over to Coba and Tulum and went through each of those sites. It was very interesting, but very hot and humid. We'd like to go back one more time, especially to Coba, to go to a region of the site we didn't get to. The picture above is of Nohoch Mul which is a 42 meter tall pyramid. Megan and I climbed up it, sweating like crazy, while Megan's family enjoyed the view from the base. Megan's not really fond of heights, but didn't have any troubles going up and only a little bit of difficulty coming down. To give you an idea of how tough/dangerous this is, the guides were overheard to be very pleased that no one had died this year! I think 7 - 9 people have died at Coba over the years and Tulum was a very beautiful site with lots of ruins and a great beachside location. We didn't go down to the beach as we had early reservations that night at one of the specialty restaurants though.

We've posted some of our pictures from the trip. Take a look!

Garden Dinner

2006-06-19T09:32:00.000-05:00

Recently we purchased some new patio furniture from Lowe's as it was on clearance. Megan claims that this isn't some attempt at making me rip up the old falling apart concrete patio and replacing it with paving stones, but I don't really believe her. It's pretty nice stuff, but I have to admit that sitting at it might be more cool if say the patio was even somewhat level. :-)

Earlier in the day, we'd gone mountain biking and worked up quite the appetite. It had been a hot hard ride so we decided to have a garden dinner on the new set. I grilled some chicken and picked raspberries, strawberries, and peas, while Megan worked on boiling some (garden-grown) Yukon Gold potatoes and then added some (garden grown) peas and corn to it. She also made up some salad with lettuce and mixed greens from the garden. We have, for the first time ever, full heads of romaine this year. We've always had some romaine, but they've never developed full heads until now. -shrug- I guess that's to balance out our very pathetic two spinach plants that came up this year. For drink we had a bottle of Bella Sera pinot grigio. Dinner was darn good, as you can see.
While we were out there, we took Calvin out and put him on his leash. He likes being outside while we're out and spends most of his time chasing bugs, sleeping under the raspberries, or getting his leash completely tangled on any available object, including himself. He also vastly prefers to be out when it's cool (I imagine we would too if we walked around in a fur coat all day). He was having a good time running around. As soon as we sat down to eat, over came Tina, the neighbor's cat. She's been hanging out over here quite a bit. At night, Calvin runs from window to window talking to her. It's kind of funny for, oh, about the first 10 minutes. Then it's just kinda loud and obnoxious. Anyway, Calvin last saw Tyler outside and Tina had been over at the same time. When he saw Tina, I think he thought Tyler was coming back too. He whined and cried and ran around like he did the morning after Tyler was hit. He finally calmed down a bit, and then started trying to play with Tina. Tina generally doesn't want to be played with it seems. She does however love tormenting Calvin, although I think it's unintentional. Calvin is of course dragging a big string around and darn it if that's not fun to play with if you're Tina.
We've posted a few more pictures of the garden as it is now. If anyone wants to come water and weed it while we're gone, let us know. We'll let you eat all the raspberries you can stand!

Tyler - April 2004 to June 14, 2006

2006-06-14T17:41:00.000-05:00

Today we had the terrible responsibility to bury Tyler. He was hit by a car early this afternoon right near the front corner of our lot. We had been playing with him outside only hours earlier. He and Calvin had been rolling around and having lots of fun with the neighbor cat as well. Megan and I had gone in for a little while and then a very considerate guy came up to our house to tell us he'd found Tyler's body. It was a shock. Pardon my french, but it was a hell of a shock.

After Paco, our first cat had been hit, we decided we weren't going to get another cat. A neighbor's little girl brought over Tyler to us though. She'd found him as a stray and thought that we should have him. Since he was a stray, Tyler really did not like to stay inside. He loved to be outside, running through the yard and garden, rolling in the dirt, and generally living life to its fullest (that of course also included sleeping deeply on summer days outside under any convenient bush or tree that provided shade). We decided we would compromise and that we would let Tyler go outside, but not put in the cat door again and not let him go out at night. We thought (and hoped) that he would then be safe. We were clearly wrong and it's killing us. Calvin is now alone and seems a bit depressed. We showed him Tyler's body before we buried Tyler in the back yard, across from Paco. Calvin is now going to be limited to his current status of being inside unless he is outside with us and on his leash or rope.

We're going to miss Tyler a lot. He was such a dapper little guy. If there was a cat version of James Bond, he could have played the role with ease.

We've put up a small memorial web page for him. Thanks for reading.

Summer must be here...

2006-06-11T16:11:00.000-05:00

Well, summer must be here as there are fresh ripe raspberries on the vine, blackberries are nearly ripe, and the garden is really growing. We've been fortunate that we've had consistent rain over the past few weeks since the garden has been in. Other than having way too many weeds to deal with effectively, the garden is going great. We've harvested a couple quarts of raspberries already and will have lots more for at least another week or two. The blackberries have not yet fully ripened up, but they're getting there. We have a few strawberries, but since we just planted them this year, we weren't expecting a bumper crop. We've planted peas, cucumbers, 4 kinds of squash, 2 kinds of corn, carrots, lettuce (mixed), spinach, onions, garlic, a variety of herbs, 4 kinds of beans (pole, black, bush Blue Lake, and something else I can't remember), potatoes (mostly Red Pontiac, but we have a few volunteers from last year that we can't yet identify), tomatoes (roma and a variety of others), and peppers (Anaheims and a mix of bells). Of course, we're looking forward to eating all of this and reducing our grocery bill too!

My mom (Dodie) was out visiting us for a few days this last week. While she was here we took the opportunity to visit the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA on the 62nd anniversary. It was quite an impressive memorial and we were impressed with the number of living soldiers who were there at the ceremony. We'd driven by this memorial innumerable times on the way to Megan's parents' house, so we were glad to have finally stopped to see it! We went to lunch up on the Blue Ridge Parkway and ate at the Peaks of Otter Inn. It was pretty good food, but the service that day left a lot to be desired. Still it was a beautiful day and we had a lot of fun.

We're now getting ready for our 2nd trip to Cancun (I suppose I should not be saying something like "neener neener neener - we're going to Cancun 2 times within a month and a half"). :-) Rather than just laze around by the pool, we're going to get out this time and see some of the Mayan ruins and hopefully snorkel in an underground river. We are also hoping to take a zip line tour of the jungle and maybe see a few crocodiles somewhere along the way. I think I speak for both of us that we hope we see the crocodiles at any time other than when we're snorkeling!

Finally, to show you that it really must be summer, here's a picture of Tyler having a siesta on the recliner. It doesn't look like a comfortable position at all but he slept there like that for a couple hours!

2006 Wilderness Road Ride

2006-05-27T18:39:00.000-05:00

Friday night we went to a spaghetti dinner for the Wilderness Road Ride/Mountains of Misery. We went there early to work for the New River Valley Trails group at an information booth concerning the proposed trails. At the same time, we were there to pick up our own registration materials for the ride on Saturday. That night, the invited speaker was Bob Roll (Bobke). He's a former rider on the old 7-11 team and went on to ride for Motorola as well. He retired from the road and then raced mountain bikes for awhile and is now a commentator on OLN's cycling coverage. I got his autograph on his latest book and we were all very entertained by his stories.
Megan and I got up this morning (Saturday) about 6:15, grabbed some breakfast, got changed, and headed to RU's Dedmon Center for the start. We left the start area about 7:15 and headed out on the 57 mile ride. Since we'd ridden there, and had to ride back home, we were going to end up doing more than a metric century (100 km). It ended up we did over 950m of climbing (that's about 3100 feet). As you can see in the photo, it at least started out overcast and cool. Unfortunately it was also humid from the 1"+ of rain we've had in the past two days, including a lot of rain all day Friday. The ride heads out of Radford up the new bike path and then heads out of town towards the interstate. Rather than take people up Tyler (the main road to the interstate), they put you on Greenbriar Road - a steep, moderately long climb up to a residential area and a back way to the interstate. I think it climbs about 140 meters total in something less than 2 km. Yep, that's about 8% grade or so.
Here's a pic of Megan catching a guy on the climb. We're nearly at the top, but there's still a bit of climbing left before you reach the top. It at least does level out a bit. Here's another picture of Megan showing her effort level a few seconds after this picture. This is not an easy climb by any stretch. After the top, this road rolls up and down for another kilometer or so, then you take a left out towards the interstate. That road reconnects to Tyler and we're on that very briefly while we connect to Mud Pike. Mud Pike is a road Megan and I have ridden very often and it's a nice road. Last year though, Megan's bike computer exploded (no we don't know why) on this road. Very weird. We didn't have any troubles this year and here you can see Megan cruising down Mud Pike.
Notice the sun's come out and it's starting to warm up quite a bit. Mud Pike is about 10 km long or so and then we drop down into Christiansburg, site of the first rest stop. Unfortunately to get to said rest stop, you must first go through a residential neighborhood. Like Radford, it's very hilly. Like a residential neighborhood, there's lots of stop signs. That means coming down a hill, coming to a complete stop, then climbing back up another hill. If you could just roll through it wouldn't be a big deal, but starting from a dead stop always just kills you. We eventually reached the rest stop and had a bit of food and drink.
See how happy she is now? At this point, we're maybe a third of the way through. We leave from here, take a long descent (about 6 km long) and head out on a very quiet road to Riner. At the Riner rest stop, which we have no pictures from, you run into all of the people who are on any of the rides (29 miles, 57 miles, and 78 miles). The only riders who don't go to this rest stop are those on the 14 mile ride. We spent a little time there and then headed out again towards Snowville. These roads are mostly familiar to us as we ride on them, but as we neared Snowville we got on a road that we've only been on in the car. Boy, that road hurt. It was pretty bad up to the rest area at the Snowville Fire Dept. It gets much uglier after that. The road is very rolling and the hills are steep. Okay, so we're out of shape, but it was painful. We spent quite a bit of time at the rest stop trying to get as much food and drink into us as we could. It was starting to get hot and very sunny. Here's a pic of each of us at the Snowville rest stop.

We're at more than the halfway point and we're finally starting to really hurt after we leave this rest area. Shortly after the rest area (and actually right before it too) there is a short, but very steep climb. There are people walking their bikes. Thankfully, we know that soon we'll be back on familiar roads and that most of the nasty climbing is over. Eventually we cross over Claytor Lake on a bridge, and then we're back on the transcontinental bike route (highway 76 around here). We then head up to Newbern. There's a great rest stop here (again, no pictures as we're both darn near exhausted now - I'm dehydrated too). The cookies at this rest stop are homemade and fantastic!!!! I personally ate 3 oatmeal raisin cookies and 1 chocolate chip. They were so good and I'm certain it's not just because I was starving and exhausted! I also ate a bunch of small PBJ sandwiches. Megan sucked on some ice to cool her off. At this point we've done more than 80 km and we know we're heading home. There's only one problem. Neither of us looked at the cue sheet. After we cross the bridge into Radford, instead of heading straight to the Dedmon Center, we have to head up this super steep hill near the high school. Why? So that we can ride all of Radford's bike path. That added about 3 km to our trip and since we're already exhausted, heading up this hill was not our first choice. The route took us just a few blocks from our house so we were going to lose all that altitude we just gained to get to the Dedmon Center (to check back in) and then have to re-climb that same amount just to get back home! We did it though. Dorks! We finished up at the Dedmon Center, eating a bit more food and drinking some more before heading home. It was a good ride, but very tiring. Neither of us can recommend a 100 km+ ride on about 3 days of training. Neither our legs, or our butts, are very happy with us right now. We did have a lot of fun and will have a lot of great memories about the ride, especially those cookies!

Trip to Cancun

2006-05-25T15:52:00.000-05:00

We got back from the Mayan Riviera on Saturday. It was a great, relaxing trip. We had planned to go in November and to spend a lot of time siteseeing, but plans change. Wilma made sure we didn't go in November, and since we're returning next month to a place closer to the ruins with Megan's family, we decided to forgo the off-resort excursions and instead spend time playing water volleyball, eating nachos, and working on our tans.

The trip coincided with our 3rd year anniversary and Megan's birthday, not to mention Brett's tenure notification, so we had much to celebrate. The resort had great restaurants for dinners and we met some really nice people from all over, so we had ample opportunity t0 eat, drink, and socialize for all occasions (and non-occassions). Brett got to eat seafood almost every night and Megan was able to avoid it (be sure to check out the food pics, everything tasted as good as it looks!). They also had great raspberry mousse and tiramasu most nights and creamy ice cream by the pool in the afternoon, so again, we had everything we needed to be happy.

We took some pictures of sunrise a few mornings. The big cloud on the horizon in most of them is actually smoke. All of the fallen trees from Wilma are now drying out enough that wildfires are becoming an issue in the area. It certainly gave our room air conditioner a nice "tent camping by the fire" smell. :) The area behind the resort (that our room faced) was a swamp. The signs say that there are crocs in the water, but we never saw them. I think they might've been victims of Wilma. The swamp did attract many water birds of various flavors. I tried to get some egrets, but had to use the digital zoom. There are also some other birds that were less afraid to land nearby someone with a camera. Megan's no Jerry, but they're here if you want to see.

We did a little bit of shopping while we were there, but are mostly saving our efforts for Playa del Carmen next trip (so much so that Megan didn't even buy a Mexico spoon!). We are trying to collect cool ethnic pieces from our travels, and this time we found a neat reproduction Mayan mask and snatched that up. The jewelry seems to be very reasonable, even in the price-tagged shops we went in. In PdC, the shops are all on a haggling basis, so I imagine a skilled person might be able to get REALLY great prices.

We went out to one of the reefs by kayak one day and that was amazing. We had been warned that the reef itself had suffered much Wilma-inflicted damage, so we didn't expect much. While the coral was certainly not that exciting (a few orange and yellows here and there), the aquatic life seemed to be rebounding faster. For a while, a family of rays swam alongside us, flipping upside down so we could see their white bellies. We also saw lots of blue tang, easy to spot since they're REALLY neon blue/purple. We can't wait to go back and do some snorkeling or a glass bottom boat tour.

We've posted some pics for any who'd like to see. Mostly they're of us headed to dinner, dancing, or of the beach.

New wall around arbor

2006-05-11T06:12:00.000-05:00

This is a quick post before we head out to Charlotte. Just wanted to put up a picture of our new wall around our arbor. This was, almost entirely, designed to make mowing easier and to keep grass from growing into the bed. It also matches the arbor nicely. Now that we've done this one, we're probably going to add similar walls around the roses (where the green cinder block wall used to be) for similar reasons.

Now, off to Cancun. I'm sorry I didn't get some of our new flower and garden pics up, but we'll do that when we return!

Tenure and Promotion!

2006-05-06T07:53:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note - I got tenure and promoted to assistant professor, effective May 6th! Now let them try to get rid of me! :-)

On other notes, Megan and I have about finished another project outside (putting a little wall up around the arbor area) and will post pictures of it when it's done, which will hopefully be this weekend. Now that finals are over, my grades are in, and I think it's going to stop raining for a bit, maybe we'll get it finished before we leave for Cancun.

We also have some pictures to post of the flowers. Our garden is growing well so far and we'll have boatloads of lettuce, potatoes, onions, and very soon berries (blackberry, raspberry, and strawberry)! We're going to try to get the bulk of the garden in before we leave for Cancun.

Now, gotta run - time to go sit through another graduation!

April Garden

2006-04-15T10:46:00.000-05:00

So it's my first time at the blogging thing. Usually, I just read over what Brett posts, make any changes I'd like to see, and go on with my life. However, for the past week or two, I've been taking pics of the flower garden. This started out as a quick snapshot here and there, so we'd know where the bare spots were and if there were any places lacking in certain colors when fall bulb planting season started. However, it turned out this year there aren't really many bare spots! It's taken 2 years, but we're finally starting to fill in the garden beds like we'd hoped to. It looks so striking, the other day 2 elementary school age boys rode by the house on their bikes and stopped to admire the flowers! There's a family down the road that walks their kids to school past our house and they leave extra early in the mornings so the kids can have time to check out what's new in the garden. Of course this just makes us more excited to add new beds (mostly because any bed is, by definition, a place that doesn't have to be mowed). :)

On a sad note, RC and Marie, our neighbors next door have sold their house. They went to an assisted living facility back in November after RC had a series of falls and have been looking for a buyer since, but the market around here is pretty much impossible during the school year. Marie actually grew up in our house and when she got married, her father and uncles built them the house next door. I talked to RC yesterday. They're settled in, but I doubt it will ever feel like home there. On the bright side, he does like to point out that no one has to do the dishes. :) He says they drive by every few days to look at our garden. It makes her happy to know that it's a place her "dad would be proud of". That was really cool to hear.

Calvin is now venturing outside. We were hoping to keep him as a strictly indoor cat. Honestly, after Paco, I never wanted another outdoor cat again unless we had acres for him to roam. But Tyler was born on the streets and was a stray before we got him and had only known the outdoors and as much as we tried to convince him how GREAT our house was, he still wanted some time to go chase butterflies and no amount of catnip filled toy diversions was going to sate him. We tried to put a harness and leash on him, but it was a terrible experience. You've heard about animals chewing their legs off in traps? Yeah. Like that. So we didn't try the harness thing again and we just let him out and make sure he comes in by dusk and stays in all night. Calvin, however, wasn't eager to go outside. He's only eager to be where we are. So if I stepped outside to get the mail, he would be well behaved and not try to sneak out the door. But then he'd start to HOWL like the sky was falling. This went on whether we were outside 30 seconds or 30 minutes. Once I was across the alley in a neighbor's backyard talking and Calvin was so loud that the neighbor who is hard of hearing asked me what was wrong with the cat. So we decided that if he wanted out that bad, he might be willing to go with the harness thing. And he was. He took right to it. The first day we didn't let him out, he just wore the harness around the house to get used to it. He hrmphed about how uncool it made him look and spent the next 2 hours straightening his fur. But that was pretty much it. The next day we put it on him and immediately took him outside and tied him to a fence post with a good length of rope. The day after that he even helped me get him into his harness! So now we seem to be in a groove. We're allowed to work outside, unharassed by caterwauling so long as Calvin is allowed to come out and supervise. This has also had the added bonus of keeping Tyler closer to home. He likes having Calvin outside as a playmate/thing. The only thing we haven't really worked out about this is the shade issue. The pictures will show various pieces of lawn furniture sitting in the middle of things. This is so that Calvin can reach shade at all times of the day. He's asked for Brett to install a canopy with girl cats waving palm branch fans and feeding him small pieces of chilled tuna, but Brett says that's not a priority in our landscaping.

Anyway, so I've posted some of the pics I took. The first couple are of the same spots over the past few weeks, so you can see it go from daffodil swamped yellow to many colors of tulips. There are also a lot of shots of close ups on tulips. I was intent on learning how to use other aspects of the camera than the general point-n-shoot part and managed to get the macro function to play nice...and I like the colors. :) Hope you enjoy.

Megan

Smokies Photos

2006-04-03T13:49:00.000-05:00

We've posted a fuller description of our trip to the Smokies, along with lots more pictures finally. Sorry we're so slow! Read all about it!

Back from the Smokies

2006-03-19T20:34:00.000-05:00

This is just a short post, with a few pictures, from our week long trip to the Smokies. For now, if you want to see larger sizes of the photos, click on them and they'll get you to Flickr where you can see other sizes. We'll post a more detailed web page, with lots more photos, later.

We rented a cabin between Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. Unfortunately for us, it only had a sauna, jacuzzi tub, and a hot tub on the deck... Life is tough. We spent nearly every day hiking in the park (barring one complete day after, surprise surprise, Brett rolled his ankle - imagine that!). Our goal was to go to every one of the waterfalls listed in the "Waterfall Hikes" handout from the NP. We actually did every hike in there - some were "strenuous" (and they weren't kidding), others were moderate. Our longest, but most rewarding hike, was to Ramsay Cascades.

This was a long hike (about 8 miles round trip) with over 780 meters of climbing. Much of this climbing (and descending) was scrambling over lots of boulders, roots, and trees. The falls though were beautiful and the pictures just don't do it justice. We had probably 15 - 20 minutes of the whole place to ourselves. We just sat there marveling at the falls as we ate lunch.

We got lost somewhat, mostly due to very poor signage on the trails, while going to Indian Creek Falls. That was supposed to be our easy day after Brett rolled his ankle, but we ended up hiking well over 4 miles instead. By the time we found the falls, it was already nearly 6 PM and getting dark fast.

Our day to Hen Wallow Falls was gorgeous and it had the hardest 0.1 miles worth of hiking the whole trip. Very steep, lots and lots and lots of roots, and very narrow. The falls were pretty, but not nearly as nice as Ramsay (we got spoiled). The light was good for some portrait type shots though.

Our last hike for the week was to Abrams Falls in Cades Cove. It was the only hike to a fall that started out going downstream for us. It was very nice as well, but the camera really didn't like all the white in the images and the pictures there didn't turn out as well as we hoped, but there's some decent ones of the two of us.

Crocuses are blooming

2006-02-28T04:36:00.000-05:00

The weather here has been pretty nice lately and the flowers are coming up in droves. We're going to have a bumper crop of flowers shortly, but the crocuses have already started blooming. Mostly we have yellow and white, but no purples are blooming yet. Shrug - the purples were the last to bloom last year too.

As you can see from the picture above, Calvin (l) and Tyler (r) are enjoying the spring weather since the windows are open. Tyler's probably enjoying it more than Calvin since he gets to go out in it, but I'm sure Calvin doesn't resent that. :-) You can see more of their longing looks outside here.

New Bikes

2006-01-22T11:49:00.000-05:00

Megan and I bought new bikes a couple weekends ago (okay, I'm slow in updating this...). The next day was in the mid to hi 50s so we went on a short ride in the afternoon along the New River Trail. Megan got a Giant Iguana with cable-actuated disc brakes and a nice air shock. I got a Giant XTC2 (the lowest race style bike - basically my ATX 760, but aged like a fine wine 20 years to its newer and better incarnation). It doesn't have disc brakes as purchased, but the mounts are there (the hubs are not disc compatible though). I'll probably survive.... We'll be getting Megan a rack and some panniers soon so we can do some bike camping this spring/summer/fall. Heck, if it wasn't supposed to freezing rain on us today, it'd be warm enough to go!

We're also starting to train for the Bike Virginia Tour of Love ride this year. Last year we weren't able to do it and 2 tours ago, we were on our honeymoon when it was on our end of the state. This year it's on the southeastern end of the state (read flatter). There are 2 century days so we need to get going on our training (although there are shorter routes than the full centuries). We're also planning on doing the Wilderness Road Ride again and I (not Megan) swore I was going to do the Mountains of Misery this year, but I'm starting to chicken out.

Bathroom (almost) done!

2005-12-30T12:57:00.000-05:00

First off, we apologize for a lack of Christmas cards to many of you. Getting the bathroom done (okay, working since we're still not done) took longer than we expected - in fact right up to when Megan's family got here. Since without that bathroom working, we'd only have one shower for 6 people, we spent most of our awake time working on it and not on prepping for Christmas. We got out cards for immediate family, but even those were pretty impersonal! So, while you may not have gotten a card (or you got a lame one), we were thinking of you and hope you had a good day!

Now to the bathroom. First, if you plan on doing a bathroom consider not using hard ceramic tile on the walls. Seriously. Or be willing to pay big $$ for a diamond-coated hole saw. We went with carbide-coated (since it was much cheaper - I mean we're only cutting 5 holes total for the faucets and spouts right?). Ugh. I spent literally most of a day trying to cut 4 holes for the tub spout and faucets. I got 2 done and then broke the tile on the 3rd hole. Nope - not doing that anymore. We went with a slate mosaic around the faucets and the spacing was just right - all I had to do was pop a few squares off. If we ever do any of this again (still have the upstairs shower in principle) we'll either use something softer (like slate or marble or ....) or buy a diamond-coated hole saw on eBay where they're much cheaper than at Lowe's. The slate was a joy to work with (easy to cut when I had to do so) - I'm pretty sure you could gnaw through it if necessary.

Second - seriously consider slate. I like it and when it's sealed properly it's gorgeous. And, let me mention again, it's really easy to cut and work with. Honey, are you listening? I'll pay the extra cost to decrease my frustration levels!!!

So what's left? Well, we need to caulk around the toilet yet (we had a leak problem with it which is a huge other story). We also need to put up the towel bars and TP holder. I've tried mounting these using, again, masonry bits to drill the holes in the tile and given up. I've ordered some 1/4" diamond-coated hole saws to put these up - hopefully get here soon. I could always hang them in the drywall above the tile, but then they'd be over 4' above the floor which might be awkward for TP. :-) We need to change out the chrome faucet flanges with the brushed nickel ones we just bought to match the rest of the hardware (we couldn't find the nickel ones orignally and time was running short). We have some epoxy/paint to primp up the tub to a "new" white finish - much cheaper and easier than replacing the tub, especially since the tub is built into the wall! Finally, we also have some almond caulk (~ wall color) to seal up the top edge of the slate on the walls and the top and vertical portions of the shower stall edges.

Here's a picture of the shower in its "we're cleaning this up" state - note the sponge and wet paper towel, along with the grout and mortar in the tub still. Click on the photo for a medium-sized version or click here for a large (3 MB) version which really shows up the slate.

Master Bath Progress report

2005-12-06T14:53:00.000-05:00

Just a quick master bath progress update. The lovely avacado green tile came off remarkably easily in most places. It was a bit terrifying. We confirmed what we'd suspected before - that we have a real professional layered "mud" surface on all of our walls which is ideal for laying the new tile. Unfortunately, in the bath, they'd had some water damage that they "fixed" by putting drywall in as a patch and then a vinyl tub surround. We went in and ripped out all the drywall and were again surprised to see the outside of the old house (the fake brick siding that was on some point in the distant past). Our bedroom was an addition and it buts up against the outside of the original house. We assumed that would be water barrier enough and patched the large holes with concrete backer board. We then used some thinset to fill in the gaps and some of the areas where the old tile was stubborn coming off. Here's a view of the bathroom at current.

The tile we're using in the bath (floor and walls) is a creme color with rough edges. We are capping the top with some small slate tiles. Megan also came up with the idea of doing something fun on the back wall of the shower. We'll again use the slate to set it off and some smaller tiles to fill the interior on the diagonal with a central square of the slate again. My current attempt at a design, obviously not centered (see the masking tape on the floor laying out the back wall) can be seen below.

Sorry for the bad lighting, but that was a rush take before Calvin ran in to play with all of the spacers. :-) The slate is really much prettier than it shows in this picture.

New siding and garage door

2005-11-06T14:57:00.000-05:00

Friday we had two projects get competed around the house - the siding installation finished up and we got our new garage door installed. What this means, besides the obvious increase in the exterior's attractiveness, is that all of the really big (read expensive) projects outside are done. We have a few more areas in the yard we want to change up and remove some sod and replace it with mulched in beds of various types, but that's mostly manual labor for us and not calling in experts. We're very excited and think the house looks a lot better! Take a look at the before and after and see if you agree.

We'll be posting some before and after photos of the upstairs bathroom soon since we've gotten that tiled, but haven't taken any pictures of it yet.

A true bounty

2005-08-10T17:19:00.000-05:00

Well, the garden is going crazy. Even with all of the blight on our tomatoes, we have way too many! We've also recently harvested:

green, yellow, and orange bell peppers (with more of each on the way)
cayenne and anaheim peppers (more of each on the way along with a second big batch of jalapenos)
the last of the blackberries
the last of the potatoes
onions (4 different kinds and also some green onions which we grew from seed)
pole beans
garlic (really tasty and strong)

It looks like we'll have some vine peaches soon (these are peach-sized cantaloupe, but with a taste that's a bit more tangy like a peach), carrots, and, most exciting to me, grapes! We have concords ripe right now - I know this as I just ate one! We were supposed to have seedless grapes, but at least the concords weren't. I'll have to dig through the mass of leaves and see if any others are ready.

Tyler and Calvin are also getting along well. Sorry that pic is so dark - it looked fine before I uploaded to flickr. Anyway, they were eating from the same bowl earlier (with a mix of kitten and adult food in it as each likes the others') and spend a great deal of time chasing each other around the house.

Finally, after over a year, Megan and I got the new back door installed. For those with "short" memories, we bought a new pre-hung door to replace the old, weather-beaten, 1/16" plexiglass window, door handle about 6" too low door. The reason this took so long was that some previous owner had decided it would be a good idea to pour about 3" of concrete over the sill. -sigh- This dampened our enthusiasm slightly. We ended up having to chisel out a 3' x 3" x 3" chunk of concrete to make way for the new door. Even doing that though, we were not going to be able to use the frame from the pre-hung door - there just wasn't room and we were not going to chisel out more concrete so it would fit! Chiseling out the concrete took 5 - 6 hours with us alternating back and forth. We hung the door today and installed matching handles and locks on both back doors. We can actually come in the back via the short way now. The old door only had a dead bolt so it was "out only" unless we wanted to leave the back door unlocked.

It's a boy 2!

2005-08-04T09:28:00.000-05:00

After a weekend with Megan's family (including Brandy's new kitten Savannah), we decided that Tyler really needed a little buddy. The vet's office had a very cute kitten so we took him home and now we have 2! Our new guy's name is Calvin and as you can see he's all gray. He and Tyler have already been chasing each other around the house. Calvin's about 10 weeks old or so. He's certainly a lot noisier than Tyler was at that age. He seems to be enjoying himself immensely - we just wish he and Tyler would stop chasing each other around when they wake up at 3 AM!

In other good news, we found someone to do our siding for a very reasonable cost (much less than the $20k or so Sears wanted). We'll sign the contract in the next couple of days and then we should have new siding up by the early fall (we haven't set a timeline yet). We also recently bought some new speakers (Boston Acoustics CR95s) for the house to replace my old and blown (thanks to a house sitter) BA A40s.

Finally, if you live nearby and want some tomatoes, please make your way to our house and take whatever you want!!!! Thanks, and please come again!

July Garden Update

2005-07-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

Just a quick garden update. Long story short, garden is growing great and we're back to our normal "supply us and neighbors with food" routine for the summer. We still have many potatoes to harvest, but alread have more than 20 lbs of potatoes in the wine cellar so we're trying to hold off a bit. We're a bit terrified we'll be buried in tomatoes when both beds start producing (only 1 is currently). Now if we could only keep up with the weeding!

Catching up

2005-07-11T22:48:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been awhile, but we've been busy. Today for instance, Megan and I spent about 2 hours wandering around looking for Tyler. He never usually wanders far and usually saunters up to us meowing when we come home. Both of us came home and neither of had seen him since about 7:30 AM. Hmmm.... we scoured the neighborhood, finding no Tyler. We did however find the cat that is most likely Tyler's mom and probably his brother/father, neither of which had collars. The male cat looked almost identical to Tyler, just a little bulkier. Anyway, we asked one neighbor if they'd seen Tyler and they said no. After another half an hour, we decided to see if maybe Tyler had gotten closed up in our next door neighbor's garage. Sure enough, there he was. Darn cat!

On the home front, we have had quite a few interesting events. Garden-wise we've now had 5 - 7 ripe tomatoes (the first was before July 4th, which apparently around here is a badge of honor), more blackberries than we can eat, lots of potatoes, and the green beans are finally coming on. We made some pesto this weekend, with everything but the olive oil coming from the garden. It was yummy! Later tonight we will try the blackberry/raspberry pie I made this morning. We are also planning (now) a master bath makeover. We haven't made a final decision on the design yet, but we'll have construction pictures after we get started. We also have a lot of other projects around the house that need to get done. First and foremost, we need to get the back door that is just plain old junk out and replace it with the door currently leaning against the wall in the garage. Of course, first we've got to bust out a big chunk of concrete since some previous owner poured concrete over the sill of the door (then cutting the door down by 2 inches to fit). The 1/8" plexiglass window in it is not very energy efficient in the winter!

Now, off to get ready for the first big mountain day in Le Tour tomorrow!

New PowerBook

2005-06-23T23:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I received, courtesy of RU, a brand new Apple 15" PowerBook. I had known about this for some time so Megan and I had already sold my old blueberry clamshell-design iBook on eBay (for a surprisingly large amount of money considering). I really like the new PowerBook except:

it's a lot hotter on my lap than the old iBook
it really needs the super cool handle that the original iBooks had - they rocked

That said, it's really well outfitted - the latest version of all of Adobe's Creative Suite, Graphic Converter, all the iLife apps (although I already had those), Airport Extreme card for wireless access on campus (and from the neighbor caddy-corner to us if I wander out in the yard some), 80 GB hard drive, 1.5 GHz G4 processor, 1 GB RAM, and Bluetooth which allows me to sync my addressbook and calendar to my phone (which means I don't have to spend tedious hours entering everyone's personal data into the phone). I still have a few more things to install and I've yet to transfer all 8 GB of my iTunes library to move over, but things are moving along just fine thank ya!

Garden movies

2005-06-21T15:45:00.000-05:00

I've taken a set of photos of the yard and Tyler and made them into a slideshow. There are two sizes:

medium (320x240 pixels) - about 65 MB
large (720 x 480 pixels) - about 290 MB

These should stream just like movie previews so they should not be a problem to view unless you're not on a broadband connection - if that's the case, you should probably stick with the medium size. You'll need Quicktime to see these. We hope you like it!

Dinner from the garden

2005-06-15T22:52:00.000-05:00

Dinner from the garden (barring the chicken of course). If Tyler would just catch us some chicken..... Spinach with a anjou pear vinegarette, new potatoes with peas, and a nice white wine. Yummmy!

Garden on June 15th

2005-06-15T11:05:00.000-05:00

Just some more gardening news - things are growing like crazy. It's been very hot here recently and was fairly wet before that so everything (including weeds unfortunately) have taken off. We should have tomatoes relatively soon if it will stay sunny a couple more days. We're already enjoying some raspberries now and we just harvested some peas this morning. The lettuce, mesculun, broccoli, and cauliflower are winding down now. Take a look!

More garden pictures

2005-06-07T09:12:00.000-05:00

I've posted some pictures of the garden. See them here.

Tomatoes are coming

2005-06-07T00:43:00.000-05:00

We have tomatoes! We have probably 20+ tomatoes on the vine now and with the sunny, hot, humid weather we're hoping they'll ripen up soon. We also have baby peppers on all of our plants. Some pictures will be posted tomorrow!

Garden News

2005-05-30T16:08:00.000-05:00

Ou r garden is doing great. We still have a "few" peppers and tomatoes to plant. We'll also be planting squash and cucumbers soon. In fact, we've run out of room in our garden and are co-opting parts of our neighbors' yard (it's my fault - I ordered way too many potato sets). Our lettuce and broccoli are doing well, but are mostly on the way out with the warmer weather. The spinach is coming up late, but doing well. We also have our first 7 or so tomatoes on the vine. The grapes have grown tremendously since last year and all four plants have baby grapes on them. We also should be eating blackberries and raspberries before too long! (Note: you can also click on the title of this entry, "Garden News," or the lily picture to see some pictures. That'll be our SOP from now on. )

Welcome to "Life in Radford"

2005-05-30T15:35:00.000-05:00

Megan and I have decided it'd be nice to have a blog to keep people in the loop about our lives (including Tyler), our home, gardens, and everything else. While I doubt we'll be making any groundbreaking journalistic discoveries, we hope it will be fun!