Saturday, June 05, 2010
Posted at 8:58:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I like these pics I took today with my new little camera:
1) Wearing my new Milo in Maine sea star shirt for the first time, after shortening it to fit. I love Milo in Maine, and they have insanely helpful service reps who always write me the nicest e-mails. They're a "real" company, but they also have an Etsy store for sample and overstock stuff. My necklace is a charm (the "seaside charm - long") I also bought on Etsy, from Mamacita Beadworks, where Jan got me those amazing pewter ocean buttons. (I found the chain for next to nothing at Uptown.) I've been trying to wear jewelry recently, although I'm not that good at it yet!
B) Trying out my new super-cute stripey bag that my cousin Wendy made me and sent as a surprise! ♥ She's so talented! It's hand crocheted in my favorite color combo, and the outside pocket is a jellyfish with incredibly cool spirally reachy-out loose tentacles! The jelly's body is all gossamer and translucent. Note that when I put the bag on my shoulder, I get to snuggle the jelly. ♥ Sorry this is kind of grainy; it's a mirror photo, so I couldn't use a flash even though it was inside and kind of late in the day. But I like it because of my insanely happy looking grin. I'm wearing the ALB-looking skirt I got in Hawaii and modelled my shirred waist skirt design on, but you can't really see the cool geometric pattern properly.
Iron Man 2 was great!!! I loved every minute of it, just like Iron Man #1.
Posted at 4:10:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
The people next door are having some work done that involves a lot of hammering, so we're bolting for a 2 PM showing of Iron Man! Yay!
Posted at 1:43:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
The Lost Room is a really cool mini-series.
Posted at 12:59:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
Meanwhile, I am gulping Advils (which work, but keep wearing off) because every muscle in my back hurts! Clearly that really really really fast swimming yesterday was a good workout.
Friday, June 04, 2010
My legs are tiiiiiired. It was COLD at the pool today, so I swam really really really fast to get warm. I swam so fast I almost started getting hot! But then I started wearing out and slowing down and the ol' goosebumps came back. Now I'm doing some Thursdaying while listening to an awesome episode of Chuck vs. the Podcast. Jeffster special, with a fantastic interview with Vik Sahay!
Posted at 3:29:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
"Knowing that eels avoid light, the Conservancy partnered with Aquarion Water Company to install solar- and wind-powered lamps that route eels to safety and discourage them from entering the treatment plant through its underwater grates." I read the article about this a couple of weeks ago in the print magazine The Nature Conservancy sends out to members, and got all excited. Now you can read it online! The journey of eels to the Sargasso Sea is one of my favorite things ever, and it's so great that they found a way to help them in my home state of CT! 100% awesome!
Posted at 11:14:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.
Also: I love this! Elizabeth Graeber illustrated all the US Presidents. (Which reminds me, I am massively falling behind on my Fish of the Week project.)
Thursday, June 03, 2010
"When you were a kid, what games did you play that involved nature?" I love this discussion on Ask MetaFilter! Do kids nowadays do stuff like that? I sure hope so. I definitely did!
Posted at 7:13:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Just landed back home at Brainard (the Gs gave me a ride to their local airport and Dean picked me up in Tango). Lots of pretty fluffy white clouds! I wanted to EAT them. The weather is beautiful here, and was all weekend in NC, too! It was really nice being able to spend a few extra days with the Gs. Thanks, weather (and Dean)! ♥
Posted at 5:51:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Just had a cup of delicious homemade strawberry ice cream at Vollmer Farm with the Gs! Last night we sat out in their 4-seasons room for a while in the dark, listening to the night creatures. It was nice. Today they let me sit in on their daily Scrabble game (even though I'm horrible at Scrabble). One of my words was "vog," which was not in the dictionary, but they reluctantly let me use it anyway. What the heck, vog is definitely a word! Actually, my G then copycatted me and used it, too. :-) I also got the "q," and wrote "quid." Too bad we didn't have an "s" to add to the front!
Posted at 4:10:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Pictures from today:
1) Tall loblolly pines (aka North Carolina pines) at my the Gs' house. N.C. is the Pine Tree State! Isn't loblolly the coolest name? (I love this photo.)
B) I like the bark! It reminds me of the leg of some huge scaly prehistoric reptile or bird.
3) Vollmer Farm is just over the river from the Gs' new house, but I'd only been there once before, with Dean and Hunter (we got ice cream and bought a giant watermelon!). It's no Buell's, but it was pretty great anyway. (As you may have noticed, I love signs!)
4) Strawberries are in season here right now, and they grow their own, so my choice of ice cream flavor was a no-brainer.
5) My dad at Vollmer Farm. It seemed appropriate to ask him to pose near all the agriculture signs! (He was the Director of the Cooperative Extension System in Connecticut.)
6) On the way back from Vollmer, we stopped to see my sister's chickens!
7) Isn't she pretty? One of the roosters had a fancy double-ruffled comb (I forget the real name for it) but he was really shy and kept hiding behind things, so I couldn't get a picture. On the other hand, I did get a hilarious picture of this in-your-face chicken.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Posted at 11:59:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
[Post actually written 6/6, from photos, Herons website, and memory!] We had a superb dinner at Herons, The Umstead's restaurant. They really compete well with some of the best restaurants we've been to, especially in that they always have a special vegetarian tasting menu and a wellness tasting menu with lighter, but extremely good, options. Most of the tasting menu items also occur on the regular menu, so you can mix and match wellness and decadence if you want to. I brought my new little camera with me and took some photos using low light mode. I love low light mode! I think it's really rude to take pics in restaurants with a flash (plus, flashy photos never look good), and it's usually too dark in restaurants for non-flash photos, but, with low light mode, I got some fairly nice ones.
1) My favorite drink at The Umstead, strawberry ginger lemonade. All the ingredients taste so real. You can get this in the Umstead bar/lounge area or at Herons restaurant.
B) My first course: Baby Artichoke Soup
(Smoked Portobello, Herb Croutons, Parmesan Cream). It was insanely good, and tasted so intensely artichokey, just like steamed artichoke leaves! The parmesan cream (like crème fraîche) melting into the soup was yummmmm. Dean got the vegetarian tasting menu, so he didn't have any choices. He loves artichokes, so I ordered this so we could trade. We each ate half, then switched. His first course was the Baby Beets (Whipped Goat Cheese, Raspberries, Walnuts, Vincotto). Lucky Dean also loves beets! It was really good, too, with three or four different cool varieties of beets. The best part was a soupish chilled beet drink in a tiny glass! It was scrummy! It was sort of tart and Dean didn't like it that much, so I eagerly drank the whole thing.
3) My second course: Tasmanian Salmon (Baby Artichokes, Picholine Olives, Fennel, Olive Oil Broth). It was fantastic! The salmon was so moist and delicious. And I really like fresh fennel. Dean's veggie tasting menu dish was White Asparagus (Baby Artichokes, Morel Mushrooms, Fennel Confit, Olive Oil). He let me have one of the morel mushrooms. ♥
4) The dessert that came with the vegetarian tasting menu was Rhubarb (Rhubarb Soup, Lemongrass Parfait, Warm Buttermilk Cake). It even had foam! We shared our desserts, and they were both great, but of course I loved the rhubarb one most, especially the rhubarb soup. Aaaaaah! So good!!! And the warm buttermilt <-(great typo, which I am not correcting) cake, so delectable... My dessert was a Halloumi "Cheesecake" (Warm Halloumi Cheese, Mint Huckleberry Jam, Sweet and Salty Walnut Crisp). Halloumi is that weird Cypriot cheese that you can grill, so it was really nothing like a normal cheesecake, but it was good! The huckleberries were delicious.
I actually went back down to the spa and hung out this afternoon after Diane left (she had some errands to run after our massages, so it was still fairly early, and Dean was working on computer stuff out on the balcony). I've never done that before, and it was fun! I lounged around in my spa robe in the relaxation room in a really comfortable loungey chair, and read my whole Bust magazine while sipping tea, orangewater, and cukewater and nibbling on nuts and yogurt covered raisins. I also went back in the steeeeeeaaaam room and the bakey sauna. Endorsed! Most of the time I was the only one there.
There's a big line of storms on the radar for tomorrow, so we're staying longer! I moved up our Herons dinner on OpenTable (love OpenTable), and after dinner we're going to drive back to the Gs so I can stay two more nights and hang out with them tomorrow while Dean works from the Um!
Posted at 6:15:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
[Note: I drove both times went from the Um to the Gs... it's about an hour, but an easy drive. The only hard thing was that it was super-dark driving at night on Monday, but I could tell where I was going thanks to our GPS!]
Back in my room at The Umstead, all relaxed after lunch, bookstore browsing, and a massage at The Umstead spa with Diane! (Her idea!) Slept really well last night in my bed at Mom & Dad's house, too. Such a nice, albeit short, visit!
Posted at 3:56:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
I looooove the eucalyptus smell in the steam room. The air was so thick in there, I couldn't even see the other women; I could only tell there were other people inside because I could hear them talking!
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Just finished playing five games of Apples to Apples with Diane, Tim, Dean, and my Gingers! My mom kept saying what a great game it is and laughing her head off! I won the first three games (!!!) and then Tim won the next two. I can't believe Mom and Dad stayed up until almost 11! It was so FUN!!! ♥
Posted at 10:49:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
The best part was I think in the third game. Diane was Judge and, before she decided between the red apple cards, she went on a little rant about how I had won way too many rounds and she was definitely not going to choose my card, no way no how. (Not that she had any way of knowing who had submitted which card, of course.) The green apple card was "cute" and I didn't have anything especially appropriate in my hand, so I had played "Richard Nixon." After she considered the five cards that people had played, which one did she choose? MINE!!!! Yep, turns out Diane thinks Nixon is kinda cute. Hahahaha! Awesome!
Just set Dean up on the hammock at the Gingers', then looked at all the plants in the garden. On my way back in, I was scared by a big black snake slithering under the porch! It looked like that snake I held at the Meigs' Point Nature Center! (Note that Dean has his cool new leather iPad, etc. bag that I picked out for him, and his Kona Mountain socks! :-)
Posted at 3:19:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
[Edit: I went on a garden and yard tour with my Gs' later, and saw the snake again! (Or another one very similar... the first one may have been larger!) It was in the herb garden this time, but ran off when it saw us. My excitement over the photo opportunity outweighed my snake phobia and I crept up on it and snapped this pic before it slithered through the lattice under the garden shed! Notice how it's raising up its head! My dad also used my camera to take this photo of me on the bridge over their stone watercourse, while on the earlier part of the tour. Their garden and the golf course that runs behind their house are in the background. I'm wearing my new skirt that I remade from a way-too-big Uptown Consignment skirt. I really like it! It's perfect for travel because it's stretchy and doesn't wrinkle. It has goring (? I think that's what it's called) that would have been too complicated for me to do from scratch on one of my made-up non-patterns, so it was a great find! I also really like the design on the fabric. You can kind of see it in this photo with my mom.]
