Back from JAX!!

Hi there all!

We are back home and all is well! the last week in JAX was great and quite the whirlwind!!  Here are some photos from the last week or so.. the highlights as I can remember them...

1) Dan absolutely KILLED his talk!!!  He did so great and I'm so very proud of him!  He's been practicing every day for the last week and a half and he did a great job delivering the talk - he was good on time, clear, and got some great questions at the end and great feedback.  He even plugged the Hengill Diaries blog and upped the page views to the highest to date from that one plug!! My apologies for not getting any photos of him up at the podium...I promised him I wouldn't embarrass him!!   Just know that he did great and I was beaming with pride at the end of his talk.  That was the best he's given it in all the practice sessions we've had!  Way to go Dan!!!

2) JAX was a lot of fun!! The SFS meeting was fun with a lot of neat talks - it was my first time attending this particular conference and I hope it's not the last!  Next year is Portland and if we can scrounge up the money it'd be great to go!!  Anyhow, we got to eat at some fun places without any real duds (thank goodness for Yelp!!).  We hit up two different pho restaurants - Pho a Noodle bar and Bowl of Pho (my neuroses is clear, but shared among others we traveled with..I actually went to Bowl of Pho twice because it was that good), an upscale bistro called bb's where we all had various fish atop salad, Olio for sandwiches, a bar called Kickbacks with a ton of tasty taps, and Havana Jax, a Brazilian place with some very tasty black beans and rice, plantains, and steak...very reminiscent of cuban food that I crave from Versallies in L.A. (I do realize the irony of lusting for cuban food from L.A. while in the state of Florida that is much closer to Cuba geographically and culturally, but at least I didn't come to this conclusion in Miami which is much farther down the coast and much much closer to Cuba)...

3) The best day clearly was the afternoon we skipped out on poster sessions and headed for Mickler's beach.  I found the beach on Yelp and it was touted to be non-touristy and quiet.  It was just that but from the looks of things all JAX beaches were like that on a Wednesday afternoon.  It was an AMAZING day and we had a blast swimming in the surf and snorting salt water (I think I was the only inept one doing that).  My skin felt so great the next day!!  I need regular saltwater soaks!!!  We also got a decent base layer tan/slight burn...

Well, we are home now, the garden is amazing, the Ham-Bone (aka Hannah) is cute as ever, and it's going to be a beautiful weekend here in T-Town!  I leave Monday to pick up my parents then we tour around for a day and hit Tuscaloosa with a vengeance starting Wednesday night until Saturday!  It's going to be quite a fun week and I can't wait until they get here!!!

xo for now!!!

Hola amigos!

Hello there folks!

Well we are finally into a full on Spring.  Which means warm slightly muggy days, thunderstorms, and scattered days of "perfect" weather with a slight breeze in the mid 70s and no humidity..

This cheery weather draws us to the garden with a flurry of projects, but mostly a lot of dreaming about projects.

Here are some photos of the last week or so...We leave tomorrow for JAX so just a bit of cleanup, hopefully we bottle our beer, and a bit more packing and we are set for the week away from town.  We are all excited about the trip, perhaps not so excited about the 8 hour drive down with 6 other folks in a University minivan, but still, excited...

This last week the most exciting things that we did (for me) was re-caulking the bathroom tub (It looks so nice now!!) and cleaning up the backyard a bit.  You can see where my sad priorities lay....

Anyhow, I'm also enjoying the first cold brew coffee of the season...ahh...caffeine buzz away!!!!

Happiness is here..

xo
ct

Woo hoo!

Finished the table!!! Yeah! Now time to clean up my mess!!!
Xoxo!

Happy Mother's Day!!

Hello there!

Happy Mother's Day to all the Moms out there!  

Here are some pictures from the last few weeks!  It is trying to be spring around here, but mostly it's just really wet...today should be a nice sunny day though, with only a small chance of a random short thunderstorm..the front door is open and I'm swinging along in a hammock we set up in the house.  life could be much, much worse!

We've been getting some great bird action around here...my first Hooded Warbler, baby Carolina wrens, baby Brown thrashers, high-soaring Mississippi Kites...it's been so fun to sit outside and see what visitors we get...  The garden is slowly coming along... added a lot of compost to the boxes so I'm hoping the nutrient boost will make them happy.  This weekend has been rather low key...sticking at home and putzing around...our neighbors left this morning so the past week has been spent hanging out and having dinner together.  We are so sad!  We are super thankful to have had such great neighbors for the last three years.  Our new neighbors won't move in until August.  We don't know much about them but they are a grad student couple.  Hopefully they will be nice to live next to!!!

Anyhow, we're ramping up our grilling nights these days and getting ready for Jacksonville, FL next week!  Then my parents visit for a week, I go to Coweeta, and then Dan leaves June 6th for 2 months in Iceland!  It's gonna be a whirlwind May, but should be lotsa fun!! I'm coming up with ideas for things to see with my mom and dad, and all the many meals we'll eat here in town.  I'm excited to cook, and help cook with my mom... I'll be putting her to work making this place an eggroll factory!  I only get these homemade puppies once a year usually, so now that the brain trust (my mother) is visiting I'm looking forward to help her build me up a good stack of eggrolls to keep me content until December!  You would think by now I'd have the recipe down and memorized, but I don't.  I do know the general ingredients that go into the delicious morsels, and generally how to put them together and generally how to deep fry them.  But "generally" doesn't quite cut it!!  Thus far the plan is to pick them up in New Orleans, drive to the gulf coast (tentatively Pensacola, FL) to experience the sugar sand beaches, drive to Fort Rucker to visit the Airforce army base and the US Army Aviation museum (which looks AWESOME and should be a good treat for my Dad), then head back to Tuscaloosa meet back up with Dan and Hannah to spend the rest of the week at home showing them around!