North Carolina, Days 3 and 4

Holy moley (sp?), I have done a lot of sleeping on this trip.  So far I think the earliest I've woken up is maybe 8:00, but the earliest I've gotten out of bed is probably 9:30!  Lazy bones!

Days 3 and 4 of our trip were very similar: treats and snoozin', snoozin' and treats.  With the exception that day 4 was my birthday.  So...that happened.

We went to what ended up being lunch at Rue Cler, a super cute French restaurant near mom's old apartment in Durham.  We all shared an order of beignets, and then I had the omelet special (asparagus, mushrooms, turkey, and...something else).  There was a lot of lying around by the fire at mom's house in the afternoon, working on Charley Harper puzzle, reading, and snacking.

Speaking of eating, for my big birthday dinner, we went to a place in Raleigh called Second Empire. They printed up a special menu for me with "Happy Birthday Meg" on it!  How cool is that?  Anyway, it was a fabulous (and large) meal.  I started with the soup du jour, which was a cream-based cauliflower and roasted red pepper soup.  Then it was on to the scallops for my main, and I realized our waiter wasn't kidding when he said the chef liked to have a lot going on on the plate.  There were lots of flavors and different little things - shreds of veggies, different flavors.  That tart was delish.  But it all worked and wasn't even too overwhelming, I think because it wasn't a huge portion.  Then for dessert I forewent (is that a word?) the chocolate souffle and opted for a trio of ice creams/sorbets: lemon buttermilk, mango, and white peach.  A nice, light way to top of a filling, southern meal.

Apologies that I've been so bad about the photo-taking of late.  I brought my camera and everything!  I've just been lazy.  Are we noticing a theme here?

North Carolina, Days 1 and 2

So, I'm putting the first two days of my trip together for a few reasons:
1. I flew in the first morning, so that was gone.
2. I slept through three hours of the first afternoon, so nothing much to write about there either.
3. I slept until 9:45 a.m. on day two, and didn't get out of the house until 12:30, so lacking in activity there as well.
4. The evening of day two was our Christmas celebration, which I wrote about already.  So...

Not much of note at the airport in St. Louis, except for obscenely long security lines.  We probably waited for 45 minutes to get screened.  Once the smarties at TSA decided we were not terrorists and allowed us to continue to our gate, T helped himself to a healthy breakfast of candy and soda while commenting on the super-awesome pink hard hat that a woman at out gate had poking out of her bag.

Mom rescued us from the airport and took us to her house for some delicious lunch, and then T and I passed out on the uber-comfy blue couches for the duration of the afternoon.  (I had gotten two and a half hours of sleep the night before, and I think T had gotten two.  We needed it.)

When we awoke, we went for a short jog, then E and M let us tag along to a birthday party for their friend A.  She turned 29.  For the eighth time.  Or maybe the ninth.  I can't remember the details, but I can remember that there was lots of wine and some darn delicious dinner.  And - remember the pink hardhat in the airport in St. Louis?  Turns out that it belongs to A.  She and her hubby were on our flight that morning!

This morning I woke up to discover (a) that it was raining (so no jogging - I wasn't in the mood), and (b) that mom had stocked the kitchen at E's old apartment with some good eats!  T and I had coffee, juice, eggs, and toast for breakfast.  E rescued me and we headed off with mom to pick up K at the airport.  While we were off doing girl things (shopping for wedding dresses for K at a couple of cute places in Cary and Raleigh), T stayed back to study.  K found and bought a beautiful dress - the first one she tried on, though she tried on a few others before making the purchase just to be sure!


We came home from shopping and had Christmas #4, which you can read about here.  By the end of that, everyone was so tired that it was straight to bed for the lot of us!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Christmas Extravaganza, Part IV

Early in the morning on Boxing Day, K drove T and I to the airport, and we headed to NC for some additional festivities.  (More on the rest of the trip in upcoming posts.)

K arrived herself the following day, and we spent yesterday evening having one final Christmas celebration.  It was an Italian Christmas - mom made salad, garlic bread, and lasagna, although we did have a very lovely and French buche de noel for dessert.  It was delicious, with raspberry jam as part of the filling!

While E's boyfriend M kept Molly quiet, we all sat around the fire and opened presents.  Some were shipped down here ahead of time, others made the trip in suitcases.  The same will likely be the case for the return trip to St. Louis.  Except for the wearable gift, which will probably go home on my person.  Thanks for all the hard work, mom!

Still one thing left to do: watch Love Actually!  I can't believe I've been in NC for a day and a half and we haven't watched it yet!  Possibly the only movie mom has seen more times than that is Green Card, and that's only because GC has been out longer!

Christmas Extravaganza, Part III

I'm so behind on my Christmas posts!

First, please enjoy photos of our lovely tree, and all of our delightful-looking presents!

Now that you've done that, I can tell you that I just wrapped up my fourth - fourth! - Christmas celebration!  This has been quite a year!

Christmas #1 was with a small portion of T's family.  We went to his aunt and uncle's house for dinner, presents, holiday cheer, and antler headbands on Christmas Eve.  That was followed shortly thereafter by preparations for Christmas #2, which was to be brunch at our house the next day.  Mere moments after getting home from Christmas #1, I set about cleaning and doing food prep for the Christmas morning brunch.

The next morning, I awoke to find K and J in the kitchen working on their portion of the food prep.  We readied for our guests and were showered just in the nick of time.  We had a total of 11 for brunch, and the food was a bit of a group effort, but I think it all turned out quite well.  We had a present extravaganza and some whirlwind cleaning, then it was off to Christmas #3.

This one was again with T's family, but a different group.  There were lots of presents, including some interactive ones (lottery tickets - I won $37!).  My other gifts were food-centric: cheese and a cheese knife, a Williams-Sonoma gift card....they must know me!

[Christmas #4 to follow....]

Also, a bit more about the cookie business.  I wanted to make chai spice cookies, but I never got around to that.  I'll have to do it next month, when it's cold and miserable and I'm drinking lots of chai.  What better time to eat chai spice cookies?  Though I am sadly without a picture of it, I cannot go another Christmas post without a shout-out to K's awesomely-iced hat cookie.  It's one of the sugar cookies we made, and she iced with with stripes.  Of sorts.  It's pretty artistic.

Some special Christmas wishes to the family from Uncle P can be found here!

And finally, I watched The Polar Express!  This movie is awesome, and Tom Hanks is spectacularly talented in the voice department.  He does the voices and image-capture motion for half the characters in the movie!

A Shout-Out to Valley Park

You heard me: Valley Park, MO.

As a suburb, there is not much to recommend Valley Park.  However, it has the best Post Office in the St. Louis metropolitan area.  It's small (space for just two people at the counter at a time), but as it turns out, that's plenty of space.  It's never crowded - the longest I've ever had to wait is probably two or three minutes.

And the best part is yet to come: the USPS employees who work there are nice.  That's right, nice - unlike the grouches who work in, say, Clayton.  They know me by name (it's close to my office).  They smile!  It's incredible.

Yes, I still think all these things about them two days before Christmas, when they're busier than ever.  How's that for an endorsement?

Best post office ever.

Am I S.A.D.?

I've always liked winter.

I like snow.  Don't particularly mind cold weather, once I get used to it and remember that I have to dress appropriately.  I drink lots of tea and hot chocolate.  Catch up on reading, movies, and TV shows.  Work on projects around the house.

But this year.  Sheesh!  This year I have been nearly completely incapable of keeping my eyes open.  Every time I stop moving even for a minute - at my desk, at a red light, in front of the TV - I just want to go to sleep.  I came home from practice this morning and passed out for an hour and a half.  Needless to say, I was late for work.

So what's the deal?  Am I generally deficient in sleep?  Yes.  But that's been the case for years!  I've never been this prone to narcolepsy before - not in past winters, and not in summers ever.  So I'm self-diagnosing: I'm S.A.D.

How sad.

(Also I'm getting old.  And, as T is so kind to point out, it's gray and miserable in St. Louis all winter.  Those two things probably don't help either.)

My Philosophical Bermuda Triangle

I have, of late, found myself in a philosophical dilemma.  It started here:

"Why do we ask questions that we already know we don't want to know the answer to?"

As I was debating this issue, I began to wonder if I really wanted to know the answer to that particular question.  If we're doing things that are only going to hurt us, why do we do it?  Are we all gluttons for punishment?  Like to pour lemon juice on our paper cuts?  What does this behavior say about us?

Ponder, ponder, ponder.

I started to think back to some of the times that I've asked questions I knew I wouldn't like the answer to, and this is what I discovered: it's not really that we don't want to know the answer.  It's that we already know, but there's some sort of therapy in hearing it from someone else, rather than just inside our own heads.

That's one answer.  But I wasn't satisfied with that, so I asked around, and I liked this answer, from J: "I suspect the fear of getting the answer we expect is outweighed by the hope that the answer is something else."

So with that, I'll ask away.  I leave it to others will decide whether I'm masochistic or hopeful.

Christmas Extravaganza, Part II

More Christmas fun!  Believe it or not, I've made more cookies.  I started with pfeffernusse, and then I made sugar cookies, which K was so kind as to help me decorate.  She has mad artistic skills.  Oh, and I attempted peppermint bark.  It's tasty, but I need to tweak the technique next time I think.  I'll report back if I try it again next year.

T and I went to the Sheldon for their Christmas concert.  I like the Sheldon because it's small.  Concerts feel more intimate in a little venue.  There are trade-offs, of course, but they have a small choir, so it works well.

Then a few days later, K and I went to the St. Louis Symphony's holiday concert!  Other than the fact that I had a coughing fit near the end of the first half and almost died (I was in the middle of the row and couldn't get out!), the show was great.  The choir was made up of kids from four local public high schools, and the soloist was a guy who's sung all over, including on Broadway.  And you can tell, because he had a totally Broadway personality - you know the musical theater type: big, boisterous personality to make up for his small stature, lots of big arm motions on stage.  But he could certainly sing. 

Oh, and our conductor, Ward Stare, was another little guy, but he was great to watch, dancing around on the stage.  He was totally into the music, way more than most conductors are. So fun!  And by the way, Powell Hall was basically build to be decorated for Christmas.  All that red velvet is awesome when you add spruce trees and twinkling white lights!

I've also done lots of gift wrapping.  Most of the gifts are purchased (although there are still a couple mysteries out there), but all the ones I've gotten have been wrapped!  And there's a big, pretty pile of presents under the tree, with some help from T and K as well.

And I've gotten started on my Christmas movies!  On Friday afternoon I started it all off with The Grinch, and then last night T and I watched Little Women, which I love!!

Seriously?

K and I just got ding-dong-ditched.

Do people really still do that?

What I Watched -- Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Despite the disaster that was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, I decided to brave On Stranger Tides.  In the latest edition, there is a four-way race between Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Blackbeard and his pirate daughter Angelica (Ian McShane and Penelope Cruz), the Spanish, and our indomitable hero Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) to find the Fountain of Youth.  Conspicuously absent are Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner, but they're replaced by some seductive and kinda scary mermaids.

This movie is a definite improvement over At World's End.  None of the sequels have touched Curse of the Black Pearl in terms of enjoyment, humor, story (such as it is), or swashbuckling fun.  But there are some good bits, and Ian McShane plays a totally nasty Blackbeard.

Bottom line: watchable fluff.

What I Watched -- Out of Africa

Actually, I watched Out of Africa while I was on my break from blogging, but I left it out of the appropriate post.  But in the spirit of the earlier post, I'll keep it fairly short.

Here's the deal.  Lady moves to most rural Kenya in order to marry a rich dude.  Rich dude turns out to be not so rich (though he is nonetheless a baron), and also not so into the idea of having a wife.  He spends most of his time off hunting, leaving wife to try to make heads or tails of the coffee (coffee?) he just planted.

Enter the handsome stranger.  He's also a hunter, not to mention a friend of the baron.  But he and wife (aka Karen, played by Meryl Streep) have an understanding, if a somewhat sad one.  Their relationship is honest and harsh, passionate and lonely.

The hunter/boyfriend is played by Robert Redford, obviously, though he was far handsomer then than now, not to mention an incredibly sexy combination of rugged and refined.  In fact, then he looked rather like a clean-shaven Brad Pitt of a few years ago, don't you think?

Bottom line: a classic.  And the scenery is stunning. 

Christmas Extravaganza, Part I

Yes, the Christmas celebrations have begun.  (And you might recall from last year how much I like Christmas.  If you somehow forgot, you can refresh your memory from last year's posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.  And from the year before that here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

This year it is some of the same, although I'm doing some new things too!  We started out with baking cookies (not surprisingly).  The first round included almond crescents, Santa snacks, apricot squares, and rum balls.  I'm just getting going on round two, which consists of pfefferneuse cookies, sugar cookies, and molasses crinkles.

Where outings are concerned, for the bargain price of $10 I was allowed to attend the SJA Christmas concert.  Is it a high school concert?  Yes.  Is it clear that they are high schoolers?  At times, yes.  But sometimes they're really good.  And I love choral music.  And I get to sing along.  And I saw some of my old teachers.  So, all in all, totally worth it.

T and I also went to the opening night of festivities at the Missouri Botanical Garden.  They do a night of celebration for members, when the garden is all yours.  Our first stop was the Gardenland Express, which this year has a traditional pagan theme of trees and presents.  Then we wandered around the second floor looking at the wreath exhibit (turns out this is also an auction? I didn't know that.).  Props to the guys at the Dierberg's floral department, who did a darn good job with their wreath.

 Train cars wrapped up like presents!

My first new holiday adventure this year was Christmas at the Cathedral.  First things first, though.  We stopped for dinner at La Gra in Dogtown on the way to the CWE.  They call themselves a tapas restaurant, but they're really not.  If you go expecting that, you'll be disappointed.  Also if you go expecting subtlety, you'll be disappointed.  Much of what we got was driven by one single, powerful flavor: the hummus plate by garlic, the arugula salad by red onion, the Charlie's Special by basil (which I don't mind, but beware if it's not your favorite), etc.  Most everything was good, but not great.  T got the white wine sangria, though, and I easily could have sipped my way into a wicked hangover on that stuff.

Then off we cruised to the cathedral for the holiday show.  The first half consisted of selections from Handel's Messiah, while the second half was more traditional carols (including some audience participation portions!).  We had great seats, which made it easy to hear the soloists.  I was a little concerned for people in the back that they might not be able to hear them, but otherwise everything was simply lovely, and it's a phenomenal setting for Christmas music (or really music of any type, probably).

Quote of the Day

"You're that stubborn?"
"I'm that right."
  -- James Cromwell and Diane Lane as Ogden Phipps and Penny Chenery Tweedy, in Secretariat

Recap Part IV -- Books -- Take 2

Super-short recaps of books I read while not blogging:

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: original post here.

I read this for book club, and I liked it.  The vignettes I mentioned that fill the first half of the book I found to be more enjoyable than the second half, which is composed mostly of the legal side of things.  Which I should find interesting, shouldn't I?  But it just wasn't as colorful as all the background.

The Sunset Limited: original post doesn't exist.  Sorry.

This is a short, rather plotless tale of two men having a conversation.  The white man, we come to discover, is a professor who just tried to commit suicide.  The black man is a formerly drug-addicted ex-con who's made it his life's work to try to help other people like him.  They debate life and religion and reason.  It's a short book and an easy read, but one that I've come back to several times since I finished it.

HBO did a movie version (trailer) of The Sunset Limited starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson.  Haven't seen it, but if I do I'll let you know.

Quote of the Day

"It seems to me some fine things have been laid upon your table...."
  -- The Eagles, Desperado

Recap Part III - Other Fun Stuff

Lest you all think that I only do fun stuff so that I have something to write about, here's a sample of other things that I did while I was on my break from blogging:

London Tea Room: T and I went here once before, and it's so cute that I took a few hours off work to go downtown and try it again!  They were super slow and overwhelmed this time, but it gave us a chance to sit and chat, so it was okay.

Copia:  Another downtown outing!  Look at me go!  Copia fancies itself sort of a wine bar, but really it's just a restaurant with a big wine selection.  To me, "wine bar" means more tapas style, with small plates for sampling and lots of wines by the glass so you can taste.  (Technically, they call it a "wine market."  I'm not really sure what that means.)  This is a restaurant with a regular menu and most of their wines are by the bottle.  Which doesn't mean it's not good.  Indeed, everything was delicious.  But our waitress seemed very put out when we didn't want a bottle, and instead opted for glasses of different types.  Sheesh.

Addie's Thai House: Location-wise, there isn't a lot to recommend Addie's Thai House.  It's in a nondescript suburban strip mall/blight at the corner of Olive and Woods Mill (across from another hidden gem of St. Louis, Paul Manno's - a restaurant so great they don't even have a website).  But once you're through the door of Addie's, it's easy to forget what's outside.  Asian flavor permeates the decorations and fabrics, the menu is extensive, and what we had was quite good - although I said 3 on a 1-5 scale of spiciness; 1 or 2 would have been a better choice.  If you're out that-a-way and need a bite to eat, it's definitely worth a visit.

Is that a real bumper sticker?

I know it's hard to read, so I'll help you out:

"My child was INMATE OF THE MONTH at County Jail"

You must be so proud.

More Fun in the Solar System

Have we all accepted the fact that I love the Mars Exploration Project?  Exhibit A.  Exhibit B [I'm still a little sad about Spirit].  Good.

Some other fun at NASA:

-- Voyager 1 and Voyager 2: these guys have been flying since 1977.  1977!  That makes them older than me!  And Voyager 1 is sending back signals to Earth from 11 billion - billion - miles away, on less power than it takes to run three household lightbulbs.  How is that not amazing?

In the next billion miles or so, Voyager 1 is expected to cross through the edge of our solar system and into interstellar space.  I wonder what's out there...  In any case, their little nuclear reactors are projected to last until 2025 or so, so we have some time to find out.

-- Mars Science Laboratory: a new Mars rover named Curiosity launched four days ago.  It's bigger and heavier than Spirit or Opportunity, and has all sorts of fancy-schmancy equipment to tell us all about the Red Planet.

I hope they're teaching kids about this stuff in school.

Tangentially, NASA should get more money.  They're about the only government department that seems to get stuff right.