Tuesday Morning - Laid out most of the day
Tuesday Evening - Sat in the hot tub
Wednesday Morning - Laid out on the beach
Thursday Morning - Went shopping and saw a movie with MIOL
Friday Morning - Slept in, sipped on coffee, and worked on puzzle with MIOLDay one is finally here. We arrived yesterday afternoon to 20mph sustained winds and chillier than expected temperatures. We also arrived to see that Tropical Storm Andrea had her way with the dunes down here last week. I took a picture of our dune deck below that used to actually be ON a dune. As you can see from the picture, there is not much left protecting this house from the next major storm. It also looks like they had to lower the deck by about 4 feet (there are four new stairs), and add a new stairway (so that you don't just walk down into the ocean).
So, as many of you who know me well, you also know that this is about the time of year that my family takes its first trip down to the Outer Banks for a week. A week long vacation could not come at a better time as I am ready for the peace and quiet and ready to relax. I know MIOL is also looking forward to being able to close her eyes and sleep on the beach.
I'm going to give the no work email for the entire week a try again this trip and see what awaits me upon my return, but I do know that when I did that last fall, it made a huge difference in my ability to fully enjoy the time off. But as most of you know, the amount of email you have after being gone for a week is beyond ridiculous.
Which makes you wonder why we opt to communicate so much over email. It's one thing if you use it as a form of communicating with friends overseas or friends that are hard to get a hold of on the phone. But work? It seems that more and more people are becoming either passive aggressive or non-confrontational, and would rather send a flaming email or send a series of email questions, rather than get up and walk 20 feet to talk to the person. This has got to be one of my greatest pet peeves as I am very much a "walk and talk" kind of person. I enjoy getting up from my desk and walking around, talking to the people I need to talk to get the job done.
As BlackBerrys become more and more prevalent over the next few years, will we become an email society?
What matters is that I will not be participating in that society next week.
It's official!!! MIOL and I are engaged!!!
17 months in the making, I have met my match and the person I am looking forward to spending the rest of my life with.
I promise you that the story leading up to the proposal is well worth a phone call to me if you want to hear it. The intricate details and subtleties are too much to go into on here and will take too long to describe.
In any case, I look forward to blogging about the progress and planning as we set a date and move forward towards the most exciting day of our lives.
Stay tuned...
I'm excited to announce the launch of a new product from WeatherBug, WeatherBug Alert. Whether you want one-click access to live conditions and the forecast for your neighborhood, or severe weather alerts delivered to your desktop, WeatherBug Alert is right for you. For those of you concerned about downloading big desktop apps, or using a lot of memory, WeatherBug Alert is less than 400KB in size, and uses less than 5MB of RAM when running.
And if you're happening across this blog outside the U.S., never fear, WeatherBug Alert works everywhere!
Click here to download it and let me know what you think!
After great expectations of coming up to visit Pittsburgh and go mountain biking with my college roommate, rain has chosen to "dampen" our spirits a little bit. It definitely stinks and maybe if the rain moves on we'll get a chance to get outside, but for now we're laying low, relaxing and waiting for the NFL draft to start.
The is about as close as I may come to a bike this weekend... So sad.
Last night I was fortunate enough to meet up with a friend I met last summer at Gnomedex in Seattle, along with his friend who were visiting the States from South Africa. After a day of sight seeing, I picked the two of them up from the metro and met MIOL at Mai Thai down at the end of King St. in Old Town Alexandria.
Today, My Inferno of Love (MIOL) and I decided to take advantage of the warm weather and check out one of the regional parks in Northern Virginia that we had not been to as of yet. So, after visiting the NOVA park web site, I settled on Red Rock Potomac Overlook Park out by Leesburg. The park definitely earned its name as it was full of red rocks throughout the hike.
After a bit of confusion on where we were supposed to go, we pulled up at the hotel at 9:50. If I had gone to the right place it would have been 9:30. So, I would say that we spent all told about 3 hours on the road for a 2 hour trip. Once we got passed Fredricksburg, we were able to fly for the final 45 miles. It was just that darn stretch between there and the beltway.
Anyway, thanks for following along this evening. Hope you had fun and have a great easter weekend.
After a nice dinner at panera we're back on the road at 7:30. Hopefully it won't be long... Say maybe an hour and a half? Two hours? You decide.
To be fair we have stopped for dinner at potomac mills. A half hour on the road so far. Traffic was as expected but hopefully it will lighten up when we get going again. Stay tuned.
So we're heading down to Richmond for a family wedding and like a few thousand other geese, we'll be driving down 95. For those of you following along at home, we are leaving Arlington at 6.
Will it be 2, 3, or 4 hours to drive 120 miles on a holiday Friday... Good Friday at that!
Stay tuned as I Blog our progress.
As I went on my trail run yesterday afternoon along the Potomac, I couldn't help but think about why I like trail running so much... I mean, it hurts my knees, I have a total of 5 scars on my body that are a direct result of running this trail, and I usually have to tell someone I'm running the trail beforehand in case I break my leg.
What I like about trail running is that for an hour and ten minutes, I am doing nothing but focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. I am not thinking about anything else, and if I do happen to lose my focus, I am reminded pretty sharply by slipping or in some cases, cutting myself.
How much is 1 hour of complete quiet, and complete focus worth in today's world of instant messengers, the BlackBerry, cell phones, and high definition television? In my mind, worth the bumps, bruises and scars I have accrued, though yesterday I got off cheap with nothing at all!
The quest to learn how to play Texas Hold'Em continues. After the game got off to a late start, I lasted a bit longer this time around than the first time. I can honestly say that I'm understanding the game a bit better though I still have a lot to learn about what the potential draws could be based on what's on the table. I'm getting there... but for only second time, I don't think it was too bad.
Prior to the game, some of the guys entertained themselves with the host's Wii as seen below. You may not be able to tell it, but they are playing the new Tiger Woods golf.
We'll see if we can rally up enough people to play again in two weeks and see how I progress...
Nothing made me happier yesterday than seeing Georgetown roar back from 10 points down to beat UNC in overtime of the East regional final. North Carolina missed 21 of their final 23 shots as Georgetown ran away with the game once they sent the game to OT on Wallace's three.
My favorite sound of the entire game... "clunk." To hear it 21 times over the final 10 minutes and well into overtime, including two free throws, was music to my ears.
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the big man match up next weekend between Oden of OSU and Hibbert on Georgetown, though I hope we can make it through this week of sure-to-be-expected hype.
One final note... for a conference that sent 7 teams the NCAAs this year, should we be a little upset that not a single team from the ACC made the final four? Should we be wondering if perhaps a few of those at-large bids was given to one of the unsung mid-majors?
Just some food for thought...
Here are a few of the options we looked at. I personally was a fan of the black shirt with the silver vest since we are going with silver as the color of the vests. I'm not sure if that color will look good on everyone, so it comes down to being Jeff's fiance's call.
I really liked this look, but again... not sure if it would look as good on us.
Here are some random shots of Jeff's brother-in-law, Ahmed, and myself assisting Jeff with the process.
I didn't have high expectations for the Big Ten. Other than Wisconsin and Ohio State, all of the other teams were seeded lower than 6. So the fact that only Ohio State has advanced is not surprising. The ACC, however, which had been talked up all season, with it sending 7 teams, only has one team advancing to the sweet 16, UNC. All of the high hopes for Maryland, Virginia Tech, and UVA were squashed when all three teams lost in the final minutes of their games to lower seeds.
The big surprise to me is the Pac-10. If USC holds on to beat Texas, three teams will have moved on to the final 16. I'm impressed.
It seems that the time to blog comes and goes like the tide (and more practically, like the warm weather around here). While the time was easy to come by over the winter holidays, sitting down for a few minutes on the computer when it is not related to work, is very rare. Time has been so limited lately that trying to pull together my brackets for the NCAA tournament and my player list for the NCAA fantasy draft was tough... and those of you who know me really well, I always make the time for the NCAA tournament.
So what has happened around here? For Valentine's Day, I gave Lauren a ticket to The Lion King on Broadway and a hotel room in the theatre district. So, we left Friday afternoon and drove up 95 with all of the other thousands that had the same idea. Needless to say, a 4.5 hour drive took over 6 hours. To say I was frustrated would be an understatement. I feel the same frustration sitting in traffic that I do when sitting on a runway waiting to take off. Helpless.
Anyway, the show was great, and we were lucky to catch the city on a nice weekend in March. The weather was in the upper 50's and sunny which in retrospect is pretty darn lucky considering the weather that moved up the East Coast this weekend. While up there, we also had a chance to catch up with some friends who have a place on the Upper West Side and get a nice tour. Of course, while we were up there, we lost an hour of sleep due to the earlier implementation of Daylight Savings Time (which I think I still have not recovered from). Fortunately, the ride home was much less eventful as we left the city at 2:45 and made it home by 7.
On the note of Daylight Savings Time, I'm still puzzled as to why there was such a mad scramble to implement the DST patch across the country. The law was passed in August of 2005 yet Microsoft was releasing the final patches for Outlook a week before the change in time. Do you remember the paranoia around Y2K that ended up amounting to nothing? I want to know how much productivity was affected by this DST change. I know personally, my BlackBerry did not changeover when it was supposed to, and when I manually changed it, all of my meetings and meeting requests sent from the BlackBerry were an hour off. It took me to manually download the patch from my BlackBerry to get it right. And my brother brings up a good point... what is going to happen when the old DST date comes and goes? How will we fare?
On to my favorite weekend of the year, the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament. Over the past four years, I've either been in Vegas or off from work to fully enjoy all four days of the opening two rounds. This year, I did what supposedly every other college basketball fan does, check the scores throughout the day and leave the office as close to 5 as possible. That being said, there was an interesting article on Slate.com that talks about the myth of lost productivity due to the NCAA tournament. Some consulting company claimed that over $3.8B worth of productivity is lost each year due to workers checking scores or following games online. Speaking as someone who does keep an eye on the games, it is no more distracting to keep an eye on a score as it is to have people come up to you all day long to BS or ask you questions. In fact, I felt like I was able to get more done because I had my headphones on and people would not bother coming up to talk to me.
Anyway, the first two days of the tournament pretty much held to "chalk" as they say with most of the bigger teams winning as they were supposed to. The only "surprise" (in quotes because I picked it), was VCU beating Duke. The second round has been exciting, but again, not too many surprises unless you count Maryland losing to Butler as a surprise. The Terps looked sloppy yet again and consequently lost in the 2nd round. However, currently my Hoyas (I say my because I have always liked them, no matter what anyone else says) are struggling with a pretty good BC team.
I would like nothing more for the ACC teams to all get knocked out and the Big Ten to rack up as many wins as they can since it was downplayed as a weaker conference this year. I guess we'll see just how weak it was during the UNC-MSU game tonight.
More later...
Below are a few of the 100 pictures I took over the weekend documenting all of the memories that were made. Look for the full set on my Flickr site soon!
