October 3, 2007

Happy beginning-of- the-decorating-season!

I decorated our little place with the remnants of my Halloween decorations from college. The stuff looks a little shabby after several years of use. Hopefully next year we can afford to buy some new stuff. My favorite places for decorations are AC Moore (craft store) and the Dollar Tree. Both have really nifty things at very reasonable prices.

There are more pictures of the Halloween decorations in our Flickr album. I just posted pictures of Jamie's new computer and new printer too. Thanks to the WA for helping him build his new machine!!

In just a week's time my mom and Aunt Gloria will be in town and then we'll be off to Charlotte for the races! I'm glad Jamie has such a nice digital camera. My lil Kodak is ok, but his Canon is much nicer. We do need to buy a larger memory card for it though. It's only 128MB and only holds about 100 pictures. Definitely not enough for a whole day's worth of pictures. I will take my laptop for unloading pictures from the card though.

I have one little red tomato still hanging on and I noticed a couple of the green ones had an orange tint to them. YAY! My basil is no more. The squirrels completely devoured it. There isn't even a stalk left. I was able to get a few leaves dried and I did manage to use some fresh basil in a pasta dish a few weeks ago. So, all was not completely for waste. At least the squirrels had basil-y fresh breath!

September 28, 2007

Count down to Charlotte

T-minus 13 days

Well, we're only two weeks away from something my mom, aunt, and I have been looking forward to since October 15, 2006 -- our return to the 1.5 mile track at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

I remember getting moderately interested in NASCAR sometime during my junior year in college, and it grew during my senior year. I consider myself a New-Generation, Post-Dale Earnhardt fan. I can't remember watching many races before Dale Sr. died. ANd when I first started to watch, it was merely to have something on the tv for a long stretch of time without having to turn the channel while I played EverQuest on the computer. It was one of those tv programs that I didn't have to actively watch to know what was going on.

In the spring of 2003, I graduated from college and moved into an apartment with my college buddy who was originally from Arkansas and definitely had a bit more red on her neck than I did. Near the end of 2003, she said her dad and brother wanted to go to the Memorial Day weekend race at Charlotte, the 2004 Coca Cola 600, and asked if I wanted to order a ticket too. By this time my interested in NASCAR had risen to the point where actually being at the race would be really cool.

My first NASCAR race was awesome, even though Lowe's poster boy Jimmie Johnson (who is definitely not a favorite of mine even if he is Dale Jr.'s new teammate) won. The dirt, the drit, the grim, the smell, the sweaty-no-shirt-half-drunk rednecks, the overpowering roar of thousands of horses charging around the oval track. It was the best symphony I'd ever been too.

By this time, my mom and grandma had also gotten into watching the races and picking out their favorite drivers. My grandma has been a die-hard Jeff Gordon fan ever since she started watching. He drives the Dupont Chevrolet and her kids were all brought up on Dupont money. Grandpa retired from Dupont after over 40 years of working at the Kinston plant. Even I grew up on Dupont money. Mom worked there for 16 years. But I just don't like Jeff Gordon. Hehe.

In January of 2005, roomie and I went to a new NASCAR event in town. It was called the Fitness 500, and it was really neat. The event was sponsored by WFU Baptist Medical Center. It's main draw was a fitness competition between several teams of NASCAR folks. There were drivers and drivers' wives and crew members and other folks involved. And here is where we first met Carl Edwards. Bre and I were very enamored with the handsome new driver of the #99 Roush Ford. We even got our pictures taken with him and he signed not only our Fitness 500 posters we bought (I lost mine! How sad!), but also signed copies of his Craftsman Truck Series driver sheet from the 2004 season. That's when I picked my favorite driver.

I was tooling around the internet one day in the summer of 2005 and happened upon the Lowe's Motor Speedway site where I happened to learn that Busch series tickets are WAY cheaper than Nextel Cup series tickets. Mom and I went to her first race in October 2005. We just went to the Friday night Busch race (tickets were only $20!), but that got her hooked and before we left that night she said she wanted to do the entire weekend of races. By this time we had learned that our aunt Gloria was a dyed-in-the-wool Dale Junior fan and wanted to go to a race too. So, we all bought tickets for both the Busch and Nextel races for October 2006.

The October 2006 races were our first experience of being immersed in NASCAR for an entire weekend. We drove down to Charlotte on Thursday afternoon, and on the way down surprised Aunt Gloria with a stop at Dale Earnhardt, INC. DEI has the MOST AMAZING gift store I've ever seen. If they could put a #3 or a #8 on something, then they had it for sale. There were dog leashes and collars, tv remotes, glass bottles of fancy water, tire pressure gauges, scrap booking stuff, flags, coasters, earrings, wallets, not to mention t-shirts, hats, jackets, and glasses. We got great pictures of one of the #8 cars parked outside. On Friday morning, we headed off to Roush racing to see Carl related stuff. Roush's gift shop was nice, but had to represent more drivers and so just had standard stuff like shirts, hats, stickers, and lanyards. We stopped by the big Outdoor World, home to the Bass Pro Shop, on Saturday and even saw Kasey Kahne at an event in the big mall's parking lot. Plus, there's tons of stuff to see at the race track. Every driver has a merchandise hauler selling stuff outside the track. Even Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights had a hauler. On the way back to Winston-Salem, I realized I'd forgotten to stop back by there to pick up a Ricky Bobby shirt...they were just $5!

As soon as tickets for the 2007 Lowes races went on sale, I snapped up four tickets. This year Jamie is coming with us! He started to get interested in NASCAR while we were chatting online, since I usually talked about it on Sundays during races. Then when he flew over in November, he watched all the races with me. Now, he even has his favorite NASCAR websites that he likes to look out regularly. His favorite driver at the moment is Dale Junior (for Christmas last year I bought him a Junior shirt and toboggan), which puts him in Aunt Gloria's good graces. We'll have two Junior fans and two Edwards fans at the race this year. He also likes to pull for the Busch brothers and Juan Pablo Montoya just because it irks me. Hehe.

So, we're looking forward to this year's races. I hope their good. I'm really pulling for Junior to win, though I wouldn't be too bummed out if Carl won. :)

September 25, 2007

Well, I finally did get rid of my cold for all of you who might have been wondering about that. But this morning I woke up with a sty in my eye. Dunno which is worse, a cold or a sty, but at least I can breathe with the sty.

Not much has gone on in the great month of September. Jamie and I enjoyed a very lazy Labor Day. It was nice to have a holiday during my sick time for more lounging in the recliner.

We're gearing up to have my mom and aunt over in a couple of weeks for going to the races at Lowes Motor Speedway in Charlotte. I hope the races are spectacular. It would be the most awesome thing ever if Junior won.

Jamie just built a new computer yesterday. It's up and running a-ok today. I really like Windows Vista. It's very pretty and has all sorts of nifty thingies here and there. Currently Jamie has widgets (little side thingies that are neat) on the right side of the screen. One is a calendar, one shows what the weather is like in town, and one scrolls through pictures in the picture folder. Right now the pictures are just of the sample images that came pre-installed with Vista, but they're all gorgeous!

This weekend I have a rehearsal and a recording session with the orchestra and choir who are performing for the MMF's next CD, a CD of Moravian Christmas music. Moravians are known for how they celebrate Christmas and every so many months I always talk to someone on the phone who wants to know if we have a CD of Moravian Christmas music. We will this Christmas!! And, my name will be listed in the violin section of the liner notes! YAY!

The weather has improved greatly over the past couple of weeks, though it has been in the upper 80s to near 90 degrees for the past few days. The air isn't so hot anymore, just the sun. The mornings and nights have cooled down considerably. I'm hoping for sweater weather soon.

Tomato plant update: There are quite a few green tomatoes on the vine. I even plucked a little red tomato yesterday afternoon and ate it on a sandwich with a fried egg and a slice of cheddar. There's one more little red tomato still left. I don't know if the other greenies will ripen anytime soon. The poor plant got too big for itself and started falling over on itself. Next year I'll have to be vigilant about tying up any branches that look like they'll fall over and bend.

Oh, and if anybody is looking for someone to design a very simple website for a business or for personal reasons, I've recently become a Dreamweaver addict. I looooove designing small websites. I can't do overly fancy stuff, but if you're in need of a "first website" I can certainly help out. And, I'm cheap! :)

August 31, 2007

Ugh. There's not much worse than a summer time head cold. It's hot and miserable outside (though finally the temperature has dropped to the high 80s from the low 100s) and I feel absolutely wretched.

It all started Tuesday morning when I woke up feeling a funny tickle in my throat. There was really no build up to the feeling bad, no little warning headache or anything. In the hour between getting up and sitting down at my desk on Tuesday morning I felt horrible. Needless to say I called in sick on Wednesday morning, and I left work around 2:45pm on Thursday.

Last night around 9:30pm, I climbed in bed to burrow under blankets (I was cold...in August...when it's been 90+ for the past 4 weeks) and mindlessly watch tv. Jamie came up an hour or so later and took my blankets away from me! He said I was too hot and needed to cool down. I was cooooold! Meh. I did have a teeny fever of about 99, but that's more than just a .3 degree fever for me. I'm like my grandpa in that my normal temperature is usually less than 98.7 degrees.

I did stay at work all day today, but didn't scoff in the least bit when the boss lady said I could go anytime I wanted to (it was 4:15pm at the time). I finished up my work on the website and scooted home to dope myself up on more Sudafed.

I've probably had seven doses of Sudafed (the real stuff...the stuff you have to go up to the pharmacy counter and sign for) and I can't tell a difference yet. And for the past two days I've had awful cases of the sneezes...... Ew. So, essentially, I'm suffering from both a stopped up nose and a runny nose. I still don't understand how it can be both at the same time. It's like being a narcaleptic insomniac.

Anyway, at least I have a three day weekend over which to recouperate. Was I the only one who didn't realize Monday was a holiday until Tuesday of this week? We didn't make any plans, but that's probably a good thing since I'm sick. If I'm better by Monday and if the weather is pleasant, a trip to the zoo would be a lot of fun.

Well, the right side of my nose is completely stopped up yet I can feel the snot starting to trickle towards my nostril in a fruitless bid for freedom. Best go lay/sit somewhere to get the stuff to slide over to my left sinus. Meh.

Oh, by the way, Jamie and I now have a lovely black and white poster of the Eiffel Tower (how romantic!) in a black frame on the wall over the yellow chair in our bedroom. I should take a picture sometime. And, I should also take a picture of the Nascar wall going up the staircase. Hehe. I'm such a lil redneck!