The Month in Review

Justin: April started off with the Hotel IK going INTERNATIONAL! Our friend Steve left us over a year ago to teach English in South Korea and has since found a life there he thoroughly enjoys. He also has met a great woman, Mi Hee, and brought her home with him on his visit! They were only in town for a few days so they stayed with us in our soon-to-be world famous "Sunflower Suite" while they caught up with friends. It was great to share time with Steve even in such a small dose. He revealed a greater plan of staying at least one more year in South Korea and then hopefully bringing Mi Hee back to the states. We were discussing the differences in US media vs. International news and well, that's just a long winded bitching from me that a few of you have already been privy to so I'll keep it in this time. Needless to say that what we are given as "news" is normally far, far removed from the rest of the world.
Anyway...
Steve brought us some great gifts: a small Buddha from Cambodia, Japanese prayer beads and a Korean prayer bracelet (wearing it now, actually)! I'll include photos later on when I get back to the house.

Lets see... the next weekend (I think) Stacey had to work her first big event with the JDRF and it turned out to be an almost all Saturday affair. Sunday I went to catch up with my family in Blowing Rock for the day. My sister and the boys were up as well so I got to hang out with Coop and Hayden. Cooper can almost say my name now! Well, it's more "Unkajussin" but we figured it out. We ran around the small shops and ate at The Canyons, one of our favorite spots for grub in the little town. Mom and Dad stayed all week and said they had he best weather that they've ever had during that week of the year. That sounds right as I remembered it snowing the last several times I went up.

The next weekend was pretty quiet, I think... some cleaning and general straightening up, but nothing that jumps out at me...

Of course last weekend was the Derby Festival in Louisville, Kentucky! WHOO! We broke away from The Queen City at like, 4pm (UGH!) and hauled booty and pug up 77 and over 64. I had forgotten how beautiful West Virginia is. We got to our hotel about 11:30 and was ready to hit the sack and rest up for the morning's haughty demands!
NOT!
So there was a baseball team staying at the hotel and it took us 20 minutes or so to get our roomkey. It took Oscar another 20 minutes to pee and another 20 mins to get stuffs into the room and settled. I think I remembered looking at the clock a little after 1 before drifting off.
You know how sometimes something in real life will work its way into your dreams when you're sleeping? In my dream there was a tornado alarm going off and nobody knew what to do so we were all kinda panicking and the horn kept getting louder and louder and louder and wait - I'm really hearing a horn... What is that?

It was the fire alarm.
At 4am on the dot.
"Are you kidding me???" So we're looking at each other with that "Do we really have to go" look before gathering up Oscar and heading down the stairs and outside. At 4am.
Did I mention that it was raining?
We piled into the Kia and the girls slept for an hour while the fire department checked out the place. After the thumbs up, we all went back inside.
At this point it's after 5AM and they have to be at the start corral no later then 7:15. Stace and I opted for a little more sleep and we climbed back into the Kia about 6:30. I had mapped a route to the start line (which was only a few minutes away) but took us a back way as I knew the main way would be backed up with traffic. It looked easy enough - like 4 turns from the hotel and we were on Rochester, the road that intersects with 3rd - where the Start line is. Sound easy enough, right?
/sigh
At 7:05 and evidently a some-how-missed-turn later, we were lost. I knew we were in the right area but had no idea how to get to where we needed to be.
I said it was raining, right?
Tensions were high in the car as we were finally able to pinpoint our location on the GPS (Thanks Ed and Sue!) and HA! We were maybe half a mile from where we needed to be. Zip-zip, turn, and I dropped the girls off with plenty of time to reach their markers. Oh, and it stopped raining right about the time we found out where we were. Nice touch, eh?
As I worked my way back to the hotel to take Oscar to the bathroom, I realized I was actually backtracking the "easy" way we might had come over and it was nothing but cars bumber to bumper for miles and miles. Go me.
The event went rather smoothly and the girls finished the 13.1 (questionable as Sharon's pedometer says it was 13.56) miles in around 2 hours and 20 minutes! Nice job! Sharon was way excited but extremely beat. She had pretty much talked herself out of ever doing another race and the thought of doubling that distance to run a full marathon was making her sick to her stomach. Four hours and a nap later, with same stomach filled with beer and good food, she was excitedly asking Stacey how soon was the next event.

Hotel IK

Stacey: Okay, so I'm getting too lazy to type out Irwin-Keeling so IK it is.  :-) 

We've had quite the guest list these past couple of weekends and there are more to come.  Two weeks ago, Justin's best friend Paul (practically his brother), managed to slip away from Knoxville and join us in Charlotte for a long weekend.  I stayed out of their way as much as possible to give them adaquate bonding time but did enjoy hanging out with them when I could.  The weekend can best be described as a 6th grader's sleepover....with beer.  :-)  The Xbox was put to good use; the local bars were toured and I found a new bonding experience with Paul...mocking Ghost Adventures.  Seriously watch this show - it's so ridiculous, it's hysterical!

The following weekend brought Justin a visit from his parents & sister to celebrate the big 37th birthday!  I definitely lost the wife of the year contest because a) I went to Charleston with some girlfriends to run the Cooper River Bridge Run (check out my training blog), and b) because I had to ask him twice how old he was this birthday.  I tried to use the whole age doesn't matter defense but my husband knows me and my short-term memory issues well. 

I got home Sunday night in time to treat Justin to what I consider the best pizza in Charlotte at the Pizza Peel and Tap Room!  It's a little restaurant hidden in the Cotswold neighborhood with wood plank walls and a funky neon sign and the freshest ingredients you will find!  The owners grow their own veggies and herbs and they update the menu frequently to try new flavors.  Justin opted for the extreme pepperoni pizza and the Thai Chicken pizza - surprisingly pepperoni lovin' Justin preferred the Thai Chicken.  I also love their beer list!  It's one of the few places I can find Cottonwood Ales in Charlotte. 

And we practically had the entire place to ourselves as tornado warnings were everywhere that night.  It's rare to have warnings so close to the Metro area and I tried not to be nervous when the sky took on that shade of pinkish-orange that I call the tornado hue.  It's not so much that tornadoes freak me out but I never know what to do when I hear a tornado warning here in the land of no basements.  Thanks to the clay soil in the Piedmont, basements are few and far between.  Combine that with the fact that there is a window in every room of our house (including the bathroom) and it's a safe bet that there is no safe place in our house.  Our first year here, we argued about whether or not we could all fit in the linen closet - we probably could if we had to. 

Of course, where to take cover seemed a pretty pointless topic of discussion once we realized that there are no warning sirens of any sort in Charlotte.  I'd have to be standing on my front porch to see it coming and at that point, I might as well just start snapping pictures to sell to the Travel Channel's Close Encounters.

While that little diatribe is sure to make my dad nervous, he can at least breathe a little easier knowing that we are now the proud owners of an ADT alarm system!  It was installed on Friday and includes a glass-break monitor, door monitors, a fire detector and key fobs so we can arm and disarm from a distance.  I feel better knowing the pets are safe from fire and Justin is now happy that he can take Porter with him if he leaves for the weekend.  :-)

Next up on our guest list is STEVE!! Our very dear friend who moved to South Korea to teach English and hasn't been home in over a year.  We miss him lots and he will be back on Tuesday and crashing with us for his trip.  So, guest room sheets are in the wash and I'm away to spruce up the bathroom. 

Hope everyone is well!

What Mercutio Probably Meant...

Justin: I've had a revelation... As I labored for several hours in the yard this morning I made the discovery that in the classic tale of "Romeo and Juliet", with his dying breath our dear Mercutio did not curse the House of Montigue and the House of Capulet with merely bad fortune - the plague he was wishing upon them had to include these:

Sweet Gum seeds. GAH!

What an awful thing these are! You can't mow them, you can barely rake them - they barely even BURN. When I mowed on Tuesday I had to leave the area around that one tree out as I couldn't have returned Mark's mower to him all beat up. The sound was awful and even trying to bag the things, success was minimal. So this morning I broke out the rake and shovel and spent a couple hours trying to put a dent in the carpet of thorny things...

This can was empty when I started. Maybe now I can mow without making a dull spoon out of the blade. Maybe...

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Justin: So the template we were using, well, we broke it somehow. I know, but somehow we did and until we figure out how to get the photos and links to show back up correctly, we'll just swap out templates on occasion.

I spent some time in the yard this morning, cleaning it up a bit and just generally de-winterizing it. As my allergies and the flowers will tell you, Spring has definitely sprung in the Queen City.

Here are a few shots from this morning in the yard.