Wish us luck!

So it's Friday, March 30th and this means exactly one week til my family (mom, sister, my sister's 2 teenage kids and my Godfather/cousin) will be here for a DC visit..ahhhhhh! One more time....AAHHHHH! Don't get me wrong, I'm super excited to see them all and I love them to death but...
1. I have sooo much I need to get done before they get here
2. They are all (except my Godfather/cousin) staying with us (yes, in our tiny townhouse) for 1 whole week.  I think I failed to mention that we have 1 bathroom!
3.  I was only able to get 1 day off from work (I work from home & travel, but most of the time I'm way more swamped when I'm working from home).  So Tater and I will be stuck having a regular busy work week while trying to entertain and spend time with everyone.

I am glad to say that at least everyone gets along (my family loves Tater!).  My mom, sister and I are really close and always have a good time together even though I think we are all 3 different. My niece (16) and nephew (13) are your typical kids.  My niece is miss diva/teenage attitude/too cool to do anything fun with us and my nephew is a clumsy/awkward 13 yr old boy that's all about sports, basketball shoes, etc. My Godfather/cousin is actually just visiting for the weekend.   Everyone loves him....he's great and a lot of fun.

Anyways, I need to take a deep breath and get back to my To Do list! Wish us luck...I'm sure it's going to be a fun, hilarious, stressful and tiring 7 days with the fam!  Stay tuned for an update on how the week actually ends up!

Happy Friday!

-Shrimp

"lazy" weekends

How come 6:30am on the weekends is not nearly as rough as 6:30am's during the work week?

I woke up wide wake right at 6:31 today.  There was no way I was going to lay there and fall asleep again and I knew once the "always starving" big black dog in the house heard me then I definitely wasn't going to be able to lay in bed anymore.

If only I felt this awake on my early mornings M-F...I don't get it.  Oh well, at least I get more out of my weekends, right?

Speaking of weekends...It's supposed to rain both today and tomorrow here in the DC area (booo)!  I feel like this is the first time we've had a rainy weekend since we moved here back in Oct. '11.  So I can't complain at all!  I'm kinda looking forward to it.

This icky weather means catching up on chores around the house, hitting the gym instead of our typical long run outside (maybe it won't rain so hard and we can still tackle our run), grocery shopping, squeezing in some lazy time and hopefully getting to stop by the Multisport World Expo that's going on this Sat & Sun.  Never been to it before, but I love checking out new gear (especially shoes!), learning new workouts, etc.  They're having quite a few free seminars so maybe I'll drag Tater to one of these!


~Shrimp

Black & Blue

Shrimp and I have been busy enjoying the gorgeous ebb and flow of DC weather (I cannot BELIEVE I didn't take a single picture while we ran through the monument, past the blooming cherry blossoms to the Eastern Market), working, biking to work (again, that gorgeous DC weather!), working and working.

Shrimp happens to work from home.  Usually that means a lot less home and a lot more working.  In the last few days, though, she found a fun blog by fellow DC blogger Jess at Jess Runs.  We were glancing through some of Jess' posts tonight when we came across the one about her first bike crash.  Ouch!  Glad she is ok!  I managed my first crash before I got to the end of the block my first day on the bike.  That takes grace :)

And that brought up the conversation of somehow during a freak snowstorm a couple months ago we were walking home and, somewhere along the way, Shrimp managed to get a big ol' bruise where the sun don't shine!  To be fair, I wound up with some gnarly unexplained bruises on my knees, too.  And Shrimp said...

"Let's just get this clear... if we were blogging when I bruised my butt you WOULD NOT be putting a picture of it online."

Now all I really want to do is post a pic of that nasty bruise.

As I type this, she just keeps saying "No!"  Ugh... oh well :)

~Tater

What a Real Kitchen Looks Like

I had a fairly low stress Friday at work, Shrimp still has her nose to the grindstone (crappy thing about working from home!), the dogs are fed and I'm Facebooked out for the night.  Anyone else would probably flip on the TV, go for a long walk (update on DC area weather: GORGEOUS!) or call up another buddy and head out for a few drinks.

I decided to make some soup "from scratch" (the loosest use of term I could ever imagine) again.  That meant I threw a can of crushed tomatoes & basil in the blender with milk and heated it up on the stove.

About half the pictures on my phone are of food.  Generally this is food I have prepared.  I have a confession, though.  It's not always pretty (gasp!).  Compact that with the fact that our kitchen is smaller than most of my friends' closets (and includes our washer and drier), and you get the following...

Step 1: Make a mess in your already-messy kitchen just by opening a canned good. (Check).

Lesson 1: Totally go with low sodium tomatoes if you want to embark on this "recipe."  

This soup probably turned out saltier than Campbell's.

Step 2: Manage to get crumbs and "soup" splatter everywhere.  Think about cleaning it up, get distracted by something in the other room, and return to a foamy overflowing pot.

Lesson 2: Let's be honest here, I will never learn from this, and will continue to be an absent-minded cook.
Note to self: The clock is still over a half hour off from the last power outage.  

Consider changing with daylight savings this weekend.  Or consider keeping the same.  Meh.

Step 3: Grate fresh Parmesan to make it look like you put effort into the meal.  Take a picture of the not-so-attractive product.  Scald tongue trying to finally eat something before it cools.

Lesson 3: Meh.  At least it's better than take out.

Clearly my food photography, kitchen design, attention span and Friday nights need some work.

~Tater

Shrimp's favorite words

A few of my favorites!

Hope you enjoy and Happy Wednesday!!!

-Shrimp

Another Day in DC: Getting Awkward with Our Forefathers

The skies around the capitol region cleared up this weekend and we had some beautiful weather again.  Chilly, but beautiful.  We chose to spend that time yesterday napping with the back door open, but today we headed into DC to see a couple more monuments up close.

We started out at the Lincoln Memorial.  After we visited Ford's Theater a couple months ago Shrimp has been somewhat obsessed with this guy.  I can't blame her, Abe was a pretty cool dude and I can't imagine where this country would be if someone didn't have the guts he did.  We snapped a couple shots, including the obligatory hey-stranger-here's-my-iPhone pic.

Shrimp & me at the foot of freedom

 He must have felt bad when he saw us struggling...

 Standard awkward self portrait... this is what we look like in real life

 I'm not going to save you from the same shots you always see, because I had to take them too :)  Shrimp's are much better (she was using her real camera and I was just dinking around with the iPhone), but mine are already loaded onto the computer.

At the foot of the Lincoln Memorial

 Lincoln's Profile... kind of a cool angle

It might seem creepy that I took a pic of a random little boy, but I thought this was a perfect "photo journalistic" moment.  I love seeing little kids get so excited about history.  He was reading every single word of Lincoln's second inaugural address.

Right after we saw that cute little kid is when things got awkward.  No, mom didn't scold us for snapping a picture of her kid, we maybe seemed even creepier.  We walked into the bookshop to the right of where that little boy is standing and I must have pressed something on my phone, because all of a sudden it was like we had our own theme and entrance booming, "2homos.com.  It's not a porn site, we just like the name..."

With music.

Yep.

Apparently I had pressed the "music" app and the last thing I had been listening to was this hilarious podcast, and the intro to it came blaring out of the speakers of my little iPhone.  To say a couple people turned their heads is an understatement. That bookshop is small and that phone volume was jacked all the way up.  Good thing I'm hard to embarrass :)

So, we headed to the Jefferson Memorial.  Thomas Jefferson is by far my favorite politician of all times.  I know he wasn't perfect, the man used pure logic and I really appreciate that :)  During our cold walk there I snapped this pretty pic of the sky.

 Look at that beautiful blue sky over the Jefferson Memorial!

By the time we got to the memorial we were cold.  It was beautiful but windy next to the water, so we kind of hurried through this one.

My man, Jeff up close and personal

 I have a bunch of pictures of the Washington Monument from different angles.  

This one is from inside the Jefferson Memorial.

After all that walking and cold, we or course needed to fill our bellies with something warm and delicious, so we hit the famous Ben's Chili Bowl.  Yum!

 Inside Ben's

Chili dog, chili half smoke, fries, and sodas (which we never get!)

Let's just say we went home and took our "before" pictures, which we will NOT be sharing, when we got done with this meal.  Surely we will still be eating delicious food, but there will have to be much more running around the monuments and more color in the foods we choose.  Sigh.  It's not much fun being nice to your body.

Have a great week!

~Tater 

A Year

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'll try to make this quick... This has absolutely been the best year of my life. It had been extremely stressful at times, dealing with the drama that grad school, work, deaths and divorces in the family from a couple thousand miles away, and moving cross-country... Again. But dammit, it has been amazing :)

And all because of this girl. Cheesy? Yes. But she makes me smile. Every. Single. Day.

I've always been a happy person by nature, but Shrimp just makes every little part of my life better. Take, for instance, when I came home 366 days (it's a leap year!) after she worked up the guts to make things official. I came home to this...

On the front door

And on the living room wall

A whole slew of little notes she wrote about all "our little things." From our firsts to our favorites. I love this girl :)

~Tater