Packed Up

So it goes without saying that we've been bad bloggers of late. But we totally have a good excuse: We've been packing.

Not this whole time, although sometimes it felt like that. We've spent much of the last two-plus months preparing to move -- and it still felt really sudden when the day actually came. But it did, on Saturday, and our two-year stint together in Charlottesville is now officially over.

For a temporary home, we sure did a hell of a lot there, what with the cross-country move to get there and the getting engaged and married and all of that. And we'll miss our free Friday wine and Christian's pizza and gelato (although going there four times in our last week softened the blow).

But we're also ridiculously excited to get to our new home in L.A. and start our life there. We may even post more than once a quarter. Stay tuned.

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And now, spring

So, a few things have changed outside since the last post. (I remain a lazy blogger, however.) Some shots from a couple of recent weekends, at Monticello, Keswick and around our neighborhood. The rest are on Picasa.

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Snow day

We didn't get the full blast of the snowstorm that hit this part of the world last night and tonight. But it did dump a couple inches, which was enough to make things look right purty when the sun came out this afternoon. A few shots follow; the rest are on my Picasa page.

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This is what snow looks like

The other day at Target, I bought a snow scraper/brush combo for my car. Good timing -- see above.

OK, so I'm stretching a little there. The snow that fell on my car this morning was gone by midafternoon, and the snow that fell on it tonight will be gone too -- hell, it's gonna be 60 by Saturday.

But damn if I wasn't happy to see the first snow of the season -- and my first personal snow since, oh, 1997.

Before today, it had been a little more than a decade since there had been a chance of snow falling in the place where I lived. I could see it on the mountains around Los Angeles some winters there, but it was three cross-country moves ago that I last had to have a scraper in my trunk.

So this morning I went out and took pictures of it snowing, and I caught a couple of flakes on my tongue and I generally behaved like a little kid. I'll probably re-acquire my distaste for snow over the next few months, but for now it's very exciting. Can't wait to fire my first snowball.

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I think I'm becoming a foodie

As soon as Lisa gets home this evening, we're probably going out to the Market Street Wine Shop in Charlottesville for their free weekly tasting. We did that last week too, and it's fun. And I mentioned free, right?

We've also made a habit of hitting the weekly farmers market that sets up shop down the street on Saturdays. It's tomato season, and we've been going a little nuts with the heirloom varieties -- probably spending a good 50-60 bucks on tomatoes alone in the past three weeks. We also invested in a new wine rack, because, well, we had too many bottles for the other one to handle.

Which leads me to wonder:



Have I become a foodie?

The answer, I think, is a qualified yes -- qualified because I had Wendy's for lunch yesterday, and sometimes I just want to sit on the couch and eat potato chips out of the bag.

But I also get excited by the prospect of cooking dinner a couple times a week, and by the idea of trying a new restaurant -- which, let's face it, is one of the good things about moving. The restaurants are almost all new.

The wine thing, too, is a recent development. Five years ago I probably would never have ordered a glass of wine with a meal. I was a beer snob, sure (and still am), but wine was a little outside my realm of experience.

Funny what a couple trips to Santa Barbara will do for that, though. Now, we have 20 bottles from all over sitting in our new wine rack, and if we try something at a restaurant that we like, we write down the name so we can find a bottle of it later. We spent an afternoon last weekend on part of the Monticello Wine Trail, drinking some surprisingly good (and a couple of really not very good) local wines.

Twice, we have stuffed dates with blue cheese, wrapped pork products around them and baked them.

A lot of this -- including the blue cheese-stuffed dates, which we had during our stopover in St. Louis -- started on the trip. We made a conscious and pretty successful effort not to eat big-box food while we were on the road, and that idea has pretty well carried over once we got here. Charlottesville also seems blessed with an inordinate number of good restaurants for a town its size, so there's probably no need for us ever to set foot in an Applebee's.

So now, I guess, the trick will be keeping this all in check, remaining a food lover while not tipping over into nose-in-the-air territory. I suspect that won't be too hard -- we both love our cheez-with-a-z too much to become true snobs.

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What does your license plate say about you?

We didn't really play the license plate game on our trip per se, but in the 2+ weeks we've been home in Virginia, we've both noticed something what seems to be an inordinate number of personalized license plates.

Now, no offense to those who feel that this is the best venue to express themselves. Wait: I take that back. Really? Dude, get a blog.

I haven't kept a close count...



...but over the course of the past couple of weeks I've counted at least a dozen personalized plates: VA ALUM, WAHOO47, I AM WENDY, URASINR, what have you. Either a lot of people in this area really get a kick out of the personalized license plate, or they're just narcissists.

Today, I hit the laudable Virginia DMV web site, and discovered, in addition to the more than 180 possible license plate styles, that it's only an extra $20 a year to buy yourself a wee billboard for your car. Yay you.

I guess it beats the bumper sticker I saw today on a taxi, proclaiming the driver "Directionally Dysfunctional."

Get hobbies, people.

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Wisdom vs. mercy or, life in a college town

So it's Friday evening, and we're walking to have drinks and dinner at a place called Continental Divide (which, if you're ever in town, has no sign outside that says "Continental Divide" but does have a neon sign reading "Get in here." A little precious maybe, but the margaritas are tremendously strong and the food is right tasty. Lisa had marinated-pork tacos the size of your face, and I had a special of red mole-cooked flank steak that was fantastic.)

We're headed west on Main Street in Charlottesville, and a scruffy-looking dude passes us going the other way and says, "Excuse me." He's got longish hair and a beard and is wearing a big Bob Marley T-shirt; he looks a little like Steve Zahn, if Steve Zahn let himself go a little.



I'm ready to say either, "Sorry, man," if he asks for change or defer to Lisa if he asks where something is. But it's neither, because he says this instead (I'm paraphrasing a little here): "I'm taking a survey. If you could only have one, would you rather have wisdom or mercy?"

Then, seeing our bemused looks: "I've been asking a lot of people, and I'm trying to get my own mind around it, wisdom or mercy."

So now we're intrigued. Our guard relaxes a little, and we actually start to think about it for a second. We both say wisdom. Because -- at least this is how I see it -- wisdom would allow one to know when to be merciful. And, as Lisa pointed out later, if you're merciful without being at least a little wise, well, then you're just a pushover.

The guy didn't ask us why, though; he just thanked us and went on his way. And we went on ours, shaking our heads. "You gotta love being in a college town sometimes," Lisa said.

I imagine that, rapidly aging as I now am, there will be plenty of times in the coming nine months that I'll mutter and curse under my breath about students making my wait for lunch longer or whatever. But she's right: You gotta love it sometimes.

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Home.

Ten days, four hotel rooms (all with curved shower rods, so that was cool), three freeloading stays with family, countless roadside religious icons and porn shops and 3,726 miles (including side trips and driving around places we stopped) after leaving my old home, I'm in my new one.

There are boxes and piles of crap everywhere, but all my clothes are put away and the fridge is stocked with groceries. One of the local weeklies just published its best-of list, so I'm armed with information about how not to look like a tourist.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna like it here.

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