new laptop!

whoohoo, got me a new laptop.  well, laura let me buy a new laptop, but same end result.  it's a dell inspiron 11z, 11.6" screen, dual core processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive, with windows 7 home premium.  all for just under $500 (or $250 when you factor in the gift card we grabbed from our credit card points).

after taking off the crapware that comes pre-installed and loading up my software, he's running really nice.  battery life is estimated at 6.5 hours, and that seems to be a pretty good estimate.  overall, i'm quite pleased (bruno couldn't care less, of course).

--dave

valentine’s weekend!

well, we had a pretty great valentine's weekend.

started off on friday, getting some flowers from my lovely sister, lauren.  for some reason they didn't put the card in the box, so i had no idea who they were from, but it was a pretty easy guess.

so on saturday, we packed the car and headed out for asheville, NC.  it's a really cute town in western north carolina in the smokey mountains.  we'd been there before with laura's parents (and i suppose drove through on our way down from AK), but this time we decided to bring bruno along for the trip.  he loved the car ride down, but didn't care much for the motel (the downtown inn, which was cheap and in a great location).  i suppose there were too many strange smells and noises for his liking.  he did pretty good walking around downtown, though.  asheville's a really dog-friendly town, and we were able to take him into a few shops even.  we stopped in the three dog bakery, which specializes in baked goods for dogs.  he had a sample of their carrot cake, and we ended up getting him his own slice of carrot cake, a brownie, and chocolate doughnut (all good for dogs, of course).  we also got a new leash, which i'll have to devote a separate post to, it's that cool...

we ended up locking the dog in his kennel and taking off for dinner at zambra, a great tapas restaurant.  we had some butternut & shrimp croquettes, pomegranate braised pork spring rolls, a homemade pork sausage chimichanga, and some fresh bread with garlic olive oil.  we had to skip out on dessert, although we found a chocolate place where we grabbed some caramels, and toffees.  so i guess that was our valentine's dinner, even though it was the night before.

the next morning, we ended up running out to the over easy cafe, which had a 20 minute wait but was completely worth it.  we had a breakfast sandwich and the whole wheat french toast, which was drizzled with a strawberry-banana glaze.  unbelievably good.

so that was the asheville trip.  we had a blast.  i brought the camera around, but didn't take a single picture.  guess you just had to be there...

new look!

thought i'd try out wordpress, so i'm moving stuff over to a new design.

hopefully this means i'll be updating things a bit more often.  i'll probably be adding more projects in the future and photos, so stay tuned.

christmas decorations!

so this weekend was the big christmas decorating weekend. actually, i did a lot of the decorating the weekend previous, but we got our tree this weekend so we finalized everything, i suppose.

--dave

thanksgiving 2009

well, we had a lot to be thankful for this year. 2009 has been a great year for me, and even without a job right now, we've got nothing to complain about. we're quite blessed...

so thanksgiving was really nice this year -- our friends randy and nica came over, so it was still a fairly small table, but nice to share it with some friends. laura cooked probably her best turkey so far, i made maw-maw's dressing, randy and nica brought some sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, and amazing cranberries, and we finished it off with laura's homemade pumpkin pie.

they brought their pup, bali, to play with bruno. the boys were better than we expected, and turned into really good boys when the pig ears came out...

--dave