Weekly Roundup

These days I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with titles to my posts, especially the ones where I have no real theme or topic and just regurgitate the week's happenings. Weekly Roundup seems like an apt title, if somewhat boring. But maybe that makes it that much more apt!

Anyway, we've been trucking along here at the Sheriko Inn. In an effort to get out of the house and explore our surroundings, we took a day trip to Newburyport. Newburyport is a bit of a swank town on the very tip of the North Shore, only about twenty miles from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It's got a nice little town center and is very much a maritime town, so there's plenty of history and New England village style. It's home to a very welcoming (and well-funded) public library and, our main reason for trekking there, Plum Island. We like Plum Island, even in the winter. Don't you?

So that was a fun day. Cold, but fun. Naturally, we did some extensive searching of the Newburyport real estate market when we got back home, and Google Mapped our commutes to work, because we got Let's-Live-in-Newburyport! fever after our little jaunt. But those feelings have subsided (somewhat). I blame the distractions of life on these fleeting feelings.

Distractions like busy weekends filled with lots of driving and socializing with family. While Doug was hanging with the boys at his now annual Hotel Reunion, I spent my Saturday at work and then traveled down to CT to hang out a bit with my mother and brother. We saw The Woman in Black and had a very tasty dinner. I can't say enough good things about the food at Al Frescos in East Hartford (of all places!) but I have a limited number of good things to say about The Woman in Black, and most of them stop with these two words: Ciaran Hinds. And on Sunday it was more family fun with heading down to see my niece cheer at her last basketball game of the season.

Yes, you read that correctly. My niece, Maria, is a cheerleader. At first when I heard that she was going to be a cheerleader I was a little annoyed. I don't consider myself one who would willingly associate with the cheerleader type (and I do think that there is something of a cheerleader type), so I was having trouble reconciling these feelings with the fact that my niece was going to be, or become, this "type." But, really, who am I kidding. Maria is totally the cheerleader type, and in a good way. She's a performer, that Maria, and she loves the spotlight.

She makes a great cheerleader; in my biased opinion, she's one of the best on the squad. And she's darned cute, too. We'll keep her.

Although we had no cheering squad to help us celebrate a milestone this weekend (if only my niece didn't live so far away!), Doug and I managed to get in the festive spirit to acknowledge our fourth wedding anniversary. Four years! How does one celebrate four years of marriage? By going to Aquitaine and getting the most tender cut of spare rib you can imagine

and getting in some cuddle time with the fuzzy ones.

And by cuddle time I mean narrowly avoiding suffocation by the giant 15-pound beast who thinks that your head makes a very good resting place.

Lest you think that's not enough celebration, that four years is certainly a significant enough milestone in one's married life to warrant something a little bit more substantial, we finally got our new shower door installed at 8am on Saturday morning.

Honestly? I may have liked this activity better than our fancy dinner. I've been trying to get that door installed since early December and have been kept up at night with visions of water leaking through my living room ceiling (due to the water leaking out from the faulty door), but now I can sleep easier. The old door is gone, the bathroom is cleaner than it's been since we moved in, the possible leak in the skylight was investigated and found to be no issue, and now Doug doesn't have to listen to me whine about getting the bathroom fixed anymore. So life is good here now. Onto the next.

Doughnuts, doughnuts everywhere

I've got to make this somewhat quick, as I have a date with Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, but I have to share these great photos of our weekend in Maine visiting Chris and Chris.

Whenever we go to Portland we have a lot of fun. Unfortunately, we haven't been there as much as we would like to be there, but we do try to go as often as we can. On Saturday, Doug and I stopped at Congdon's Doughnuts in Wells, ME, on a tip from my co-worker, and picked up a baker's dozen to share with Chris and Chris. After all, nothing says friendship like everyone gaining 5 pounds by eating doughnuts together. Saturday was a nice day (The sun! The sun!) but we decided to spend a good portion of the afternoon in the HART shelter, where Lulu found Chris and Chris and decided to have them take her home with them. It's a pretty cool shelter - the cats have a lot of space to roam around, and they all have adequate bedding, plenty of food, and lots of people to take care of them. I could have taken at least three home with me, but Doug and I really are reluctant to make that plunge into owning four cats. That just seems extreme.

I have a lot of photos of Chris and Chris from this weekend. Unfortunately, none of them showcase girl Chris's growing baby bump - but trust me, it's there! It's so funny - the last time we saw Chris and Chris we did not know of the bun in the oven, even though it was there. And now when we see Chris and Chris we know of the bun, we see evidence of the bun, and there is a whole new part to the equation. It's a good thing, for sure, and let me share the photos of the soon-to-be parents. This one was taken at dinner on Saturday night (good choice of restaurants, guys - very tasty) and this one at the Lobster Shack, home of greater Portland's best lobster roll (and what a view... I'll get to that) and this last one at the Portland Head Light If they look wet it's because they are - it rained all day on Sunday. Not a hard, driving rain, but enough to make walking around in the outdoors a little unpleasant.

We persevered despite the rain, though. The Lobster Shack is where we headed for lunch. There were great views from this place, which is situated right on the edge of Cape Elizabeth. We could have dined at one of these picnic tables if the day were nicer, right up near the water, but we ate inside, in where the lobsters are waiting to meet their death in a pot of boiling water and in a buttery hot dog roll.I was momentarily struck with a desire to free one of them, to grab one and throw it into the nearby sea, but I didn't and instead stepped up to the register and ordered my cheeseburger. The food was good - put Doug in a stupor but he quickly recovered and we went about the rest of our day.

The rest of our day included a trip out to Portland Head Light. It seems that Chris and Chris always go here when they have visitors, but this is the first time that they visited in the rain. Here is the requisite shot of the visiting couple in front of the lighthouse I don't know if we were sure we wanted to head out to the lighthouse, given the weather, but I sort-of thought that it would be the perfect weather for a lighthouse - just the kind of weather they were made for. And look this dark sky against the crisp white paint of the lighthouse - makes for quite the nice contrast. I'm glad we went, despite feeling a bit like drowned rats before we left.Three drowned rats, see how they... eat doughnuts?

Doug and I took some of the remaining doughnuts home with us after we left the lighthouse and left the guitar store (yes, there was a guitar store in our weekend. Two, actually, now that I think about it), and we're still eating them. Here's the one I had tonight: Congdon's indeed makes a tasty doughnut, but tonight my doughnut was a little hard. There's one left. I think I might leave this one for Wyatt.