Breaking news...

We got some good news today...  so good that the news needs some intro music..
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I decided that the best music to set the mood comes from the Mormons.. just the beginning should set the mood for you.

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Did you listen to it?
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Any guesses?
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Ready?
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WE FINALLY SOLD OUR HOUSE IN GEORGIA TODAY!  Yes, we've been living herer in IL for 26 months and we finally sold it!    It is a huge relief, even if we lost a bunch of money on it.  I'm just trying to forget about that little detail, however I did tell the CFO that the house we are in now might just be the last house we ever buy.  I am officially declaring that the old theory that says "real estate is a good investment" is a load of crap.

Yard update part 2

Another weekend of football and yard work is in the books.  All of our teams, except the University of Virginia won, so that means UGA and ISU are both still undefeated.  I keep telling the CFO that we need to go to an ISU game, especially since they are her employer.

I was out working in the yard on Saturday afternoon while this vintage 1929 Ford Tri-motor kept doing circles around the airport, so I got my camera and took some photos of it. 

Since I had the camera in the yard, I went ahead and snapped a few pictures of the yard.  As I expected, it looks a bit weedy, but that is how native looks a lot of the time.  The lighting wasn't ideal either, but enough with the excuses:

here is that same picture with some plants identified on it:

There are also some Forsythia in the back near the big blue stem, I planted them as tiny bare root twigs two springs ago and they have put on some serious size this year.  I'm hoping for a good display of early spring color from them in 2013. The purple cones have pretty much stopped blooming and I am letting them dry out and drop seeds to increase the quantity of plants in the area.  Unless the birds eat them all, which is a distinct possibility.  The side oats that are planted with them have quickly become my favorite, I like how the oats hang on the side of the stem. 

The little blue stem is starting to turn red for the winter, I think the red in the fall is definitely more prominent than the blue color for which it is named, but who am I to judge the people who named these plants?  Considering all the natives were planted from seed last spring, I think I am doing ok...

I took some cell phone photos of the front planting, but they didn't turn out too well... I will re-shoot that area with the real camera this week.

A yard update

After the previous weekend’s great UGA football adventure, last weekend was focused on minimizing expenditures, watching football and catching up on yard work. Our two Virginia colleges, James Madison and the University of Virginia both lost their football games, but UGA and ISU won theirs... so we have two teams at 2-1 and two at 3-0.  I also updated the title photo above with one of a recent sun rise...  The sun rises and sun sets are definitely really beautiful here.

When we bought our house, the fact that it was brand new gave us an opportunity to make a lot of decisions about it, especially when it came to the yard. I am now 2 growing seasons into it and I decided that it was time to start documenting what I had planted and where it was located. We probably won’t be in this house forever, so I thought it might be appreciated by the next owner. Here is a copy of that initial hand drawn plan that I did as the house was being built:

The most obvious omission on this plan is the fact that none of the plants are labeled. If I was preparing a plan like this for a client, every plant would be labeled. For our house, I basically used this as an initial concept and I’ve been “winging it” ever since. The only things that are pretty much like the plan are the sod lines and the patio and garden locations.

Plant selection for our yard has been heavily influenced by a couple things: 1) Plants donated by one of the CFO’s co-workers and 2) plants that catch the CFO’s eye when we are roaming through one of the many local nurseries. She identifies a plant that she would like to add and then I figure out the possible locations where it can be integrated into our yard. I never know what is going to gain favor with her, so there is no sense in labeling the plan. I refer to this process as design by committee.

I took the plan to work so that I could scan it and start tracing it in autocad. It will be a lot easier to label the plants in cad, even if the drawing won’t have the same hand drawn feeling to it that my sketch did. The other item that is missing from the initial plan is the dry creek bed that I built to handle the rain water from our uphill neighbors. Since I have no idea where I actually built it, I decided to pull the house up on goggle maps and use that image as a basis for tracing the dry creek bed. I knew that they had an image from last summer, you can see it below:

It looks like I did a pretty good job of laying out the sod lines for the landscape crew that installed the sod...  the final outline of the yard looks pretty close to what I drew on the plan.

To my surprise, they had also flown over the neighborhood this past summer and shot the images at an angle. Unfortunately, this photo was taken at the height of the lawn’s summer dormancy (because I am too cheap to spend money on water for the yard [and I think heavily irrigating lawn is wasteful]), so it doesn’t look that great. I wish they would shoot it now, as the grass has greened back up. Who do I need to talk to at google to discuss scheduling their fly overs?!

The two green spots in the rear yard are where I place the sprinkler to do my once every 2 weeks “keep the grass roots alive” watering that I do. I knew that area was staying green, but had no idea how funny it would look from the air!  I think that the dry creek bed is more "curvy" in person, these shots don't seem to show it very well.  The photos also don't show the plants that we have planted very well, I'll have to take some photos around the yard before everything goes dormant for the winter.  You can't really make out the swath of native grasses that has come in pretty well in the rear mulch area, hopefully they will show better the next time they fly over the house.   Temperatures dropped into the high 30's last night and the sun is setting earlier and earlier... here comes winter!

Road Trip!

Wow, what a crazy, busy and fun weekend. The CFO picked me up from work on Friday afternoon, I hopped into her new CRV and we headed south towards Missouri. It rained off and on during the drive and three hours later we were crossing the great Mississippi river and entering the city of St. Louis. We quickly navigated our way to the hotel and I ran in to get our room keys while she stayed in the car out of the rain. We unloaded our bags into the entry way and she waited there while I parked the car. Yes, even though it was raining, I’m still too cheap to pay for valet parking!

After finding my way back to the street level (I got a bit disoriented in the maze of an underground parking deck), we grabbed our stuff and headed up to the room and were greeted by a huge room with a living room (with a wet bar) and a separate bedroom. It was the second largest hotel room I’ve ever stepped foot in, the first being the Suite my friend had when he got married in Vegas. What made the big room even better was knowing that we were only paying $70 per night to stay there, thanks to Priceline. According to the Hyatt website, the cheapest room in the hotel was going for $169 per night for the weekend we were there! Yes, the name your own price ads on tv are dumb, but you can really get a good deal on rooms in nice hotels. However, based on our experiences with them, we have determined that you really only get great deals in big cities where they are probably never fully booked.

Saturday morning, we walked down to the arch, checked out the baseball stadium and noted that there weren’t many restaurants or stores in the down town area. When travelling, we typically spend more time shopping and eating than anything else, so the downtown area wasn’t going to cut it. Not surprising, the CFO had already identified several nearby communities of interest (read that as places with local stores, art galleries and restaurants), so we got in the car and headed west, stopping at two small communities to roam around, shop and eat. After that, we continued west, stopping at my favorite, Chick-fil-a, for an early dinner. It was so good… I wish we had one in Bloomington! While we were out roaming around, it seemed like every time we turned a corner we would run into someone dressed in UGA attire. Every time that happened, we received an enthusiastic “Go Dawgs!”  from them.  It is funny how something like a football game can bring together complete strangers from all walks of life.

The Arch in shadow

We finished our westward trip and arrived in Columbia, MO about 1.75 hours prior to the football game kick off. We were happy to see a good bit of UGA red and black mixed in with the Mizzou black and gold. We spent the better part of half an hour driving around looking for a parking spot and found one on campus at a lot where no one was charging for parking. Sweet, free parking! We didn’t see any obvious “no parking” signs so we parked next to some other UGA fans and started the 1.25 mile walk down to the stadium. The energy on campus was high and the locals were talking a little bit of smack… I decided to take the high road and just responded with a “we’ll see” and a polite “welcome to the SEC.” (for those of you that don’t know, this was MIzzou’s first game as a member of the Southeastern Conference and they were hoping to prove that they were worthy of membership by beating UGA)

We got to our seats with about half an hour to go and were happy to see that we were nestled right in the middle of the biggest group of UGA fans. We watched the teams warm up and before we knew it the game started. The first half was a blur of bad plays and missed opportunities and there was a serious sense of unhappiness growing in the UGA section. I would say that most UGA football fans are not supporters of UGA’s offensive coordinator, we all think that he is a horrible play caller.  No one is really sure why he hasn't been fired, but every year he shows no sign of improvement. The first half of this game was definitely chocked full of his signature collection of poor play choices, repeated plays back to back and stupid screen passes on third down and long plays. We did not travel all this way to see this crappy play calling!

The packed stadium

During half time I went on what turned out to be a grand adventure trying to find a restroom in the stadium. After walking what seemed like halfway around the stadium, I finally located one and was greeted by a line that wrapped around itself several times… evidently the mizzou facilities might not be sufficient enough to support sold out football games. They definitely need to add some more restrooms to the stadium. Georgia finally woke up in the second half and the mood in the UGA section improved tremendously. Then we jumped to a 14 lead and you could almost feel the entire section take a deep breath and enjoy being at the game. Once we hit the 21 point lead, we all started laughing as the Mizzou fans started streaming out of the stadium before the game was even over. Suddenly, all you could hear inside the stadium was the sound of chanting UGA fans.

What were we shouting you might ask? Well… last week one of the Missouri players made some twitter comments that watching georgia’s first game was like watching “Old man football.” Evidently he wasn’t impressed with their play. As you might imagine, that got the fans and the team all stirred up and “Old Man Football” became the chant of choice at the end of the game. I’m sure that mizzou player was wishing that he had never typed that. I saw an article online that said that he apologized about the comment to UGA’s coach after the game. Georgia ended up winning by 21, giving the Missouri Tigers a fitting “Welcome to the Southeastern Conference” beating.

Game over!

The walk back to the car was filled with groups of Dawg fans chanting “it’s great to be a Georgia Bulldog” and much more humble Mizzou fans. We got into the car, battled our way through poorly directed traffic to the interstate and headed east back to St. Louis. We decided to Stop at a McDonalds about 20 miles outside of Columbia and were surprised to see that we weren’t the only ones in need of snack. The restaurant was full of UGA and MO fans, even though it was 11:55 and they were supposed to close at 12:00. When we finally got our food and left, it was about 12:25 and the place was still full. We got back to the hotel around 2am and crawled into bed for some much needed sleep.

Seriously old fashion donut shop

Sunday morning, we used our iphone to locate a highly rated “mom and pop” donut shop and went there for some breakfast. The owners were a couple who had to at least be in their 70’s, but still working very hard. He was in the back rolling out dough and she was filling orders and keeping track of the prices in her head. The donut pricing made me laugh: caked donuts for 49 cents, glazed for 51 cents. I guess you have to pay for that extra sugar in the glaze somehow! We took our donuts to the Missouri Botanical Gardens and spent the morning walking through the gardens. It was a nice and peaceful end to the weekend, happily interrupted by a few more “Go Dawgs” when we ran into other members of the UGA family.

Here are a couple shots from the Garden:

 Cool wooden garden gates topped with Dale Chihuly glass.  We are huge fans of his work and have a glass piece that was made by someone who studied under him.  Maybe one day we'll be able to have an original by him!

 A view across the pond in the "Japanese" style garden.

A feeding frenzy of asian carp in the pond shown above.  This photo was taken at the bridge where a coin machine provides fish food.  These things were positively huge, look at the normal sized ducks in the upper right for a sense of scale.

Hurricane Party

Last week started out with a phone call from my 6 year old nephew, he wanted to warn me of the severe weather that was headed our way (the hurricane that was still spinning in the gulf at this point).  It was nice to know that he's concerned about us!

Friday evening that weather finally hit, however the 4.5-5” of rain that we did get didn’t even make up half of our deficit for the year. It is strange to think that we were so excited about the storm and didn’t want the rain to end, while those who were first hit by it along the coast were feeling the exact opposite. Of course, if I lived in an area that was at/or below sea level, I would be nervous every time that it rained, let alone when a hurricane was on the horizon.

------BEGIN RANT------

Oh wait, you couldn’t pay me to live in an area that was at or below sea level or in a low area that was prone to flooding. Sure New Orleans, Biloxi and other coastal cities are necessary hubs for shipping/commerce and they are beautiful to visit (well, I wouldn’t use the word beautiful to describe New Orleans, mainly because the streets in the quarter always seems to reek of stale beer and vomit), but I would never live on the coast. I still don’t understand why people constantly (and unnecessarily) put themselves and their belongings at risk - and why the rest of us have to pay higher insurance rates and taxes to bail them out every time a storm hits. If you need a man-made structure to hold back potential flood waters from your neighborhood, perhaps you are living in an area that shouldn’t be inhabited?

Last time New Orleans got hammered, I argued with friends that while the commercial/historic areas could/should be restored, I think that the majority of the residential areas (and their residents) should be relocated to higher ground and not restored in their current locations. It is only a matter of time before the area gets hammered again, why do we keep constantly rebuilding? It is just wasteful – a waste of natural resources, money, materials, and labor.  Here we are years later and now many areas are flooded again...

We toured New Orleans last fall after our cruise vacation, it was amazing to see that damage from Katrina was still visible and how much effort people had put into rebuilding houses that STILL weren’t taking into account what just happened to them. Most of the houses were still built at grade, not elevated over potential flood waters. Did they not learn anything from what just happened? The levy didn’t hold last time, do you really, really, really think that it won’t fail again? I was very surprised that they didn’t at least take a page from the east coast beach house builder’s handbook, which says that you should elevate your structure on piers to allow flood waters to pass under it. We’re not building rockets here people; we just need to apply some common sense if you are going to build in an area that is prone to flooding.

Before being developed, the outlying coastal areas were marshes, sand bars and islands. These natural barriers are excellent at absorbing the initial blow and tidal waves from storms, protecting the inland areas. Even though I am in a design field that seems to constantly develop and reshape the ground, I fully understand that no matter how much engineering thought and design goes into it, sometimes man just can’t compete with nature. Sometimes you just need to call a hole in the ground a hole in the ground and not encourage over 300,000 people to live there.

------END RANT------

Other than the rain, our Labor Day weekend was uneventful. We went out for pizza with friends Friday night, followed by running errands and watching football (and the rain) on Saturday. I am happy to say that all four of our teams (University of Georgia, University of Virginia, James Madison and Illinois State University) all started out with wins. It was nice to be able to write a W down for each team on the 4 team schedule spreadsheet that I printed out and stuck on the refrigerator. Yes, we have so many teams to keep up with that it requires a spreadsheet to know who is playing who when.

On Sunday, I had the fantasy football draft and then we went to a dinner party at one of Karen’s co-workers houses. I think I was able to draft a decent team; hopefully I’ll be in the running to win some money this year.  The draft can sometimes be complicated, requiring a lot of info and last second decisions.  This year I used a combination of the laptop, ipad and charts that I printed out.  Crazy, right?

My fantasy football draft headquarters

On Monday, some friends of ours exposed us to something that I wasn’t familiar with since I grew up in the south where unions don’t rule everything, the Labor Day parade. I will save you by not delving into another opinionated rant for the day (one is probably enough for you), but the tour-de-force of labor unions in the parade was a pretty crazy sight for me. Did you know that bakers, confectioners, grain millers and tobacco workers are all members of the same union? Seems like a strange combination… I could go on, but I’ll just stop myself here and won’t discuss my feelings towards the overlying theme that was “collective bargaining is the American way.”

My favorite float in the parade was the “don’t beat women” float. My main reason for selecting it was that there were a bunch of “bad ass” looking motorcycle guys on it; they were all wearing their leather vests with their motorcycle club crests on the back while holding hand painted signs that said things like, “hug’em, don’t hit’em” and “real men don’t hit.” While I obviously approve of their message, I just found the whole scene very ironic and humorous. I regret not taking a picture of it with my phone so I could share it with you. Please forgive me. The kids that were standing along the parade route all made out like bandits, as every float/group was throwing out candy to them. The kids in front of us each ended up with a shopping bag full of candy, definitely enough to carry them through until Halloween.