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| snow 2009 |
Showing posts with label NC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NC. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
snow
Not only did Obama become the 44th president yesterday, but it snowed over five inches at our house. Because of the snow I was able to watch the first presidental inauguration that I ever remember watching. There certainly was a lot of hype over it this year, so it was nice to watch on the TV from our living room. It would not have been fun in any way to be among the two million people in person. To see the event which was only five hours north of us when we were snowed in was interesting. It looked cold but it was sunning and bright for the big day, which was nice for them. It was many years since we all as a family had a snow day of this magnitude. I found a weather web site that shows all of the recent snows in the Raleigh NC area. We were in Apex NC for the January 2000 snow and our young kids loved every minute of the 20" snow fall. There was a very large hill outside our subdivision leading down to Highway 55, so I walked the boys down and we slid on cardboard boxes for sleds. There was no one on the road so we had snow fun for a long time. The next month we moved to Fuquay Varina and in 2002 was the next big snow. We had a long sloping hill behind our house going down to Johnson Pond below. We bought two red plastic snow boards that provided endless entertainment that year. Previously we built a quarter pipe skateboard ramp and the boys moved that to the top of the hill to launch them even faster down the hill. We were in San Antonio TX for the 2004 snow in this area, so the snow yesterday was our first since 2002. We had no hill this year, so we walked back into the woods behind our house to see the amazing underbrush and trees full of snow. Today was the second day the kids were out of school so they built a snow man to have fun. We have some really nice icicles hanging from the gutters at the back of our house which have grown even longer today. I guess this is what happens when you don't see snow or ice very often as the little things amuse us.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
The big move again
Sometimes you really wonder what you were thinking in looking back at what you have done. What was I thinking in returning with the whole family, back to the great state of Texas? At the time it was definitely a huge decision for us to make. I was not too enamored with the job I had and in searching for usability jobs throughout the USA, I wandered upon my perfect job in San Antonio. We sold the house and off we went.
In order to save money we got rid of most of our stuff and whatever we fit in the 27ft U-Haul truck we took with us. Our oldest son drove my car and my wife drove our van on the big adventure. What made it even more challenging was that we had three cats with us! I tried as hard as I could and was not able to convince the family that it was a really bad idea to travel half way across the USA with pets. In the places we stopped for the night we not only had to find a place with two rooms but a hotel that accepted pets. We moved in the middle of the summer and the U-Haul truck A/C malfunctioned so with the engine and wind noise I was worn out each evening after the daily fight with the truck and traffic.
Before we left North Carolina, I had arranged for a 3 month stay in a nice townhouse near my work. When we pulled up to the rental office, they told me they could not accept our application as our family was too large for the townhouse. This was to become just the beginning of two years of trouble in Texas. Since we had no where to stay we moved around in several hotels until we found a very cheap In-Town Suites that had weekly rates. We finally found a house we wanted to buy, but our house in NC had not sold so we had to wait. The realtor we were using had a friend who rented us her house for two months while we were in a holding pattern.
The house we were waiting for and eventually bought was the same one we saw in NC in on-line house hunting The street appeal was amazing and the house was a couple of miles from work and across the street from Sea World's Shamu. It seemed like a perfect place for us. It had a super nice pool and a sport court, which both provided hours of entertainment for the whole family. Sometimes things that seem perfect are only so on the surface as we soon found out.
It is difficult to know what to say and what to leave out. We wanted to have a change for our oldest boys to hopefully wake them up into making new good friendships. That all back fired on us. Instead of a good change, things took a turn for the worse. So many bizarre things happened while we were in San Antonio. One night at 3am I found a policeman wandering through our house while one of our sons was in the police car in handcuffs. That was a high point. One morning while I was at work, the police called to tell me they found my son in the worst drug infested part of the city and I should hurry up and get him as the police were leaving him as they had real work to do. That was a high point. Then on the day we were heading to Arizona for a week long Christmas vacation, the police called to tell us they had our son in the juvenile detection center and we had to wait four hours before we could see him. That was a high point. One day we found out that between us and Sea World was a neighborhood that was riddled with youth gangs. One of our sons friends got beat up pretty bad a block from our house by one of these gangs. That was a high point. All of these were nothing compare to the highest point of all.
I knew something was odd on the night we first moved into our house I met our neighbor on the right side. He told me to watch out for the neighbor two houses down from us. Then a couple of hours later, this neighbor two houses down came to tell me to watch out for our next door neighbor! The neighbor on our left side had three corvettes. One was a Z06 with a $45,000 engine upgrade. When he started it up on Saturday mornings, I felt like I was at the raceway. No really bad, just odd. Things heated up between the two neighbors who warned me about the other after about a year of us living there. One Saturday I woke up to find the neighbor, on our right side, had all four tires on his white Saab 900 Turbo punctured by an ice pick and the whole side of his car spray painted blue, which is called tagging. A neighbor down the street had the whole front of his garage tagged with the same blue paint. Things were heating up to boiling point in our quiet cul-de-sac! The strange thing was that most of our huge neighborhood was gun carrying military good old Texans. The cops came in to figure out who was causing the problems. Within a couple of weeks the neighbor two doors down tried to kill our next door neighbor by running him over with his Ford Explorer. Our next door neighbor was badly injured with a broken pelvis, broken arm, four broken vertebra in his neck and a severely strained back. That was all we could take of high points. Even though my job was absolutely perfect and the best job ever, I decided it was not worth it and we sold our house in two weeks time and headed back to safe North Carolina. Thus yet another big move half way across the USA!
One of the few things we still miss from our San Antonio days is Rudy's Texas BBQ, which had a funny acronym of "The Worst BBQ in Texas". Kind of appropriate for our days spent in San Antonio. It is one thing to visit the Riverwalk, watch the Spurs play basketball or attend a conference in the Alamodome, but quite another to live where we did and see a whole different side.
In order to save money we got rid of most of our stuff and whatever we fit in the 27ft U-Haul truck we took with us. Our oldest son drove my car and my wife drove our van on the big adventure. What made it even more challenging was that we had three cats with us! I tried as hard as I could and was not able to convince the family that it was a really bad idea to travel half way across the USA with pets. In the places we stopped for the night we not only had to find a place with two rooms but a hotel that accepted pets. We moved in the middle of the summer and the U-Haul truck A/C malfunctioned so with the engine and wind noise I was worn out each evening after the daily fight with the truck and traffic.
Before we left North Carolina, I had arranged for a 3 month stay in a nice townhouse near my work. When we pulled up to the rental office, they told me they could not accept our application as our family was too large for the townhouse. This was to become just the beginning of two years of trouble in Texas. Since we had no where to stay we moved around in several hotels until we found a very cheap In-Town Suites that had weekly rates. We finally found a house we wanted to buy, but our house in NC had not sold so we had to wait. The realtor we were using had a friend who rented us her house for two months while we were in a holding pattern.
The house we were waiting for and eventually bought was the same one we saw in NC in on-line house hunting The street appeal was amazing and the house was a couple of miles from work and across the street from Sea World's Shamu. It seemed like a perfect place for us. It had a super nice pool and a sport court, which both provided hours of entertainment for the whole family. Sometimes things that seem perfect are only so on the surface as we soon found out.
It is difficult to know what to say and what to leave out. We wanted to have a change for our oldest boys to hopefully wake them up into making new good friendships. That all back fired on us. Instead of a good change, things took a turn for the worse. So many bizarre things happened while we were in San Antonio. One night at 3am I found a policeman wandering through our house while one of our sons was in the police car in handcuffs. That was a high point. One morning while I was at work, the police called to tell me they found my son in the worst drug infested part of the city and I should hurry up and get him as the police were leaving him as they had real work to do. That was a high point. Then on the day we were heading to Arizona for a week long Christmas vacation, the police called to tell us they had our son in the juvenile detection center and we had to wait four hours before we could see him. That was a high point. One day we found out that between us and Sea World was a neighborhood that was riddled with youth gangs. One of our sons friends got beat up pretty bad a block from our house by one of these gangs. That was a high point. All of these were nothing compare to the highest point of all.
I knew something was odd on the night we first moved into our house I met our neighbor on the right side. He told me to watch out for the neighbor two houses down from us. Then a couple of hours later, this neighbor two houses down came to tell me to watch out for our next door neighbor! The neighbor on our left side had three corvettes. One was a Z06 with a $45,000 engine upgrade. When he started it up on Saturday mornings, I felt like I was at the raceway. No really bad, just odd. Things heated up between the two neighbors who warned me about the other after about a year of us living there. One Saturday I woke up to find the neighbor, on our right side, had all four tires on his white Saab 900 Turbo punctured by an ice pick and the whole side of his car spray painted blue, which is called tagging. A neighbor down the street had the whole front of his garage tagged with the same blue paint. Things were heating up to boiling point in our quiet cul-de-sac! The strange thing was that most of our huge neighborhood was gun carrying military good old Texans. The cops came in to figure out who was causing the problems. Within a couple of weeks the neighbor two doors down tried to kill our next door neighbor by running him over with his Ford Explorer. Our next door neighbor was badly injured with a broken pelvis, broken arm, four broken vertebra in his neck and a severely strained back. That was all we could take of high points. Even though my job was absolutely perfect and the best job ever, I decided it was not worth it and we sold our house in two weeks time and headed back to safe North Carolina. Thus yet another big move half way across the USA!
One of the few things we still miss from our San Antonio days is Rudy's Texas BBQ, which had a funny acronym of "The Worst BBQ in Texas". Kind of appropriate for our days spent in San Antonio. It is one thing to visit the Riverwalk, watch the Spurs play basketball or attend a conference in the Alamodome, but quite another to live where we did and see a whole different side.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Indochine Cafe
For my father-in-law's 80th birthday he requested we as a family eat at Indochine Cafe in Wilmington, NC. Besides the fact that my mother-in-law insisted on paying for the meal, it was a great place to eat. The food was so excellent that I would go back any chance I get.
We tried many things, but the 3 I liked the best were the following listed from hottest spice-wise:
The red curry was one of the hottest dishes I have put in my mouth and just kept getting hotter the more I ate. Finally my temples felt like they were increasing 1 degree in temperature every minute. Then the back of my neck started sweating. What a strange experience but the taste was so good. I also tried the green curry and it must have been the coconut sweetness that did not give it the same edge. It was also very hot but the hotness did not last. If you like coconut and hot food, then it is a perfect dish. The yellow curry was spicy with tumeric based spices and had a great flavor but was not hot at all.
The environment is so unique with Buddhist statues all around and lovely pottery as well. What a nice evening!
We tried many things, but the 3 I liked the best were the following listed from hottest spice-wise:
1. red curry
2. green curry
3. yellow curry
The red curry was one of the hottest dishes I have put in my mouth and just kept getting hotter the more I ate. Finally my temples felt like they were increasing 1 degree in temperature every minute. Then the back of my neck started sweating. What a strange experience but the taste was so good. I also tried the green curry and it must have been the coconut sweetness that did not give it the same edge. It was also very hot but the hotness did not last. If you like coconut and hot food, then it is a perfect dish. The yellow curry was spicy with tumeric based spices and had a great flavor but was not hot at all.
The environment is so unique with Buddhist statues all around and lovely pottery as well. What a nice evening!
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