September 2009 from Karen Sams on Vimeo.
Category Archives: Photos
Indian summer
As much as I miss the beauty of autumn in the Midwest, I’m slowly learning to appreciate just how beautiful this time of year is in North Carolina.
The leaves are changing slowly, and though it’s still a little too warm for me, the weather reminds me of those beautiful fall days when the sun is warm and the air is clear. It’s like Indian Summer every day. It’s different, but equally beautiful in a lot of ways, and I’d be lying if I said I won’t miss it just a little.
Click the photo for more images of North Carolina’s Indian summer.
You say it’s your birthday
Today my husband turns 26 years old.
I apologize for the blurry image, but Tony refuses to smile whenever a camera is within 100 feet of him. This smile was purely by accident, which is why I didn’t even have time to focus properly before I snapped the picture. But he has such a lovely smile, doesn’t he?
We didn’t start dating until January 2006, but it was this time of year in 2005 that I realized I was in love with him. He was my best friend then, and he still is. Only now I get to kiss him whenever I want.
There’s nothing that he wouldn’t do to make me happy, and I absolutely can’t wait to see him as a father. I hope our children inherit his generosity, compassion, and genius-level intelligence along with his beautiful blue eyes.
For his birthday, I surprised him with the remastered mono box set of all the Beatles albums. It was an extravagant gift by our standards, but you should have seen him moping around the house like Charlie Brown for the past few weeks since its release.
Usually, Tony will tell me what he wants for his birthday, and I’ll tell him to go ahead and order it since he knows where to find it and exactly what to get. For the past few years, he’s failed to ever order his gift. He thinks it through, plans on it, and then decides it’s not worth the money.
This year, I didn’t give him the opportunity to do that. I ordered the box set the day of its release, and kept it a secret for weeks. It may be an extravagant gift, but the happiness it brought him was absolutely worth it. It threw off our budget for this month, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Believe me, no one on Earth deserves it more.
This weekend we went to the art museum (free admission yesterday thanks to Museum Day), then we saw “Food Inc.” on campus (free), and ate at his favorite pizza place (courtesy of his parents who sent us money for a dinner out). And this morning I made him a delicious apple streusel coffee cake that you must try.
Happy birthday, sweetheart. I’m so very glad you were born.
For more pictures of the festivities, click here.
L’Shana Tova!
This weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the Jewish new year. Tony and I aren’t Jewish, but we love to learn about and appreciate the spirituality of other cultures (especially when there’s delicious food involved), so we decided to make a traditional Jewish new year dish in honor of Rosh Hashanah.
One of the foods traditionally served on Rosh Hashanah is challah, a round sweet bread, to symbolize the cycle of the year. Apples and honey are often served to symbolize a “sweet” new year. In honor of both of these traditions, we baked apple-honey challah, and oh my goodness, it was more like a cake than a loaf of bread.
We drizzled it with honey and served it for dessert last night and breakfast this morning. It’s a lot like a coffee cake: sweet, but not overwhelmingly rich. And the recipe is so simple.
I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, and to all of my Jewish readers, L’Shana Tova a day late!
Dancing with myself
Yesterday was one of those days when our city didn’t seem so bad. A huge block of the historic downtown was closed to traffic for an annual Art Walk. Artists displayed their work, and we were free to stroll from tent to tent viewing everything from paintings and photography to crafts to homemade candles and soap.
We finally had a chance to stop at the record shop around the corner from our house, where we found four great vinyl albums in the $1 bin. We’ll be taking all of our CDs there sometime soon so we can sell them and make the switch to all digital music. We’ve started rebuilding our collection of vinyl albums, but we’re only buying those when we find them cheap.
We spent the evening sipping wine, listening to our new albums, and dancing in the living room. Well, I danced in the living room anyway. Tony isn’t much a dancer. Howie tried, but he decided he’d rather wrestle than waltz, so I gave up on both of them and danced by myself.
Click the photo for this week’s slide show.
Menu Plan: 9/5 – 9/11
We’re having a fantastic Labor Day weekend. After spending Saturday in Charleston, we ran all of our weekend errands yesterday, and now today we’re celebrating Labor Day precisely the way it should be celebrated: by doing nothing at all. We slept in, ate breakfast at noon, and I’m still not dressed for the matinee we’re seeing in less than an hour. Every weekend should be this way. :)
You can see some photos from our gloriously lazy rainy morning here:
Here’s our menu plan for this week:
Sunday: Bacon wrapped baked chicken with roasted red potatoes
Monday: Barbecue pork with corn on the cob
Tuesday: Tacos
Wednesday: Taco salad
Thursday: Leftovers
Friday: Homemade pizza
For more menu plans, visit OrgJunkie. Happy Labor Day!
Doing the Charleston in South Carolina
Yesterday we took a spur of the moment drive to Charleston, SC for the day. I’m glad we did the trip in a day instead of spending a whole weekend there last May. After walking around downtown, there just wasn’t much to see. As usual, we brought the dog and ate cheap, so the trip cost about $40 including gas.
I told Tony when we bought the camera that I wanted to be in the pictures, too, so he’d have to take camera duty every now and then. This plan isn’t working out. As you’ll see in the slide show, this picture of me in the side view mirror is the only picture I’m in from the whole day.
Click on it to see the rest of our photos.
P.S. Would you let me know if the bigger images I’m posting look funky? Even though Tony is using the same browser and operating system as me (Firefox and Mac), these bigger images are overlapping with my sidebars on his computer. Please let me know if you’re having this issue, too.
Two years ago
Click this adorable puppy to watch him grow before your eyes.
On August 31, 2007, we adopted this little guy.
For a full year after that, Tony looked at me every day with a look that said, “Why did you do this to me?” I assured him that he only had to wait a year. After a year, the puppy magically wakes up one day, and he’s a dog. He can let you know when he needs to go outside, you can turn your back on him without fearing that he’ll rip the couch apart, and you can leave him alone for longer than an hour at a time.
Best of all, I told Tony, there will be times when you’re sick or you’ve had a bad day, and he’ll somehow just know. And in those moments, there are few things more comforting in the world than feeling his head in your lap or his presence at your side, and you’ll know the purest kind of loyalty and the most unconditional form of love.
The good news is I was right. The bad news is that this particular dog grew into such an amazing companion that we know he’s set an impossible standard for any other dog we ever adopt. I’m 99% certain that we used up all of our good dog karma on Howie with all of his sweetness and obedience and not an ounce of destructive tendencies. Someday we’ll get another dog, and it will be the exact opposite, and we’ll have NO IDEA what to do.
But for now, we’re both glad I turned out to be right about this one. Otherwise, I don’t think Howie would have lived to see two years old.
The first of many Sunday slide shows to come
Well, I paid a small fortune for this camera, and the good news is that it’s absolutely worth it. Just as I suspected photography is easier and more fun with a fantastic camera, and we’re having such a great time with it. The bad news? You’re going to have to endure a weekly slide show (or two) from me. :) I’ll be uploading images to Flickr every Sunday and posting a link to a slide show here.
This week I have two. First a few shots of Howie. He wasn’t quite cooperating with the camera at first. The shutter is loud and the flash is bright and he seemed a little afraid of it. But I finally sat him down and explained, “Howie, I spent enough money on this camera to feed you for 2 and a half years, and if we don’t get our money’s worth out of it we’re going to have to cut corners else where to make up for the money we wasted which means you may not eat for the next three years, so you better just GET USED TO IT.” He was more willing to cooperate after that.
Click on the action shot to see him pose.
On Saturday we took the camera out to Fort Fisher in Kure Beach, North Carolina to give it a test run. After deleting over 100 practice photos, I posted the 30 that turned out okay. Click on the image below to see them.
I hope you all have a fabulous Sunday!