Small Calamities

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Back in the Big Apple
March 8, 2006 | permalink

Well Gentle Readers, I'm back. Our trip to Chapel Hill was awesome. It was so great to get out of the city for a few days and spend the weekend with Surfer Grrl and Mountain Man. I saw them on Thanksgiving, but only for a few hours; before that, I hadn't seen them since they moved down there in May.

The trip down last Friday was pretty uneventful. Laughing Girl and The Director rented a car for all of us the day before, and we ('we' being Smacktalk and myself) met at their place at 9 and hit the road. Traffic was light and we made good time, listening to the iPods and chatting about whatever. I was a little nervous about Laughing Girl and Smacktalk rubbing each other the wrong way while we were cooped up in the car for 10 hours, but there was none of that. The one blight on the way down was our poor choice of lunch. We stopped just south of DC at the something or other Grill... it was one of those places where it's all the meat you can eat, brought to your table on a spit by a bored waitress. It didn't sit well with anyone.

The first night we were there, we went out to eat at a place in Brightleaf Square, which is an old tobacco mill and warehouses that have been renovated into an urban park. I would tell you which place, except that I cannot remember and didn't write it down... oops! After dinner, we headed back to the house for beer and hot toddies.

Saturday, after breakfast, we went for a hike in the woods around the Duke campus. I tried out the new wide angle lens on my camera, taking some big wide vistas as well as some extremely close up shots of moss and leaves. It took me a while to get the hang of it for the close up stuff, but I think by the end they were coming out pretty well. We had lunch at Foster's Market in Durham, which was so delicious that I bought one of their cookbooks. Sara Foster even autographed it for me! (I'm a geek, I know...) Dinner was at a pub in Durham, where we met up with Scully (another New York technician turned grad student) and fought rabid basketball fans for posession of our table. When they got too rowdy for our taste, we decided to continue the beer drinking back at the house. Which pretty much wrapped up the evening. Oh, except that I made bread for Sunday's breakfast.

Sunday I took the bread I made the night before and cooked up some French Toast for everyone. It was quite delicious, if I do say so myself. We had decided to spend the day getting some culture, so after breakfast we went to check out the Nasher Museum of Art, which had just opened on the Duke Campus. It was small; it only took us about an hour to see it all. But the collection was top notch, and quite varied. I think Side Steppin', the living sculpture outside, was my favorite. We whiled away the afternoon at the independent movie house in Chapel Hill watching Nightwatch. (Yes, again... Smacktalk and I had talked it up so much that everyone wanted to see it for themselves.) Surfer Grrl and I cooked dinner for everyone that night- baked catfish with mashed potatoes and broiled asparagus, and molten chocolate volcano cake for dessert. While we ate all that good food, we watched the Academy Awards and pretty much heckled everyone.

We spent the first part of Monday, our last day, wandering around Chapel Hill. It's a cute little college town; lots of little shops and pubs and public art. There was an awesome rare and used bookshop... I spent a lot of money there. Then we hit the Chapel Hill Botanical Gardens, which was pretty cool even though it was way too early in the season. I got to play some more with my wide angle lens, and there was an awesome oversized chess board upon which The Director and Smacktalk faced off. The last half of the day, we earned our keep by helping our hosts install a drainage system in their backyard. That's right- digging ditches, lining them with gravel, laying pipe- the whole shebang. Dinner was out, at Mama Dip's Country Kitchen. Truly delicious. After that, we spent the evening drinking beer and playing Scattergories, which if you don't know it is one of the finest games ever made for playing while you are drinking beer.

Monday we came back. The trip up was mostly uneventful, though tensions were running a little higher and there were a couple of dicey moments. And now I'm back.

Posted in Artistic Endeavors & Out of Town & Social Life
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