Sometimes, you can catch up with all of the work you have sitting in front of you. That’s how we’ve been feeling with all of our pictures. Right now, we have over 9300 pictures sitting in our “to process” queue. What that means is that we’ve taken pictures over the last 4 years that we’ve done nothing with… not even reviewed and filed in some cases.

So, this afternoon, we made a decision to find a café and just do a few directories of pictures each. Laura replicated some of the folders from the server, and I have them ALL on my laptop [thanks to a 500GB second hard drive]. We started at lunch, but felt we had to leave the restaurant after a couple of hours. Now, we’re at a nice coffee shop in Reston which has good WiFi connectivity.

Laura is halfway through her directory, I’m halfway through my planned files and I got sidetracked and did more that weren’t on the list.

Here’s to finally moving out those pictures in the 2007 timeframe! Maybe…

Many of you may have noticed [or not] that my web site has been down for a while. This happened right before we left on vacation and I did not have a chance to fix it until now. Well, yesterday.

As you can see, it’s up and running and we will be posting pictures soon of our vacations. In the mean time, here is a teaser shot of our trip to Wyoming:

See you soon!

With the pendant lights and the backsplash finally done, we’ve just finished sealing it and we thought we’d share a few pictures. This means that we’re done with renovation – all but the painting, that is. Following are a couple of pictures of the whole kitchen. For a full photo-documentary, visit my photo gallery on the subject.

Next up: painting!

Today is a melancholy day.

Oh, most things are looking up mind you. The remodel is coming along and I’m sanding and painting the patches in the wall and ceiling. The electrician will be in tomorrow to finish most of the work. And, I even have a new opportunity at work which should help my career.

However, I just sold my motorcycle. That makes me sad.

Here are some pictures just before I sold it:

33,000 miles is quite a long tenure for a bike and it will probably get even more with the new owner.

I almost cried as a watched it ride away. Almost.

But I know that I will one day have an even better one.

One day.

Having attempted barbeque brisket a couple of times before in my smoker and not being completely satisfied, I’ve sought advice on how to proceed from those who have tasted success… literally. The key, it seems, is the meat. Not just the quality of the meat, though, but the cut. Most briskets here are trimmed and very lean. These just don’t smoke well. What you need is a whole untrimmed brisket. like this:

As you can see, I finally found one. I have been shopping around for quite a while looking for one. Even Whole Foods, which usually carries quite a variety of cuts doesn’t stock this. We finally found it at The Organic Butcher in McLean, VA. The butcher was so nice as to get us this cut as well as some beef ribs to smoke next to it. He said that he never trims the brisket without explicit instructions from customers to do it.

Tomorrow, I will be firing up the smoker to take a pass at this 11-pound pile of jiggly fat and meat. Since I’m going to be working from home, it will be a great time to try it out.

Of course, it’s supposed to rain, too…