Crabby Weekend Recap

This weekend my in-laws were here.  We went to our favorite all-you-can-eat crab house, The Red Roost.  It is officially the best crab house I have ever been to and if you are ever on the Eastern Shore, you should probably go (if you like crabs).  It's about 30 minutes away from where we live and pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  You drive and drive and drive in woods and fields and back roads until it appears.  

Yes, it's right there down by the "Chesapeake Forest Lands".  It also happens to be about a quarter of a mile from the Chesapeake Bay, where they catch the crabs.

It's one of those places where they give you tons of stuff to fill up on before they throw a pile of crabs on your table.  But, it's okay because the stuff they give you to fill up on is delicious, too.  We eat it all and it's worth every penny.

From the left: french fries, fried shrimp, clam strips, hush puppies.  In the containers: vinegar, Old Bay, cocktail sauce.  In the top left you can see the beers.  They also serve local microbrews, which is awesome.  

While you are eating those things, they bring out fried chicken (the best you will ever have), and an ear of local sweet corn.  Below is a picture of Josh's dad's excited-ness to see his fried chicken.  By the way, all of this is "all-you-can-eat".  If you want more clam strips, they will bring you as many as you can eat.

Next up is the real reason why we come.  The Maryland blue crabs.  Yeah!

I like to keep a tally on the paper on the table of how many I eat.  I am known to have eating competitions with my boss.  I always win.

So, how was your weekend?!

Our Weekend With Irene

As it turns out, we did not lose power for more than one second at a time.  However, we did not have cable/internet for about three days.  This made it pretty difficult to do my grad school work... which is why I am writing this and taking a break from reading boring articles right now.

Although we were expecting the worst Saturday morning, here is the view we had from our deck on Friday night:

Pretty, right?  I like to think those clouds look like they are swirling in a hurricane, but unfortunately I checked the radar and they were definitely not hurricane clouds.

Irene was quite the popular girl, but she ain't that great. Don't get me wrong: I saw the disaster that is Vermont.  I am praying for those people.  But seriously, this is the extent of our hurricane damage:

Yeah, that's my poor crepe myrtle out front.  With one amputated arm.  Remember my friend, M, that I talked about in this post?  Well, she and her fiance live in our old townhouse in Salisbury.  They were under a mandatory evacuation.  So they stayed the weekend with us.  It actually turned out to be a great weekend.  We watched movies, drank beer, played games, drank wine, did the puzzle I bought, and drank whiskey.  All in all, it was a good time.  We didn't go outside, though, because our trees were sideways.  Our neighbor's tree (and many others in Salisbury) actually fell down completely.  And there were some tornadoes about 30 miles north in Delaware and one in our county as well.  But everyone is safe and sound.

Today was the first day of school!  I went yesterday to set my room back up after tearing it down in hurricane preparation.  It was a very pleasant day.  Not very stressful, not chaotic, and altogether "good".  My classroom is really cool this year, with "Under the Sea" as our theme.  Josh's schools were closed today.  Ocean City is in his county and they got pounded pretty good, so they were busy cleaning up today.  Josh's first day will be tomorrow.  He is excited because he starts out his year with a 3-day week (no school on Friday--labor day), then a 4-day week (no school Monday--Labor Day), and finally a 5-day week.  He is lucky.

I originally wanted to finish a spray painting project this weekend, but obviously that was out of the cards for me.  Now I am going to finish reading for grad school, take a hot bath, and go to bed!  I am exhausted!

Come On, Irene

I keep singing "Come On, Eileen" over and over in my head with the word Irene instead.  So, have you heard?  About Irene?  She's comin'!

Apparently there hasn't been a severe hurricane in Salisbury, MD for nearly 70 years.  That is about to change.  My friend, M, moved here about two weeks ago (she just got a music teacher job here).  When her mom mentioned that the weather might be bad here, M said "Oh no!  It's perfectly safe!"  Well, two days after she said that there was an earthquake.  And five days after that a huge hurricane is supposed to hit.  Sorry, M's mom.

I will show you exactly how this is supposed to go down (found on The Weather Channel's website this evening):

Do you see that yellow dot?  Yep, that's Salisbury.  That's me.  I have to put all my instruments (that I just got out ) at school back in the closet for the weekend.  And bring my patio furniture inside.  And buy up all of the milk and bread.  And prepare for possible long periods of power outages.

So, we went to the grocery store tonight and bought milk and bread (it was crazy, by the way).  And we bought lots of dry goods in case we don't have electricity for a while.  And we are bagging all of the ice that our ice machine is making.  And tomorrow we will gather all of the candles and flashlights.  Friend M and her fiance may be coming here this weekend to stay safer.  So I also picked up some 1000-piece puzzles to keep us busy!  It's weird to think that our very first day of school (Monday) may be cancelled due to weather!  Usually that happens in the dead of winter!

I will try to keep updating about Irene (if I have power!).  If you don't hear from me in the next few days, you may need to send a raft.

On another note, I am actually in my grad school class right now.  It's the first session of my Fall course.  I was all worried after the B+ fiasco I talked about here.  So I tried so hard to prepare for this session.  Then it started.  And my professor's voice is so boring I can barely stand it.  I can type and ignore him at the same time, which is what I am doing right now.  But don't fret!  I think I will be fine.  I just caught these short phrases after desperately trying to pay attention for 51 consecutive minutes:

"...you will not be penalized for late papers."

"I want everyone to have a grade at the end of this semester."

hmmm....

Wow Weekend!

Friday after school I went to the gym, got Chinese food with our PE teacher, and came home and watched basketball all night.

Saturday I woke up, ate breakfast, and immediately got ready to go to Barnes & Noble.  They were hosting a book fair for my school and lots of our students were performing there throughout the day.  I had about 80 kids there, which was an excellent turnout.  The band, the orchestra, and various other classes performed as well.  Josh videotaped it with our flipcam.  I have not been able to figure out how to embed my flipcam videos on Blogger... can anyone help me with this?

Anyway, the performances went well.  I got home, went grocery store shopping, and made tacos because we had company.  The orchestra teacher at my school and her fiance came over Saturday for dinner.  It is really nice to finally be making friends in this new city.  It gives us stuff to do!

Then Sunday.  Oh me oh my.  I woke up, looked outside, and saw two inches of snow.  Also, it was 35 degrees.  What?!?!  It's the end of March for goodness sake!  Well, I promised myself a long run, so I did it anyway.  I wore gloves, earwarmers, compression shorts, pants, large socks, a wintery tank top, a CoolMax shirt, and a long sleeved shirt.  Yeah, the gloves were off within the first ten minutes.

When I walked outside and started running, I saw this and I had to take pictures with my phone:

What a great way to start a run, huh?!  It was beautiful and I had all the energy in the world!

I had to run through small patches of snow, which wasn't so bad.  The worst part was that the snow was really heavy and wet... and it was windy.  Every time I would run under a tree (and as you can see, there were lots of them) the wind would blow snow off the tree and it would conveniently land directly on my head or face.  Yes, I'm serious.  This happened many times.

In addition to that madness, I got lost.  I use a site called mapmyrun.com, which allows you to plug in any route in your area and it will tell you your distance, your height climbed, etc.  It's essentially an online GPS for runners.  Here is the map of the run that I was supposed to do:

Map Options

Map data ©2011 Google - Terms of Use

2 km

2 mi

Map data ©2011 Google - Terms of Use

1 km

1 mi

    

28 ftStart Elev

59.0 ftMax Elev

89.0 ftGain

As you can see, I basically just needed to do that loop 3 times and I would have done 10.98 miles.  It doesn't seem that difficult.  Well, I turned on a road called Dogwood instead of a road called Woodland, got lost for about 20 minutes, turned on several roads trying to get myself back, eventually found something familiar and went with it.  Well, when I got home, before I passed out, I mapped the run that I accidentally did (including the "*whoops* detour), and it added up to 11.02 miles, which is good.  My time was not good, however.  It took me a whopping two hours and five minutes.  Ouch.  But I am still proud of myself for running nonstop for two hours and five minutes.  That is definitely something that I would not have been able to do at any time in my past!  I am more confident than ever about the half marathon, too!

I literally spent the rest of the entire evening either in a hot bath, guzzling iced tea or water, eating, and reading in bed.  It turned out to be a very relaxing Sunday :-)