Eric surprised me with a Garmin StreetPilot c530 portable unit as an anniversary gift this year. He told me to be expecting a UPS package because he ordered an extra drive for his computer.

Silly me for believing him.

When the nondescript brown box appeared a day early, I opened it.

Surprise!

Not a computer drive!

Oops! :)

So he didn’t get to see the look on my face at that very moment, but I have been raving about this thing all weekend. I love it. Now we have instant maps and a compass (which my new model of VUE had eliminated), as well as turn by turn direction capabilities and points of interest.

Another feature is the fact that the entire thing is completely removable, so if I’m in a sketchy area, I can remove and hide all traces of something worth stealing.

Last year we won a gift certificate to 115 Midtowne in a raffle at SchnoOctoberFest. We had a month left to use it and figured, why not make it our anniversary dinner?

The first thing we liked was the $10 corkage fee… so we brought in our own bottle of champagne. We let the Moet chill on ice while we enjoyed two cocktails, a Ginger Snap for me and a Mojito for Eric. Our drinks went nicely with the complimentary chipotle sour dough bread and our crispy duck and savoy cabbage spring roll appetizer. We couldn’t decide which dipping sauce went the best, they were all very tasty.

Our waiter opened the champagne and we were on to the main course. I couldn’t resist the espresso and ancho chili rubbed NY strip with cabernet blue cheese butter (perfectly medium rare throughout) and Eric ordered the adobo pork porterhouse with a citrus smoked garlic glaze. Both dinners were excellent, including my accompaniments of asparagus frites and grilled tomatoes.

Somehow we managed to save enough room for dessert, so it was on to the chocolate torte that was so dense and delicious, like a creamy flourless cake.

This place is very cozy with a casually elegant atmosphere. It is also extremely hard to find… it’s located in a strip mall to the right of the Harris Teeter near 440 off Six Forks Road in north Raleigh. The service was prompt and polite and we will definitely head back here if we find ourselves in the area.

See photos of our wedding here.

Seven novels in five weeks. My Harry Potter marathon is over and wow, am I glad to have experienced this slice of pop culture. These stories are fantastic and having seen the movies in advance did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm of the books.

Eric is about halfway through with The Goblet of Fire… he’s been wanting to read these novels too and since we now have the entire series (mostly borrowed) laying around the house, he figured now is the time. :)

With the amount of time I spend online, it took some serious luck to not hear how the series ended, and I, like everyone else I talked to, cried for most of the end. (Makes it hard to read, I must say.)

I’m hardly going to post a review here, but I will say that if you haven’t picked one up… make the time. Totally worth it.

(I cannot believe the page total actually turned out to be a round number!)

Two months ago, I received an email from a woman who found me through the NCSR rescue page for pup. She wondered if I did pet portraits and I truthfully said I hadn’t in the past, but was planning on doing one of Riesling this summer.

I just finished it today!

I throughly enjoyed this experience and already have another pet portrait in the works. I also offered to donate a pet portrait to raise money for the NCSR at SchnOctoberfest 2007 later this fall.

Read more about my painting process on my art blog.

August was a very hot month with the most sustained heat I’ve ever experienced. Several weeks of 90°F+ days (many of them 100°F+), low humidity, and only one short thunderstorm in the past 7 weeks have lead to quite a drought, and our yard and garden are feeling the effects. I haven’t mowed the lawn since mid-July (since it isn’t growing) and most of our shrubs and small trees are drooping. Even the big trees are feeling it- below are the leaves from our big tulip poplar:

pre-cleanup and post-cleanup

Raking isn’t much fun to begin with, but raking in the summer is just plain wrong! We’re hoping for a break in this drought soon, but it will probably take something like a small tropical depression to make a dent at this point. Foo.