A couple weeks ago we flew up to Long Island to attend my Aunt Joy’s retirement party. Generally, we try to fly into Islip-McArthur airport, instead of LaGuardia or JFK, since it is much closer to my parent’s house on the East End of Long Island. For this trip we couldn’t get a reasonable price on Southwest into Islip, so we flew Delta into LaGuardia. Our trip up was surprisingly uneventful even with the somewhat stormy weather in NY that day.

Of course, that meant we were due for some delays, and we got them in spades on the return home. That Sunday saw some wicked storms in the NY area - in fact, we later found out that after we had left for the airport my parents house was struck by lightning! Our flight was at noon, and even though the weather was ok around LaGuardia, we fully expected our flight to be delayed due to the earlier storms. Surprisingly, we boarded and pushed back from the gate on time… and then the airport basically shut down due to a line of storms just south of us. Our flight attendant was great, proactively handing out waters and snacks, and even brokering magazine and newspaper exchanges. Three hours later the airspace opened, and we were inexplicably sent to the head of a line of at least 40 jets waiting to takeoff. All in all, it could have been a LOT worse.

Fast forward two weeks and we receive two $50 vouchers in the mail from Delta, with an apology for our delays. Huh? Sweet! Now, following the flight I sent a short email of praise about the flight attendant, but I never complained about the delay as it was a very clear weather issue. I don’t know if the vouchers were sent to everyone, but we were happy to get them. Nice job Delta :)

I’m a sucker for data, and today I saw an interesting interactive map of the US on the MSNBC news website that lets you view data such as age of population, education, wealth/poverty levels, etc by state. Even cooler, you can zoom into each state and look county by county, and even by congressional district. For example, our area, the Research Triangle between Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, has one of the highest densities of college degrees in the country. Cool :)

The Eurocup football/soccer tournament started while we were in Barcelona several weeks ago, so we were able to watch Spain play on local TV. While we didn’t understand much of the announcing, the games were great, and we’ve been rooting for Spain ever since. Last week I watched online as Spain beat Russia in the semifinal, and this afternoon we watched as Spain defeated Germany 1-0 in the final!

Friday was beautiful here in NC- 80 degrees and sunny- so we headed over to the Duke Botanical Gardens in the afternoon. They have a number of raised beds filled with tulips in the spring and this year we seemed to visit right around their peak.

and irises too

The garden allows dogs so Riesling got to strut her new haircut (and pink bandanna) around the grounds.

As usual, she got a lot of smiles and comments from folks. She’s not used to heat yet so she was panting heavily; of course, this didn’t slow her down too much, though she did stretch out on the cool futon when she got home.

More pics can be seen on our flickr pages.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a new way to update our collection of waterfall photos. Previously, we would add new waterfalls by hand into the respective state and county indices. While this worked for a few waterfalls, now that we have well ~140 falls it had become hard to manage. Instead, I decided to build a small database that would hold the important info (state, directions, photo, etc.) and write some PHP code to build the pages for us. I’ve been wanting to learn a bit more PHP code and this seemed like a good excuse reason.

As you might have guessed, I’ve finished the first version and our redesigned waterfall site is now automatically generated. Anytime we have an update we only need to add the data to the database and let the scripts do the rest of the work. Sweet.

Leandra has spent the better part of yesterday and today organizing her stacks of old photos- she’s making good progress and finding some great old shots along the way!

“Would you like to go and visit the puppies?” Um, YES! We went over to the Southeastern Guide Dogs breeding center down the road this morning and got our fill of fuzzy warm pups.

Rocky was the only puppy born to Sensei (Lynn’s sister’s dog), and he came out big!

Love the paw over the head of the one pup… What, you want MORE puppies? Alright, you asked for it:

Surprisingly, Leandra made it out of the building without stealing any. :)

Leandra: He’s serious. I was <this close>.

The recent rainfall along with the warm temperature has brought most everything in our garden to life over the last few weeks, and we are fully in mid-spring in Durham. Some photos from the garden:

Our daffodils started blooming in mid-February, and this is one of the last with a bloom. I’ll need to deadhead them next weekend.

A group of grape hyacinths in the front yard. This is the most prolific they’ve ever been, which is surprising considering the drought we’ve had.

These hyacinths have a great scent so we’ve been cutting some to bring inside.

With a little luck our dogwoods will be in bloom next week!

We are back from our weekend trip to Zürich and definitely glad to be off the plane! It was a great weekend and we’re really glad we went. We were lucky to have sunny weather both Saturday and Sunday, so we walked all over the city and took lots of photos (naturally), visited the art museum, sampled Swiss chocolates, etc. I’ve posted two photos below with more to follow over the next few days…

above: a side street in Zürich below: the famous Grossmünster church towers

This morning I flew up to Maryland for another interview, and due to the weather, I was beginning to wonder if I would ever get here. Though the weather is just fine here, it was very foggy both at home and especially bad in my connecting city of Philadelphia. So a delay leaving Raleigh meant a further delay getting into Philly. Fortunately, my second flight was also delayed, so I was able to catch my second flight. Unfortunately, my one checked bag didn’t make the same flight as me. Normally I don’t check a bag, but in this case I had to because these planes were so small. Foo.

At least I have my toothbrush with me… here’s hoping that my suit will show up in time for my interview tomorrow :)

Edit: my luggage arrived at 12:10a Wed morning-phew!