French Wine Country - Beaune

Our first stop in the French Wine Country was in Beaune, the major city in the Burgundy region and not unexpectantly a town centered around wine. We arrived late in Beaune and started off by having dinner at a wine bar complete with Escargot. Sarah was pretty cautious about trying one of the region's signature foods, but I was able to finally convince her to try one. Everything cooked in a pesto garlic butter sauce will taste good.

As you might expect, our day in Beaune was centered around the region’s wine. That morning we took a short class on the essentials of understanding the labeling, production, and tasting of Burgundy wine. The upshot is that Burgundy wine is bottled and labeled by the area in which the grapes are grown. The more specific the area, the better winemaking conditions for the terrior (soil, drainage, micro-climate) and therefore, of course, the more expensive the wine. So for example, a Burgundy regional wine (with grapes from anywhere in the region) is less selective than a particular village "Gran Cru" with grapes only from the upper slopes of the area.

The Town of Beaune

Later, we did a tasting and tour the Bouchard Aine cellar estate. Our tour guide gave the tour in both French and English for us, and promised that her English got better the more wine she drank! The estate grows and bottles several red and white wines, although Burgundy is more known for their whites than their reds. It was fun and I was particularly impressed that they tasted their premier “Grand Cru” wine, made mainly from Pinot Noir. It was a very, very good wine, but it cost 70 Euros for a bottle so we reluctantly passed.

Tasting on the Cellar Tour

Adventure in Europe: Part Four

On Monday we took the Metro straight to the Louvre to spend several hours touring one of the world’s largest museums. We had been warned by several sources that the Louvre can go on forever. Instead of trying to see absolutely everything, we decided to take a more targeted tour of the highlights of the museum. Thanks to a Rick Steves audio guide, we had some guidance on where to go. We saw the biggies: the Venus de Milo, Nike of Samothrace, the Mona Lisa, parts of the Parthenon, as well as the Italian Renaissance and large format French paintings. There was still tons of stuff to see, so after a lunch break, we spent a few hours walking through the German/Dutch painting wings, as well as the Roman, Egyptian, Greek areas. We had heard from guidebooks and others that Mona Lisa is soooooooo small that by the time we got to it, I was practically expecting a postcard. Our expectations were so low, we thought it was a fairly standard sized portrait.
Outside the Louvre
Next we headed across the city to the Arc de Triumph. Since we had the Paris pass, we trudged up the stairs to the top to see the 12 streets that converge into one big traffic circle. Not surprisingly, Sarah even witnessed an accident amongst the chaotic merging of traffic!

The Arc is bigger than Mike Diehl
From there we relaxed a bit at our hotel, and then ate a nice dinner sitting outside at a Parisian café at Le Soufflot Café near the Pantheon. One of the last Parisian sites we saw was the Eiffel Tower that evening. Our wave of crime almost continued when we almost jumped the Metro gate when a ticket machine broke down, but we decided to find a working ticket machine instead to finally end our criminal lives. At night, the Eiffel Tower is well lit with a sparkling light display at the top of every hour. We rode up to the second level (the top level was closed and supposedly didn’t have any better views anyway) and soaked in the Parisian landscape at night.


On our final morning in Paris, we headed to the last of the must-see sights on our list: the Orsay museum. In a manner of speaking, the Orsey museum picks up where the Louvre leaves off, with the rise of Impressionism in art. Sarah and I’s focus was here, as Sarah got to see several paintings she had studied in college by Monet, Renoir, Whistler, Degas, and Van Gough. That afternoon we said au revoir to Paris, and headed by train to French wine country.

Adventure in Europe: Part Trois

On Sunday, we spent the majority of the day touring Versaille, one of Europe’s best palaces. We started by touring the vast Gardens and fortunately it was on a weekend the fountains were running full blast for a good part of the day.



After that, we soaked in the opulence of the Chateau and were glad that we had a pass which lead us straight to the museum without having to wait in a long ticket line. We also took advantage of the free Rick Steve’s audio-tour that I had downloaded to our MP3 players as we toured the spectacular rooms. We especially liked his insightful, but to-the-point commentary; plus it was free. After that, we took another short walk back through some of the gardens we had missed and then took the train back to Paris.




That evening we saw the very scenic Sainte Chapelle church. It’s not really a large or famous cathedral, but it has amazing stained glass windows that surround the entire sanctuary. It’s hard to capture on film (or a memory card), but it was impressive and definitely worth a visit.



That evening we got to see a whole different side of Paris. In a strange coincidence, Sarah had recently worked with an intern at Deltek who happens to live in Paris and before she left she invited us over one night to eat dinner with her family. They lived in a nice apartment on the North East side of town. It was hard to believe how narrow the street was to their complex, it was sized for at most a Mini Cooper. Aminata's family is Sengali, so we were treated to both traditional Parisian and Sengali dishes. Everything was yummy!

Adventure in Europe: Part Deux

Our next day in Paris, we weren't actually in Paris very much. We took a day trip to the Loire Valley to see its famous Chateaus. Since we were traveling by train, we took the train in the morning to the small city of Amboise and did some wandering around their local Chateau and Leonardo Da Vinci’s final home.
City of Amboise
For the afternoon we arranged a minivan tour to two major Chateaus. The first, Chenonceau, was the most scenic. It had beautiful gardens and was actually built partially over the river.

Chenonceau Chateau

The second, Chambord, was huge and the area’s largest. It was sparsely decorated, but the guards were strict. Sarah was spied sitting on a ledge for a picture from afar, and we were actually scolded five minutes later in another room (our second “illegal” act in France if you're keeping track).
Chambord Chateau
Sarah illegally sitting on the wall

We had a nice four course dinner at L’Epicerie, which included something every meal should have, a cheese course. After dinner we had another fun moment. For some reason, I thought our train back to Paris left at 9:21 PM (I blame the 24 hour system that listed the time as 21:07), instead of 9:07 PM. I discovered this as we paid our bill just before 9:00 PM. I told Sarah to pretend that we were on the Amazing Race, so with ridiculously full stomachs we ran to the train station (there were no taxis around) a little over a mile away. Luckily we made it with two minutes to spare, and realized that it was the last train to Paris that evening!

Adventure in Europe Part I

For the next several blog posts, I'm writing up our recent trip to France and Switzerland in travelogue style. Part I starts here:

Our trip actually started by visiting Madrid, the Madrid airport anyway. Our flight was on Iberia and we actually changed planes in Madrid in route to Paris’s smaller airport called Orly. After arriving in Paris, we decided to take care of some practicalities like getting Euros, picking up our pre-ordered train tickets, and buying a Paris museum pass. According to our guidebook (Rick Steves), a shuttle bus service called Jetbus was available to take us from the Orly airport to the Paris Metro closest to our Hotel. Even though it was still listed on the web, the Tourist desk at the airport told us that the shuttle was no longer running. Eventually they told us of a regular French bus that would run to the same metro station. We followed a circuitous route through a series of tunnels until we reached a door with partially shattered glass. This lead to a highway under an overpass with fast moving traffic. After we got to the highway, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a bus coming with the name of our Metro stop. Sarah and I sprinted the 25 yards (with all our luggage of course) and barely made the bus. Regrettably, we hadn’t read the section on how the buses work, so we were caught staring blankly at a stone-face French bus driver who obviously spoke no English. As we searched for money to pay (we had no coins anyway), the bus driver pulled on without giving us a second look. As we observed people boarding the bus, almost all already had a bus ticket which they validated/scanned against a ticket machine. Either the bus driver thought that in all our fumbling we were searching for our ticket, or he just didn’t care. Regardless, we left the bus quickly when it got to our stop and were thankful for the free transportation. Only one hour in France and we committed our first illegal act!

After our initial adventure, we didn’t have much time for sightseeing after checking into our hotel. We walked to Notre Dame and did the free tour inside. It was definitely worth it, but fairly typical for a European cathedral. For as famous as it is, I was expecting something more grandiose on the inside. We had some yummy Crepes that evening at a restaurant called La Crepe Rit du Clown as we struggled to stay awake until normal bed time.

View of Notre Dame

Our 15 minutes...

In what has become an annual tradition, Sarah, Ben, and I hit the links last weekend to watch the AT&T National tournament in DC. More commonly referred to as the Tiger Woods tournament, the weather was perfect for a 4th of July weekend with temperatures actually below 90 for a change. The crowds were thick for championship Sunday, with a showdown brewing between host Tiger Woods and Anthony Kim in the final pairing. If you've never been to a pro golf tournament, or more importantly ever followed Tiger Woods, there are a couple of things you should know. In the AT&T National on Sunday, there were around 46,000 people present. If those people are all spread out among the entire golf course, then there would be no problem with great views of the action. Of course. in the Tiger Woods tournament with Tiger Woods in the lead, pretty much 95% of the people are going to try and follow Tiger. In order to get decent views, you have to either camp out on one hole for the entire day, or if you try to follow you have to jump ahead by 2-3 holes after seeing him. After meeting up with Duncan, Jeremy, and Matt in the morning, we went all in and decided to follow the Woods/Kim pairing in the afternoon.

Our big claim to fame that day was actually getting into the TV coverage. After returning home that evening, we searched the TV coverage in crystal clear HD and were able to find ourselves a few times during our quest to follow Tiger. Our onscreen time was probably less than 5 seconds total, but who said you had to get all of your 15 minutes in one chunk?

The first time we were caught on camera was a very small portion of the screen during a Tiger putt on #5. If you look very closely (I put in a convenient arrow) you can see us in the upper right-hand corner and a big reaction from Ben after Tiger misses his putt (you'll need to click on the picture to get the full view):





Although we didn't get on camera for this, probably the most exciting thing that happened to us was almost getting hit by Anthony Kim on the 6th hole. We were not even watching that hole and were probably 40 yards off the fairway in a grove of pine trees when his ball landed in between us and ended up rolling right next to us as we walked toward the 7th hole. We got a close up view of the action, and avoided getting kicked out of the tournament by resisting the urge to pickup or kick the ball. Unfortunately though, we were standing behind the cameras and didn't quite make the tv coverage.

In our second appearance on #13, you can see Sarah, as well as the rest of the crowd is very serious awaiting Tiger to putt. Ben's hat also makes an appearance below me if you look closely.




In our third and best appearance on #17, Sarah and I offer Tiger some advice on a tricky putt:



All in all a good tournament, and although it is postponed the next two years, I'm looking forward to the US Open in 2011!

Classical Music...

Over the last few weeks I've been feeling a little nostalgic. It all started when I found a few sites with sheet music for Classic Nintendo video game themes. Although most of these tunes are very familiar, I always like hearing a piece before trying to learn the sheet music. Youtube came to the rescue, and really got me into learning some old classics.

I drew my inspiration mainly from someone known as the videogame pianist (also known as the blindfolded pianist). I will never be able to play nearly as fast as he does, but it's fun to try. Do you recognize all the Mario themes in this:



So, I devoted the last few weeks to learning the Super Mario Brothers main theme and starting to learn the Legend of Zelda theme. This kicked off a run on playing some old games on Nesticle and seeing how quickly I could beat the original games. The original Super Mario Brothers took about two hours because I forgot where the second warp zone was...

On a related note, I stumbled upon this guy during my searches on YouTube for video game music. I never would have thought playing a flute could be this cool. I'm not going to learn how to play the flute but this is freaking awesome (check out his Inspector Gadget remix as well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59ZX5qdIEB0&feature=related):

On Facebook...

Several months ago, I finally caved to see what this Facebook thing was all about. For myself, I think the results have been mixed. I definitely went through an initial addiction phase where I was on a lot and amazed about the amount of information out there on people I hadn't seen in 10 years. I was able to “catch up” with them without any effort at all, which was addicting in a voyeuristic sort of way. I even was able to help gather a mini-reunion amongst a few old friends. I really like it as a photo sharing site. It is very user friendly and it's easy to post pics on there for any of your friends to see without worrying about who to email them to. I’m not really a fan of status updates (“Mike is a writing a blog entry…”) and I have never actually posted one yet. I liken them to “reply all” in email, it can serve an important (or at least interesting) function, but it can also get incredibly annoying. Hearing about your kids potty training is really not something I'm interested in hearing about. Part of this is my fault, as I know there are ways on Facebook to customize and filter such that I could eliminate a lot of annoyances and hear from only those who post “good” status updates.

I definitely take advantage of the privacy settings and essentially “lock it up” as restrictive as possible (as they set everything to wide-open by default). It amazes me that the next generation doesn’t understand privacy. Even high school students were quoted in a recent Washington Post article that they didn’t think that school security and local sheriffs should look at students Facebook pages to gather evidence. If you’re dumb enough to 1) post pictures that incriminate you in a crime, and 2) not restrict them so that law enforcement can’t freely look at them, then I have a rock that can keep away tigers that I’d like to sell to you.

Here are a few choice quotes from the Washington Post article:

"I think it's an invasion of the student's privacy," said Sarah Steinberg, 18, a senior at Robinson Secondary

"It's not really [their] business to be looking at students' profiles," said Eleni Gibson, 15, a freshman at Robinson. "Because they might see something that students didn't want them to see."

"It's crazy, the things they put on there," Loudoun County Sheriff Stephen O. Simpson said. "They seem to think they're invisible."

Facebook has been fun and we’ll see where it goes. It’s a nice tool, but it hasn’t taken over my life yet. I have many other ways to communicate with friends, and I’m still using those a lot. In the meantime, don’t take it personally if I don’t accept your friend invitation...

Aloha and Mahalo...

Sarah and I are back from our trip to Hawaii. It was very relaxing and we loved seeing my Uncle and Aunt again on the Big Island; they were happy to see my Mom and Dad again who wouldn't have made the trip without going with us. We also explored Kauai for several days, which was a great side trip midway through the vacation. We didn't really get a tan (sun screen is your friend when you skin tone if best described as pale), but I thought I'd share a few highlights from our trip:

Hiking: Sarah agreed to take one day out of our relaxing vacation to go on a long hike with me on the North shore of Kauai on the Napali Coast. I had read and heard that this was generally thought to be the most beautiful area in the world. We're not really into the camping thing, so our best option to explore the 11-mile Kalaluu trail along the Napali Coast was to hike up and down the coast two miles until you get to secluded beach and then two miles inland along a stream to a majestic waterfall.

Highlighted Trail Map

For an 8 mile hike, it is fairly challenging due to several major stream crossings and the fact that this time of year the rock climbs are slippery and muddy. At some point you just embrace the mud and plow right through. The last part of the hike is not really marked so there are lots of opportunities to get off the trail; at one point we thought we were at another stream crossing but suddenly saw people walking 25 feet above us. Despite all that it was a very unique hiking experience and having plenty of water and bringing the right equipment (crocs for stream crossings were great) made it a great hike.

At the Falls

Roosters: If you haven't been to Kauai, a strange but interesting fact is that roosters (and chickens) have taken over the island. It's sort of weird...imagine if you went to someplace local like the Reston Town Center with nice restaurants and shops and also found like 15+ wild chickens running around. Our first night sleep on Kauai was cut a little short thanks to some added COCK-A-DOODLE-DOS much earlier than dawn.

Lava - We did something that we missed out on last time due to not planning ahead and relatively poor conditions, we got to see the lava at dusk. We grabbed our flashlights and walked down a small trail to the viewing area. What a show! It is hard to do it justice in words but here is picture at dusk to show you the entry point and a video once it is a little darker that gives you a feel of how dynamic it was:





Turtles - We spent a lot of time snorkeling and and we saw several giant sea turtles at several different snorkeling spots. Sarah now has a mini-fascination with turtles, so here is a cool turtle picture from snorkeling on the big island with one of those disposable underwater cameras.

No more bowling...

What I didn't I do this past week you ask? One thing I didn't do last week was watch the BCS "Championship" game. I finally reached the breaking point with college football and decided not to watch the bowl games this year. I love college football in general but if your team isn't playing in the game (which wasn't a problem for me thanks to UVA tanking right when it looked like they might make a run) I find the bowls really unwatchable. A lot of this is driven by my continued frustration with the BCS system and the lack of a championship for an otherwise great sport. I almost watched the Penn State vs USC Rose Bowl, but in a strange but true twist, I ended up being entertained by a robotic dinosaur instead (if you're curious ask Mike P.)

I'm assuming most everyone has heard the basics of the playoff vs BCS debate...hell, even Obama has talked about it several times to advocate a playoff system. I don't want to repeat too many of the standard talking points but I will rebut two of the most cited arguments by the University presidents and big conference comissioners who support the awful BCS:

1) A playoff system would be infeasible and make the college football season too long. Let me throw the B.S. flag right off the bat for this one. Interestingly enough, every other level of college football (I-AA, II, and III) has a simple playoff system every year without a hitch. As far as season length, no one in the college football establishment had a problem extending the season from 10 games to13 games delaying the bowls until Jan 8th.

2) The college football regular season is so important that every week is like a single elimination playoff (and therefore a playoff would eliminate that fact). This one is even easier to argue. Just ask Utah from this season. They won every week, finshed undefeated, and won their BSC bowl game. For doing that Utah was rewarded with the coveted #2 slot in the final BSC poll despite being the only undefeated team. Florida and Oklahoma somehow missed the memo and despite being eliminated earlier in the regular season "playoff" played for the title.


So I'm continuing my boycott of Bowl games (it's easy to do from mid-January to December) and encouraging other like minded individuals to do the same while hoping that Obama will tackle College Football right after the Mortgage Crisis, the Credit Crisis, the Middle East Crisis, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Energy Policy...

Thank You Mr. Policeman...

Editors Note: The extreme tardiness in posting a blog entry caused the backdating of this post, not because I control the fabric of time.

This is my official thank you letter to the police officer who pulled me over after returning from a basketball game at UVA. Thank you for not giving me a ticket and continuing my streak without a traffic violation (14 years and counting). Thank you for taking pity on a 30 year old family man with his wife and 3 young'ins in the back of his SUV (Ben, Traci, and Cassie). Thank you for being a basketball fan, which gave us something to talk about while you contemplated whether to give me a ticket or not. Thank you for making it extremely obvious that my problem was a faulty odometer. Thank you for reminding me that cruise control is my friend, pretty much anywhere on Route 29 in Virginia.

Jeckell and Wahoo???

I have witnessed two football games in the last 10 days that have me very confused. I saw one in person, so I have reliable evidence that the event did actually occur (see the photo on the left as proof). Yes, I'm talking about the aberration that is the University of Virginia football team. If you haven't been following the UVA football season, I'll get right to the point: WE LOST TO DUKE 31-3. Let me repeat that for you: WE LOST TO DUKE 31-3. This was a record breaking achievement (but not in the good way):

• Duke's first ACC win since Nov. 13, 2004 (vs. Clemson) snapping a 25-game conference losing streak.
• Duke's largest margin of victory in an ACC game since a 49-16 win over Maryland on Sept. 3, 1994.
• Duke's largest margin of victory against anybody since beating Northwestern 44-10 on Sept. 12, 1998.

That loss put UVA sitting at 1-3 after the first four games of the season with some rather dubious distinctions:

• UVA was ranked 119 out of 120 teams in total offense. Take that Florida International!!
• Dead last (#120) in scoring offense
• Ranked 82nd in total defense
  
• This is an unofficial stat, but most players leaving program while not graduating: 10. This included smoking ganja while on probation (QB Peter Lalich), leave of absence for personal reasons (DE), and the UVA unique getting kicked out for honor code violation (DE Fitzgerald).

Take a look at the UVA game by game stats up to this point:

1) USC: L 7-52, 187 yards on offense
2) Richmond: W 16-0, 295 yards on offense
3) UCONN: L 10-45, 219 yards on offense
4) Duke: L 3-31, 304 yards on offense

This all set the stage for a strange evening last Saturday night. I watched the UVA-Maryland game on ESPNU HD (thank you FIOS) and everything went perfectly. UVA won 31-0, Verica, our former 3rd stringer QB before academics and the aforementioned ganja bumped him up to starting job, went 16-19 for almost 200 yards and accounted for 3 touchdowns...in the first half!! It didn't stop in the second half; UVA held on for the shutout. It was a big enough blow out that the Washington Post almost decided not to print the story. (For those who don't read the Washington Post, a UVA win gets Column C on page 7, Maryland wins get front page of the paper).

When I went down to the East Carolina game on Saturday with my family, I had no idea what team to expect. Would this be the team that crushed Maryland or got crushed by Duke by the same amount? While it certainly wasn't as perfect a game as Maryland, UVA looked pretty good for most of it and came out with the 35-20 victory. The offensive load was carried by Cedric Peerman (the Rev) with two long touchdown runs (79 and 60 yards) and 173 total yards on the ground. It was a tense third quarter, but we held on with the best fake field goal I've ever seen.

All of a sudden we are putting up 30+ points and 420+ yards of total offense with regularity (we are now #98 in total offense). Why the change? It's hard to tell. I think it's a combination of UVA playing much better at home (Duke and UConn were away), having Peerman back full-time in the lineup, and a young QB learning from a few tough drubbings. I'm slightly less embarrassed to be a UVA football fan...sweet. We'll see what happens next week, bring on UNC!

Gooooooooooo....Sandstorm!

I am going to have to brag a bit here on a recent volleyball success. Our coed fours team, Sarah, Bruce, Colleen and I, kicked some butt last week and won the tournament for our outdoor sand league! To give you a little background, pretend for a second we are doing a NBC style Olympic preview of our team....

<Montage of us practicing in the indoor racquetball courts, strategizing using salt and pepper shakers at IHOP, and someone slamming a ball into one of the Donohues' faces>

<Quick human interest story of Bruce constructing his own outdoor volleyball court out of spare lumber>

Bob Costas would talk about our initial struggles on the Dulles Volleyball circuit, advancing to the playoffs but failing to make it over the "hump" due to some inconsistencies and then throw it over to volleyball analysts Chris Marlowe and Karch Kiraly...

This season due to a tough schedule, (we only play 7 out of 19 teams and played most of the best ones) we barely made the playoffs. Our team was like the college basketball program that schedules a bunch of quality teams; we had a few more losses than a lot of other teams but we were battle tested. We entered the last match of the season with a 9-9 overall record (each game or set within a match counts toward your overall record), and our hopes of making the playoffs hanging on a thread. To make matters worse, Sarah was out sick. We played the team 3 on 4 and won all three games to improve our record to 12-9. That was enough to send us to the playoffs as the 8th seed facing off against the #1 seed.

We were down early by 5 or 6 points after some tentative play, when a timely time-out (one of the best timeouts for team Sandstorm ever) awoke the "thin beast" inside our team. Our defense kicked it up a notch and our opponents started to come unraveled pretty quickly. After a huge comeback win in the first set we rolled to a second set victory. I personally was about to collapse, and I don't think any of us was feeling particularly fresh after our huge comeback. The league organizer at the tournament that night was like "if you want why don't you go ahead and play the semi-final match on a free court" The other team had been resting for our entire match and we had to roll right in still trying to catch our breath....wonderful. Luckily, we continued to play at a high level and won the first set of the semis comfortably. Set #2 didn't go so hot, mainly because we were just getting too exhausted. Thank God the final set was only to 15 points; we played well enough to escape and made it to the finals. Fortunately I was starting to get my second wind and my hitting was coming back alive. After winning the first set handily, we were closing in for the win. We were up I believe 23-20 and we had a mini collapse. I won't say who hit a serve into the net, but they still owe us some beer :) The opposing team squeaked out a 27-25 win, and we had to settle the match in another tie breaker to 15. Luckily we went on a pretty big run and coasted our way to the championship.

I've reconstructed the playoff bracket below so you can see our historic run:

Randy Pausch...

Who was Randy Pausch? He was a professor in the field of virtual reality who passed away from pancreatic cancer just over a week ago. He lead an amazing life and become internationally known for a talk he gave on achieving your childhood dreams. I won't repeat his bio (you can check out wikipedia for that), but if you haven't seen any of the following I strongly encourage you to check them out:

1) His lecture given in a Carnegie Mellon "Last Lecture" series after he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer: The Last Lecture. He achieved all of his childhood dreams, even playing in the NFL (at least in practice) after the Steelers organization heard about his talk.

2) His lecture on Time Management given at the University of Virginia (he used to teach there, which was how I originally heard about him). More pragmatic than his inspirational Last Lecture; I love his point on time as an even more valuable commodity than money: Time Management

3) Although I haven't read it yet, I'm guessing his recently published book, The Last Lecture, would be an excellent read: The Last Lecture on Amazon

A multitude of small projects...

One of the main things I've been up to this summer is a slew of small household projects. I haven't yet gotten up the nerve to tackle anything that involves wanton destruction of pieces of our house, but I've been steadily expanding my horizons. Some of these projects were things Sarah and I wanted to improve, but others were put high on the priority list because they involved things like massive amounts of water in places where water shouldn't be.

1) Kitchen Sink Pipe Break
I had the privilege of being introduced to plumbing when I discovered the aforementioned several inches of water under my kitchen sink. Sarah asked if it was a leak; as you can see from the picture, it is incorrect to call something a leak when all the water from our garbage disposal ended up on the floor. The plastic tube that connects the disposal to the waste water line just completely broke. Unfortunately the part that broke was the standard part size, and not wanting to repeat the same mistake twice I tried a couple of creative solutions. Unfortunately, neither of my first two attempts really worked (although they were very creative involving plastic pieces and rubber connectors). Thankfully, the Lowe's near where we play volleyball had a slightly larger plastic piece that fit much better.



2) Kitchen Makeover
On top of having water under our sink, we had more unwanted water entering our kitchen via a bay window leak during one of the recent violent rain storms. After all that, we decided to repaint the kitchen. We never quite understood the previous owner's "checkerboard" pattern for two colors above and beneath the chair rail, and the water damage on the window sealed the deal to begin the repainting. As the family art major, I left Sarah in charge of both choosing paint colors and getting slightly obsessive on painting straight lines in places where no-one will ever see. We survived the painting and I was pleased with the results, I think the before and after speak for themselves.

BEFORE (notice the tan is on the top and bottom on the two walls):



AFTER:




3) Programmable Thermostat
Not hard, but our heat pump with auxiliary heat has lots of wires to connect. Couple that with the fact that our old thermostat had some letter markings that were hard to decipher, it took some time to put the new version in. However, we are very happy with the results and we have learned that we can not turn up the A/C during the night as energy star suggests.

4) Clogged Master Sink
Now that I own the pipes in the place I live, I'm finally listening to the advice not to just pour chemicals down them to unclog obstructions. The master bathroom sink had pretty much been clogged since we moved in and finally, 10 months later, I got around to unclogging it. Did I mention that seeing what gets stuck in your pipes is pretty friggin gross? Anyway, our sink does much better now, and I will never get those two hours back.

UPDATE: And just when I thought I might be done with random house maintenance, I just discovered yet another leak in our house :(
The master bath tub/shower drain is leaking....

Doubles...

I reached another volleyball achievement a few weekends ago: I played in my first doubles tournament! (I think it should be worth at least 20 points for my Volleyball Gamerscore...). The tournament was actually held all day on Saturday the weekend before last, which meant it was pretty much the hottest day of the year with plenty of extra humidity. The temperature reached 98 with a heat index of a scorching 105! It was a charity tournament called Side Out for a Cure, which benefited cancer research. You can still donate from our team page.

A little background information. A doubles (or really any) volleyball tournament works like this. Each division divides up into "pools" of 4 to 5 teams. In our case we were in a ten team division that divided up into two pools of 5 teams. Each team plays two games against every other team on that net, and the teams with the two best overall records advance into a bracket style playoff against the other teams in their division.

Did I mention that this was my first time playing doubles ever? Well, the first game was against a pretty good team (they ended up placing first on our net) and I didn't quite have down the differences in strategy for doubles play. There tends to be a lot of open court on doubles, but I kept hitting it right at their best player (not your best strategy). After losing our opening match 17-10 (usually games would be to 21, except the organizers shortened the games due to the excessive heat), we completely turned it around. With a little better strategy and some of our best play of the day we smoked them 17-10.

As the sun burned through the morning fog and haze, it actually felt cooler for a couple of hours due to the drop in humidity. Despite the support of some great friends who endured the ridiculous, (Meghann, Duncan, Traci, Traci's Mom, Cassie, Colleen, Sarah, and Jeremy's tent for some much needed shade) we didn't play our best volleyball and ended up losing both games in our next match. They were a good team, (who incidentally ended up winning our entire division after placing 2nd on our net) but we should have taken the first game (lost 17-15). After that we took turns staying cool, reffing other matches, and winning our last four games. The competition wasn't as good, but we started playing a lot smarter as well.

All in all we finished one game out of the playoffs (third on our net), didn't suffer heat exhaustion, had a couple of celebration beers, and generally had a lot of fun. Really our only causality was that BOTH of Bruce's shoes completely broke on the same play.

Symmetrical action shots courtesy of Colleen:

A Strange Commute...

I had a rather interesting journey home last night that was noteworthy enough to justify my return to blog entries after my month long hiatus. My tale begins with me spending yet another day working for the man. I've been quite a bit busier recently, so I was actually working just after four o'clock when I got a call from my lovely wife that our two volleyball matches for the night (one at 6:30 and one at 7:30) were canceled. It wasn't too surprising as we had already had a strong storm roll through Arlington complete with close lightning strikes and even a brief power outage. I moseyed down to the metro at my normal time of around 5:15, thankful that I didn't have to go outside in the pouring rain. After passing by the "Escalator Modernization Project" at Clarendon which is apparently an excuse for Metro to rebuild an escalator from scratch, I noticed my first sign that something might be amiss. A train had just let out, as I could see the people streaming up the escalator, but the platform was still extremely full for the Clarendon station. A new train was arriving as I made it to the crowded platform, but luckily I'm pretty adept at metro "sardining," so I was able to squeeze into a car after making a last second decision to avoid the car with parents with two giant strollers. My second clue that this was going to be a strange commute was that the driver soon said "this is the Orange line to East Falls Church." Since I live and park at Vienna, that was going to be a problem. Eventually, I learned that a power line was down between the East and West Falls Church stations, and that Metro was providing a shuttle bus between East and West Falls Church as an alternative. Unfortunately, simple math told me that the metro station would get backed up pretty quickly unless they provided 8-10 buses every five minutes. Did I say backed up? I meant it would turn into a human parking lot.

At about the time I joined the human parking lot I got a call from Sarah. The powers that be un-canceled the volleyball matches, and we were back on. Using my secret talent of being freakishly tall, I was able to see about 1,000 people in a giant mass waiting for the buses. Then, I had a great idea: Trassie lives right next to the East Falls Church station.

What are the chances that I could hang out there or even get a ride to the next Metro stop from Trassie? What's the chance that Cassie got off work early because of the impending storm? What's the chance that I could actually make a phone call because all the people stuck were jamming up cellphone service? Luckily everything fell into place. Cassie was home early from work, had access to a car, and was reasonably sober. After some strategic maneuvering and fence jumping, I was on my way to my personal shuttle...the Mini Cooper. Cassie and I made a fairly quick jaunt to the West Falls Church metro, while Cassie got a good lesson in driving during rush hour when they were a lot of annoyed people on the road. When I finally made it to the train at the West Falls Church station, I had to keep my smile to myself as the other passengers traded war stories of their 3+ hours commute (little did they know of the free Mini shuttle).

I finally got in touch with Sarah as I was driving back home to find that our 6:30 game was off (which I just heard about from Colleen) because the other team couldn't make it in time, but that as far as she knew the 7:30 game was still on. I changed into volleyball gear, grabbed a drink and some snacks and was back on the road in about four minutes flat. It was still raining hard in Vienna, but by the time I got to Chantilly the sky actually looked pretty clear. I pulled into the Dulles Sportplex lot at about 7:20 and headed down to the court.

Can you guess what happens next? Well, first off there is only one other team at any of the three courts (and even they are a player short). I don't think we were scheduled to play them tonight, but we've had so many games canceled, we probably needed to play them anyway. We agree to their proposal to scrimmage to get at least some volleyball in for all our trouble. Once the score is 4-2, a few hard and quick rain drops come down. We all head to leave but then it stops and Bruce convinces us to play on as he can see a sliver of light through the clouds that appears to be coming closer. On the next serve, the heavens open up. It was one of the those rains where you are already soaked in the three seconds in takes to open your umbrella. We give up and decide to head home. The drive home wasn't awful but very slow amongst the giant puddles and many tornado warnings on the radio. I arrived home and figured that I got two things out of the three hours of commuting I'd just finished. Ten minutes of volleyball (that by the end of the season will probably have cost me about $30) and a story to write about. Hope you enjoyed the story :)

New York...

I decided to mix things up a little bit for our fourth anniversary with the promise to whisk Sarah away on a “secret” weekend getaway. I did a pretty good job keeping the location a secret from Sarah, although I finally slipped up a week before the big announcement. I chose New York City, somewhere neither of us had been in several years and somewhere we have never been to together.

Given the short time we had up there, I planned the hell out of this trip and I probably could have generated an hour by hour schedule if the need arose. We left work early on Friday to head up to the Big Apple. I picked out a hotel in the Financial District downtown. It was close to some touristy things I wanted to do, cheaper than Midtown, and more importantly nice and quiet when you wanted to get some sleep at night. We arrived on Friday and headed to our restaurant reservation in Midtown at Becco. It is an Italian restaurant that had two nice features: a prix-fix menu of all-you-can eat home made pastas and a full selection of wines only $25 a bottle to encourage experimentation. The food was great and after getting a free glass of wine simply by being clutzy enough to break my glass at the end of the meal , we waddled over to Rockefeller Center. We headed up to the Top of the Rock, the observation deck on the top of the 70-story 30 Rock building. It wasn’t quite as high as the Empire State Building, but I liked the observation deck better – unobstructed, 360 degree views from the very top.

On Top of the Rock - Empire State Building in Background

Saturday was the day of walking, and thus we were glad the weather was perfect. We started by walking to the Ground Zero site. There is not really much to see there yet, just some construction cranes, but it was something I wanted to see to remember what happened. Next we took the subway to Brooklyn (Saturday wasn’t all walking) and then walked back to Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge had great views and was an impressive engineering feat as well. After our walk back to Brooklyn we lunched at the first pizza place in North America: Lombardi’s in Little Italy. It was quite yummy.

Brooklyn Bridge Overlooking Downtown NYC

Our next stop was at Broadway to watch “Spamalot.” Being as uncultured as I am, it was my first trip to Broadway, although Sarah is an experienced theater goer. Spamalot, based on Monty Python and Holy Grail, did a great job of recreating some of the funniest scenes from the movie, but also was different enough to not just be a rehash. It was a lot of laughs and a really impressive production.

After an early dinner that was good but expensive, our final activity of the night (yes, I packed this trip full) was to go dancing at Swing 46. As we learned earlier in the day, the ultra convenient subway stop 50 feet from our hotel was closed on Saturday for track maintenance. So, we took a different line which put us about a mile from the club. Apparently after four years of marriage Sarah and I can still have communication breakdowns, because the message of how far away the club was never really got from me to her :) Anyway, a mile of walking later (with one us wearing high heeled shoes), and we were ready for some drinks. The club was a lot of fun; the small dance floor took a little bit of time to adjust to, but by the end of the night Sarah and I were cutting a rug.

Our last activity was to take the Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island on Sunday morning. We weren't that interested in seeing Staten Island, but since the Statue of Liberty tickets were already sold out, the ferry was a free way to get some great views of the Statue like below:


After that, it was back to the airport to give up the New York lifestyle and return to the Suburbs.

America's New Tanker...

The recent award by the Air Force of the KC-45 Tanker to Northrop Grumman over Boeing has been controversial by all accounts. This story has stayed in the business news an amazingly long time, so I'm finally going to chime in. It hits pretty close to home, although whatever happens probably wouldn't have much affect on me. I don't actually know a lot of the details, but I wanted to put a few facts out there and highlight some of the ridiculous statements made by some members of Congress. The back-story is basically this:

• The Air Force fleet of tankers used to refuel jets in mid-air is getting really old.
• In 2003, the Air Force tried to give the contract to Boeing to lease the Air Force new tankers. A major scandal erupted when Darleen Duryun, the chief acquisition officer for the Air Force was investigated for inflating the price of the tankers while negotiating a position at Boeing and ended up pleading guilty. Boeing executives were fired and Druyun went to jail. the contract had to be recompeted.
• Northrop teamed with EADS to take on Boeing for the new contract.
• Northrop and EADS won the competition. According to initial statements by the Air Force, they won by a big margin.
  
• Congress members in Washington state and Kansas (places with the largest concentration of Boeing workers) go ballistic.
• Boeing files a protest, and the GAO is currently investigating.
  

Now my collection of ridiculous quotes by the Boeing supporters:

From Forbes:

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., echoing the thoughts of many congressional Democrats, sees McCain's role in a less positive light. She said the earlier tanker deal was 'on course for Boeing' before McCain started railing against it."

Wow...blaming McCain for taking away the earlier contract from Boeing. In a sense, that's true, but perhaps you could blame the ethically-challenged Boeing executives and AF officials for destroying the first deal and not the person who found them cheating.

"The person that stopped (the tanker) from going to a U.S. company was Senator McCain," said Emanuel, "and now we are going to send major high-paying jobs overseas"

I'll be first to admit, I don't really know how they come up with job creation numbers, but the latest estimates from both companies are now relatively even on the number of jobs created for both tankers. I'll agree that this would move jobs from Washington and Kansas to Alabama, but no one ever explained what jobs would move to Europe. Plus, Northrop is a U.S company!! I mention this because after all the misinformation, some of my parent's neighbors thought Northrop was based out of France...

From the Kansas Star:

"I continue to believe the Air Force's shortsighted decision is a threat to our national defense and the future of America's aerospace industry," Murray said in a statement.

I don't understand the threat to our national defense argument, as this statement and others talk about military technology going to France. The Northrop plane would be assembled in Alabama from parts made in the US and around the world, but the militarization steps (like say integrating command and control software) would be done by Northrop in the US.

Also Friday, the Kansas state Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling on Congress and President Bush to block the contract award to Northrop-EADS. "This is an aircraft that should be built in the U.S.," said state Sen. Mike Petersen, R-Wichita.

Great, too bad no modern airplane is built completely in the U.S. The Northrop offering is estimated to have 60% American made parts, which exceeded the contract requirements. The Boeing offering does have more American made parts (estimated 85%), but I'd like to see how they will fly it without a fuselage made in Japan or a tail made in Italy.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, my guess is that there won't be enough evidence of anything improper to change the decision. However, when politics get involved, it's anybody's guess what will happen.

March Sadness...

It's the time of year when my favorite sport shines its brightest, and the whole country takes notice of college basketball. Unfortunately this year, my beloved Cavaliers of Virginia shockingly didn't get selected to the NCAA tournament; alas when you finish 5-11 in the ACC you don't typically have a lot of things to put on your tournament resume. The year started off promising, with an early win against Arizona, at Arizona. Unfortunately UVA had a horrible stretch during the middle of the season in which they lost 7 in a row and basically sank to the bottom of the ACC. Maybe the UVA football team used up all the availalbe karma when it broke the NCAA record for most number of close wins this past season, because the basketball team caught the brunt of several heartbreaking loses. Several losses came in OT, and a total of 7 games were lost by 4 points or less. Injuries certainly didn't help during this stretch, but several of our players never really seemed to "get it" or play with much heart. Sean Singletary, our star player who decided to come back for his senior season, looked tired trying to carry the team on his back. Things started to turn around a bit during the end of the season, Singletary was finally completely healthy and Lars Mikalauskas, who wears his emotions on his sleeve, gave us a spark on the inside. That was enough to win a few games at the end of the season (4 out of our last 6), and to win Sean's last game at JPJ while getting his jersey retired. As an added bonus, that last win essentially eliminated Maryland from the NCAA tournament (if I'm going to be suffering, might as well have Terps fans in the same boat).

The final redemption for UVA has come as a result of an age old adage: you can never have too much of a good thing. Although my Econ 101 professor Kenny Elzinga might disagree with that adage, we now live in the era of three post season college basketball tournaments. There is the famous field of 65 teams that compete in the NCAA tournament every year, the teams that at had an argument to make it on Selection Sunday that play in the NIT, and finally introducing the College Basketball Invitational or CBI. Selecting the best 16 teams in America, after the NCAA and NIT get the first 97 picks, the CBI doesn't even let records tarnish the image of its teams and doesn't have any restricting requirements on "winning" records (just ask 13-18 Cincinnati). UVA takes on Richmond tonight in the inaugural matchup, and if we can't get excited about playing in the third best post-season college backetball tournament in the land, well then I guess we're normal...