The Big Move

Amber and I are getting ready to make the move over to our new Oxford New Town townhouse. It's a great area since we'll be able to walk to the movies, coffee shop, restaurants, bars, shopping, etc. It's super close to the recycling center, it has it's own car wash station, we have a cute outside patio, and best of all, it's brand new. We just got the keys yesterday and went over to finally see OUR townhouse instead of the model homes. Very exciting. So we're just working on boxing up the old apartment and doing a lot of cleaning before next Saturday when we'll be making the official move over. But it's nice because we'll have this whole week to move little things over after work. Check out our neighborhood (our place is on the right of this picture, not shown) and our front door!

More pictures of the inside as we get settled! Ok, I'm going to get back to packing. :) Hope everyone has a fun Memorial Day weekend.

Dream Come True

This may sound silly, but Saturday I got to do something that I have ALWAYS wanted to do - and have never had a chance to. Ride a four-wheeler!!!!! It was soooo fun. We got one at work from someone else at VIMS that wasn't using it, and now we get to use it for odds and ends around campus (like going to get buckets of water for the tanks, etc.). So Saturday was Marine Science Day, and we got to take it down to our exhibit and I drove it around the parking lot. :)

Marine Science Day went really well. We had HUNDREDS of people show up at our beach seining and discovery lab station. Everyone had a great time and we caught some really interesting things like turtles, eels, and a puffer! But I'm glad that day is over - always a big stressful day. Now it's just thinking about the big move coming up next week and starting to pack up things in the apartment. Amber and I are really looking forward to being over in New Town and having everyone over for a housewarming once we have everything settled. :)

In other news, I spotted my first tiny bud of the Yorktown Onion this morning on the way to work. These flowers are so cool and look like onions on long stems for the past few months, and any day now will all bloom and make my drive to work on the parkway just that much better! Here's a pic of one from last year.

Eastern Shore Bay Club Trip

This past weekend, Jes and I took 10 of our high school Bay Club students to the Eastern Shore to the VIMS lab there. It was the last meeting for a year long club that we started this year. After making it through terrible traffic, and high winds, we made it to the lab in Wachapreague in time to get all of our stuff settled and play a game of "Never Have I Ever". Saturday was the big field day. Three of the Eastern Shore Lab's staff took us out in two skiffs to do several types of sampling and exploring - mud flats, dredging, trawling, plankton tows, island cross section hikes, beach/shell collecting, etc. We had a great time and got to see many things that we wouldn't have seen here on our usual field trips (like chitons, sponges, urchins, whelks, etc.). It was really cold and rainy, but that didn't stop us from doing everything we wanted to do. The afternoon was spent in the lab, identifying all of the species we caught. Saturday night, we made t-shirts, watched a video, and played a Spoons tournament (card game for those of you who have never played - or attended one of our overnight programs b/c we always play spoons). We did get a chance to stop at the Fisherman's Island Wildlife Refuge http://www.fws.gov/northeast/easternshore/ on the way back on Sunday and at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I've definitely going to miss those kids and the eastern shore. We had such a great time! I can't wait to take another group back.

Field Trip Season Again

It's field trip time again and Jes and I are so excited! It's been a long winter being in the office, and being outside with the kids in the water is where we like to be most. We have started out with some really interesting field trips. You never know what we're going to catch while we're out there, but last week we caught something I've never seen here - only seen them in the Keys in tropical waters. We caught a nudibranch! It was so cool - much cooler than it looks in this picture through the microscope.

Even though it's time for field trips to start back, it's still really cold in the water so we have to use the ever fashionable waders. But at least we aren't wet all the rest of the day after being in the water. But still, not looking my best in those.

Another exciting thing at work is our schoolyard habitat garden. Bob and I planted it on my birthday in 2005, so it's almost three years old and the maintenance crew at VIMS recently cut it WAY back so it looked pretty rough for a while. But it's back and looking great. The first purple blooms (need to look up the name) came this week and it finally looks great again!

Jes has a human inside of her!!!

We had a baby shower for Jes (girl that works with me) two weekends ago and we decided to go with a garden theme since her new baby girl's middle name is Sage. Ellie Sage Russo is due to join us on July 16th, 2008, but I've asked Jes numerous times to have it earlier so that I'll be in town. I'll be at the beach for vacation when she's actually due. So we'll see if she can do that for me.

The shower was really fun, and Amber and I had a great time planning it. Jes was trying to guess what the theme was going to be all week - under the sea, under the estuary...But I think we really surprised her with gardens.

We played lots of fun shower games - nursery rhyme quiz, baby food quessing game, and guess the size of Jes's belly. And Jes got lots of cute gifts (check her expression when she opened MY gift). And to top it all off, Amber made the cutest booties cake, which was of extreme difficulty and we will never be making one again so Jes should feel very priviledged. :)

Big City Traveler

*NYC*

Andrea and I have enjoyed some lovely big city traveling this year. We started off with a trip to NYC with her mom and her mom's friend, Nancy. A fun time was had by all. We started out in Little Italy (after driving into the city and fighting traffic and checking into our hotel - only blocks from Times Square!). The first night we walked through Times Square and it was amazing - my first time there! We also went to the top of the Empire State Building (which I kept wanting to call the Eiffel Tower) at night.

Friday we spent doing a bus tour of downtown and then took a ferry to Staten Island where we saw the Statue of Liberty and the skyline from the water. We saw sooo much that day, too much to list but we did go to Rockefellar Center and saw the ice skaters and NBC studios. Walked through St. Patrick's Cathedral, went to the Museum of Modern Art, went to Serendipity. Saturday we did the Uptown loop of the bus tour and saw Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harlem, and got tickets for a Broadway play. We saw "A Chorus Line" that night which was really awesome, but a much smaller theater than I was imagining.

Sunday we went to Chinatown and heard the words "Gucci, Dolce, Coach....chanel" over and over and it was hilarious but also overwhelming because the women were asking us to buy stuff literally before we stepped out of the cab. We also saw FAO Schwartz and the giant piano from the movie Big and went into Tiffany's. All in all a great trip. :) My first trip to NYC will not be my last. There's still so much to see.

*DC*

We met up with friends (Pat, Erin, Amber, me, Andrea, and Jen) in Alexandria because I was teaching some kids at a private school a lesson about the Bay and rays. So after teaching, they put me up in a swanky hotel in Old Town Alexandria and we decided we should make a weekend out of it. Andrea came up, Amber was there visiting some friends and we all went out Friday night. Then, on Saturday Andrea and I went to the Holocaust Museum in DC, she had a giant eggroll (Andrea I almost put the picture up here), and we headed back. We stayed on just one little block of downtown DC but it was fun and something that we have been talking about going to for a long time. The museum was really great and I highly recommend it!

It's been a great year of traveling with my buddy so far and definitely looking forward to our next big city - San Francisco in the fall!