March Madness

Gabriel is getting more and more curious. While Patty was walking around the apartment doing something or other, she heard a noise that sounded like the cell phone vibrating. The phone was set to ring, so she went to investigate. She walked in on the scene above. Our little Curious George got bored with his toy keys, walked from the living room to the kitchen where he stopped to pull the towels off the stove handle, which you can see being dragged by his walker along with the keys, and play with a chain hanging off the refrigerator door. He then proceeded to the bathroom, where he learned how to open a drawer. Now, when his mommy was his age, her parents put a yardstick in the cabinet handles. We're not so sure that would work here. We're just going to have to step up the vigilance another notch.

Today was our second annual March Madness Starbucks party. This entails getting a drink at Starbucks and sitting down with articles about the NCAA basketball tournament regions and filling out our brackets. We both ended up with North Carolina winning. We have Oakland University making it to number 64 and Michigan State going out in the second round. Georgia Tech should put up a good fight but go out in the second round. We wouldn't mind being wrong on that one, though, since they are across the street and all. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, Michigan will not be included in the tournament this year.

While we were at Starbucks, Erica called. She said that she and Raul are doing well in Quebec and that she's getting more work as a tutor. Raul is working on his PhD and should be done in a couple of years. We've been thinking of them, since Raul's native Peru has been featured on "The Amazing Race" the past two weeks.

We bought our tickets to DC for April 13-19. We are going to try to get tickets to the first Washington Nationals home game ever for Patty's birthday. It's a birthday tradition for us every April. If we don't get tickets for that, we'll just go to the second game. Independence Air, with which we had a great experience the last time we went to Virginia, is having a sale right now. The tickets were $29 each way! It will be nice to see the family and explore DC a little more than we did last time.

AR7 Watch

Warning: spoilers ahead!

No, really - if you don't want to know what happened, look away right now!

This is your last warning...

Okay, so we were happy to see those two girls go. They will undoubtedly be much happier sitting somewhere adoring each other, without having to worry about pesky Roadblocks and Detours. We are really liking Rob and Amber more and more. They are playing the game well, and Rob is turning out to be really funny. How smart were they to convince other teams to give up the challenge? That was brilliant! Speaking of funny, the two brothers are great fun, and we hope that they stay in the game for a while, even though they're dumb as rocks and will probably be eliminated very soon. Has anyone else noticed that Ron really doesn't like Kelly very much? We like him, but she isn't a very good teammate and seems pretty annoying to boot. Argentina is one of the places on our "must visit" list, and today's show just reinforced its place there. What a beautiful country.

We came up with a few more rules today: when choosing between two tasks, never choose the one that involves searching for something or counting something, and always choose the one in which you have helpers, especially if they're professionals; also, Patty automatically does any task that involves eating.

Note: As of yesterday, our photos are now "clickable," so you can now click on them for a larger version.

Some Photos

Here are some great photos that Snapfish put online today from film.

Gabriel's first trip to the beach - Onslow Beach

Gabe-Luke and Uncle Jack bonding at Camp Lejeune

Laura at the lodge

Grandpa gives Gabe a bird's-eye view

Gabriel, Grammie, and Aunt Laura on Onslow Beach

A tree outside our apartment the day after an ice storm closed down Atlanta

The Perfect Day

Today, we decided to play hookie from all responsibility and headed to Stone Mountain for a day of, well, whatever struck our fancy. On the way, we went through the drive-through at Krispy Kreme for a donut. We were at the red light outside the store and it looked so good that we couldn't resist. Anyway, there is so much to do at Stone Mountain that even though we'd just been there 8 days ago, we found a lot of new things to do. It's amazing that you can go to a place over and over again and keep finding new things that you like about it.

The first time we visited Stone Mountain, we thought that it was a tribute to the Confederacy. We've learned that all the Old South stuff is not actually the main point of the park, even though a lot of people identify it that way. It's a place where there is a lot to learn about history, ecology, geology, and so on. The park was originally a granite quarry and was bought by the state of Georgia as a nature preserve.

We found the old rock quarry today. We would have found it a couple of years ago if we'd ever bothered to read the map they give us at the gate. It was the place where granite was mined and sent off to places all over the continent. We learned that some of the granite from Stone Mountain is in West Quad and its surrounding buildings at U of M, as well as in the Ann Arbor post office! Those years that we sat down in the MUG with our Subway cramming for tests, or mailed a package, or the time when Matt wiped out on his rollerblades outside the post office, we never knew we were surrounded by the rock from the place we'd visit as a family years later.

We stopped for the better part of an hour to feed Gabriel and have some snack bars at a picnic table overlooking an old grist mill between a stream and the lake. It could hardly have been more picturesque.

We tried unsuccessfully to locate several geocaches. The first was in an area that looked like hiking through it would be destructive to fragile plant life, so we decided to forgo that one. We hiked through woods for a while, only to realize that the second cache was on an island just 100 feet from the edge of shore. We didn't want to rent a kayak with Gabriel to go out there, so we decided that we should try another one. We made it to the third spot and looked until it started to get dark, but since we had a lot of hiking yet to do, we finally moved on. We did find a beautiful spot with a bench under tree cover next to a stream, though. It would have been the perfect camping spot.

We decided to take an old Cherokee trail over the mountain. As we started the trail, a very big fox accidentally began to follow us until we spotted each other and he decided to wait until later to climb the mountain. Not too long after that, we made one of the most breathtaking discoveries we've ever made hiking. There was a place where the mountain cleared out and became steep granite. Just as we got there, the view opened up to miles and miles of skyline. The sun had just set, and the sky was horizontal streaks of varying shades of red. We could see the Atlanta skyline 15 miles in the distance. The moon was high in the sky, and the stars were starting to be visible. Patty's shifted center of gravity (Gabriel in the carrier) and quickly-tiring legs combined to bring back her fear of heights, and as soon as she saw the view, she bent down and grabbed the ground before getting back up and hurrying across the mountain for safer ground. We had to move quickly anyway, since it gets very dark up there at night as we learned last weekend. We have a flashlight that has both red and white lights, so we could use the white light while in unfamiliar territory and red when we got to the wide trail that most people use to get up and down the mountain. Red light preserves your night vision, but while light is better when you really need a good view of where you're walking.

Our GPS unit saved the day once again, when we needed to find the "walk-up" trail to get back to the Jeep. It wasn't marked by signs or blazes that we could see at night, but we had it marked on our GPS. We had initially passed the trail before realizing that we were descending; we knew that the trails crossed at the highest point of the Cherokee trail. Sure enough, our GPS pointed us back to the junction and we were back at the cars minutes later. It was fun to imagine the Cherokees passing over the same rock and along the same ridges that we were. We even had a papoose to make it a more genuine experience!

As usual, Gabriel was a trooper all day. He seemed to love being outside in his carrier for six hours and fell asleep just when the Cherokee trail got scary. He missed all the drama but woke up just in time for the drive back to Midtown, happy as ever.

Update on Jack

Jack called home this morning to say that he's at the airbase and doing fine. You can read it in the comment from Mom K attached to the post below, but we'll reprint it here to make it easy.

Jack called this morning. He's finally at his camp. He used the satellite phone and the sound quality was much better than the last time he called us. He said the camp was very small, maybe a mile around the perimeter, and you could probably throw a stone all the way across it. They're in tents right now, but some Navy guys are building some more permanent shelters. He said they have a hot breakfast and dinner, but lunch is an MRE, which he said he doesn't mind. And they can have a nutrition bar any time they want. No TV, so a lot of the Marines have DVD players and buy DVDs at the PX. We might try to see if we can send Jack one soon. The only newspaper they have is Stars & Stripes. He'll be catching up on his phone calls soon, now that his calling card works.

She Did It!

Congratulations to Laura, who passed her boards and is now Nurse Laura Kelly, RN! The boards are computerized, and the number of questions varies. Laura and her friend Genevieve both got the minimum number of questions, and after going home and checking some of her answers, she was certain that they'd both failed. After a rough 24 hours, she found out that she is just as brilliant as we already knew she was. We're so excited. She's worked harder for those two little letters than just about anyone we know has worked for anything.

This morning, the largest manhunt in Georgia history came to an end when they caught Brian Nichols in Duluth, about half an hour's drive north of here. It turns out that he escaped the scene of the crime by taking MARTA, Atlanta's train system. It's a little scary to think that we could have easily been on the train with him and that he did, in fact, go right underneath our apartment while we were sitting here watching the story on the news. We were going to walk over to the overpass to watch them drive by with him this morning, but they stopped at the FBI headquarters so we went to lunch instead at Noodle. When we were walking back, we saw all of the news helicopters fly right by us, following the curve of the interstate. We knew right away that they must have been transporting Nichols. They were taking him to City Hall East, which is across the street from the Whole Foods where we were yesterday.

We spent the evening at the Karsons'-to-be house with Steve and Kelly's dad, Bob. We had some fantastic Thai food (fourth Asian meal in a row - Japanese for dinner Thursday, Thai for dinner Friday, Vietnamese for lunch today, and Thai for dinner today) and played a lot of ping-pong on their new table. Gabriel was so good all evening and got a lot of floor time, which he doesn't normally get. He watched Daddy play foosball and calmly sat in Daddy's lap all through dinner without fussing one bit. Kelly was at work and didn't get there until we were driving away, so we took the car out of gear and coasted backward down the street to go say hello and see her engagement ring. Steve did a great job with the design - it's really beautiful.

On Thursday, Paula Zahn Live on CNN will be at Camp Lejeune, so that should be an interesting show... even if they're about 3 weeks too late.