Wine and Chee

Our neighbors, Kelly and Jay, had a 'Wine and Chee' party last weekend. We brought the fruit of the vine, they provided the chee and fun was had by all! The party started with a blind taste test, we had five wines to try and we had to match them with their correct varietal (merlot, shriaz, pinot noir, etc). You will be proud to know that I got zero correct, Chuck didn't get any right either - our palates are clearly not as refined as they should be and we will be working hard over the next few weeks on bringing them up to speed. We also played a game called 'LCR' where everyone starts with three $1 bills, then you roll three dice that have 'L', 'C' and 'R' printed on their sides. These correspond to left, right and center respectively. You pass your dollars according to the dice you roll and all the money eventually ends up in the center (the pot). The person with the last dollar left gets to take home the pot! It was very fun and very addictive...

Busy

Evidence of just how behind I am:

Paige, you are choosing Columbia, right?

Scrabble at the Beach

Final Score: Paige 238, Chuck 242I did win a racquetball game later that day so don't feel too bad for me.

Father Paris

One of Chuck's BC professors was in town last weekend and he stopped by Manhattan Beach to see how his former pupil is surviving. We spent the day at MOCA , where he quizzed us on the pieces to find out how much we knew (not much for me, Chuck fared better but he has been to museums with Father Paris before) and then showed us how to look at the art and talked us through most of the exhibits - it was a very cool learning experience. My favorite part was that before we even walked in the door he gave us a goal: we had to choose one piece of art for our personal collection and one that we would give to a school of our choice. After the museum we came back for a beer on the beach and then spent the evening learning to cook! We started with shrimp stuffed avocados and then had scallops, rice pilaf (with chopped up apricots and cinnamon mixed in) and spinach - very tasty!

Montana Ski Trip

You probably saw Julie's post already and I have many similar photos from the trip so I wasn't going to post about it and then I realized that she didn't even mention the best part of the vacation! On my last night we rode to a mountain top cabin on horse drawn sleighs for the best steak I have ever had that was cooked on a 100+ year old stove! I know that was a run-on sentence but it was so much fun that I don't want to leave anything out... the cabin had no electricity so we ate by candle and lantern light and they cooked with a wood burning stove. My favorite part was Walkin' Jim Stoltz - he is a long distance hiker who has spent the majority of his life trekking all over the "wild places" of the continental US. He happened to be passing through Montana and was spending a few weeks singing at the cabin for room and board. He did about ten songs for us over the course of the night and he made it feel like we were really out in the woods somewhere entertaining ourselves around the fire after a long day on the trail - it was great! Here is a picture of us in the cabin:

Big Sky Montana

Paige is here in the center of the "Congo"


Julie and Jeff not posing at all :-)

Happy Valentine's Day Paige!

Thank you to those who participated in the production of this project!



I love you!

Love,
Chuck

Weekend at Put

I made a last minute trip to New York this past weekend. I spent Thursday night in the city with Katie and Sheldon (and failed to take a picture - boo) and then on Friday I headed up to spend the weekend with Dad and Julie. They had and unexpected couple inches of snow late in the week so everything looked pristine for my visit. It was so nice outside that we decided to do a little ice skating on the lake one afternoon. In that top photo you can see Dad clearing a skating path with a leaf blower - since we aren't trying to play a big hockey game or anything it is much more efficient to just clear a big track (like a jogging path) than to worry about clearing a big circle. This bottom photo of Julie was just too flattering not to be published.

LaBacon

When I started school as a freshman at the University of Florida we had to sign up for a .ufl email address so that the university could communicate with us newbies by email. Up until that point in my life I had shared one .aol email address with my mom and my sister that I'm fairly certain I never even went on. Suffice it to say that I had no idea of the importance email would play in my life so I was very unconcerned with picking my email address, I actually just accepted the one the university email system suggested for me which was predfiel@ufl.edu - no, it did not occur to me to add a "d" onto the end, so I spent the next four years with my primary mode of communication resembling the word "pedophile" a little too closely for my liking and having to spell it out letter by letter when giving it to someone because you really just can't pronounce "predfiel" phonetically. Laura had a bit more foresight and chose lahender@ufl.edu - this is a good choice because it logically combines her first and last name (Laura Henderson) and is pronounceable. It rolls off the tongue so nicely in fact that I took to calling her LaHender on a regular basis. Now that Laura is getting married she can no longer be LaHender because her last name will no longer be Henderson... Jay's full name is Jay Bacon Frasier IV and while LaFrasier is nice, it doesn't hold a flame to LaBacon :) A few weeks back we rented a cabin in northern Georgia for Laura's bachelorette party! Unfortunately I got strep throat a few days before the party and spent the weekend sick as a dog. I felt so terrible that I failed to take even a single picture, lucky for me that someone else managed to snap a group photo of us in our souvenir shirts: