I know, right! Two consecutive weekend posts in a row. How long has it been since that happened? Off we go!

Friday night marked the first of what I’m sure will be many, many upcoming baby showers. This showerish/dinnerish co-ed affair took place at Ben Wheeler’s house and was complete with food, presents, and games. What kinds of games can you play at a co-ed baby shower? The men played a game called suck-the-water-out-of-the-bottle-and-try-not-to-pass-out. No kidding. A bottle was filled with 4 oz of water and Chris, Ben and myself were tasked with seeing who could finish the fastest. These bottles were not plastic, mind you, but were traditional old school glass bottles. Photographic evidence can be found at a horton life. I don’t know how babies do it, seriously. It was ridiculously hard. The ladies had to identify baby food. Brook nailed the bananas, Kacy struggled a bit with turkey tetrazzini.

Saturday took Brook and I car shopping for the afternoon. As many of you know, I generally loathe my car with every waking moment so in an effort to remedy that, and reduce my monthly payment, we decided to scour the internet and a few dealers for a slightly used, new-to-me vehicle. We came across a 2006 VW Passat at the Leith VW dealership. The test drive went well and they were really itching for a sale but in the end Brook and I decided that we hadn’t looked around enough- that was only the second place we’d been to. The first was Crossroads Ford in Cary. We went there mainly because the showroom was completely indoors and we thought it’d be cool to look around. Of course, the used cars were outside

That night we met up with Dave and Lindsey for some Shiki Laka Laka scrumptrulescense. Sushi is delish, albeit quite slow. We had planned on going to see the new Disney movie, A Chrismas Carol, but we didn’t get out of dinner in time. Not to be discouraged, we decided to go chill at casa de DingLingBing for a while. The ladies chatted about stickers and jelly beans or whatever it is they talk about and Dave and I played assorted Wii and PS3 games until it was time to go. Brook got in on the action towards the end and proved herself at a game called Rag Doll Kung-Fu. It was most impressive

So, earlier in the week my dad had called and said he was going to the Redskins game on Sunday and asked if I wanted to go. Smithfield has a suite at the stadium so we’d have great seats, air conditioning, and all the food, beer and liquor that we could consume. Who turns that down? The game was at 1pm. We had to leave his house in Richmond by 8:30am and its a 2.5 hour drive to Richmond. Yikes. The alarm went off at 4:40am and was out the door around 5:30. Of course, it’s still dark out at that time but one thing I hadn’t counted on was the fog. Holy crap! It was probably the worst fog I’ve ever driven in and there was no escape from it for the first 45 minutes of the drive. I was limited to around 60mph and that was putting a lot on blind faith that there was nothing in the road ahead of me. We got up to Washington around 11am to meet some of my dad’s work folks: customers, brokers, buyers, etc. We had a platinum parking pass so we got to park practically at the front door at the stadium and then headed through a side entrance for suite owners. Crowds, shmowds. Here is the only pic I got of the proceedings, taken during warmup.

The view was awesome!

As an added bonus, the Redskins (2-6) beat the Broncos (6-2)! It was a great game going all the way into the last part of the 4th quarter tied at 17. We headed out with a minute or so left in the game and the Redskins had a ten point lead. Unfortunately, an ish-ton of people had decided to leave just a minute earlier and we sat in traffic for days. The bad thing about parking up front is that you have the longest way to go to get out! We got back to my dad’s around 7pm and I grabbed a quick bite to eat and was back home around 9:30pm. Exhausted. Time for sleepies.

This week the car hunt continues. I don’t really have a clue as to what I want so this might take a while. Peace out homies!

What is happening, dear friends? Halloween has come and gone and the insanity of retail stores putting up Christmas decorations well, well in advance is upon us. [Fourty-four more shopping days, by the way]. This past weekend took Brook and I to Asheville. We hadn’t “gotten away” for any length of time since our honeymoon and decided it was time. We took off work on Friday and started the drive, arriving at the Grove Park Inn just after noon.

Brook was the official navigator. Even though her phone does turn-by-turn, she prefers to use the atlas

That hotel is amazing. I haven’t read the history book about it yet but it was built around the turn of the century (20th century, that is) and is built from a lot of stone, both inside and out. The main lobby had fireplaces at either end that were big enough walk in. Sadly I don’t have a picture of inside of the place but here is a pic of the outside. Apparently they were working on the roof tiles, ergo the scaffolding.




We had an awesome lunch outside overlooking Asheville. I had the prime rib sandwich, Brook had a salad that was exploding with Canadian lobster. Mmm Mmm bitch! So, I told few folks we were staying at the Grove Park on Friday night and everyone I spoke to said the spa was amazing. Indeed, friends. Indeed. Contained mostly underground, we took the elevator down to the first floor and then walked through a tunnel over to the spa. Eucalyptus and peppermint filled the air. Ahh…. The spa had two large pools, one was deemed a lap pool and was heated to 84 degrees while the other was chill-out-and-float-around-pool and was heated to 88 degrees. The cool thing about the pool was that it was filled with a saline based solution and didn’t contain any chlorine so your skin wasn’t all dried out when you got out. They also had two hot tubs, heated to 103 degrees, each of which had two waterfalls you could put your back under and enjoy a powerful yet relaxing massage at 200 gallons per minute. For obvious reasons I couldn’t take the camera in the spa but here is how it looks from the outside.



That night we had dinner at the Grand Bohemian Hotel in downtown. But wait! Before we get to that- another bit of intensity-in-ten-cities must be discussed. As we were walking around the hotel we noticed a table in the lobby that said BMW Resort Driving Tour. ‘That looks interesting,’ I thought. Later, after we came back from the spa, Brook read something about it in the daily goings-on paper she’d picked up. Apparently they just give you a BMW to drive around for a few hours. A short game of phone tag later and we had secured a 2010 BMW 335ci hardtop convertible for the evening. For realsies.





That car was freakin’ B.A. Our ride now acquired, the adventure to find the hotel where we were having dinner began. So I’m driving this 300HP, 3.0 liter, turbocharged inline V6 BMW and I’m not able to take it above 30mph because we’re lost in downtown Asheville. Define irony! Eventually we find it, drop the keys with the valet and head inside. The hotel was recently completed and it was phenomenal. All of the little touches were covered. Check out the menus, below. As we were walking through to our table I noticed peoples faces, and their menus were glowing in the low-light ambiance. At first glance I thought they were LCD panels displaying a PDF file pulled wirelessly from some server (hwahh!) but upon closer inspection- paper menus with a fluorescent light behind them that turned on when you opened the menu. Still, they were very bad ass.



I had the short rib, Brook had the duck. We did some damn fine eating this weekend! Also, I had an Old Fashioned made with Woodford Reserve. Yumma dum dum! After dinner, needless to say, it was on. We got out on I-40 and drove around for about an hour. It took me a while to come across an opportunity to open the car up but our persistence paid off and we were eventually cruising at 120mph and were stopped only by my fear of a revoked license- the car had a lot more to give

We checked out of the hotel the next morning and drove/walked around Asheville for the afternoon. Mostly we were trying to find a place to park… then we were trying to find a place to eat that didn’t have twenty people lined up outside waiting to get in. After lunch we checked into the Inn on Biltmore Estate. That place is insane. I didn’t actually get any pictures of the hotel, but here are a few of the view out our window.

That night we went to the Biltmore for the Candlelight Christmas Evening tour. Having never been to the Biltmore before I didn’t know what to expect, other than a big house, but I seriously had no idea how big it was. It was jaw droppingly huge. Plus it was all decked out for Christmas, including a 30 foot real tree in the one of the main rooms that was completely decked out. Sadly I have no pictures of any of this. After getting back to our room that night we decided we wanted to go back tomorrow so we booked one of the early afternoon tours for Sunday. Since we’d already seen most of the house, we booked a tour called the “Legacy of the Land” that gave a lot of background info on the 8,000 acres of Biltmore Estate, plus the 110,000+ acres that they originally had but were later donated to form Pisgah National Forest. One of the most amazing facts about the area is that when it was purchased the land was completely barren from over-farming and there were no trees to be seen. The Vanderbilt family had over 3,000,000 trees planted to create the view you see in the pictures above, and below. I’ll leave you with a bunch of pics we took of the house and the surrounding areas. Peace out homies!

What the haps is, folks? I hope the first weekend of frost warnings and sweater weather finds everyone as healthy as can be expected. I’m steadily gaining ground in my battle against pink eye, and my earlier illness has receded to a nagging cough… which Brook now has. Tuesday I woke up with yellow crusticles sealing my left eye shut (in fact I had to pull it open.) A trip to the doctors office which involved putting some orange dye in my eye to check for retinal bruising (there wasn’t any) confirmed the mauve assault. Interestingly, I had been to the doctor the previous weekend in Richmond because I thought I had pink eye. “No”, the doctor said, “it just looks like allerigies to me.” As relieved as I was at his diagnosis I was quite pissed that I had to go back to the doctor a few days later only to have that ish turned around.

The weekend was pretty good aside from the damp, chilly weather. It actually followed a pretty good week as well. Since I had pink eye, which eventually became pink eyes, I was working from home Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I gotta say, I miss working from home a bit. I worked from home for 3 months after getting to Raleigh and it was kinda nice to do again. I will add that my productivity went up quite a bit as well thanks to the solitary confinement.

Friday night and most of Saturday had Brook and I couch shopping. Our mission to find an adequate flesh support apparatus began Labor Day weekend but we’d been wrapped up in other things since that weekend and never actually finished the job. Our ventures during Labor Day had yielded a lot of a high price tags, a firm decision that we wanted a sectional, and an extensive education in the different types of fabrics [microfiber, chanel, etc.], leather [top grain, split, bonded, blended], and the different kinds of support systems that couches can have [8-way hand-tied, no-sag-spring]. An education, indeed. So much so that when we went looking this weekend the sales people we dealt with asked if we used to sell furniture. Many stores were visited this weekend and in the end we went back to one that we fell in love with over Labor Day weekend. It has been purchased and I can’t wait to plop my A on it and sit around for a few hours. We should get it this week.

Saturday morning I had to drop off my car at Nissan for some much needed maintenance. Oil change, state inspection, new wiper blades, brake inspection- OH, and new battery because the sombitch would no longer start without a jump. How I loathe that vehicle. Twenty-five months, almost to the day, since I drove it off the lot and the battery craps out. Really? One ray of sunshine did pierce through the otherwise crap-lined cloud of that experience- the brakes did not need to be replaced. In that moment, if only briefly, I hated it just a little less.

Saturday night we dorked it out and watched the latest Harry Potter movie. Rather, we put it in and within 10 minutes were like “what the F is going on here”. Apparently there was a movie between Goblet of Fire and Half-blood Prince called Order of the Phoenix (pronounced ‘pah – ho – nicks’). I had that one as well, and had definitely watched but I couldn’t remember anything about it, let alone how it ended. I decided, much to Brook’s dismay, that we had 2 hours of homework before we could watch the new one. Yes, I made her sit through the previous one. How much did it help us to understand the first 15 minutes of Half-blood? Not. Very. Much. Brook wanted the last two hours of her life back- I could only offer her an ice cream bar.

We went to church this morning and then went to meet the videographer from our wedding to get his ‘first-cut’ of our video. We watched it this afternoon and were very happy with it. We’re going to have him swap out a few songs and see if he can put an effect here and there but he did an amazing job. I’d like follow up with Chuckles McDouchbagger who sent us that scathing email some months ago and cram our DVD up his self-righteous dumper.

Anywho, I suppose that’s about it for…. wait for it! So let me touch on this Girl Talk business. Have you heard of Girl Talk?? I’ll guess that you might have as I’m usually the last to find out about new music. So, I was in my Executive, doing executive tasks and reading GQ magazine. Yes, the clothes are mostly fagacious but they do have some good articles- don’t judge me. They had an article on this band, really a one-man-show, who calls himself Girl Talk (to my dismay, the article did not explain why). He’s one of these laptop composer guys who takes samples from an ish ton of songs and combines them into sync’d up techno style jams. A copyright lawsuit waiting to happen. Two albums mysteriously showed up on my PC and I’ve been giving them a listen while writing this so if this post seems all over the place or disorganized its because I’m trying to figure out what lyrics are mixed over what beat and from what songs is the beat comprised…etc. My favorite ’song’ thus far involves, among other things, lyrics from Notorious BIG’s Juicy laid over Elton John’s Tiny Dancer. Awesome. I highly recommend it. Peace out homies!

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Leaves are changing, temperatures are dropping, flu shots are being given. Fall is upon us. And perhaps the worst part, worse than getting sick and having less daylight and, sadly, just as bankable, the state fair is coming to town. Oh, how I loathe the state fair. How do you get the entire state population into a small, concentrated area at the same time? Apparently all you need is some freakishly large livestock, a deep fryer, and an ish ton of food types that one normally wouldn’t deep fry. Oh, and carnies. Stand back and watch the madness ensue. Deep-fried bologna, haggas, turkey, banana, oreo, chitlin sandwich anyone? I digress…

As I stare blankly at my ‘Daily Working Report’ trying to figure out what I can do to get these assclowns to push a live order through so I can close some tickets, I felt the immediate need to… not look at that anymore. I hit The Ingram, per my daily regimen, and saw Lindsey’s most recent post- found here. Upon reading I was immediately reminded of this classic Lewis Black stand-up. Now, don’t get me wrong I love some candy corn. I even love the candy pumpkins they throw in there now. Nothing says fall, or Halloween, like a miniature sugary gourd.

Greetings folks. So it’s 2:30pm on Friday afternoon and I’m at home. Ill. I’ve gotten a case of whatever virus is going around and it’s manifested itself, thus far, in the form of aches, shakes, and chills. It’s great fun, really. So, now that I have a minute- why not a post!?

In the time (weeks) since my last post Brook and I have been quite the busy bees. We’ve completely moved all my stuff out of my old apartment and scattered between our new place, our 10×10 storage unit, and GoodWill. The apartment has come together quite nicely and we actually have all the boxes unpacked and place set out for everything. We’ve also gotten 98.9% of all the stuff out of Brook’s apartment. Only a few tasks remain there: moving the china and repainting the big blue wall. You may recall a post last year where we painted said wall blue… The trip to Sherwin Williams has already been made to pick up a gallon of Believable Buff (#6120). Guess what we’re doing on Saturday??

This might be the point where you’d expect to see some pictures of the new diggs… not so much. For starters, I’m not actually sure where my camera is and secondly, the blanket cocoon I’ve wrapped myself in has risen to a toasty utopia and I dare not venture out into the cold. There will be some pics before too long so please hold your WTF’s, b.

In other news Brook and I, well I think mostly me, have gotten hooked on a new show. No, it’s not Glee. I’ve tried to prepare Brook for the fact that that S will probably be canceled by November, on account of it’s abominable. No, I’m talking about A&E’s Mad Men. A drama set in the 1960’s that follows the professional and personal lives of a company of ad executives. We’ve only seen it through the third episode (so, three hours worth of show) and there is actually yet to be one happy thing that has happened. There hasn’t been a single positive experience that the characters have gone through. In fact, we usually reserve an episode of The Office, or Dragons’ Den or Shark Tank to watch after it goes off to overcome the urge to down a bottle of laundry detergent. But still, I love it. Brook asked me last night why I love the show so much. I didn’t have a good answer. The show is well-acted and well-executed, and from what the reviews say, pretty accurate in depicting the work place environment of that era. Plus, Don Draper is always ordering an Old Fashioned- a whiskey cocktail that I hope to learn to make this weekend. But again, nothing good ever happens. When the show ends you’re left wanting more (at least I am) but it’s not because there was some cliffhanger in the last minute like every freaking episode of Lost. I got nothing. Just watch it.

I guess that’s about it for now. I’m hoping that amidst all the chores we have to do this weekend that I’ll start feeling better. Luckily I feel pretty confident in saying that I have a never-ending supply of Bayer aspirin.