Bend it Like Brian

This afternoon I found a park where I could on a soccer field for the first time since IM indoor at Carolina. It felt good to get out and kick the ball around except it was insanely hot; probably wasn't smart to go at 2:45 but it made for a good sweat. I ran around the pitch and did some dribbling drills as well as practiced some juggaling and set pieces.

While I do feel the biking has helped my fitness it's a different type of exercise than running so I realized I'm going to have to start running again and probably alternate that with some biking and with the little weight lifting I do, that should be some good cross training. Hopefully I'll start to see some results.

Another realization is that I need some new boots (figured I'd say that instead of cleats since I've already said pitch and set pieces) as I developed a couple of blisters. I think I'll hold off on buying some until I actually get picked up by a team. In the meantime my turf boots should work fine. The highlight of the afternoon was when I did set up a shot similar to Beckham's amazing free kick during the World Cup (I forget which game) and it curved right into the upper left corner, I can't get the dip and curve but it was a good feeling to know that I could do something at least somewhat like it should be done (of course I missed probably 5 more of the shots I tried again from the same place).

In other news, contininuing my infatuation with the Food Network you should join me in watching Alton Brown's new show Feasting on Asphalt which began yesterday. I'm sure it'll be replayed many times so just set your DVR. The show is a simple concept of him riding his motorcycle across the country while avoiding interstates and all chain restaurants, sounds like a good plan to me. He started in Charleston, SC and then headed to Savannah. From Savannah he traveled up to Washington, GA then to Taccoa then to Spartanburg then to Charlotte and the first episode ended. I was hoping he'd end up wondering through Carrollton but it doesn't look like he will. I really enjoyed this first episode as it was all about the south and our good food and down home ways. Take that Yankees! His final destination is Los Angeles so it should be interesting to see the different food he finds across the country and to see if anything really is that different 3,000 miles away.

What Tha Followup

In response to my previous post I figured I'd provide an update on at least one front. As I mentioned, my driver became broken stuff on Friday afternoon so I had to get one today in preparation for the two work golf outings this week. This morning I headed to Carolina Custom Golf and went straight for help in picking out my new toy. I was sufficiently clueless as to what I needed as far as head size, shaft length, and shaft stiffness so the guy put me on the swing monitor which records with a high speed camera and computer how you hit the ball and your mechanics. After warming up I proceed to hit the ball very well my first drive and shot an 89.9% which pretty much is an A. The guy said there's not much room for improvement and I warned him that I'm definitely not consistent, a fact he soon realized. Overall I hit decently well for an average of 270-280 yards which is about 20 yards farther than normal. I hit five different drivers and ended up selecting a Nicklaus airMax DPT 460 driver which was the first suggested by the salesman. He says he uses that one and I tried some that cost twice as much and I hit the Nicklaus more consistently and I liked the price so I went with it. We'll see how it works out on the real course on Monday afternoon.

This afternoon Emily came over to see my apartment for the first time since she just finished summer school at Carolina and his headed home to Carrollton for the next month. She wanted to check out a ski store that was having a big clearnace sale in search of a winter coat but didn't have any luck. We then headed to Hillsborough Street to eat at El Rodeo which was good as always. After luppper we hit Cameron Village in search of mom's birthday present. We were successful on our first stop at Talbot's where we bought her a purse. I also lucked out and found a couple of casual dress shirts on sale for a great price and I also bought a pair of pants. I'm officially old now since I own Talbot's clothing (but it does look good and received Emily's approval). After shopping Emily headed back to the Hill.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, Fayetteville Street reopened this weekend and ther was a big bash with bodacious fireworks. I didn't go to the party since Emily didn't want go but I was sitting on the couch as the launch time grew closer and decided to go watch them and try to take some pictures. I googled Raleigh skyline photos and found the perfect suggestion, the Boylan Street bridge. I rushed out the door to hit up Target for a cheap mini tripod and bought some golf balls too, then headed downtown again. I arrived and found a place to park about 9:00 and there were probably 15 other people on the bridge watching but as the time passed probably 100+ showed up for the perfect view. This was by far the best fireworks photography I've done (only tried twice) and it definitely helped to have the D20 so I could see what I'm doing with some test pics (the lcd control panel light also is very handy). Though I knew the photos wouldn't be anything to write home about since I didn't have a cable release and was using the mini tripod I figured I'd try. Here are three of the best shots. My next two camera acquisitions will definitely be a cable release and tripod.

While on the bridge the fireworks weren't the only entertainment I ended up meeting some people and talking with them awhile before they started, one of whom was a man in probably his 50s that was definitely drunk (brought his beer with him too but entertaining. He liked to talk about all the construction work and the sawdust he generates and not knowing what to do with it. I suggested he make mdf and he went off about that stuff; he only uses real wood. The other person was a nice 30 y/o lady name Teresa that waitress at the Capital City Club and just moved back to Raleigh from ATL. Overall a very interesting and entertaining experience. You never know who you'll meet. It turned out to be a pretty good, though expensive, day.

What tha?

Yesterday I was planning a trip to Auburn, AL for work and was looking at flights on Orbitz and there are three options for getting to Auburn from Raleigh, you have to fly through either Charlotte, Memphis, or Atlanta in route to Montgomery then drive an hour to get to Auburn. So I posed the options to the guy I'm traveling with and we selected the Memphis route on Northwest because it offered the best times and wasn't too expensive, $177/person/roundtrip. As I was calculating travel times to decided on a meeting time I checked the actual Northwest website and saw that the price was listed as $866. What tha!?! Yeah in the 15 minutes I was checking flights, dicussing options, and filling out my travel request form and getting ready to call the developers to confirm the price jump to almost $700. Needless to say I didn't book any flights yesterday. Argh.

The second incident of the day occurred on the driving range after work. I was hitting my driver and during one swing about half through my large bucket of balls I hit the ball and saw the ball and my club head bounding down the range and landing right next to the 75 yard marker. Kind of funny and embarrassing but luckily nobody saw it happen. I just left the club head out there since I didn't want to make everyone stop hitting so I could run and get it. Another "what tha?!?" moment. Now I'm going to buy a new driver this morning in preparation for the two work golf outings this week!

Oh yeah and North Raleigh has a paucity of soccer fields. My new soccer ball arrived this week and I wanted to go kick around this morning so I left around 7:30 in hopes of finding a vacanct field and the one I went to first already had an organized game on going. Then I tried every park I know about in a 10 minute drive and if you want to play baseball or softball you're in luck but no soccer fields or even open unprogrammed space. I'll have to do some research and ask around work

Tax Credits 101

Today some networking/acquisitions working started coming to fruition. Last October I went to Ft. Lauderdale with my boss for a Faith-based development conference sponsored by BB&T. While down there I met several non-profit directors from NC and they all seemed really excited about getting into affordable housing development, specifically utilizing the low income housing tax credit program. Towards the middle of June one of the ladies called me out of the blue wanting to discuss how we could work together. Since our company-sponsored conference was coming up I invited her to attend, turns out her husband attended and went to the property management sessions instead of the developer sessions...oh well. Fast forward to last week and she calls again and wants to set up a meeting face-to-face to discuss development since she's new to the game, so I set a date for this morning.

I hadn't really planned on a formal presentation until I was informed we had a "Tax Credit 101" type presentation already created so I decided to work with that. It turns out what was the perfect thing for her. The presentation was a whopping 88 slides but they presented the material in an easy to follow order. We ended up talking for 1.5 hours as I presented the material and answered her questions. She's definitely fired up to get the ball rolling with affordable housing development. This game isn't that easy to play with many, many balls that a developer must juggle and hurdles that must be jumped for a successful development to be built but I think she's getting a feel for everything. It's really neat to be a part of helping somebody work towards achieving a dream; especially when the dream helps a lot of other people have a place to live. Even if nothing comes of the meeting it was great practice in describing the tax credit program and presenting all the steps to getting a development built. My boss also stopped in to meet her at one point and she told him she was very impressed with me when I met her in FL which made me feel great! One things for sure, I haven't done that much talking at once in a long time, my throat was scratchy at the end.

In other news, here's a brainless game I saw on the Hive today: Keep the tennis ball in the air (should be a soccer ball) My highest score is 27 and was my first time playing; I guess I get bored easily.

Also don't eat and exercise. I've been doing pretty well with exercising every day for the past couple of weeks in the afternoon. The only downside is that I'm always hungry when I get home from work so I tend to eat dinner and that isn't such a good thing before exercising. I guess I just need to eat a snack of some fruit or something to get something in me and for a little post work energy boost. Do any of you wise blog readers have any suggestions?

Downtown

Yesterday morning I ventured downtown for an Urban Land Institute roundtable, the topic was the opening of Fayetteville Street. For those not in the know, Fayetteville Street:Raleigh :: Peachtree St:Atlanta, but Fayetteville Street is a lot shorter (1/2 mile) and there's only one. In the early '70s it was converted to a pedestrian mall like many downtown streets at the time to compete with the burgeoning suburban malls unfortunately almost all of them were a miserable failure and Raleigh's was no different. One interesting thing that came out of the speakers panel was that design by committee is diffcult (duh) and that benches should have a middle arm rest to keep people from sleeping on them. Apparently the new benches are already being utilized for some sleep with the most popular ones located in front of the WTVD (local ABC affiilate) studio on Fayetteville St. a bench with a view of TVs, can't beat that.

I didn't get to really check out the streetscape yesterday as it was raining and I was in a hurry to get back to work but it will definitely be an improvement. It's also created a gravity to downtown which is leading to several hundred millions of dollars in private development. The biggest downside is that there is no moderately priced housing downtown with median condo prices according to today's N&O of about $343,000. There are only so many young professionals (who makes that much money as a young professional? There are only so many lawyers) and retirees out there but as of now condos are selling quickly which leads to a very homogenous populace.

This Saturday is the grand opening of the new street and looks to be a big party, even Good Morning America will be there. The City of Raleigh's press release even states this, "A military flyover and a bodacious fireworks display will officially conclude the party and begin the new life for North Carolina's main street." Who says bodacious? Maybe the Ninja Turtles will be there! I think Emily, her boyfriend, and I are going.

Bodacious Press Release

Sir Walter!

Get Outdoors

It's a great day for Americans competing in international sports; first Floyd Landis won the Tour de France which continues the streak of Americans winning the last 8 years and then Tiger wins the British Open.

This morning I skipped church and spent the morning enjoying the great outdoors. I headed what is becoming one of my favorite parks, Occoneechee Mountain State Natural Area in Hillsborough for some fishing and hiking. My first cast hit the water at 8:30 and I was the only one in the park for about an hour! I've come to the conclusion that the park grows extra smart fish. They'll follow a lure once or twice and then quickly completely ignore it which is different than most places; either that or I've lost my bream catching ability (which could be the case). Anyway, after about an hour of futility with a top water plug, plastic-tailed road runner, dough bait I made, and a couple of flys on the fly rod, I tied on a brand new crankbait and that's when it happend. The first cast with the brand new lure and bam a largemouth bass hit it! The fish didn't jump and pulled pretty hard. It wasn't a lunker by any means but it was the biggest bass I've caught in quite awhile. I guess there are really fish in the lake. Unfortunately I didn't have anymore luck, but at least I caught one.

After fishing I hit the trails for some hiking around the mountain. I thought I saw a couple of rare Brown Elfin butterflies (info here) but it turns out they were some other brown species of butterfly. Oh well, it was still a great Sunday morning excursion.

For some scale and gotta have the foot pic (right Jacs?)

The Lure, a Rapala DT-6 in Green Tiger

Fun Day!

As you probably know by now if you regularly read my blog, my company has a Fun Committee that plans events for the staff to participate in every couple of months. Yesterday the office was closed for the afternoon and we all headed to Frankie's Fun Park for some good times. I was excited as I've been wanting to go to Frankie's since I discovered it. The bonus was that the company paid for four attractions and $2.50 worth of video games for everyone. I played a round of mini golf, two go kart races, and a rousing game of guys vs. girls laser tag all of which was very fun. It's interesting to see who the competitive people are and how they think when they're in situations like that. We smoked the girls team in laser tag, outscoring them 40,000 something to like 10,000. The company president/ceo had the highest score because he just sat near the girls team base and shot they're target which was worth more points than people. Pretty smart, so I started doing it too. :)

One of the video games is a big trivia setup that allows six people to play at a time by answering a multiple choice question, speed and accuracy are the keys. The first game we played I blew everyone out of the water which I think frustrated the other five players who are all older by probably twenty-plus years. With my bounty of 90 tickets from that game I bought a Frankie's shot glass for 50 and gave the other tickets away to a family with a young child. It was nice to have the company pay for the games since each attraction is $6/person; that would quickly add up if you took your kids there plus video games. I'd say it's worth the trip out there if anyone ever comes to visit and wants to play some laser tag or other games.

Baseball

Last night the Chalmers and I went made the trek over to Zebulon to use some free tickets from work for the Mudcats vs. the Huntsville Stars AA game. It was a hot and humid night but the Cats prevailed and I think we all had a good time though I didn't realize how far Zebulon was from Burlington so it was a late night for the B-towners. Another interesting tidbit is that the Mudcats third baseman used to play for U(sic)GA and was the one that got harassed into making a couple of errors one game at the Rusty C but he did play well last night.

In other news, if you want to go to the Tech vs. NC State game in Raleigh on Nov. 4 let me know ASAP as we're going to order tickets soon before the go offline. They are $40 through RamblingWreck.com.

Second Harvest

I've grown tired recently of just cooking for myself (it's much more fun and enjoyable to cook for/with somebody) but I think I'm back in the mood with tonight's culinary adventure. For dinner I had grilled chicken with Emeril's Italian Seasoning and a pesto pasta salad recipe I saw online that turned out to be great. For dessert I made a strawberry granita (like a strawberry snow cone) and flambé strawberries that I saw on Take Home Chef on TLC. It all turned out great and I didn't burn down the apartment when I flambed the strawberries. The strawberry flambé requires cognac so I bought some Courvoisier VS today (cue Busta Rhymes), man that's some strong stuff, but it combined well with the strawberries.











In other observations, my grandparents always watch the Lawrence Welk Show on PBS every Saturday so I flipped it on tonight and saw a funny occurence. The had a "tag dance" which meant that ladies in the audience formed a line to dance with Lawrence Welk while the band played. One lady would dance for a few bars and the next tapped his shoulder to cut in and so on. You'd think this would work well and it did for about two or three ladies but then somebody skipped the line and came from the other side of the stage and cut in, from there it was a free for all. It was apparent who were the aggressive women and who were the more polite or timid. I thought it was all kind of funny. Then after the song ended a girl asked Lawrence Welk if she could dance with the guitar player from the band, the girl looked to be in high school as did the guitar player. When they started dancing it was another free for all even with old ladies. That kid didn't know what was going on and had a smile from ear to ear. Funny stuff. Below is a screen cap of the dancing.

Articles

Here are two interesting articles from today's New York Times. The first is a Q&A with the Assistant Managing Editor for Photography that my sister found. The second is about the Napoleon Dynamite Festival in Preston, Idaho where the film was filmed. Enjoy!

"Talk to the Newsroom: Assistant Managing Editor for Photography Michele McNally"

"Rural Idaho Town Seeks to Turn Film's Cult Status Into Prosperity"

Weekend Update

Saturday Joel and I played golf in Burlington at Indian Valley; Joel beat me 116 to 118. Golf is one frustrating game, sometimes the ball flys straight and other times it goes in undesireable angles and curves. The positives of the rounds are that my chipping and putting were much improved and the course was pretty nice for a municipal course and only cost $15.

After the game we went to Zack's and grabbed some hotdogs. I stayed at my grandparents' on Saturday night and went to church with Joel on Sunday morning. After church we hit up Bojangles and then watched the World Cup final (Joel wore his Buffon jersey (Italian keeper). We both concurred that France outplayed Italy, especially in the second half and that Zidane is a punk. Even if he is one of the greatest players ever he's a punk.

Happy Independence Day!

It's been a busy weekend. Friday night I rented The New World on demand since I never saw it in the theatres. It was pretty good and I recommend it, though it wasn't how I thought it would be. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a Native American and see those tall ships emerge on the horizon for the first time. I also can't imagine how that first encounter went. Kind of mind blowing how things possibly unfolded at that time in history.

Saturday was errand day.

Sunday I went to church and was disappointed that we only sang one patriotic song. Sunday afternoon I played golf at Quaker Creek in Mebane with my dad and finally beat him! I shot a 121 and he shot 128. It appears that the 108 about a month ago was a fluke. My dad came up for the weekend because of my grandparents' 60th anniversary which was yesterday. Man that's a long time; major props to them. I spent the night at their house on Sunday and Monday nights.

Monday morning dad and I went canoeing for a couple of hours at Lake Mackintosh in Burlington and had a great time. I even caught a small catfish on a plastic roadrunner jig! The lake also had kayaks for rent so I'll have to go try one of those out some day that I feel like flipping over and getting wet. After canoeing I did a little work and took some photos of two apartment sites we're providing equity for in Burlington. We then headed to the tractor store and I took some pics there since my dad is wanting to create a website to record the history of Oxford Equipment Company. We then (a lot of we thens) hit up Zack's in downtown Burlington for some great hotdogs. After lunch we drove out to see the Glencoe Mill Village rehabilitation undertaken by Preservation North Carolina and we were both impressed.

Monday night Emily came over after classes and studying and we all went to Longhorns for the anniversary dinner (their preferred choice, a local restaurant, was closed). After dinner and converation about the recent innovation of Diet Coke and Mentos fountains dad and I provided the evenings "fireworks" with four two litters. It was kind of anticlimatic but still worth trying out. Here's one of our bottle fountains: Click Here. If you want to see a cool bottle fountain check this out: Coke Fountain

Today on my way home I stopped in Hillsborough for some fishing at the Occoneechee Mountain State Natural Area and I caught one tiny bream that I used for bait but it didn't work. Still it was fun getting outside for a couple of hours. After fishing I came home and exercised, watched the Italy vs. Germany match, signed up as a free agent for the Triangle Adult Soccer League fall soccer, and the Capitol Fourth in DC on TV. Standing on my porch I smell the scent of grills and hamburgers wafting through the trees and I really miss having my own backyard, but I know it'll happen in time. Hopefully next year at this time I'll have friends to hang out with and watch fireworks with. :)

Images of the Weekend