Monday morning, 8:16 am. First cup of coffee, still checking email. Maybe IMDB.com for celebrity gossip (we all have our guilty pleasures).
Coworker #1: Have a good weekend, Curtis?
Me: Yeah, it was nice. I went to Atlanta and Chattanooga to register for baby stuff. It was pretty much exactly what I wanted to do to recharge after a long week.
Coworker #1: Really? Gosh, I thought you hated that kind of stuff...
Me: Nah! I know I put out this macho vibe but it's all an act. When it comes to shopping, it's pretty much my favorite thing to do. Some people like to play video games, crap like that. I love shopping. Though, I had no idea that looking at things for the baby could be so much fun. Wait till I show you the kick a** bedding we picked out at Pottery Barn for He Who Must Must Be Named. He's going to love it!
Coworker #2: Are you serious, man? That sounds worse than filling out TPS Reports.
Me: Let me tell you, it is a thrill registering for all these gifts. The whole store is your playground and you can register for whatever you want. Sure, it's sometimes hard to decide if you want the sports themed crib sheets verses the Winnie the Pooh sheets but you've just got to stay focused. I packed several Powerades so that I would not get dehydrated. The Cliffbars really helped too. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
__
I dragged Kristina and my mom, who was in town visiting, on trips to Target, Pottery Barn Kids and Babies R Us this weekend. They didn't really want to go but I made them. "We've got to get this stuff done," I said. We powered through it, but not without lots of whining and complaining. So we now have gift registries established should anyone feel like sending a gift. Now, it feels weird writing that, almost like I'm fishing for gifts. That is certainly not the case, believe me. I guess it is just one of those expected acts of our society these days. Kris wanted to register for DVDs and PlayStation 3 games but I told her that would be a little tacky. Good grief.
We're picking out paint colors for the nursery this week. I can hardly wait!
Pottery Barn Kids Id - 2119547
Our Target registry
Our Babies R Us registry Id - 41037244
Sunday, March 30, 2008
An Answered Prayer
A quick post to share an answered prayer:
For quite a while now, I (along with others, no doubt) have been praying for a dear friend of mine. This person is extremely bright, thoughtful and fun but has been in a funk for a quite some time due to their situation at work. My prayer for this person has been that God would provide them an opportunity to be in a place that valued them for their expertise and talents. Throughout their search and various interviews, I continued to pray that God would lead them to where he could be use them, a prayer that I pray for myself all the time.
God has answered this prayer! My friend was offered and accepted an awesome job with an amazing organization. It is a great move for their career with opportunities for future promotions. Throughout the process, God has had this in mind, even though we were all blind to it for a long time. And He knows what is best. So even though the new job and a move will bring trials and tough choices, God has prepared this new path and it is so exciting!
Lord, I thank you for your plan, your timing and for the gift of friends. I am very proud of my friend!
For quite a while now, I (along with others, no doubt) have been praying for a dear friend of mine. This person is extremely bright, thoughtful and fun but has been in a funk for a quite some time due to their situation at work. My prayer for this person has been that God would provide them an opportunity to be in a place that valued them for their expertise and talents. Throughout their search and various interviews, I continued to pray that God would lead them to where he could be use them, a prayer that I pray for myself all the time.
God has answered this prayer! My friend was offered and accepted an awesome job with an amazing organization. It is a great move for their career with opportunities for future promotions. Throughout the process, God has had this in mind, even though we were all blind to it for a long time. And He knows what is best. So even though the new job and a move will bring trials and tough choices, God has prepared this new path and it is so exciting!
Lord, I thank you for your plan, your timing and for the gift of friends. I am very proud of my friend!
Monday, March 24, 2008
Easter and other items
First off, I hope that everyone had a great Easter. The weather was beautiful in Columbia and Greenville, where we were this past weekend. We had a great time with the Browns and it was great to worship the risen Lord at Shandon with the Joneses. Here is what we looked like two days ago. Notice the baby bump on My Baby's Momma:
Other items:
Other items:- No names yet. But, in the mean time, Baby Callaway will be referred to as "He Who Must Be Named." It is much more fun than calling him Baby Callaway, I think. If you have any name suggestions, real or fake, please post them in the Comments section. We'd love to hear your real or fake names for our child. Just remember that we reserve the right to use or shoot down all names and will eventually go with whatever we want to call him, even if it is Kramer Moonbeam Callaway.
- Some amazing news was delivered over on Keepin' Up with the Joneses, the blog of our dear friends Rachel and Doug. They are newly pregnant and we are very excited to have a couple to experience this time with. We were lucky enough to learn in person this weekend. I'm pulling for a girl so that He Who Must Be Named can hit on her pretty hard.
- We held our annual live and in person fantasy baseball draft over the weekend in Greenville. A bunch of my buddies are in the league so it was great to see Bogle and Baggett this weekend. Oh wait, Baggett wasn't there because he couldn't drive the 45 minute drive from Greenwood to draft in person and had to phone it in. Way to go man. I managed to drive from Dalton but you couldn't make it from Greenwood. I hate it that you weren't there, man.
- Lastly, Kris was watching Emeril tonight and I don't understand why everyone cheers when he puts garlic in the dish. If anyone can rationally explain this, I would love to know. I just think that his audience is deranged.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Constant Gardener
Just a quick post to give you a quick update from our silly dog, Allie. Kristina caught Allie lounging in the middle of our water deprived garden today. It's the first time we've seen her lying down in there. Notice that she's not far from her precious frisbee either. She's something else.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Catching up
Thanks to everyone who has emailed us over the past two weeks. We are both behind on our correspondence so expect to hear from us soon. Almost as soon as we got back in town from Spain, we left to go to Greenville for Matthew Fowler and Hillary Powell's wedding. It was so great to see everyone. In fact, all of my best friends (sans Trey) were actually in the service. It was pretty cool to spend so much time with everyone, even if I am still behind on my sleep.
I still have some random thoughts to share from our trip, plus some other things that I've been thinking about lately. The problem is that I usually think about what I want to write about while I'm at work. And for obvious reasons, I have a self imposed "no blogging at work" policy, unless I'm eating lunch. So by the time I get home, I've usually forgotten about fodder for posts. So just think, these posts would be much more insightful and absolutely hilarious if I wrote between 8 am and 5 pm. Alas, all my creative juices will be spent on Shaw Contract Group, which is still pretty cool, I think.
So to make up for the lack of posts, here is a short clip of our time in the town of Girona, just to give you a little taste of Spain. The defense wall around the city that the Romans built is still intact and we were able to walk on it. Very cool. Unfortunately, one of us still has a childish sense of humor. Can you guess who it is?
I still have some random thoughts to share from our trip, plus some other things that I've been thinking about lately. The problem is that I usually think about what I want to write about while I'm at work. And for obvious reasons, I have a self imposed "no blogging at work" policy, unless I'm eating lunch. So by the time I get home, I've usually forgotten about fodder for posts. So just think, these posts would be much more insightful and absolutely hilarious if I wrote between 8 am and 5 pm. Alas, all my creative juices will be spent on Shaw Contract Group, which is still pretty cool, I think.
So to make up for the lack of posts, here is a short clip of our time in the town of Girona, just to give you a little taste of Spain. The defense wall around the city that the Romans built is still intact and we were able to walk on it. Very cool. Unfortunately, one of us still has a childish sense of humor. Can you guess who it is?
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
A Quick Trip Recap
I have many thoughts on traveling abroad and observations made while in Spain but I think I'll save them for another post. In all honesty, I'm still a tad jet-lagged and am looking forward to going to sleep soon. But, I want to give all of our 5 readers a quick recap of what we did on our trip to Barcelona.
A short 8 hour flight from Atlanta plopped us down in Barcelona, Spain. Pretty neat stuff. For 600 bucks you get a seat that doubles as a flotation device, half a soda and some peanuts. Whatever. From the airport we navigated our way via bus, subway, train and taxi out of the city to a small town to the northwest called Cardona, home of one of Spain's many paradors. These are historic castles and such that are owned by the government and run as lodging for tourists. Since we had always wanted to stay in a castle, we decided that Cardona was our best shot.
You can see the castle on the hill in background. The defensive position on the heights was impressive as the castle held a commanding presence over the entire valley. This picture was taken from the small town. We spent the night in neat and comfortable accommodations. The real treat were the views and the ambiance of the place.
From Cardona, we trekked back toward Barcelona via train and stopped at a place called Montserrat, a monastery also built on a mountain. Actually, Montserrat was above the clouds while we were there. The place is very old and we were amazed that it was constructed so high up. Yes, it was pretty touristy and we only saw 2 real live monks and 1 nun, but it was definitely worth the trip.
We then took the train back to Barcelona, were we stayed for the next 4 nights. The city is pretty amazing. It is a big city of 1.7 million people and boasts all the amenities you would expect, but it also has a rich history that really interested us. We found ourselves seeking out old Barcelona, tracking down Roman ruins and spending time in the Barri Gotic, or Gothic District. This is actually where we rented an apartment. The accommodations were fine and the location was perfect.
This is a picture of a remaining portion of the Roman defense wall that surrounded the original city. Pretty cool, huh? Our favorite museum was called the Museau de la Ciutat; its highlight were Roman ruins discovered and excavated in the 1930s. We saw the remains of the original city Forum, laundry, wine making facilities and a temple. Awesome stuff.
The enduring symbol of the city is La Sagrada Familia, a cathedral that began construction in the 1880s. Well as you can see from the picture, it is still under construction! Hard to believe. Antoni Gaudi is credited with the vision for the church and oversaw its construction for the first 30 or so years of the project until he was run over by a city tram. The work continues and is expected to end in 2026. I can't even begin to describe how unique this place is so you'll just have to take my word for it. The imagery is very different. Take a look at a few more pictures.
Getting sleepy....
The last highlight I'll share before I turn in is this: on our last full day, we decided to take a spur of the moment trip out of the city to Girona, about a 90 minute train ride northeast of the city. It turned out to be one of our favorite parts of the trip. We actually were able to walk a huge section of the Roman Wall in Girona. I wanted to pour hot oil from the top onto tourists but I was all out of hot oil. Bummer. We also saw a beautiful cathedral with the second widest gothic nave in the world behind St. Peter's. Yeah, it sounds like a stretch to me but you gotta have something to hang your hat on, right? Just ask Greenwood, SC and its Widest Mainstreet. But I digress. Girona was beautiful and also had an awesome restaurant called Blanc that served us some great seafood.
That is all for now. We will definitely try to write more soon. Feel free to post questions, if you have any. I also think that Kris is going to post our photos on Snapfish so we'll try to post the link to those as well for our 6 loyal readers out there.
A short 8 hour flight from Atlanta plopped us down in Barcelona, Spain. Pretty neat stuff. For 600 bucks you get a seat that doubles as a flotation device, half a soda and some peanuts. Whatever. From the airport we navigated our way via bus, subway, train and taxi out of the city to a small town to the northwest called Cardona, home of one of Spain's many paradors. These are historic castles and such that are owned by the government and run as lodging for tourists. Since we had always wanted to stay in a castle, we decided that Cardona was our best shot.
You can see the castle on the hill in background. The defensive position on the heights was impressive as the castle held a commanding presence over the entire valley. This picture was taken from the small town. We spent the night in neat and comfortable accommodations. The real treat were the views and the ambiance of the place.From Cardona, we trekked back toward Barcelona via train and stopped at a place called Montserrat, a monastery also built on a mountain. Actually, Montserrat was above the clouds while we were there. The place is very old and we were amazed that it was constructed so high up. Yes, it was pretty touristy and we only saw 2 real live monks and 1 nun, but it was definitely worth the trip.
We then took the train back to Barcelona, were we stayed for the next 4 nights. The city is pretty amazing. It is a big city of 1.7 million people and boasts all the amenities you would expect, but it also has a rich history that really interested us. We found ourselves seeking out old Barcelona, tracking down Roman ruins and spending time in the Barri Gotic, or Gothic District. This is actually where we rented an apartment. The accommodations were fine and the location was perfect.
This is a picture of a remaining portion of the Roman defense wall that surrounded the original city. Pretty cool, huh? Our favorite museum was called the Museau de la Ciutat; its highlight were Roman ruins discovered and excavated in the 1930s. We saw the remains of the original city Forum, laundry, wine making facilities and a temple. Awesome stuff.
The enduring symbol of the city is La Sagrada Familia, a cathedral that began construction in the 1880s. Well as you can see from the picture, it is still under construction! Hard to believe. Antoni Gaudi is credited with the vision for the church and oversaw its construction for the first 30 or so years of the project until he was run over by a city tram. The work continues and is expected to end in 2026. I can't even begin to describe how unique this place is so you'll just have to take my word for it. The imagery is very different. Take a look at a few more pictures.
Getting sleepy....The last highlight I'll share before I turn in is this: on our last full day, we decided to take a spur of the moment trip out of the city to Girona, about a 90 minute train ride northeast of the city. It turned out to be one of our favorite parts of the trip. We actually were able to walk a huge section of the Roman Wall in Girona. I wanted to pour hot oil from the top onto tourists but I was all out of hot oil. Bummer. We also saw a beautiful cathedral with the second widest gothic nave in the world behind St. Peter's. Yeah, it sounds like a stretch to me but you gotta have something to hang your hat on, right? Just ask Greenwood, SC and its Widest Mainstreet. But I digress. Girona was beautiful and also had an awesome restaurant called Blanc that served us some great seafood.
That is all for now. We will definitely try to write more soon. Feel free to post questions, if you have any. I also think that Kris is going to post our photos on Snapfish so we'll try to post the link to those as well for our 6 loyal readers out there.
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