It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere!

We had some friends over this weekend to celebrate a few things. Johnathan and my new jobs, Marilyn's return from her research cruise (and her belated birthday), and one last hurrah for the parents-to-be, Mike and Alison. We also tested our ability to have our first vegetarian grill out, and here are the results.

To celebrate Johnathan's new job in Australia we bought him an Australian bottle of wine. Wade found the perfect one called "Evil" - it even had a barbed wire tattoo around the neck! Johnathan will have to report back on how it tastes...

Wade was also extremely happy to be able to break in the picnic table he built. Yes, that's right, there are 5 people comfortably seated on one side! We thought originally it would be an 8 person table, but now it looks like it could be a 12 with 2 chairs on the end! (Far left, working your way around the table is Taryn, Wade, Mike, Alison, Johnathan, Jason, Rachel, Marliyn, and Herman.) Now that's my kind of table. We grilled out and drank pitchers of margaritas in the back yard and had a good time. Amy's veggie burgers, vegetable kabobs, corn on the cobb plus some of Alison's awesome potato salad made for fantastic grillin'! (The carnivores did bring some chicken and burgers to supplement.) :) Only one thing thing could possibly make it any better...

...S'mores! We broke out the fire pit to have s'mores for dessert under a sky full of lightning and some thunder... we all stuffed ourselves just in time before the rain finally came down on us to put the fire out. After the rain chased us inside we watched Jason and Rachel's DVD from their round-the-world trip. We discovered Rach has quite a latent talent for producing DVDs! She put pictures and video from their trip to music and it was just AWESOME!





Here are Mike and Alison - the parents-to-be! Alison's due date is Monday - so exciting!! We hope they enjoyed their last hurrah before the poopy diapers set in. ; )


Thanks to everyone for making the trek down!! It was so great to see everyone!

Workin' Hard or Hardly Workin'?

I just added some more pictures to our Picasa site today under the Cara and Wade at Work sections. Wade's are more scenery and mine make it look like I don't actually work... but when the last day in my office arrives (July 29) I'll post cool pictures and things I will miss - and if you're lucky, I might even overcome my pride and post a picture of me in my "Smokey the Bear" get-up. Eeek.

Check out the new "Recipe of the Week" section to the right!

Sarasota is where??

So, it occurs to me that maybe not everyone knows where Sarasota is! Sarasota is the town just to the south of Bradenton (where I grew up, and we were married), on the west coast of Florida. It's got a neat arts scene, a year round farmer's market, a downtown that's being revitalized, and beautiful white sandy beaches. Seems like everything's close, but we'll be living in a smaller town which is a welcome change. I'll be staying at my Mom's house on Anna Maria Island (thank you!!) until Wade can join me September. Then we'll be looking to rent a house near my office in downtown. Wade will get to enjoy the benefits of working in a home office (think: naps with cats). Once we find a place visitors are always welcome!!

We already joined the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program at Geraldson's Community Farm (about 1 minute from where I grew up) so I'm excited to see what kind of goodies we'll get come fall when the CSA kicks into gear. (You can check the Local Harvest website to find a Farmer's Market or CSA near you) Stay tuned for our CSA experiment - I'll be blogging on our success (or lack there of) with a surprise basket of fresh local organic veggies every week. On a side note to that, since we've been working on going vegetarian for the last few months, I'll start posting a new recipe every week that even meat lovers can enjoy. We've been surprising ourselves with how good vegetarian food can actually be!

Also, in case you're interested, if you e-mail me I can add you to our blog list so whenever we publish something you'll get a notice. I also changed the settings on the comment section so you don't need a Google account to make a comment on our entries. :)

Wooo-Hooo!

As you can tell, I'm a wee bit excited about the new job. (Ok, we posed this picture, but I sure feel that way) I told Wade he should have been in the picture too - he can't wait to move to Sarasota.

Wade will be here in Miami until he's done with field season (and our lease runs out) at the end of September, while I will head up to Sarasota to start work the very end of July (I start on Aug. 4).

So, some more details... I applied for a position with Environmental Defense Fund back in April and after a series of interviews they made me an offer we couldn't refuse. :) I'll be working on regulating the coral trade for the aquarium industry - it'll be a challenge since I'll be buidling the program from scratch, but I think it'll be exciting. From what I've heard, working for EDF is great and I should learn a lot. I'll be based in their downtown Sarasota office, and we're hoping to find a place nearby so I might actually have a commute that's less than 85 miles a day. I also will not miss wearing my wool blend park uniform in mid-August.

We just added some more picture to our Picasa site today, so check them out... they're buried in amongst the rest - think of it like a treasure hunt (haha). If anyone has pictures for some of our albums that we could add we'd love to have them!

This is what the Big Orange (Marley) and Wade were "busy" doing while I was working on the Blog... couldn't resist taking a picture!