Fran's Quick Visit Home

I had the opportunity to spend a recent weekend in northern VA centered around a speaking engagement at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, my alma mater. I spoke about careers in system administration to their computer systems lab students. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to do that again in the future; it's always fun to get back to TJ and see what they are up to.

To make the trip worthwhile, I decided to stay the weekend, which would afford the opportunity to see my sister's new house and also catch up with a few friends. On the way in I stopped for lunch with a former co-worker from Florida, Rob Treat, who is now saving the open source database world from his new base in Columbia, MD and doing well.

After the talk, I headed out to my sister's new townhouse. (I apologize for the rotation of this picture - Blogger apparently has a bug in it - it's rotated correctly when I import it.)

The new house is great. Lots of room and a great kitchen.


It has a lot of interesting angles for a townhouse, not the typical rectangle that you would expect.

On Saturday, I decided to take my mom into DC for the day since she rarely makes it there. Also (and this is shocking), my family has lived in DC since 1988, and my mother had never ridden the Metro!! So off we went into town on the Metro... (Blogger bug again)


Neither of us had ever been to the National Botanic Gardens, so that was our first stop. They just opened a new outdoor garden alongside the conservatory, and it looks like they did a really nice job.


Inside the Conservatory itself, we stopped for a picture in the jungle.


After wandering through the Conservatory for a while, we headed over to one of the newest museums in town, the Museum of the American Indian. I was surprised to learn that it covers all native Americans from Alaska down to Chile. It was also nice to see how well they integrated input from many tribes into a cohesive museum experience. For lunch, we had heard that the museum's food court was among the best in town, and it did not disappoint, with five stations representing food from different native American regions. I managed to work in three of those into one (very large) lunch.

We finished the day at the National Gallery of Art. Mom had never seen actual paintings on the caliber of Monets, Van Goghs or Cezannes, so it was a real treat to see all of those and more in the Gallery. After a pass through the gift shop, it was home again on the Metro.

Sunday was a relaxation day. I tried to recreate my Dutch Baby breakfast for everyone, but mostly failed to get it to rise correctly. However, the results were still tasty, if a little more flattened than usual!

Somehow my sister, Cesar and Enzo all managed to avoid my camera for the entire weekend so I have no photos of them to post. I'll do better next time.

Sunday evening I met up with our friends Brendan and Lizzie and their boys Colby and Dylan for BBQ and a movie. They live close to the airport and more importantly, in the right spot to avoid morning rush hour on the way to my flight, so I crashed with them for the night. The boys gave my still-wonky knee a good workout running around in the yard, while Brendan and Lizzie made monstrous burgers and other BBQ food. We then watched The Last King of Scotland (disturbing but good) as a weekend wrap-up.

Great short getaway trip! After the trip I was only home for four days before heading out again to Dallas for Memorial Day weekend (blog coming shortly).

MV07

All has been quiet at the Fabrizio homestead but that changed recently with MV07 - Mom's Visit 2007! From 4/11 - 4/21, we hosted both of our mom's for a fun visit.


One of the highlights of the week was the annual Mom's Meatballs Extravaganza. This always attracts a crowd, and this year was no different. Barbara and Fran worked on the final cooking touches....

... while Sally enjoyed appetizers and beer and got caught up with our friends, meeting some for the first time.

Finally, the feast was set and it was time for the main event.

This year's dinner had a buzz of excitement, because Laura had declared that she was going to break her own record, set last year, of five meatballs. She confidently stated that she would polish off six this time around. Before long, she was off and running...


I'm happy to report she finished off six with ease. She's already begun stomach stretch training for next year.

While Katie and Fran went back to work during the week, Sally and Barbara hit the garden, transforming the garden from winter's doldrums to spring's new life. They groomed, weeded, trimmed and planted all around the house. The yard looks fabulous now! Here is Fran admiring the moms' work in the veggie bed.


Late in the week, Fran and his mom took a road trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was Barbara's first visit to Tennessee. We got acquainted with Chattanooga by taking a ride on the world's steepest incline railway to the top of Lookout Mountain. The train goes straight up the side of the mountain, reaching a maximum angle of almost 70 degrees. I'm not sure Mom enjoyed the ride too much, but the view from the top was very nice.


We then visited the Tennessee Aquarium. Although this fish tank porthole was clearly sized for kids, Fran could not pass up the photo op.


In the aquarium's butterfly house, mom had no trouble making friends.


Lots of other fun activities transpired over MV07 as well, from movie watching to tasty restaurants to great shopping.

The Oregon Coast

These are a little late, but here are some scenes from our trip to the Oregon coast a couple of weeks back. They are in no particular order and are not captioned - just enjoy the scenery!










We (From left: Brendan, Katie, Chris and me) had a great time and the coast is fantastic! Can't wait to go back and do some more exploring.

Hello from Portland

A quick hello from Portland, OR. Katie is here for a neuropsychologist conference, and I'm just tagging along. We'll have lots of pictures to post when we get home... we made it to the coast and saw some incredible sights. We're also enjoying great weather for February, lots of fun city sightseeing, and plenty of encounters with Portland's "colorful" people (as one has just come wandering through the coffee shop...)!

The most bizarre part of the trip is that the entire city is crawling with Subaru Outbacks. Having just bought one, we can go days in Birmingham without seeing another Subaru. Here, we were sitting in a coffee shop for 20 minutes yesterday and saw more than a dozen, and this was on a little side street. They are EVERYWHERE. We've seen at least 150 Subarus. Kinda fun! Yet another sign of our compatibility with Portland. Some time ago, Katie and I both took a test that was supposed to tell you your ideal place to live. For both of us, #1 was Portland. While Katie is still adjusting to the aforementioned "colorful" people that are everywhere, I think I could move here in an instant. (Not that I'm unhappy in the 'ham - and the 'ham has its own set of advantages. But if we ever get the itch to move, Portland will be high on the list.)
We read somewhere that market studies have shown that Subaru drivers are almost always democrats and all Subarus are 4WD which is great for the terrain and weather around here, so this all sort of makes sense. Still, there are SOOO many, it's bizarre. I can see 3 from where I am sitting - and that's out of 9 cars total.

Speaking of coffee houses, I'm in latte heaven here. Every block has a different local coffee place, and they all blow away what we can get in Birmingham. And, they are very artistic - they draw pictures in the latte foam. Nice touch.

Well, we're off for another day of exploring. Pictures coming this week, in the meantime, hope everyone enjoys their weekend!

Fran on TV

So very early this morning while you were probably still asleep, I was headed to the FOX News studios atop Red Mountain here in Birmingham. I was asked to make an in-studio appearance on the FOX News Weekend show's consumer segment to discuss Microsoft Windows Vista, the new operating system that Microsoft is releasing this week.

I had a lot of fun with it, and it was interesting to see the inside of a local TV station. I'll have to figure out how to get the video off of the Tivo so that I can share with family and friends. In the meantime, here are a couple of screenshots.



Note that they made me a Dr.! Katie goes to school for seven years to earn her doctorate and can't get most people to realize she's a doctor; I show up for the weekend news show and bam, there it is. Where is the justice in this world?

Anyway, I don't think I'm quitting my day job any day soon, but it was something fun and different... now if only I could stop the adoring public from asking for my autograph everywhere I go. Has anyone seen the mineral water and rice cakes that my people were supposed to arrange for me?

Cozy by the Fire

Just a quick hello to everyone. Hope you all are staying as toasty as Katie was by the fireplace yesterday.

A Minnesota Christmas

Katie and I celebrated Christmas on the 24th (continuing our pattern of doing holidays on days other than the actual day - it works so much better!), but we also traveled to MN to celebrate with Katie's family a week later. Here is Katie settling in for a nice long northern holiday weekend...


This weekend was actually a double bill, as it was also Ada's dedication weekend! She's all dressed up and ready to go!


The family assembled for the ceremony (several hours late, but that's another story!)


After the very nice ceremony, during which Eleanor perfected the honorable big sister duty of the symbolic pouring of the water over Ada, we got to the serious business of playing...




We even had some snow to round out our holiday. A fun time had by all, not to mention the great gifts that were exchanged and all of the yummy food we ate. And so we sent 2006 off in style, and welcomed the new year in Minnesota.

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree....

We got a late start this year thanks to Disney and wedding trips, but we're in full Christmas decorating mode now. Of course, the key ingredient for that is the Christmas tree, and each year we head north (well, at least north of Birmingham) to cut a live tree from Beaver's Christmas Tree Farm. They grow white pine, Virginia pine and Leyland cypress trees. When we're in the mood for a traditional tree we'll get one of the pines, but this year was one of those years we were in the mood for a Southern christmas, and the Leyland cypress is known as the Southern christmas tree. It's a little different than what you're used to up north, but we think it works well.

So off we went in search of our Leyland cypress. As another example of why it's pretty nice to live in Alabama, it was 72 degrees on December 16th when we went out for our tree. :-) So it was sunroof-open on the car as we made our way through rural Alabama. Here we are enjoying the beautiful sunny day on the tree farm.


It didn't take very long for us to find our tree. She's a 7-footer, just the right size for our living room (I think the hill I am standing on is making it look taller - no,I haven't shrunk to 4' tall!) I got the saw and prepared to go to work.



Thanks to Katie's new Subaru Outback, loading the tree up for the ride home was significantly easier this year than in years past when we had to finagle it into the Accord. The tree got home in excellent condition, and here it is, up and decorated, in the morning sun with the first of the presents already underneath.


Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone!

Ellen and Dave Gealt

This past weekend we traveled to Philly to attend the wedding of our friend Ellen from Wash U. She is now married to Dave Gealt, whom I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time back in October when we got together to attend a Flyers game.

The wedding also served as a Wash U. reunion - we hadn't seen some of these people since graduation! We did lots of catching up.

Friends old and new gathered for lunch on the day of the wedding.

Here we are with the happy bride. (Sorry Dave, we didn't get a good photo of you on our camera!) Ellen was the one who introduced me and Katie, so we owe her a special thanks for that as well!

We stayed in Philly most of the day on Sunday so we could catch up with Fran's family and have dinner with Auntie and Uncle Paul, Louis and Vincent.

It was a quick trip but a fun one! We got to see and catch up with lots of people in the short time we were there. And, Fran got his cheesesteak (best wedding hors d'oeurves ever!) and soft pretzels, so it was a complete trip.

Disney!

Katie's favorite place on Earth is probably Walt Disney World, and we hadn't been there for a vacation since we moved from Florida, so the week after Thanksgiving, Katie and I headed back down to Disney for a week of fun with our friends Dan and Michelle.



It was the -perfect- week to go. It's the least busy week of the year, and there were NO lines on any of the rides for much of the week. Plus, we caught a break in the weather, and it was 80 degrees every day, with some nice cloud cover that kept the hot sun off of us, but very little rain all week. We couldn't have asked for better weather for December in central Florida.

Here's Dan and Michelle while we are on the MGM Studios backlot tour. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of the most famous sight on the tour, the "award winning Mickey Mouse water tower."


Katie and I both rank the Tower of Terror at MGM as our favorite ride anywhere. Here is Katie in front of the Twilight Zone-themed freefall ride. We rode the Tower six times, thanks to the lack of crowds! The ride is randomized, so each ride is different than the last.


Katie's favorite of the theme parks is Animal Kingdom. Here we are in front of the Tree of Life.


While lounging in Africa, a tribal dance troupe ambushed us and recruited us into their dance lineup! (I'm down on the end there). I have mercifully omitted the pictures of our solos, which is when I managed to reinjure the bad knee while getting a little too jiggy with it.


The highlight of every trip to Animal Kingdom for Katie are the gorillas. Their large and natural-looking habitat seems to encourage behaviors that you normally don't see in a typical zoo setting. This was a particularly good day for the gorillas, we saw at least seven of them doing all sorts of fun stuff like pounding their chest, scaling rock walls and protecting their favorite resting spots from the others.


Here's a shot of the newest ride at Disney, Expedition Everest. This scale model of the mountain houses a roller coaster that goes forwards and backwards while trying to escape from the Yeti which calls the mountain home. We were able to ride it twice back to back since there were no lines. It's definitely one of the best rides at Disney now!


Here we are after having conquered Everest, in the background.



While we did Everest, Dan and Michelle hit the Bug's Life 3D movie...


...and Fran and Dan got soaked on the Kalimantan River Rapids.


Over at Epcot, we had fun exploring all of the countries. This is Katie lounging in Morocco on Day 7 - doesn't she look relaxed?


Then it was time for the grandaddy of them all, the Magic Kingdom.


We had a fun encounter with a talking, moving trash can in Tomorrowland, and he was very happy when we told him that he was our favorite attraction at Walt Disney World. Michelle leaned in for a hug and a photo.


Here we are taking the jungle cruise. We barely made it past the angry hippos, charging elephants, and cheesy tour guide jokes!

We had plenty of fun outside of the parks too. Besides going to see Cirque du Soleil's La Nouba, we also had dinner at several of the other resorts. This led to The Ketchup Incident of 2006...

and finally, proving you're never too old to be a kid at Disney, we also found time to play in the Old Key West resort pool...

All told, an excellent vacation! After a week of Disney where we rode EVERY ride we wanted to, ate and ate and ate good food, and saw just about every nook of every theme park there, you'd think we'd be sick of Disney for a while, but we're already ready to go back.