Anniversary

Josh and I celebrated our 9th anniversary yesterday. We had a nice dinner at the Tabard Inn last night, and we also enjoyed a fabulous weekend in St. Michaels, MD, on the Eastern Shore. We stayed at a nice B&B called the Five Gables Inn, which was right on the main street and easy walking distance to shops, restaurants, and other attractions.

It was a little rainy on Saturday, but still relatively warm. We had lunch in Easton on the way and went to a juried craft show at the museum there. After checking into the Inn, we walked around a bit and later had dinner at a nice restaurant a few blocks away. Sunday the weather was picture-perfect -- sunny, clear, 70 degrees -- so in the morning we visited the local maritime museum, which was right across the street. The road in was spanned by a drawbridge, which had been relocated from another part of town. Not sure why they decided to save it, but it did make for a dramatic entrance.
As we were walking to the museum, Josh found this baby snapping turtle on the sidewalk. He took it to a little stream by the water, in hopes that it would have a better chance of survival. It was a gorgeous day to be right on the waterfront. We had to check out of the Inn at noon, and then we headed down the street to the St. Michaels Winery. One of my colleagues at Discovery is a co-owner of the winery, so she met us there and gave us a tour. It's a pretty small operation compared to most of the wineries I've toured in California, but they have won several Maryland wine awards.

Afterwards, we had lunch at one of the waterfront restaurants, and then paddled across to Oxford, MD in our canoe. We found a boat ramp that just happened to be right next to an ice cream stand, so we sat on the dock and enjoyed some ice cream before paddling back across to the car and heading home. On the way back, we stopped at a farm stand and bought a couple pumpkins for our front porch. All in all, a great weekend getaway!

When we got home, Josh hung our nicely-framed house number tiles by the front door and disposed of the ugly plywood sign once and for all. It's a good thing we chose last weekend for our anniversary getaway, because the temperature plummeted 20 degrees yesterday and now it's cold (in the 40's!) and rainy. The abrupt change was hard enough to adjust to, but I especially noticed it when I was working from home today, since our heat wasn't turned on yet. Our HVAC team showed up at 8 am to try to fix the problem they discovered last week. Once that was resolved, they still had to drain all the air out of the system. Uncle Lewis was here until 5:15 pm working on it, and finally said he'd have to come back tomorrow to finish the job. The heat is on now, but it's still only 66 degrees on the main level of the house, and a bit cooler upstairs. Hopefully by this weekend we'll get to experience the full benefits of radiant floor heat. For now, I'm just glad to have a little space heater to warm up my office.