Pawleys Visit

What a blast I had in Pawley's Island, SC! Anna Kate is just precious...obviously I'm a bit biased...but she is!!! Clay (my brother), Anna Kate and I went fishing on her boat on Friday afternoon. We (Clay) caught one flounder and one bluefish.

Get ready for picture overload!!!
There's the flounder...

Searching for fish!

Carrying Aunt A's purse which has GUM in it!!! "More gum Aunt A, more gum!" Of course I gave it to her every time. How could I say no?!!!

And she got all dressed up in her little Lilly dress for dinner Friday night and to wait for Nannie and Poppa to arrive from Maryland!

Check out those flips flops! They came from Miami! Whew, hot stuff!

Waiting patiently for Nannie and Poppa!

Nannie arrived!

Poppa is SO fun! He throws me up in the air as high as possible! We had a great dinner at River Room. Aunt A took me out to play on the dock when we were waiting for dinner! ;)

Playing past bedtime!

Boat ride from Georgetown to McCellanville for lunch on Clay's boat. I will tell yall more about McClellanville on Where in the World Wednesday this week or next! Umm, yes, Emily gave me the good idea to do that!

The Captain's - Dad (Poppa) and Clay.

My favorite sister in law - Emily! :)

Perfect day for a boat ride!

I came home late on Saturday afternoon. Made it back to Charlotte around 6:30. Kevin and I celebrated our one year! Pictures to come later this week on that too! Hope yall enjoyed your Easter weekend!

Girl's Night and Easter Weekend

Last night I had a couple different girl's nights and they were so fun. I met some girls at Cabo Fish Taco in an area of Charlotte called NoDa. It is an artsy area and so great for people watching. We sat on the patio and enjoyed the 85 degree weather!

Then I went over to Fran's house (who I featured yesterday), for a monograming party that one of our friends is doing as a side business. It was so fun and I got my mom a Mother's Day gift which we'll have to wait until May to find out what it is (hi Mom!). It was so nice to catch up with the girls I used to work with!

In a couple hours, I'm going down to Pawleys Island, SC to see ANNA KATE (and my bro, SIL, mom and dad)! I am so excited, I can hardly stand it.
And just for fun, I'll leave you with a couple pictures from Wednesday night. We went up to our friend John's place who lives on the 35th floor of our building (our building is 36 stories). Look at these awesome views. You could see so much from up there - mountains, the airport, miles and miles of land, the skyline... In the below picture, the taller building on the left is the new Wells Fargo building. Well Wachovia built it but then Wells Fargo didn't want it when they bought Wachovia so now Duke Energy will be in it. On the right side, you can see the blue seating - that is the Carolina Panthers (NFL team) stadium.

This is what it looks like looking straight down. That's our pool on the 10th floor and you can see the cars on the road. Wow, far, isn't it?! In the green space to the left of the pool you can see a stone statue looking thing....that is our outdoor fireplace. Ha, crazy you can see that from 250' away!

Hope you enjoy your Easter weekend with your family and friends!

Franswa!

Now let me tell yall about Fran otherwise known as Franswa! She is presch, has impecable taste and has a heart of gold. She grew up in small town South Carolina and has lived in Charlotte for almost four years now. We used to work together at an engineering firm (she made work fun!). ANYWAY, she recently began a blog due to my constant nagging and pestering her to do it. Here's the link....go visit her and become a follower. She is full of crazy, exciting information so I know she has huge things in store for her blog. Enjoy!

Wal-Mart vs. Harris Teeter

Let me start off by saying how much I love Harris Teeter (our local supermarket). They always are super nice in any store you go in, they always have fresh, non-expired food and drink, and is always clean. We shop there every Sunday, coupons in hand because they double all manufacturer coupons.

But let me tell yall - we went to Wal-Mart last week, spent an hour and got everything SO much cheaper. Not just a few pennies cheaper, like half price. WHOA! I need to get with the program, at least every other week!

Shopping at Wal-Mart does come with a price to pay - it is dirty, Kevin forbids me to go there alone (especially at night), I don't buy produce or meat there (so I still have to go to the Teeter), and it takes forever to check out beacuse speed is not their number one task. But I can deal with all that for half the price!

Do you shop at Wal-Mart? Have you seen your bill dramatically decrease?

Engineering at the Bar

On Friday night we went to Dandelion Market which is at the bottom of our building. It's a pretty cool spot with good beer, no cover, decent music and normal people. One of those neighborhood places, you know what I mean. Upstairs, they have this huge picnic table, I'd say it is at least 12'-15' long. It's massive and is in the middle of the whole room. We've been there numerous times before and they have never removed it after the dinner crowd, even when it is crowded. Well on Friday, they did. And it was SO cool. I took lots of pictures on my phone of the process but here is the gist (because let's be honest, you don't care as much as my Dad and I do). We are the engineering geeks around here!

Here they are attaching the cables to the table (they have already put the benches up on the table): And here it is as they use a pulley system to hoist it into the ceiling.

How cool is that?! Maybe you had to be there. Ha! Sorry, just thought I'd be a dork and share!

Crowder's Mountain

Neither of us had ever hiked Crowder's Mountain before so we did that this weekend. It was really fun. I'm definitely not the outdoors type despite many years of girl scouts but we had a good lil workout cut out for us. We did the "strenuous" trail called Rocktop which, yes, was full of climbing up rocks. I kept wanting to get on top of the rocks in the below picture and it made Kevin soooo nervous. He kept telling me to get down. Ha!
This is from the same spot - you can see uptown Charlotte. Our building is the second from left!

One more, just for good measure! Kevin had a good time too I think. He is good at all the outdoor stuff (minus the directions, right?! ;)). He knows all that boy scout ish in case we got lost. We met a bunch of folks on the way up and back. It was fun and the perfect day for it!

Hope yall enjoyed your weekend!

Lilly Dress

I got the strapless version of this "Sidra Blue Icing" Lilly Pulitzer dress yesterday at Belk (they have a HUGE Lilly section in this Belk flagship store) because I thought it would be super cute for a wedding or rehearsal dinner this spring/summer and it was on sale! But I would rather the one below because I think it is more flattering on (they had a smaller size that I slipped on). SO, I'm on the hunt for this dress at a good deal. Does anyone know any Lilly shops that have this on sale? Does anyone have any big plans for this weekend? Carolina Cup is tomorrow but I'm not going this year off since the Charleston bridge run is the same weekend (my friend Lauren who typically organizes our Carolina Cup bus is running that). Yall have fun if you're heading down that way!