Happy Easter 2011

I hope everybody has a wonderful Easter weekend. Its not the same without little kids and easter baskets and chocolate bunnies and egg hunts and all of that fun stuff. Still, we went with Dad and Barb down to Morehead City and had a really delicious lunch at the Sanitary Fish Market. My shrimp and scallops were amazing. And we got to meet friends of Barbs, Tommy and Carol. They are a really nice couple who have a home down there near the beach. Barb hadn't seen them since Stephen and Hannia got married 3 years ago. We hit a couple of the cute little shops there, and rode around and took a "home tour" of the gorgeous houses on the waterfront in Beaufort. It was a nice day.

Tomorrow we have reservations for the special Easter brunch at Chef's 505. The one time we did that, it was really good. I hope it doesn't disappoint. They only do a buffet brunch twice a year....Easter and Mother's Day. I managed to get our reservations, but the guy on the phone said the spots were filling up quickly. I think Dad and Barb are driving back to Danville tomorrow afternoon. No eggs or chocolate bunnies for us though. It makes me a little sad........

A lesson in futility

I have a little Easter centerpiece decoration for our dining room table. I fix it, put the little tree back up with all its tiny spring decorations, put the candles back upright, and make sure they are straight. And no matter how many times I do this, within a few hours I come back to find this:



And THIS is my suspected culprit.



See? She even looks guilty, doesn't she????

We survived the storms....

We survived the storms that tore through our state (NC). I swear we were so lucky. We had tornadoes touching down all around us....in Raleigh, Wilson, Farmville, and Kinston. A lot more hit further north. There was tornadic rotation over Greenville, we could see it from our house, but I don't think it ever touched down. We had high wind and the clouds were churning like mad. We barely even got rain here. A few brief downpours that lasted only a couple of minutes here and there. I read that Kinston, or was it Vanceboro? had hail that was an inch and a half in diameter. No hail here thankfully.

The whole thing lasted about 2 hours. Several storms moved through one right after the other. But we managed to stay in this safe little path as they passed over just east or west of us. Bruce spent a good part of the evening outside just watching how crazy the sky looked. I ran in and out but the wind was chilly and I just wasn't into it enough to stay out there for long at a time.



This is one of the pictures we took of the tornado passing over Greenville. You can see the darker patches that reach down from the bank of storm clouds. It was so loud outside. There was a long rumbling of thunder that never seemed to stop. It just kept growling and roaring with no breaks in the sound. Crazy.



Because we were directly in between 2 separate storm cells, getting the outskirts of the action, we would occasionally catch of glimpse of blue sky in the midst of an angry rolling bank of clouds. It didn't last for long. A glimpse here and there and then it would disappear as quickly as we saw it.

Anyway, having seen a lot of coverage of how awful it was for so many people I am just so thankful we were spared the worst of it. I know its crazy, but I kept thinking about our cats and what in the world would we do if our house was flattened.
How could I keep them from running away scared into the storm? And where in the world would we stay while our home was rebuilt (or repaired)?? I don't know many hotels that welcome 4 pets for an extended visit. I have no idea what we would do, but we would need to stay around here to work, and to supervise the rebuild and all.
Bruce suggested that I get the cats in to the vet to be microchipped. You just never know, living here in tornado/hurricane country when a disaster might rip through and pets get out and run away. I mean, we DID have a huge pecan tree fall through the house once....and that was one night I would never want to repeat again in my life.