celebrating 2 and 26!
yup, it's that birthday/anniversary time of year again! Chrissy has managed to
survive 2 years with me! brave woman she is. we decided to celebrate by spending the weekend in Cincinnati since we were in the area for a wedding on Saturday. my good friend Carl from college went and got himself all married up! we felt so bad for them though. last week was so miserably rainy and it continued into the weekend. the wedding was held out at her parent's land near Brookville Reservoir. the area is beautiful ... a pond, several old barns and houses/cabins, lots of trees, large open expanses of grass ... just gorgeous ... but add lots of water to that and you get mud. lots of mud. georgeous
mud, but still mud. they moved the ceremony into one of the barns (which turned out really neat) and had the reception in a big tent. but you still had to get there and the tent was just over grass ... so everyone got pretty muddy. everyone seemed to take it well though and still had a good time ... and they'll have some fun stories about their muddy wedding to tell their grandkiddies. upon leaving, the valets managed to get our car stuck. there were wheels spinning and mud was flying everywhere. it was kind of humorous really. the car was unbelievable coated with mud. so we tracked down a carwash in town before heading into Cincy. unfortunately this picture barely does the mud justice.we spent the night downtown at the Westin (yeah Hotwire!). very nice.
Sunday we got lunch at the world's best rib place ... Montgomery Inn! oh yeah. that is some good stuff. way good. from there we headed to the Cincinnati Zoo/Botanical Garden. in the 2 summers i lived there, i never went ... not sure why. turns out it's really a great zoo. i think they say it's in the top 5 nationally or something. lucky for us, the weather cleared up and we even a few minutes of sunshine! here are a few photo highlights ... everyone loves pictures of animals!baby flamingo.
baby cheetah being lazy.
about 2 minutes after that picture was taken ... ATTACK! funny kitties. i think Hazel could take them, unless it's thundering outside (she's a wuss when it comes to storms).
these guys totally cracked us up. these are ring-tailed lemurs. we walked up and here these 4 sat on this log like 15 feet up in the air. all lined up, arms out (almost in that meditative finger-pinching stance). i love the sequence of these pictures ... let's all look away ... ok now let's all look back. seeing them there ... i just had to think: Dave, Jim, Nate, Chris (me and my brothers).
not necessarily a "zoo" animal, but there were sure a lot of them there. we wonder what native animals think about these weird creatures they live amongst. hmm.
we encountered this strange bird also. we went into the first room of the bird exhibit and there was this bird standing inside. he was trying to figure out how to get through the
automatic doors. after a few minutes we noticed he was gone ... must have got out when the next people came in. we didn't see his little picture in that room, so figured he didn't belong in there anyway. when we went to the next room ... there he was again. hmm. picture not in there either, and he was gone almost right away. the next exhibit wasn't in a separate room, just a little cave-like thing off the hallway. there was a crazy dancing parrot in there ... and that same bird had crawled in and was munching on some food in the back. when we left, he was attempting to leave that exhibit also. we still aren't sure where he was supposed to be. maybe it's just some native Ohio bird that roams in there from time to time?and of course, lions, tigers and bears ...
we followed up our zoo visit with more great food ... Graeters ice cream. some scoops of black raspberry chip (nothing finer) and mint chip later, we headed home. thus endeth our Cincy trip.
Sunday night Tony came over and we finished off the stumps! and the natives rejoiced (yeah). they provided more of a challenge than we expected considering all the rain we'd had. but, they met their doom nonetheless. Monday we had Chrissy's "birthday dinner" and cleaned up from the stump pulling (dirt and roots were everywhere). Tuesday we had dinner w/ one of Chrissy's college roomates. after that i sharpened the lawn mower blades (got the kit in the mail on Monday) and sort of mowed the yard. i say sort of because it didn't go so well. with all the rain it had grown quite tall ... and it was still wet so the tires would slip which means the blades aren't getting power. i managed to get through it, but it doesn't look good. i'll have to try to trim up tomorrow.
tonight we worked in the garden a while. then things got interesting. just after the hippies won Amazing Race (woohoo, way to go guys!) the power suddenly went out. not the usual dimming, trying to come back on type of outage ... just gone. we were stunned for a second then started to look around to try to figure out what happened. we were looking outside and noticed a flash down the street. we also heard this humming noise, like some sort of motor trying to start. we went outside to see what was going on only to see the light from what obviously was a fire down the street about 3 blocks. it got brighter ... and brighter ... then we saw flames over the buildings .... then a fireball ... then a bigger fireball. i bet it was about 150 feet in the air! Tony and i decided to go check it out. it was a transformer of some sort that blew we heard. by the time we got down there the fire was pretty small and there were already some electrical-type guys looking around. so, we don't have power. i'm typing by laptop-light and candlelight. the fire is still going after almost 2 hours (i just went and checked on it). that probably means we won't have power anytime soon and this post won't actually get posted tonight.
well, sorry this post got so long. what else is a guy to do but blog when there is no power? how did people ever live without electricity? update: just as i finished, the power came back on. good work by the fellas over at Cinergy (or are they Duke Energy now?).
posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 1:50 AM
2 Comments:
Some of us are unable to type when there is no power!
Thanks for the interesting blog and pictures!
Love ya,
mam
Chris and Chrissy,
Glad to hear you enjoyed the Cincy Zoo! We love going there. We've always gone when its been cold or slightly rainy, so there's never been crowds. The first time I went with BJ we didn't see another person for the first hour we were in there. Here is one of my favorite zoo photos. Happy anniversary and birthday Chrissy! Time sure does fly, doesn't it!
Love,
Jessie
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