Back

So, we made it back Saturday from our week-long exile in West Virginia's #1 vacation spot - Myrtle Beach, SC. We were able to be on the ocean or at the pool every day, which is pretty awesome considering it's the beginning of hurricane season.

I won't bore you with the day-to-day itinerary, but will share some highlights:

• Fondue rocks, and we wish heartily we had a Melting Pot near home.
• Beach chairs are great when sitting in the surf watching the waves roll in.
• Sand in your crotch from said beach chair in the surf is not so great.
• Assholes who monopolize the pool, play horseshoes in over your stuff so that it's trampled into the sand, and are drunk (excluding the pregnant-but-I-still-wear-a-string-bikini-to-show-my-stretch marks-and-tramp stamp) by 11:00 am, do not make the best neighbors; we were grateful for the "quiet time" policy.
• Screened-in porches are the best place to watch nighttime thunderstorms over the ocean.
• My mama makes a mean shrimp boil with fresh shrimp, smoked sausage, onion, lemon, corn, new potatoes, and enough spice to slap your grandma. We licked our plates.
• I love having vacation with my parents now that we take separate cars to and from our destinations.
• C is a total chicken and we wasted 50 bucks on a Haunted Adventure attraction.
• Having no access to the Internet is both empowering and crippling at the same time.
• C is a terrible liar. She was caught red-handed (or should I say, 'red-gummed'?) in a super doozie about flossing the gunk out of her nasty-ass red, white and blue braces. This one took a bit of forethought and effort; thus resulting in the wrath of me, and the subsequent "Life is Hell" attitude she unleashed on everyone.
• Sand does bizarre things to your feet, and my pedicurist Jenny cussed me in English and in Vietnamese the entire time she repaired the damage to my soles and polish.

San Antonio

Per Johnny's recommendation, I decided not to blog about our recent trip to San Antonio until we returned. I hinted several times on the blog that we were headed to Texas, but never said when we were going to be gone. Not that I believe any of the few readers I have were going to rob our house.

B and I had a wonderful week in San Antonio at the 2007 SITE conference. Instead of comprehensive exams, my university requires doc students to complete a Residency Portfolio. The RP is a capstone experience that each student must complete prior to acceptance to candidacy. I am pretty far into the process. I have developed an online course, taught said course for the last 2 semesters, and presented at our bi-annual student seminar. With this conference, I added 2 more artifacts to my RP - a published paper and a presentation at an international conference. My presentation was part of an 8 person symposia about the RP process and multimedia integration. My piece was about the mentoring relationship during the development of my course. It went off without a hitch, and I was especially flattered because one person (who wasn't B) came just to hear me speak! How cool is that?

On to the trip...

Weather: San Antonio is beautiful, clean and breezy. When the weather was good, it was great. However it managed to rain all day on Monday, and spit in fits on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wednesday was perfect.

Flight: No big deal. The flights down were cramped and we were seated in the very back of a small plane across from the toilets. Nice. The return flights were just as cramped, but we were farther up the plane. Lots of turbulence from the storms, but otherwise okay. Dramamine is my friend.

Food: Everyone I've met who's gone to San Antonio says that the food is wonderful. To me, it was okay. We had good meals and bad meals.

~On Sunday and Tuesday we ended up at this place, it wasn't on purpose, it just happened that way. The best things were the margaritas and the chicken flautas.

~On Wednesday we went out with our group to this place, and I had my best meal in San Antonio - penne with chicken, spicy chilies and tomato cream sauce. Dang, it was awesome.

Wednesday we ate at this crap place because we were stuck in the Riverwalk Mall and later had junk food at the Spurs game. Wednesday was a bad food day all around.

~Thursday those of us left at the conference had our last supper at this place. Meh. Not my favorite. You can swing a cat in our state and hit a steakhouse. This was my worst meal.

~Breakfast was in the hotel. I loved the chef; he made me tomato and cheese omelets every day. It didn't hurt that he was really cute and had sexy tattoos on both forearms.

~I also discovered these, and I am sad, sad, sad because they are not offered in my state. Actually, it's probably a good thing. If I ate these all of the time, I would have cankles and probably weigh 4000 lbs.

Fun:The Riverwalk that winds through the city is beautiful and relaxing. We walked our legs off every day.

~Before we took our car back on Monday, we went to the Quarry Market and shopped, but it was like any other mall.

~Wednesday was perfect, and was Big Fun Day. We shopped at the Riverwalk mall on Wednesday, and I ended up bringing home many T-shirts and lots of this stuff, which smells like a dream. After shopping we went to the Alamo and then took a River Taxi back to our hotel. Later the entire group of us went to the San Antonio/New Orleans NBA game and were so far up in the arena I got vertigo! Check out the pics if you don't believe me!

Crack

I love bread. Warm, crusty, chewy bread. This is an addiction for me. I am not ashamed of my love for a crispy oven-toasted, buttered-to-the-rim piece of bakery bread. Out of our local bakeries, only one is known for it's bread. Duchess Bakery makes a white butter-pan bread that is perfect for toasting or grilled cheese. It's to die for.

Today we were closer to Pan*ra than we were to Duchess. Because it's snowy and cold outside, I had decided that today's a perfect soup day. Tomato soup day. With that in mind, I told Mom I wanted to run into Pan*ra to get some country bread to make nice, gooey grilled cheese sandwiches to dunk into our soup. She was reluctant because our Pan*ra is not the greatest. The selection of breads and pastries are usually slim pickings, and the customer services is disappointing to say the least. Regardless, I made a beeline for the bakery. I won't bore you with the details that confirm that our Pan*ra sucks, but I will tell you all about the one good thing that they are selling:

Peanut butter and banana crunch bagels.

OH MY GOD. Chewy sweet bagel with peanut butter, bananas, and nuts baked in all topped off with little crunchy banana crumbs.

I can't get it in my mouth fast enough.