My Pirate Name

My pirate name is:

Dirty Anne Vane

"You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. You tend to blend into the background occaisionally, but that's okay, because it's much easier to sneak up on people and disembowel them that way." Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org .

Silver Spring Jazz Festival

We had a great time this evening at the second annual Silver Spring Jazz Festival in downtown Silver Spring, MD. While we were there, they passed around a bucket a couple of times to collect money for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. It was an all-day festival, and it was awesome to hear that they had already collected $10,000 in donations throughout the day. They also mentioned that there are a number of survivors who were planning to stay in Montgomery County, MD -- and that some of them were in the audience tonight.

The concert was awesome. We got there in time to hear the Wynton Marsalis Quartet. The music was unbelievably sweet -- and spicy!

It was so amazing to see all the people leaning out of the parking garage to see and hear the show.



Here's a shot of the stage:



Finally, a shot I like to call "Moon over Silver Spring":



Enjoy y'all!

Vet's Liquor - Beer Wine Ice

Did you guys see today's Zippy the Pinhead strip (8/17/05)? It featured the Vet's Liquor sign. The Vet's beady eyes shine out over US Rt. 1 in Beltsville, MD. Here's a picture of the sign:

Vet's Liquor

Enjoy!

Yesterday's Adventures

Yesterday, DH and I took the day off together so we could go to the doctor and then do something fun. We had lunch at one of our favorite haunts, and then took off to Gaithersburg to wander around the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair for a few hours before we had to split for home. We tried to beat the traffic, but no such luck when you're going through the DC suburbs.

Anyway, we had a nice lazy time wandering through the animal barns and looking at the old-timey engines, the crafts, and the prize-winning veggies. We had a good day for it too... it was sunny and warm

Here's the best shot of the day. It'll show you what a nice blue sky we had yesterday.

Also, yesterday, I almost finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife. I'm having a heck of a good time with it, and I recommend it.

Enjoy your day! // Andrea

I bought these great Teva sandals at LL Bean this weekend. That, plus my recently pedicured toes, make for one beautiful set of feet, n'est ce pas??

I wish summer would never end!

Crawling out from under my rock

Way back in January, I swore to myself that I would start maintaining a blog. I would post pithy new articles to it every day. Well.... you can see what happened. Life got in the way.

To be more specific, school got in the way. I was taking Business Law I at UMUC and, while it was totally absorbing to me, it also absorbed nearly all my time. That, plus my piano lessons.

Now, here it is August, and I'm finally crawling out of my rock to commit anew to maintaining and publishing a daily blog. I'm pretty sure what will happen. In September, when I start my Human Factors in Information Systems class, I'll probably forget all about daily blogging. That subject is also very interesting to me, so we'll see how it goes.

By the way, I am now 35 credits away from graduation. I think that's why I'm suddenly making such a push to finish up. I would like to be the first in my generation of my family to get a college degree. I'm sure my niece will beat me to the punch, but that's OK.

Back to blogging. I figure that something interesting must be happening to me every day; I just have to figure out the story of each day. Yesterday, two main things happened:

• Now that I've joined Flickr, my interest in taking pictures has moved to the front of the stack. My old camera is really slow, so DH regifted me with a digital camera I got him for his birthday a while back. He never used it. It's a little quicker than my old one and has lots of new features. So now, I'm snapping pictures of everything.


• We had a wonderful dinner last night at Cafe Deluxe in Bethesda. We ordered what we usually do, but for some reason, it just tasted better last night.

Here's an updated picture of me:

I figure no one will ever see this

So why don't I go ahead and post a picture of one of my cats. This is a really old shot that was taken from my actual web site, because I'm feeling too cheap now to get hosting for pictures until I see if I will actually do this on a regular basis.



I have lots more pictures, so let me know if anybody out there wants to see them.