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I have been indoctrinated in the love of the Packers.
My dad, and my grandparents, and my paternal aunts and uncles, and a few generations before them, have lived in Wisconsin, home of the Cheeseheads.
In my house growing up, if it wasn't green and yellow, it was maroon and orange (the unfortunate colors of Virginia Tech).
Then I moved to Pittsburgh. I've adopted this city as my own. I have learned "Pittsburghese" n'at, and have visited many of their finer institutions (from the Mattress Factory to Primanti's, Wholey's to Point Park).
The Packers were a wild card team; the Steelers had an amazing record. There was no way they would ever have to play each other and my loyalty would be tested.
Hello, Super Bowl.
I started the day at church in a Steelers jersey. Safety might have been a concern.
However, being the good Lutheran church that it is, there were two others that had Packers gear on (and they weren't thrown out).
So I dared. I decided that I needed to end the Super Bowl in Steelers regalia (since, if there were riots, I wanted to blend in), but still needed to show my Packers pride.
So I showed up for the game in my green and gold, with my fingers crossed.
(It took some convincing to get any sort of Pittsburgh-Green Bay picture to happen, but I worked my charm.)
At halftime, I switched back into the Black and Yellow, but my long-time team pulled it out in the end. Congrats Green Bay! You stopped the Stairway to Seven.
So here I am, finishing my final months in Sixburgh.
Last semester, between my on-site interviews and Valerie's hectic speech tournament schedule, I never got a chance to visit the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa. It was finally both a) dreary enough in Pittsburgh, b) not a speech tournament weekend, and c) a free weekend for me, so I flew down to Birmingham to meet her.
The first night, I was surprised at the sprawl and the warmth. I didn't put on my winter coat the entire weekend (since it hovered around the 50s and 60s!) We went to midnight sushi at a local bite, and Valerie ran into friends of hers. (Go figure... 24,000 undergrads and we find someone she knows.)
We rented a car for a few days, for convenience, and she began showing me campus the next day (as I sat in on a class she TA'ed for). Then, it was off on a walk to see the library, the newest engineering buildings, the tree-filled quad (and the part that wasn't tree-filled), the mental institution that is just by campus, their stadium (Roll Tide!). I was in the presence of greatness.
She made sure to go inside her favorite building, Reese Phifer Hall, with the speech team rooms inside. When we went inside, she found others to invite out to lunch at Mugshots, the local burger joint. (Peanut butter burger? It exists, protein-full and more delicious than you might think.)
After a very filling lunch, we finished up the campus tour by going to the student center and I found the new love of my life:
Why don't we have something like this on CMU's campus?
Those two days were also amazingly gorgeous weather, even for Alabama. We had frozen yogurt, and it was melting. I had to take off my jacket while we were walking. What a pick-me-up from the gray Pittsburgh weather.
We had a couple more Southern institutions that we had to visit. One was Dreamland Barbeque, the sketchiest building with the most comforting interior. Every meal starts with slices of Wonderbread and BBQ sauce (interesting...), then some ribs (yum), and banana pudding (quadruple yum).
We went into Birmingham before my flight left the next day to see the Vulcan, the largest cast-iron statue, and the art museum (which had some Chihuly pieces, go figure). We wandered a bit, but it was getting chilly and threatening to drizzle, so I got my ride to the airport with a dozen gates, and flew back to sub-freezing temperatures.
Grandma and Grandpa really love the vacations where we can all be together in the same place. There were, for at least one night, the grandparents, the four brothers and sisters, their husbands and wives, and all of the grandchildren (all 4 + 2 + 3 + 2 of us) plus a future grandson-in-law and a few dogs.
The meals were divvied up by the day, so each family had a dinner. Breakfasts (if you were up that early) were always a surprise, sometimes planned with omelets or French toast, and sometimes cereal. Lunches were a "fend for yourself" matter: leftovers from the nights previous, a second breakfast (or first breakfast, for some of us), and sandwich supplies.
Evenings were spent in a myriad of ways, but usually involved games, either of the football variety (on the television) or board games, such as Bunco.
Additionally, a group of the cousins has gotten into more off-beat games, so Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, and Bananagrams were other favorites. (I've gotten so good at Bananagrams, though, that I had to have a handicap to prevent me from winning all the time. You try getting through a round with no two-letter words!)
The three-story house was big enough, and the top floor was large enough that it was possible for all of us to be in the same room at the same time (such as when we opened gifts around our second-life tree from the side of the road), but still have our space. There was some friction and family drama, but it was pretty easy to get lost by yourself for a while with no one noticing.
On Christmas Eve, folks began to scatter. Maria flew back to Oregon, Valerie and I with some cousins spent the New Year with the younger cousins in Virginia Beach, the rest of my family got ready to fly back to Washington on New Year's Day, and we all breathed a sigh of relief when all were home and accounted for.
We were cooped up for a few days because of the snow, but once the roads cleared, we started to venture out more.
Mom, Dad, Maria, and I spent a day driving down the peninsula, geocaching, bird-watching, and lighthouse-sighting.
The first of the lighthouses was under construction, but a boardwalk led out to a marsh with flocks of birds and a suspicious splash and trail that could have been a mammal of some sort.
We continued our way down the coast, stopping at the house featured in Nicholas Sparks' Nights in Rodanthe. Our southern-most point was the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
We wandered inside the Visitors' Center (as we are apt to do) to find a park volunteer who "lived the life", working at Mount Rainier in the summer and here in the winter. (Dad was jealous.) He started a documentary for us of how they moved the lighthouse away from the shore in the 1990s.
With the changing coastline, the original structure had gotten too close to the ocean, so engineers were afraid that the pilings that were holding the lighthouse up were beginning to rot, which could be a danger for the lighthouse keepers and others who were climbing in it. So the decision was made (and then heavily contested) to move the lighthouse inland.
After digging at the base, and sawing it off the cement rocks that it was attached to, the pilings were found to be in good shape... but too late! Time to move it back a few hundred meters to its new site.
They bulldozed the trees between the two sites, then put the fortified structure on a bed that was moved by rolling bars underneath it. Over 23 days, they inched it along until it got to its new home.
The documentary went into great detail, including what this massive engineer manevuer did for the town. Our favorite part was the shopowner who was selling shirts that said "I swear I saw it move." (Read with a twang, of course.)
As we were driving back, the sun was setting. We found a beach to pull into, and took some amazing pictures of a brilliant sky.
The next day, a group of us went out to visit the Lost Colony of Roanoke and do some more geo-caching. The park had a trail we hiked through, then a little visitors' center and a stage where the production of the Lost Colony (a famous play) was performed.
The other families were so impressed with our geo-caching skills, that we continued to find other caches along the route. Imagine our surprise when one led all twelve of us into a library, where a book was the final clue!
On Christmas morning, we enjoyed presents from Santa and candy from our stockings before packing up and heading south to the Outer Banks for a week of extended family fun. (Extended both in time and in scope of family.)
On our way down, the only restaurant open for lunch was a Waffle House. Valerie noted that it was amazingly cockroach- and drug-free for a Waffle House. That was a happy fact.
When we got to the beach house, we immediately began divvying up the rooms, finding the ideal beds in the three-story mansion. However, that night, it began to snow...
We woke up to an unexpected winter wonderland by the seashore. And it was there that we found our perfect Christmas card picture.
Now, we took a few of the same picture, but later, we discovered that each picture had a misguided snowflake that ruined someone's nose or someone else's eyebrow. With the limited photo editing software, I thought it was impossible to fix. Until we copy and pasted my eyebrow from another picture. Can't even tell, can you?
My aunt and uncle's house by the beach a little farther north had gotten dumped on with snow as well, so on the 27th, we drove a few hours back to their place to play in over 8 inches of snow.
The night before, we had gotten a taste of the snow on the patio of the third story in the beach house.
That little snowman lasted a good four days (until Coco ate the carrot nose).
