Tampa!

I had pretty much had it with the cruel joke that is Spring in Connecticut, so I had to convince Joe to take me somewhere warm. We just finished paying a HUGE, annoying debt, so we decided to take that first payment off and go away for a long weekend. The Yankees training camp is held in Tampa, FL, so I knew I could lure Joe down there for sure. We went down Friday morning and had a fantastic lunch at J. Alexander's, and went to Whiskey Joe's for fish tacos and cheap beer for dinner (SO GOOD!). And we caught a game that night:

Richard Gere threw out the first pitch (that's him in the dark jacket near the mound) & it was hilarious to listen to all the swoons and giggles coming from the crowd! Then Saturday we went to Busch Gardens for the day and went to a place called Skipper's for dinner. I had my first gator nuggets (tastes like chicken!), and some awesome Florida stone crabs. We also had their key lime pie and damn near licked the plate, it was so good.
Sunday morning, it was raining, so we slept in and had granola bars from the vending machine for breakfast & headed out for the stadium around 11:30 after it stopped raining. It was only 2 miles from our hotel, so we walked to & from there. Half way there, we got a little residual rain cloud overhead, so we ducked into Subway to escape it. They had such a good deal on their subs (some of their footlongs were only $4 instead of $5), that we decided to just eat there & save ourselves a cool $50 on ballpark food. We had GREAT seats that day:

Seats that close at Yankee Stadium would have been at least $300 apiece, and ours were around $30 each. So, IMO, definitely worth it to go to Tampa to Yankee games! We went to Oystercatchers that night for dinner & had such an amazing meal & even more amazing view:

Everything we had there was simply grilled, perfectly seasoned, and really healthy and light. I was so impressed with the all restaurants we ate at, Oystercatchers especially, because of all the healthy options for Joe (and me), and how MOST of the menu was that way.

All in all, it was a really fun trip and we are ready to go back NOW!

Darn Pretty

Well, Joe LOVED the kitchen. He took a minute trying to figure out what the heck happened, but he finally caught on. He even surprised me with a dozen roses the next day! Little did he know, I had already rewarded myself for a job well done. Somebody's got to stimulate the economy; might as well be me, right? I decided I would finally let myself get some of those Darn Pretty Needles by Grafton Fibers. They are sooooo expensive normally but they were having a great sale on their Bubblegum Stripe sets, so I got a couple to try them out. It took me about 5 seconds to decide that I wanted more. I instantly got inspired to finish my socks made with Lorna's Laces in Black Purl:

And I had a gift certificate to Creative Fibers that I needed to use, so I got some of their newly-in-stock Malabrigo Sock yarn. Between the Malabrigo and the DPNs, I am in sock heaven!

I did end up getting more sets of the Darn Pretty's, especially since they came out with size 2.5. If you you use wood dpns at all, I would highly recommend trying these out. They are so smooth and velvety, they don't hurt my wrists when I work with them, and since they're only 5 inches long, they don't snag at the sleeve of whatever I'm wearing while I'm knitting. And they're on sale! How can you resist? ;)