Big Newses

Well now, there's been a bit going on around here lately.  So much, I haven't been able to share it with you.  So now an odd collection of exciting developments in my little world.  And I'm saving the excitingest for last, so there.

First off, just yesterday Miss Chef facilitated our entrance into the 21st century.  Doing an online MBA program was becoming frustrating for her, since our DSL hookup made the videos she has to watch pause and load way too frequently.  She finally put her foot down a couple of weeks ago and decided we were going to upgrade to broadband.  I'm pretty stingy, and wasn't too excited at the extra outlay, but I have really been wishing we had a better connection.  So it didn't take a lot of talking to get my ok on the project.

Now not only do pages load faster, but I can watch your videos without stopping them and finding something else to do for awhile.  And I can even upload my own videos without throwing everything into a loop!  Here's a short one from last summer's Big Trip--inside the Louvre.  (Points if you can name the work of art, bonus points for doing it in French, lol.)

Wow, that loaded about 10 times faster than before.  Watch out, I've got a whole new medium to play with now!

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Speaking of last year's Big Trip, my second exciting news has its origins that far back.  A little background: I have a cousin on my mom's side who lives in Chapel Hill, only a couple of hours from Charlotte.  Lolette's dad was French, and also an artist, so you can imagine I was eager to share my photos from France with her when I visited last winter.  She got really excited about this one when she saw it:

This was taken out the window of our rental apartment in Paris, as a thunderstorm approached right at sunset.  Turns out Lolette was working on a series focusing on skylines and rooftops, and this fit right into her theme.  Well, just this week, she emailed me to let me know she'd finished the series and was photographing it to catalog it.  And so she emailed me a copy yesterday.

Check it out, whaddya think?

I'm interested to see the rest of the series, to see what commonalities she carries from one piece to the next.  But I'm just very flattered to have been able to inspire an artist!  She hasn't posted this series yet, but if you're curious here's a link to her website: Lolette Guthrie.

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So I've saved the best bit of news for last, and I don't even have any photographs to mark it.  I guess I'll just have to announce flat out that Miss Chef is actually quitting one of her jobs!

Yep, she's finally had to acknowledge that two jobs and an MBA were just a little more than she cared to handle.  She sat down with Chef Adam about a month ago, and told him the time had finally come for her to leave.  He's always known she'd leave eventually, and he had noticed that she'd become burned-out and distracted.  So as it turns out, they had come to a mutual decision separately--he'd actually been thinking about looking for a replacement (knowing full well he can never find one!).

Miss Chef told him she'd get him through Restaurant Week, and would be happy to help with any big events, and I'm sure he'll take her up on it.  So her last day at the restaurant will be August 11th, and then she'll finally be able to focus on her teaching and coursework.  Still, I'm glad she's probably going to step back into his kitchen to help him out once in a while, because I really like Adam and the restaurant family, and would miss them if we had no more ties there.

The important thing is, I'm really looking forward to having Miss Chef around just a little bit more.  Of course, I'm now teaching two nights a week...and there's always the demonstrations Miss Chef's signed up for at the farmers' market, and her commitment to help out another chef uptown during all the hullabaloo of the Democratic National Convention in September...so don't think it's all gonna be 9 to 5 from here on out.

Still, if we can just have our Saturdays together, it will be wonderful.

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Ok, here's another video of Rosie, that I shot last October.  Just because I can.