Balt-Gulf-Egg

Posted: December 5, 2009 
Filed under: 2009, Blog
Comments: 2 Comments

The Scoop

Curious about the title?  Okay, it’s what I wrote on a sticky note to remind myself what to write about in my next blog post.  So here it is!  (And I do promise it’ll be much shorter than my last.  Did I just hear a sigh of relief?)

Shortly after my last post on the 16th of October, Amy and I flew to Baltimore to see a good friend of ours that we went to high school with, Zachary Patterson.  (He attends the prestigious Johns Hopkins University and is going to be a neurosurgeon.)  We left on Friday, November 6th after classes.  After the taxi ride to Inner Harbor, we ate at a nice restaurant in Little Italy.  Saturday was cold, but we still got up to go eat breakfast at a place called Mrs. Shirley’s.  It was AMAZING.  Get the pancakes.  They’ll knock your socks off.  (Excuse the out-dated cliché.)  We then toured the home Edgar Allen Poe grew up at–and it’s not in a great part of town!  As always with those literary types, he grew up in poor conditions.  I believe the rest of Saturday night was us going to a mall at Towson.  Zachary and I watched Amy shop.  We then headed back to Baltimore and ate at L.P. Steamers.  Wow.  Great steamed crab!!  We actually took mallets and knives and got the meat out ourselves.  Don’t worry.  There are pictures!  The next morning we stopped at the Barnes & Noble bookstore and stocked up on Johns Hopkins apparel.  Go Blue Jays!  We then made our way back to the Inner Harbor (very nice place) and watched a street performer ride unicycles and juggle and make bad jokes. But hey, it was fun.  And a tradition of mine and Amy’s…. we always eat at The Cheesecake Factory if there is one near-by.  There was!  It was delightful.  We then went and saw Charm City Cakes.  Yes, the place of FoodNetwork’s Ace of Cakes!  And then we had a tour of the Johns Hopkins’ campus.  Oh yeah, somewhere in there we went into some Baltimore Museum of Art of something like that.  It was…interesting.  There was a Monet exhibit, so that was kind of cool.  (I wasn’t that impressed, though.)  That night we three could be found in the library at Hopkins studying.  Zachary had a Chemistry lab report due, and Amy and I had schoolwork as well.  See, we are responsible!  And we awoke Monday morning, took a cab to BWI, and then flew home.  Mom and Mimi met us at the airport to take us home.  (Mom and Dad took us.)  It was a very fun trip, and I hope it becomes a yearly expedition.  Be sure to check out the Baltimore album on here or Facebook (which has captions under the pictures).  I’ll take this time to say that Amy picked most of the restaurants. 

Okay, point #2: Gulfport!  We decided to spend Thanksgiving break down on the coast instead of in Pontotoc.  Jordan was down there with her fiancé, so Amy, Mom, and I got a hotel room and stayed a few days.  (Daddy chose to work.)  It was filled with eating good seafood, getting good shopping deals, and Hard Rock.  Mine and Amy’s birthday was November 18th, and apparently at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, you eat for free during your birthday month!  We took advantage and had traditional Thanksgiving cuisine in a non-traditional environment.  (Ooh, that was nice wording!)  Oh yes, we also had a nice photo-shoot on the beach and at a marina.  (Christmas card pictures!)  For the first time ever, Amy and I went out and did some Black Friday shopping.  We were at the outlet mall at 11:15 pm and finished up about two in the morning.  It was actually pretty fun!  (And our purchases were all for us!)  We left Friday and stopped at Academy where Amy got all of her apparel for her Peru trip that’s coming up, and I got everything for my trip to East Asia.  The story had things for all climates! 

And finally, the Egg Bowl!  I went into the day not expecting a win, honestly, and I am a VERY optimistic person.  I spent the game in the Jumbo-Tron control room running graphics, but you better believe I was doing some fist-pumping in my nice leather office chair!  After we maimed Ole Miss–excuse me….When the game was over, I helped set up for a post-game show with Coach Dan Mullens and Jack Cristil.  They wanted the Egg Bowl trophy in the background, so I definitely took a couple of pictures with it while it was just sitting there!  

Those are the big points.  I have to go back to school for a test Monday morning, and then I am done for the semester.  This was really the easiest semester for me since I have been in college.  It was great!  Next semester, though…. I’ll be interning at WCBI (look for me on TV and the webcasts!), working basketball and baseball games for the TV Center, traveling with the praise band for the Baptist Student Union, and, oh yeah, taking a full class load.  It’s going to be CRAZY busy.  And I leave for my missions trip very soon.  I can give more details when I return.  For security reasons, I have to be non-detailistic right now.  (Yes, I made that word up.)  I would like to thank everyone that contributed to my trip whether prayerfully or financially!!  You’re amazing.

I’ll leave you with a verse I came across today that really spoke volumes to me:  “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm.  Let nothing move you.  Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.“  1 Corinthians 15:58

God bless!