Visits with Friends

As Aimee and I sit here, in the laziness of a Saturday afternoon, we’re thankful for the recent opportunities to visit with our friends, old and new.  Despite the fact that we’re both not feeling great but oh well. 

Last weekend Michael and Joanna came down from Chicago for a great visit. We hung out, had some delicious food, and enjoyed catching up.  We ate dinner Saturday night at Wisteria and enjoyed their “new Southern” cuisine which was followed by some game playing and wine.  Turns out (a) Joanna and I are particularly unremarkable at Scrabble and (b) exclaiming “Plum!” during Clue when discretely shown a picture of the Professor is not strategically sound.

In our first touristy outing, we went to the CNN Studio Tour.  It was pretty good actually though it felt somewhat ephemeral, like we were just scratching the surface the entire time. 

Michael and Joanna joined us at IHM for mass (it was nice to look up from the piano and see Michael in the choir, just like when Meg and Katie were here) and then we got to try a new Italian restaurant with the group: Nino’s on the Cheshire Bridge. 

On to some new friends… we hosted our neighbor Megan, her boyfriend and their dog Piper for wine and cheese on Friday night.  It was Crowley’s first “play date” and it’s nice to know some more people in our building.  Then this morning we had brunch at Rosebud with Katherine and her husband Beto from IHM. 

Lastly, a couple quick observations of a Chicagoan living in the South.  First, for all the complaining about Atlanta traffic, I grabbed these screenshots of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Chicago Tribune on the same day:

Second, while working from home last Friday after the snow storm, I happened to notice this industrious example of snow removal and had to video it. 

Southern Snow Removal

One more special thank you to Michael and Joanna for flying down here to be with us.  We loved it and look forward to future visits to Chicago and meeting more friends down here in Atlanta.

Six Months In: Blog Statistics

We are a little over halfway through our year in Atlanta and are really and truly enjoying this experience.  I hope that our blog has been indicative of that -- we’ve been happy to share some of those experiences with you.  But who are you?  Where do you come from?  And what browser do you use?  Below are some stats from our blog since July 1…

Starting with a chart of visits over time.  We routinely get 4-5 visits per day, except for the spikes you see which are when I e-mail the link or post it on Facebook.  In fact, facebook.com is the number one referring domain to our blog.

Clearly our “readership” is anchored in Atlanta, the Chicago area, and Michigan but we’re pretty well spread out in other places too.  If you live in a small city, you probably have your very own dot on the map!



Specifically, these are the top 20 cities in the US with Visits and other corresponding data points.  Pages/Visit measures how many pages you  click to in one discrete visit.  Given that it’s a blog, one page per visit is reasonable.  Higher than that means people are clicking on other links or specific posts.  Avg. Time on Site is interesting because you get a feel for whether people are checking often for updates or actually reading a page.  Bounce Rate should be pretty high as it’s the percentage of “singe-page” visits on the site.  However if Bounce Rate is 100% and Avg. Time on Site is 00:00:00…  Joliet… Megan? 

Today the US, tomorrow the globe!  We’ve had visits from United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Malaysia, Denmark, Netherlands, Israel, Germany, India.  However, as you’ll see later, not everyone who has landed on our blog got there intentionally (at least initially).

These are the Keywords that people have typed into Google (or other search engines), that resulted in (a) our blog being returned as a result and (b) the user clicking into our blog.  A couple of these are pretty interesting, particularly people looking for recipes for lamb ribs or searching for what I can only assume is the Bill Knapp’s Chicken Fricassee Recipe.  Also those searching for “easy fortune, happy life” probably were left unsatisfied with our posts.

This one surprised me a bit.  The median usage statistics in the US for Internet Explorer is around 46% and Firefox is a second at around 30%.  Evidently we have a disproportionately high number of Chrome users (visits from our apartment are removed from all of these calculations by the way).

I don’t always visit with my mobile device, but when I do, I use “______” [see below]. Keep reading my friends.  iPhone is the clear favorite here.

Special thanks to Google Analytics for their almost scary web tracking ability.  Expect another post like this in another 6 months or so.  Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

Snowed in, in Atlanta

We’d been looking forward to witnessing the “city shutdown” that accompanies a dusting of snow here in Atlanta.  Well….   check.  After fighting a woman for the last gallon of milk left in the city, we are home in the warmth, safe and sound. 

So there was actually no altercation at the grocery store but a few things are interesting to note:

1. There really is a serious run on eggs, milk, and bread at the grocery stores.  It is not a joke.
2. They announce school closings 2+ days before the day in question.
3. School closings are always accompanied by “church closings” (not a pairing I’m used to hearing).
4. They really don’t have the infrastructure to handle snow removal or salting.  As a seasoned veteran of Northern winter driving, you really have to be on your game because roads just aren’t touched so in many cases the conditions are actually worse than I’m used to.

And to be fair, this isn’t a dusting.  As I’m sure most people have heard or read, this has been a significant “weather event”, amplified by persistent cold temperatures, sleet, and freezing rain.  Aimee, who works more days than the mailman, even benefitted from the Emory Clinic closing both Monday and Tuesday. On that note, USPS, UPS, FedEx, and MARTA buses are all out of service. Strange.

The extra time at home has meant extra time to do some cooking, staying up a bit later (to catch the National Championship game), and just hanging out.  We had a Pasta Night at Tommy’s house so Aimee made a batch of her homemade spaghetti sauce and some Chocolate Tiramisu. It’s fun to make all the espresso and necessary fillings.

 

I was thinking about Yolk in Chicago and decided to make some Banana Blue Crunch Cakes using whole wheat flour, and homemade toasted granola, all topped with some pure maple syrup from Montreal (thanks Daniela!). 

 

Our other cooking adventure was a first for us:  Lamb.  Beautiful French-cut chops from Trader Joe’s topped with olive oil and fresh thyme, rosemary and peppers.  We served it with scallion mashed potatoes and asparagus.

 

Unlike many Atlantans I’ve come across in the past couple days, Crowley is no stranger to the snow.  Born outside Minneapolis and raised in Chicago, she simply loves it.  Except when it’s frozen snow, topped with freezing rain and no place to walk without some degree of  discomfort.  So we broke out the booties!  Before you watch, I assure you she got quite used to them once we got outside and loved it!  Getting used to them initially however?  Not quite as graceful:

Crowley tries out her booties for the first time in a year!

Veni, Vidi, Visa

Which, roughly translated, means:  “I came to the restaurant all dressed up with Aimee for their New Year’s Eve Prix Fixe dinner, I saw the delicious courses and wine pairings as I consumed them, and I paid handsomely with my Chase Freedom Visa card”.  Seriously it was a really fantastic evening at Veni Vidi Vici.  We had four courses and went with the selected wine pairings for each one:  Antipasti with prosecco, Primi (orchietta with Italian sausage and rapini and porchetta with crisped artichokes) paired with a chianti, Secondi (trout and potatoes and beef tenderloin) paired with a deeper red for Aimee and a pinot grigio for me, and finally a Dolci course with moscato d’asti.  It was fun to dress up and celebrate the new year (and a Notre Dame bowl victory!).

On New Year’s Day we relaxed the whole day, aside from some much needed grocery shopping.  After watching the Michigan State Alabama game, we decided to do some cooking of our own.  Aimee made beef tenderloin and delicious potatoes.

I made chocolate chip cookies with my newly acquired pure Mexican vanilla extract (we’re not in Madagascar anymore Dorothy).

Inspired by my success with those, I moved on to freshly baked bread.  I use the double rise recipe in Better Homes but modified it slightly to made a cinnamon swirl variety as well.  Both turned out great!

Today I did a long overdue re-arranging of the furniture and received this little delight in the mail:  a returned Christmas card with some phonetic advice for my budding southern accent.

Happy New Year’s everyone!!!!