“I saved three dollars!”

Monday night at the Travis house…  Evan goes grocery shopping without Kelly and gets a block of cheese for their lunches instead of sliced.

 

Thursday’s Scoop

For those of you who haven’t heard, I may be wearing this soon.  The latest scoop in the Travis household is that we are moving to Knoxville, TN this summer so that Evan can attend the UT MBA program.  His first day is August 4th.  Feels a little crazy to go from being comfy and settled in Durham to completed uprooting in a mere six months, but we’re excited.  The program is a condensed MBA program, so Evan will graduate in December 2009.  I am furiously looking for a job that will pay the bills.  We are really excited to be able to spend more time with Katie and Curtis Chesney and baby Cooper who already live in Knoxville, and Curtis will also be starting the MBA program in the fall.  It will be a whole new exciting ballgame to go to UT football games, and I am also looking forward to spending summer Saturdays out on the lake.

Lakeside

While the men were off in the mountains building a super cool shack, I was at Lake Norman with some of my college girlfriends for the weekend.  Sarah Tucker  was gracious enough to let us use her family’s incredible lake house for the weekend and we had a great time relaxing and catching up.  I caught up with Amber Swift, who is living in Winston-Salem and finishing up a year long counseling internship at her church, Ashley Monroe, who is living in Charlotte and promoting Republican ideals through her skillful fundraising and campaign management, Stephanie Holmes, who is enjoying life in Charlotte with husband Scott and dog Motown, Amanda Cox, who drove down to hang out on Saturday with baby Madelynn, who is only 4 weeks old and very, very cute, Kristen Kidd, who is working with me at Almac and Sarah Tucker who is loving life as mom to Owen Tucker, a 5 month old cutie.  We spent most of Saturday hanging out on the dock, lounging in the sun, reading magazines, snacking and chatting.  This is an opportune time for me to introduce the term “random tan” which Evan, I think, coined, meaning small patches of sunburn that show up where you thought you had covered yourself with sunscreen, but apparently not.  Your whole back might be safe from the sun and slowing getting that golden glow, except for that one red 2 x 5 inch streak by your shoulder.  Random tan.  I have lots of random tan after lounging on the dock, but it was worth it.

                        

Travis Mountain Cabin

I want to direct my readers to this web page on my brother-in-law Miles’ blog, which tells the story of this past weekend’s events at the future site of the Travis Mountain Cabin.  Pop Travis purchased some land in the VA mountains near Independence and Galax about a year ago, and preparations for a mountain house on the land are slowly but surely in the works.  Evan, his dad and his uncle Jesse spent some time building a shed up there a few months ago, and this past weekend was a major work weekend to complete the shed and some other land maintenance tasks.  I haven’t seen the shed with my own two eyes, so I really enjoyed the pictures that Miles posted.  My parents even got in on the action, as they headed up to VA for a visit to Oak Hill to see Andrew and also spent part of the day building some steps up to the shed’s porch.

Things I Like….Crate & Barrel

I hosted book club last night, and a few compliments on my blue Crate and Barrel dessert plates got me thinking about how much I love the store. A few of our favorite novel kitchen items are from Crate and Barrel, including our half pot rack, which hangs all of our pots neatly over the sink, and our footed dessert dishes, which hold the perfect size portion of ice cream. I went on the website today to explore a bit and also found these dessert plates that I liked. Enjoy the pics of a few of my favorite Crate and Barrel items, and to purchase them yourself, just click on the picture.