Our good friends Elizabeth and Tom moved away with their precious baby boy, Patrick. Lucky for us they moved to Charlottesville, so hopefully we will be able to see them more often than not.

My cousin, Mary, got married at our grandmother’s and her mother’s home in the Northern Neck of Virginia.

You can see more pics of the wedding here.

And finally, we started off the holiday season with one night at Warren Hayne’s Christmas Jam at the Civic Center. My biggest highlight was when John Paul Jones played mandolin and Joan Osbourne sang with the Del McKoury Band.

There are more pics here. I finally gave up around 3:30 am (the music ended at 4:30 pm) and was completely ruined the next day. I haven’t been that spent from a night out in a loooooong time. Can’t wait until next year!

We are seeing some of the lowest gas prices here since we moved to town over three years ago. However, unleaded is the only gas being shipped in. Still no premiums.

We hosted a birthday party for our friend, Charlie, aka – Scooby-Doo, last Saturday. It lasted almost 10 hours. I slept the entire next day. You can see more pics here.

I took this from the parking lot at work. I really need to get up in them hills.

Last weekend Brian and I took Sally to the Second Halloween Dog Festival and Costume Contest. We were too late to enter the costume contest for her weight-class, but we had a fantastic time walking around and seeing all the other costumes. We were joined by our neighbors, Chris and Carol, and their dog, Willow, who was dressed as the Frog Prince. The festival was right in the heart of downtown and several businesses had joined in the festivities as part of a trick-or-treat walk for the dogs. You went around to the participating businesses who handed out dog treats to all the pups and signed a sheet that you eventually took back to festival for free goodies. Our counter is still full of goodies a week later! You can see pics of more dogs here.

There are more pics here.

For the past week in Asheville, and much of the south east, we have been in a real gas crisis. It was so bad last week that police were told not to patrol, the local community college shut down for the remainder of the week because students couldn’t get to school, and government offices closed. Whenever a truck came to town and filled up a station, lines would immediately form and what would normally have been enough gas to last the community about a week was selling out in a few hours. People were waiting up to 3 hours in lines to fill up. At the end of last week I happened to drive by a gas station that is a little bit out of the way and was selling gas. Since the line for the pumps was on an obscure side street, the line was relatively short, so I jumped in and waited only about half an hour. It cost me almost $50 for half a tank! The situation seems to be getting better but gas is still over $4 a gallon. Brian is just about on empty but my tank is fill so we should be ok for another week. It really makes think hard about getting a scooter!