Brian Ulmer's Web Site

My change of domain registration finally went through so I’m fully up and running on WordPress hosting. I started moving photos from my other pages to Picasa last night but hit some kind of limit after I did a couple hundred. I guess this is going to have to be a week or two long project if that keeps happening. 2007 is almost migrated though.

Lots going on at the moment that I’ll finally post about soon. Have a great week!

My web hosting company decided to give me more features that I don’t need with a corresponding hike in my monthly fee. I’m countering their offer by moving my site to free WordPress hosting. The posts have already been migrated and all my Picasa albums will stay available. I have some old photo albums at the “Photos” link above that are hosted with the old provider, and these will be unavailable until I manually move them over to Picasa.

I’m also excited to announce that Kristin and I are moving (again) in May, but this time it’s to enjoy the luxury and glamour of home ownership! We’ll be in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington, just two blocks west of Glebe Rd and close to my office and lots of friends, trails, and fun. Summer cookouts will be scheduled soon…

My parents drove up to visit some friends in Richmond last week and spent Friday through Sunday morning in DC. We hit Ray’s the Steaks on Friday night, where I ate a dry aged, long bone cowboy steak. It came out with a rib bone sticking out of it, which must have been about 14 inches long. It was quite intimidating but I managed to eat it without knocking anyone’s drink over.

On Saturday, we headed into DC for the day. We got lunch at Matchbox, toured the Library of Congress, had drinks and snacks at the Mayflower, then walked over to the National Geographic for the night’s Banff Mountain File Festival showing. Another eight search and rescue friends joined us, in what’s been probably a 10 year tradition of going to the film festival. A great winter event.

Here are the pics I took on Saturday.

This weekend, Kristin and I visited Monticello and stayed at a bed and breakfast in Scottsville, VA – the High Meadows Vineyard Inn. We’ve been watching the John Adams HBO mini-series, and with the recent refresher on colonial and Jeffersonian history, it was especially interesting to visit Monticello. I vaguely remember going as a child, or I might just be imagining that, but it was all new to me again this time around. The inn was a great time too.  I’m on the fence about the whole B&B thing. I like staying at interesting places, but don’t necessarily long to hang out with a bunch of random people in someone’s house. High Meadows was private enough that you certainly had your own space. The owners were very nice, they cooked delicious, fresh, local food, and they had lots of animals on the property to play with. Chickens, ducks, peacocks, cats, rabbits. It was a fun weekend and we’re back home. Time to spend my birthday evening relaxing and eating cake! Here are my pictures from the weekend.

On Christmas Eve, I flew to Greenville, SC to spend five days with my parents and some of my extended family. This was actually the first year my brother didn’t join us. He ended up going to his girlfriend’s family’s place. It was a pretty relaxing and low key. We ate a lot, did some walking on the Swamp Rabbit Trail, and got just enough snow that Greenville had the first official white Christmas since the 1960′s. Here are my pictures from the trip.

Last night, Jon, Lindsey, Jason, Melissa, and Jon’s sister Lauren came over for some New Years Eve celebration and we went to Rustico in Alexandria for a late dinner. We had a great time and drank some tasty cask beers. My last meal of 2010 was a giant slab of prime rib on top of a bed of duck fat fried potatoes. Mmmmm, saturated fat is delicious… Here are a few pictures from dinner.

With my parents having moved to South Carolina this year, Thanksgiving 2010 was actually the first for me where I didn’t have family fairly close by to celebrate with. Kristin’s family is in Minnesota, so we decided to cook Thanksgiving dinner and invite any friends who were going to be in town to join us.

Along with being new to hosting Thanksgiving, this was also the first time I’ve attempted to cook a turkey. I did some research and settled on a fresh free range turkey, brined it for 12 hours, smothered it in butter and herbs, and popped it in the oven. It came out fully cooked and very juicy…delicious. The rest of the meal came together well and three of our friends arrived for food and some football watching.

Today, I met up with Jon and Jason to do some geocaching. I’d done this once before.  Some time in the past, someone hid a container, ranging in size from a centimeter, to one of those large metal ammo boxes. They publish the coordinates and you use a GPS to get close to where it’s hidden, usually in the woods somewhere. Once you get to the point, you’re usually off by 100 feet or so and you have to run around looking under rocks, in logs, etc, to find it. The two we did today each consisted of 3 points. The first two points contained clues needed to get to the next point, and the last point has a log book in it you sign and some random items that people sometimes leave or exchange. They were both fairly challenging but we found them. It ended up being a nice way to play outside without having to drive a couple hours to find a place where it’s entertaining enough to go hiking.

Here are a few pictures from the geocaching outing.

Today, Kristin and I spent the day in Charlottesville eating, shopping, and walking around. Last fall we did this same day trip and it rained most of the time, today the weather was perfect. Lots of people were out enjoying they day. Here are a few pictures, including Kristin in front of her favorite store, Alakazam.