Super Tuesday!

It's Super Tuesday here in Virginia, and Ollie and I voted on the way to work this morning. We also talked to a woman with a petition to get the light rail proposal a referendum in November (which is a very complicated and long-time issue in Virginia Beach / Norfolk).

Bar Trivia

My husband's med school held a bar trivia night at local brewery O'Connor's, and his pathology lab group made a team, so we participated. We didn't do too well in the first half... did GREAT in the second half... and had no idea what we were doing with the final question where we wagered all our points. (There was no prize so we figured we might as well.)

Blue Ribbon at the Norva

I believe I've taken a previous LV to see my brother-in-law's band play at the Norva (a great little music venue in Norfolk) but this time they were headlining!

Blue Ribbon on stage!

A great little restaurant around the corner from the Norva, the Grilled Cheese Bistro.
They serve something like two dozen variations on the classic, plus sides like
fried pickles, fries, tomato soup, etc.

The marquis outside the Norva (with a Norfolk mermaid on top)

Fan Fic February

The library and Tidewater Comicon are working together to bring a fan-fiction program to the high school closest to the library I work at, and I was invited to be a part of it!

I didn't want to distract the kids from their great work (or worry about photo waivers or whatever) so Ollie posed with the flier:

We'll be doing this every Thursday this month, so there's more fun to come!

Graffitti

Ollie and I stopped at a thrift store to look for some pieces for an upcoming cosplay, and this was spray-painted outside. We thought it was kind of nice, and it matched Ollie quite well.

Snow

I know some of the other LVs got REAL snow this weekend, but Ollie got a typical Virginia Beach snow:

Looking out the windows at work, wondering if we're going to close early.

Getting home after we DID close early... Ollie doesn't have cold weather clothes,
so I let him share my very large infinity scarf.

We don't have 8 mittens so Ollie didn't play in the snow.

Ollie's 3-Day Weekend

We haven't been doing much, other than going back to work and cleaning up after Christmas and New Year's. But this is a three-day weekend, so we're having a little bit of fun!

Friday night, we tried a new sushi place (and no, Ollie didn't shrink... the pieces were ENORMOUS compared to what I'm used to at our other favorite sushi restaurants). And we didn't order any octopus, because we didn't want Ollie to be icked out.

Then, today, we went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens again, but in IMAX 3D this time. We went at 9:15am on a Sunday, so Ollie got his own seat this time...

(Those are previews... I wouldn't take a photo during the movie!)

We spent the rest of the 3-day weekend doing boring things like cleaning and watching TV.

New Year's Eve

Every year for New Year's Eve, my husband and I borrow my in-laws' house (we're usually house-sitting for them anyway) and host a dozen of our friends for a full fondue dinner. (I highly recommend it... we start at 6-7pm and it takes up most of the time until the good stuff on the New Year's Rockin' Eve show around 11:30pm starts.) But this year, my best friend had a baby two days before Christmas, two people couldn't make it... it just wouldn't have worked out quite right. So it was just us, the cats, and Ollie!

Ollie sampling the chocolate fondue

Ollie trying on my silly New Year's Eve hat from Wal-Mart

Happy New Year!

Checking out the table before the cheese fondue starts

And finishing with the table set for chocolate fondue

Happy 2016, everyone!

Christmas

Between the chaos of having four different Christmas celebrations and my phone suddenly deciding that every other photo should swap the blue/red colors to make everything weirdly colored (Ollie turned out a burnt orange in every photo like that), I didn't get photos of Ollie doing things like opening presents or stockings, etc.

But on December 30, Tidewater Comicon hosted a free movie night at another library (not the one I work at) in Virginia Beach, so we went and saw Guardians of the Galaxy, and we saw this big book tree in the library.

Hanukkah (Belated)

Sure, Hanukkah was in early December this year, but my in-laws don't celebrate until my sister-in-law can come home for Christmas, so it's usually a few days before Christmas for us, no matter when the actual holiday is.

Ollie helped me and my husband make a batch of latkes for me to take to work as a gift for the people who had to work at the library until 9pm on December 23rd.

Yum! Want to make your own? We put five potatoes and two yellow onions in the food processor (with the grating blade on), mixed it by hand with four eggs and added matzo meal until it felt more like a dough and made neat patties. (Salt and pepper them at some point, too.) Then we fried them in vegetable oil in the wok (the wok made it REALLY easy to flip them without splashing oil everywhere) and as they finished, we put them on paper towels to drain a little oil. This made three dozen latkes about 3 inches in diameter.