Birthday Dinner...

My sister and her husband arrived Tuesday, just a few minutes after we got off work. We decided to go out to dinner for my birthday so we went to the Village Tavern. We've heard great things about this restaurant and it's only about three miles from our place. The restaurant was awesome ! It was a beautiful post and beam structure with soft lighting, an open display kitchen, wood fired pizza oven and a great outside patio area.

I had Shrimp Bayou which was good but a little on the salty side. Linda and my sister, Phyllis had the shrimp scampi which was amazing. My brother-in-law, Mickey had tilapia and he said it was very good. For dessert, the server brought out a birthday sundae that we all shared. We had a great time with them..it's the first time that I think we've socialized with them outside of family events. It was a fun evening and the restaurant is certainly a place we'd go back to again. Once we got back to the community, I gave them a little tour of the place. Some of the residents were sitting in the atrium listening to some music, playing on a boombox. Paul, one of the residents who used to be a dance instructor "back in the day" asked my sister to waltz so they took a spin around the dance floor. He told me the next day that he really enjoyed dancing with her and that she was really good. She and my BIL used to take ballroom dance classes and actually won an event many years ago out of hundreds of other couples. I remember watching them dance, back when they took these classes, and it was a lot of fun to watch them do all the fancy moves.

That evening, after they left to go to their hotel, we got hit with a horrible storm. We were under a tornado watch until 3 a.m. and Boomer was pacing most of the night. It poured rain all night and most of the next day.

I went back to work on Wednesday...working a reduced schedule of 40 hours until my final appt on Nov 24th. I also have to adhere to the low weight restriction on my lifting until then too. Feeling good...if I'm out and about too much or walking for too long, I start to feel a little sore and achy in my abdomen and know I need to sit down and take it easy.

Today we drove out to Wilkesboro, NC to check out the W.Kerr Scott dam and surrounding campgrounds. We have seen the listing on the Workamper web site for the Army Corp of Engineer positions that go up for bid each year and thought since this location is so close to us, that we'd check it out. It's a gorgeous area and a pretty, fall day to take in the sights. Boomer enjoyed getting in the water at the boat launch. We got some info on the bid process from a volunteer at the visitor center and went to check out the site arrangements for the workers at Bandit's Roost campground. Seems to be a fairly small campground....nice setting and the two sites, for the contracted positions is located right near the entrance gate. Everything was nice but after talking about it, we decided that this would be an ideal type of position once we wanted to slow down in a job and stay put for 4 or 5 months. It would seem to be a rather slow paced job and really long hours each day. Even worse than what we work now ! We'll file the info away for "someday", in case we need it.