Raleigh

Online Article – COLOR ME GREEN

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Color me green  (Part I of II) April/May 2012 Written for TriangleMommies Blog Copyright ARLADEAN ARNSON

Like the characters Kermit the Frog and Yoda of Star Wars, it really isn’t easy being green. In fact, around this time every year the green-eyed monster within has reared her (unfortunately) ugly head and signals the beginning of the growing season. Yes, I must admit that I have Garden Envy.

And, this year, the force is quite strong. Due to the mild winter we have had here in North Carolina, everything started blooming early and with gusto. (I’d hate to even think about the amount of bugs that will be showing up soon. But, that is another blog article.)

I had been used to having my own home-grown vegetables at my finger-tips, but those days are gone. I have moved from a house with a yard to a duplex with, well, a back porch. Gone are the days of green vines spreading out in all directions! Those corn stalks; they would reach to the sky!

I have friends that have been tending their seedlings this spring and I just look on with awe. In fact, I have one friend whose husband has taken a five by five foot area in their rented house’s back yard and built a two tiered vegetable growing plat. The top is for the herbs. They sit right at arm’s length. The lower (outer) plat is for the veggies.  He has sectioned the area off into squares with twine and each set of squares has its own function. These squares are for the tomatoes and these other ones are for the radishes. Amazing.

So, I am suffering with Garden Envy. And, most doctors won’t write a prescription for it.  However, it seems, I might have found a cure! I won’t know if my cure works until the trials, which start t this weekend, end and the data gathered and published. But, if I plant my own little mini-garden on my back porch, I might just shake this GE affliction!

I will be sure to publish my findings here at Triangle Mommies, so if ever you catch this malady in the future, you know what to do, or what not to do.

Until then, keep your chin up and watch out for bees!

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Online Article – BLACK GOLD

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Black Gold June 2013 Written for TriangleMommies Blog Copyright ARLADEAN ARNSON

My co-workers and I have discovered black gold. No, it isn’t the “Texas Tea” sort either.

We have discovered a little sandwich shop inside the corner gas station that sells Café Cubano or cafecito.

This is a black coffee, sweetened oh so perfectly, and served hot with foam in a small little Styrofoam cup. It smells perfectly pungent with hints of the tropics swimming in a dark sea of caffeine. It tastes like the smoothest dark chocolate, almost liquor-like in its consistency. The foam just tickles your lips with buttery kisses while the coffee warms your whole being.

Beware! It is STRONG. Ah, so strong-strong enough to carry you through the rest of your stressful day on just that one cup.

Of course, it is strong enough to last into the evening too. A couple of us have had a cup of cafecito in the middle of a particularly hard afternoon and found out that it did get us all through the day without killing anyone, but we were up half the night ready to kill someone for lack of sleep!

There are several places throughout the Triangle where you too can try a cup of Café Cubano: The Oakwood Café in Raleigh, the Havana Grill in Cary, The Old Havana Sandwich Shop in downtown Durham, and our little secret in Morrisville, The Latin Corner.

If you love coffee, and you haven’t had a cup of joe you could call “black gold”, then you must seek out this lyric-poem-in-a-cup, a cafecito.  Be warned, you might get addicted.

ONLINE ARTICLE- Family Outing: 2 for 1 Adventure in Raleigh

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Family Outing: 2 for 1 Adventure in Raleigh, NC Oct. 11, 2009 Copyright Arladean Arnson Originally published on Triangle Mommies blog.

 

What to do? What to do? I have THREE “Flat Stanley”s that have traveled to our house from far afield that need to go home in the next two days. We haven’t done anything interesting at all in the time they have been visiting. And, my son really wants bring Daddy on his first Letterboxing adventure today, Sunday, the last day of the weekend.

 

Hey, I know what to do! I will jump onto the computer and find out if there are any Letterboxes in downtown Raleigh so we can hit the historical parts, take some pictures with the “Stanley”s, learn a little more about North Carolina, and take my husband on his first Letterboxing adventure!

 

Now, if you have read this far and have no idea what a “Flat Stanley” might be and you have never heard of the fantastic outdoor activity of Letterboxing, I congratulate you on your enthusiasm for my writing!

Flat Stanley is a book written by Jeff Brown and illustrated by Tomi Ungerer and published in 1964. The story is of a little boy that unfortunately gets flattened but sees the bright side of his predicament. He ends up being able to go around the world being mailed by letter. There is a string of stories to tell of his adventures.

This story was so popular that in 1995 a Canadian teacher started The Flat Stanley Project. This effort encourages children around the world to find out about each other through the mailing of paper dolls that either look like Stanley from the book or images of themselves!

My son and I received our three visiting paper dolls from a family of homeschoolers in Texas.

Now, what about Letterboxing? The easiest way to explain it is that it is an outdoor activity where a box or bag containing a notebook and a homemade stamp is hidden in a public place like a park or even a parking lot! To get the clues on where this box is hidden, one would log onto certain web sites that have them listed. Using the clues, the seeker finds the box, stamps his own notebook with the homemade stamp, leaves an imprint of his own stamp in the letterbox notebook, and then “reburies” or re-hides it for the next adventurer. Then, when the seeker gets back to the computer, he can log that he had found the box!

We started off our adventure by heading downtown to the NC Capitol Building. We walked around the grounds of the Capitol as we looked for the perfect place to take our “Stanley” picture. We stopped every once in a while to read the many and varied statues. Did you know there were three Presidents of the United States from North Carolina? Yes! But, I am going to leave you to look up who they were!

I noticed that a light was on inside the Capitol and I took a few steps to see if the building was indeed open on a Sunday. Yes! We were in luck. After checking in with security, we made our way around the building going up and down the staircases and peeking into rooms. I highly suggest a visit to the Capitol, especially if you are not from North Carolina.

Making our way out of the building and around back to our car, my son wondered if we were going to find any Letterboxes today or are we going to just hang around all the old buildings! Letterboxes were next!

There is a beautiful old and very historic cemetery right in downtown Raleigh and that was where the two Letterboxes were for today’s hunt. There are many other Letterboxes hiding in downtown Raleigh, but being October, I thought a trip to the Oakwood Cemetery would be just the place to get us in the spooky mood! Of-course, by day, Oakwood Cemetery is not spooky but a lovely garden where families actually bicycle together on a Sunday afternoon. We even saw a family flying a kite there too.

Following our clues, we started out for our first Letterbox. This first one was found under a bush and being held there by a white rock, near a beautiful old Oak Tree. The homemade stamp was of lovely oak leaves! How appropriate for our day in the “Oak City”! We left our mark, my son’s stamp of a little lamb, in the notebook and “buried” the Letterbox again where we found it.

The second, we found out, was very complicated, but we followed the clues in the car instead of by foot which would have taken us all over the southern part of the Cemetery! After a few minutes of circling around, we found the Camilla bush with the cute turtle nearby! We stamped our mark and gathered our treasure in stamp form of a flower emblazoned with an “A”. Hid the box for the next Letterboxer and drove out of the Cemetery happy to have found both boxes!

We ended our downtown adventure with a snack break at Krispy Kreme Donuts on Person Street. Of-course, this was another fine place to take a “Stanley” picture!

So the next time you have a quandary of how you are going to do two or three projects at once, remember there is ALWAYS a way to do it! We did it with a camera, a car, a Capitol and a Cemetery!

 

For more information on Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown please go to your local library or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley .

 

For more information on The Flat Stanley Project go to http://www.flatstanley.com/ .

 

For more information on Letterboxing research it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxing .

 

Or visit sites on Letterboxing: http://www.letterboxing.org/ and   http://www.atlasquest.com/ .

 

The official tourism site for Raleigh, NC is here: http://www.visitraleigh.com/ .

 

Krispy Kreme’s official web site is here: http://www.krispykreme.com/ .