familiararity...

..there is something very nice and comforting about it. i miss it!

yesterday marked 6 months of marriage for ryan and i! as much as a i love my sweet husband, he's not usually much into "anniversaries" (it's in " " because he's into the actual anniversary-i.e. december 1, but not really into any other ones-like celebrating how long we've been together (dating), and especially not usually into the month by month anniversaries!), but he pointed out early last week that yesterday was going to be our 6 months anniversary...and decided a few days later that we should celebrate. there are two places that we love and are sooooo thankful they are not too far away from our new home: the cheesecake factory and jim n nicks. so, ryan said he'd take me out to eat at one of those places for our anniversary and the other place for my birthday (which is thursday-ahh!!). after much thought, we decided to go to jim n nicks last night...so, we asked some friends of ours about it's location and got terrible directions. they were the sort of directions that i tend to give: "get on the interstate and go for a ways...then get off at so-n-so road to avoid the tolls, then you turn off that road onto another one, but i can't remember the name of that road right now. but once you turn on that road, you just go a little ways and turn again and you're practically there." amazing, right? so, we took our laptop and sat outside the school just long enough to look up the address of jim n nicks and put it into the tom tom (which, let me just say, has been a HUGE help in trying to navigate around a new city-thanks mom!). unfortunately, we did not avoid the toll roads, which was a little bit stressful. they have these huge signs up everywhere saying that you have to have EXACT change. it made me wonder what would happen if you happened to not have the exact change.... one toll we went through didn't even have an attendant-just a big metal thing you dropped your coins into, that somehow counted it, beeped when you had the right amount in and gave you a green light. pretty strange.... anyway, we made it:

and...they had sweet tea! just like at home!!! i went to the bathroom and made ryan order because it's so embarrassing when places don't have it. they just look at you like you are the stupidest person in the world, "sweet tea-why would we have that crap?!?" i hate that....

and they had cheese "bread"...or what ryan insists are actually called "cheese biscuits," according to birmingham restaurants. they are, in fact, more muffin-ish than anything else. anyway, ryan loves these and i was trying to take a pictures of him eating one, but i was too slow--it was already in his mouth by the time i snapped the picture..

for some reason, we think maybe because jim n nicks began in alabama, they had a glass case with this inside:

and one more picture...the sunset was amazing, though the picture hardly does it justice!