Ladies who dinner.

The birthday fairy - well, Brad - brought me a new camera, and, I must say, it takes pretty nice, crisp pictures! It has a lot of fun features that, well, I can skip and do after the fact in Picasa, but I've already found that I have much less fiddling I need to do in editing re: brightness and color correction. There is also a low light function that is pretty amazing, and helpful because I almost always have the flash turned off - so far, so good! Just for fun:

 Watercolor, then illustration - kind of crazy!

This one is neat but you don't seem to be able to control what color is picked up...

There is also a food function - sweet! Although I suspect it's really just the old "close up" macro. Regardless, I couldn't be happier. Thanks, hubby!

I got to test my new toy out last night for Girls Night Out at the Tabor Hill restaurant. None of us had been there yet but it was on everyone's radars - so we decided to finally just go for it.

The setting is beautiful! It's a winery, so it's surrounded by a vineyard, and there were pretty yellow birds flying around everywhere. There was a lovely outdoor patio, but they didn't seem to be seating people out there. Inside was a simple (slightly dated) dining room that was perfectly cozy. It was all very inspiring, so we celebrated with wine and cocktails.

The menu is pretty amazing. Lots of interesting meals and side dishes and appetizers and salads. We all had a really hard time deciding what to get and asked our waitress a hundred questions - and kept changing our minds. In the end, I'm pretty sure everyone really enjoyed their meals.

I ordered the squash blossom poppers to share, and they came on a steeeek. They were stuffed with cheese and onions and some other yummy things, but I was too busy scarfing down to really remember what it was I was eating. And they were beautiful.

For an entree, I (finally) decided on the soft shell crab special - a sushi roll (YUM!) as well as a fried crab atop a bed of stir fry veggies. Fresh and crunchy and delicious - this was even better than I expected (I wasn't sure what to expect and was worried it would be too Asian saucy). Certainly filled the sushi hole in my heart for now.

Liz and Hillary both ordered the scallops and shrimp - which sounded delicious... especially because they were atop a bowl full of jalapeno cheddar grits!!!! Alas, it was littered with gross bacon, so I just had to live vicariously.

And then I strong-armed Hillary into sharing the key lime tart with me. It was perfectly sweet and tart. And we finished every last bite.

A lot of people complain that there's no where to go out around here... And I think they're just crazy. It only takes a teeny bit of effort to do some research and drive a few miles outside of town. So glad I found this group of like minded ladies to share my beach life with. Can't wait for the next GNO!