NaBloPoMo #13: Friday links*

*Friday links are a selection of some of my favorite posts, recipes, articles, and photos from this past week.

Happy Friday! Every year it seems the closer we get to the holidays the faster the days fly by, so I am looking forward to a couple of days of relaxing, reading, knitting, and watching Carolina sports. 

Adam Lucas - my favorite Carolina sports writer. 

An article about the basketball team touring the Naval Academy

A yummy crockpot meal I plan to make this weekend 

A great post about not wishing our lives away

*photo source

NaBloPoMo #12: Inspiration

As I was driving in to work this morning, I was racking my brain trying to think about what I would blog about today. Then, as I was about to turn into the street where I park, I saw this 
sign:

And I remembered an article about Oliver Smithies, who won the first Nobel Prize at UNC in 2007, and it said: 

"There stood Linus Pauling, the future winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, when a young Oliver Smithies, an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1940s, became so enamored with the presentation that he decided then and there to dedicate his life to biomedical sciences. Nearly seventy years later, when Oliver Smithies won his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his prize money: fund an annual symposium to bring Nobel laureates to UNC to inspire students." 

Research can be tedious, slow and frustrating. Weeks or even months of feeling like you are taking one step forward, two steps back can make you lose sight of the big picture and instead focus on the day to day grind. But signs like the one I saw today are a reminder that over time, years even, the work we do can add up to something pretty amazing. 

Inspiration can come from within us or from around us, if we just take the time to stop and look.

NaBloPoMo #11: Routine

Monday's prompt: What is the first thing you do every single day?

The first thing I do is watch the local news for a few minutes to get the weather and traffic reports,

then I get up and make the bed,

have breakfast: oatmeal + egg whites + fresh fruit and a green smoothie,

  

shower (if I'm not going to the gym) then drive to work. 

NaBloPoMo #10: Fall Foliage

Peering through raindrops to get peeks at fall foliage on the UNC campus today.

NaBloPoMo #9:Willpower on a Rainy Monday

When I woke up to the sound of rain this morning, it was hard to get up and get moving. And it was hard to leave work and go over to the pool across campus to swim (I swim with a masters team at lunch), because in addition to the weather, two of my friends were unable to swim today. But I made it and I'm glad I did because I always feel better after I swim. 

View leaving the pool:

View when I got back to work:

Now time for tea, knitting and reading.

NaBloPoMo #8: Statement Win

UNC remains undefeated in the conference after blasting rival Duke 66-31 yesterday. It's been quite a few years since UNC has played this well, Usually UNC  just eeks out enough wins to make it to a low-tier bowl but not this year. We'll see how long it lasts but the ride has been fun so far!

NaBloPoMo #7: Lesson in Gratitude

Thursday afternoon a friend asked us if we would like to go with him and his family to the UNC- Guilford exhibition game on Friday night. We always love seeing these friends so said sure! Getting to see UNC, who is the pre-season #1 team in the country, play was an added bonus. Ok, being a rabid UNC basketball fan more than an added bonus.

What we didn't know was that these seats were 7 rows from the court! Our friends had been given these tickets by a man who, let's just say is a big donor to the athletic program, had ~40 tickets. Tickets in any area of the lower level (that's not a student section) are extremely hard to get so for him to have 40 was incredible.

During the second half, the donor came over to say hello to our friends and I thanked him for the tickets. I told him that in my 15 years of seeing Carolina play, these were by far the best seats I'd ever had. He said he liked being the Robin Hood of tickets -  getting them into the hands of people that normally wouldn't be able to sit there. It seemed that he was just as happy to see our excitement at getting the tickets as we were at being given them.

A good reminder that being generous to others is just as fulfilling to the giver as it is to the receiver.

Here are a few photos from the game, which UNC won handily 99-49.