Mixed Bag

This past weekend brought absolutely no plans. Wow. And we took full advantage. On Friday night, I convinced Jeff to accompany me to First Fridays Art Walk in downtown Richmond. On the first friday of every month, the art galleries downtown have open houses with live music and refreshments so the public can check out their latest exhibits. I have been wanting to attend this event for a long time just to check it out and I finally got my chance.

We started with dinner at Lift Coffee Shop located right in the middle of all the galleries. The place was adorable and the food delicious. We then grabbed an Art Walk map and began our tour. The exhibits at the galleries were more eclectic than we thought they would be but we enjoyed seeing the work. Many of the galleries were selling crafts and jewelry for the holidays and I picked up a couple of Christmas surprises.

I was especially looking forward to stopping in at Quirk Gallery which is owned by Katie Ukrop of the Richmond grocery empire. Quirk was having a jewelry exhibit I was interested in and the gallery also has a shop with some cool little items in it. Quirk was featured in a recent issue of Domino magazine (which I love) so I wanted to see the shop in person. It did not disappoint.

I am glad I finally got a chance to experience this Richmond event and hopefully I can convince Jeff to go back again in the months to come.

On Saturday we decided to take Ginger on a hike at Ragged Mountain in Charlottesville so we made the hour trip there and were met with multiple signs reading "NO DOGS ALLOWED" (the website did not tell us this). Those Wahoos-they can't get anything right. Needless to say we were disappointed. I made a quick call to the local Blue Ridge Mountain Sports to see if they had any suggestions for an alternate locale but they weren't extremely helpful. I had read that there is a hiking trail that circles the city so we set out in search of the nearest starting path to this trail. When we spotted something we thought was it, we parked and hit the "trail." For awhile it seemed like a legitimate trail until we ran into a random road so we turned back to the car and headed back to Richmond. Big bummer right? We couldn't help but get a good laugh out of our attempted hiking trip and realized the fact that really it just compared to a long walk around our little neighborhood. Oh well, we tried. Sorry Ginger.

On the bright side, we did manage to get some photos of some pretty fall foliage and took some pictures of Ginger to add to her modeling portfolio.

When we got home, I decided that even though we didn't exert a tremendous amount of energy, we still needed a dinner of comfort food. Jeff grew up on this type of food and I didn't meaning I am not too comfortable (hehe) cooking it AND it is not always the best for you. But I found a recipe in Cooking Light for chicken pot pie and set off to the store to purchase the necessary ingredients. 2 hours later (phew!), I had created a culinary masterpiece...sort of. The inside didn't quite thicken up like it was supposed to but the pie tasted great nonetheless.

On Sunday we slowly woke up and stayed in bed while waiting for the beefy, bald Verizon Fios installer man to show up. At around 8:30am, the doorbell rang and he got to work installing a new cable set up for us that not only gives us more channels and better HD, but is also way cheaper than Comcast. In the words of a sorority sister of mine, "Score!" Jeff followed said beefy bald guy around the house as he did his thing and I busied myself playing Susie homemaker...doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, organizing closets, etc. The rest of the afternoon was standard-Jeff worked in the yard, I went to the gym and clipped coupons and then we went to the grocery store. Gosh this is riveting.

In the words of another sorority sister, "long story short," we did whatever we wanted this weekend whenever we wanted to do it and it was pure bliss.