weekend recap

This weekend was full of friends, Halloween prep, delicious food, and snow. Yes, snow. In October. In Virginia.

Snow in October is one of the top reasons I vowed never again to live in the town of my alma mater after graduating. Dear Syracuse, please take your snow back, we don't want it here!



I refuse to bust out my winter parka in October, so I spent the weekend in an oh-so-fashionable get-up that consisted of a puffy vest over a fleece over a thermal shirt. Stylish.

Despite the craptastic weather (and my lack of style), I made it downtown (thanks to a ride from Karin!) to meet up for brunch with local bloggers. Spending the afternoon cozied up in Kramerbooks, eating delicious breakfast food, and chatting with Sarah, Lisa, Lauren, Karin, and Tessica was the perfect way to spend a snowy Saturday. We swapped nailpolish and photographed our food and discussed tattoos - pretty sure the waiter thought we were crazy. Though he did offer to take a group photo of us and we forgot to take him up on it.

I love that a monthly brunch with these girls seems to be becoming a tradition.



Social Saturday continued that evening when Larry and I went to hang out with old friends over a delicious dinner and some autumn ales. Tattoos were also a topic of discussion, and we decided that a friend of ours needs to get "mud flap" tattoos - that is, the silhouette of a naked woman tattooed on each butt cheek...

On Sunday, we made some eleventh hour purchases of pumpkins and Halloween candy, then went home and gathered our supplies for our second annual backyard carving party.

Supplies = two pumpkin saws (which both broke during the carving), two beers, and two pumpkin-eating pups.

Seriously, Gravy and Banjo are obsessed with eating pumpkin flesh. Larry and I sat at the picnic table working on carving our masterpieces, but we might as well have been sitting in a shark tank wearing suits made of chum. The dogs circled the table swiping chunks of pumpkin whenever they could. I almost lost a finger several times, and not because of the useless pumpkin saws...

"Hey Dad, you gonna eat that?"

(.03 seconds after this photo was taken, Banjo jumped up doing his best Cujo impersonation and I nearly lost my hand.)

"Mmmm! I found a pumpkin lid!"

(Gravy attempting to stealthily thieve the other pumpkin lid.)

They managed to get their snouts in every picture...

Me: "Ewww! Pumpkin guts!" Gravy: "Mmmm! Pumpkin guts!"

Our tradition is that we don't show each other our jack-o-lanterns until we're finished carving. Oh, the suspense...

Her view:

His view:

(Stay tuned for photos of our finished masterpieces.)

We ended the weekend with a delicious meal of, what else? G(h)oulash! (This recipe was awesome, and so spicy - thanks, Hungarian Hot Paprika -  it nearly melted my face off. In a good way.)

And for dessert...Halloween candy, of course!

I hope we still have enough to hand out to the four trick-or-treaters we usually get on Halloween night...

Happy Halloween!

sequestered

The photos I've been sharing recently make it seem like my life is full of galavanting in the woods, traipsing around farms with cows, and spending my fall picking apples and stuffing my face with baked goods.

How quaint.

Also, such a lie.

The truth is, I've been sequestered in my studio lately. I haven't been leaving the house or even going outside most days. I'm living a nocturnal lifestyle - locking myself in my studio until 3 in the morning, painting, drawing, trying to figure it all out. I've got a lot in the works for Funnelcloud Studio, and I'm already prepping for the holidays. I'd like to have a completely new series of prints available in November. I'm the type who gets completely stressed out in preparation for Christmas and I'm already feeling overwhelmed. Owning a small business only exacerbates the holiday stress problem. And it's only October!

I'm trying to work my butt off now so I can relax come December (ha!), but I already feel behind. My house is a disaster. I have half-finished projects and gifts that were never finished from last Christmas. I have a three-page list of things I'd like to write about. I have a pile of e-books from the library that are going to expire before I have the chance to read them. There's food rotting in the fridge. I've already cut a few projects out that I just don't have the time for. I hate that. I can't keep up with blogging or reading blogs, e-mails, phone calls, twitter, friends...

So, I'm sorry for being a jerk - especially during a season that is supposed to be all about family and friends.

I'll continue to share pictures and words when I can, but I don't see any respite in my workload until the end of the year. So ironic, considering I hated the end of the year stress when I was in the workforce and now that I'm self-employed...it's a hundred times worse! (Not really - I'd still rather be working in my home studio at 3 am than in a beige cubicle at 3 am.)

So I'm looking to January 1st as the day I'll take a big sigh of relief. Scratch that - January 2nd. I'm planning to be recovering from a hangover on New Year's Day...

leaf pee(p)ing

On Thursday, we played hooky from work and took the dogs out to Shenandoah National Park for a hike and to check out the fall foliage. Leaf peeping, if you will...or leaf peeing if you're Gravy and Banjo.

Unfortunately, both dogs were being jerks and the weather changed once we got up the mountain, so it wasn't the best conditions for photography. We were on a completely deserted backcountry trail and it got super windy. The sounds coming out of the forest were straight from LOST and I half expected the Smoke Monster to get us. It was freaky.

Still, no complaints about a day off from work with my boys and some beautiful fall scenery:

haiku by gravy #2

Squirrel, you run fast,

But not as fast as I do.

Caught ya! Now you're dead.

......................................................

This brings the tally to Gravy 3, Squirrels 0. Plus a fourth squirrel that just dropped dead on our front porch a few weeks ago. Evidently, our property is not a good place for squirrels to visit. Yet, the stupid squirrels continue to overlook the fact that two 80+ pound beasts patrol our backyard.

The incident happened while Larry was downstairs eating breakfast and I was upstairs still in bed. Larry let the dogs out and I was awakened by three barks in a pattern I call The Death Bark. I didn't hear Larry take action, so I yelled "Larry, check on that!" I heard him slowly get up, walk to the door, go outside..."Oh no!"

They say mothers can sense when their babies are crying - apparently, I can sense when my "babies" have killed something.

RIP squirrel.

weekend adventures: hartland orchard

      (Moo.)

After stuffing our faces with pulled pork, donuts, and ice cream, we left The Apple House to search for a farm where we could obtain actual apples. And just down the road, we found Hartland Orchard. The sign advertising apples caught our attention, but as soon as we drove onto the property, we saw a far more interesting sign:

PIG RACES

Could this day get any better?

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to stop and watch pig races, so we continued up the drive in search of apples.

The orchard had bins of 6 or 7 different varieties of apples, so our u-pick experience consisted of picking them out of the bins. Which was about all we could handle due to our distended donut-filled bellies which were on the verge of exploding. (You could drive up into the orchard and pick your own if you wanted to.)

We "picked" a peck of pickled peppers apples (which turned out to be 27 apples) for $5.



More exciting than the apples, were the cows. Well, I found the cows to be exciting. Larry found the cows to be "smelly" and "gross", and he said - and I quote - "These guys would look better hanging in my freezer."

Sigh. I guess I won't be turning Larry vegetarian any time soon.

Unfortunately, and while I'm no expert on cattle, I'm somewhat certain that WILBUR (that's WLBR in txt-speak) and his buddy here are Black Angus, which means they most likely will be hamburger some day.

Poor guy. I'm going to pretend Wilbur will have the same fate as his porcine namesake and be saved...does anyone know of any literate spiders who could lend a hand leg?

"Hey, you gonna feed us or what?" (I've seen this exact look on Banjo's face.)

A beautiful day in apple country...now let the baking begin!

weekend adventures: the apple house

It's that time of year when everyone is going crazy for apples - apple picking, apple cider, apple pie... And if you're in search of apples, it's a very good time of year to live in Virginia. Did you know that the Shenandoah Valley is the historic heart of the U.S. apple industry? (Whatever that means...) Anyway, Virginia is a good place to get apples.

I wanted to get in on this apple frenzy, and my initial plan was to go to a u-pick orchard, but when I was researching apple picking, I came across a place called The Apple House in Linden, Virginia. According to Yelp, this place has the best apple butter donuts on the east coast. Imagine a record scratching as I read that last part. Apple Butter Donuts?!?! Get in my belly!

I think I may have mentioned how much I love donuts before. And a few years ago, Larry and I drove out to a farm in Maryland for the sole purpose of tasting their famous apple cider donuts. Ever since then I've been obsessed with finding apple cider donuts each Fall (they're rather hard to come by). I'm not sure how an apple butter donut compares to an apple cider donut, but I knew I was about to find out.

Notice how quickly I had trashed the idea of picking fresh fruit and replaced it with the opportunity to stuff my face with deep fried dough? Yeah, yeah, but I also knew that we'd be heading west and straight into apple country in pursuit of the donuts, so I figured we could just find an apple farm along the way.

It took about an hour to get to The Apple House. From the website, I thought it would be a sleepy little place along a country road, but the parking lot was packed. And also - THE PARKING LOT SMELLED LIKE DONUTS. Oh man, the torture continued when you stepped out of the car, smelled the cinnamon-sugar perfuming the autumn air, and noticed a smorgasbord of apparatuses for delivering culinary delights: a soft-serve ice cream stand, a BBQ smoker, and a kettle corn truck. This place was not messing around! Oink oink!


But our first priority was the donuts. We went into The Apple House which housed a weird mix of taxidermy, ahem...kountry krafts, and oddly, Vera Bradley bags.




We ordered a dozen* apple butter donuts and a jumbo pulled pork BBQ sandwich to share. (We even split the pickle. But not the cole slaw - that went in the trash.)


Oh man. All of it was so delicious. The donuts were cakey and piping hot and the BBQ was spicy and tender and messy. Delicious.

Despite the fact that my stomach was quite full, there was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity for soft-serve ice cream. Let the face stuffing continue! (And after that, my stomach really did hurt. Probably should've gotten the kid's cone instead...)

That was one of the most sinfully delicious days I've had in recent history. Kountry krafts aside, I highly recommend this place and can't wait to come back...I'm pretty sure I can twist my mom's arm into coming with me for the ice cream alone!

So long, Apple House - I'll be back soon!


P.S. Mmmmmmm!


*I should clarify that we did not eat all twelve donuts while we were there (come on, do you think I'm that big of a pig?!) - we took them home with us for breakfast the next day, and they were still good at room temperature.