Tag Archive | personal: weekend

Going to NY(C) – a belated blog post

Nov19

How many of these did I write up and then forget to post?

Well, this one was written after the weekend of 10/11-10/13 of this year, so that’s the weekend I’m referring to. 

🚌

I went to NYC this weekend!

And I got sick.

I also got lost!

Okay, let’s start at the beginning.

I have been to NYC once before in my life, and that time, the marvelous B (from Brasilia) very nearly literally held my hand through the whole thing.

Yes, I grew up in upstate*/North Coast**/above-thruway NY State, but I grew up on my grandfather’s farm, in an area that I have to describe as outside of Churchville*** to be most accurate in location. Continue reading →

Brewfest, a late-posted Blog Post

Nov5

This weekend  September 28th was Brewfest. 

I got a little behind in posting these.  Oops!

“Is Brewfest just Oktoberfest with a fedora?”

“It’s more like… Oktoberfest without a hat at all.”

That being said, around here, Brewfest, at least the one we go to, is at the Boathouse, which used to be Thee (yes like that) Amish Market and is now a nice combination of a brewpub on one end and a flea market/craft store on the other end.

With your ticket, they give you a little 6-oz mini “pint glass” and 12 tasting tickets.  Continue reading →

Bright Lights, Small City (a blog post)

Sep24

I’m generally the sort of person that likes to have plans, well, planned out well in advance. 

But sometimes a friend drops a link in your chat box and says “do you guys want to go to Binghamton tomorrow?”

And… well.  It looked good  — the link, the hanging out with close friends, the relatively short drive (1-½ hour or so).  And we didn’t have anything urgent to do that Saturday, and…

So we drove to Binghamton. 

Binghamton is… well, let’s start.  NYState is in the Rust Belt, which I’m sure you know if you live around here.  It has a lot of remnants of former glory — for instance, I grew up in (near) Rochester, which is the birthplace of Kodak, Xerox, and Bauch and Lomb (film cameras, photocopiers, and eye care/vision enhancement).  You can see not only, say, the Eastman House (George Eastman founded Kodak) but the old Kodak building, the Xerox tower, the great mausoleums for all these people, then Gleason (works) and Strong… hold on I need to google… oh ha.  Henry Alvah Strong, first president of Kodak. Via Helen Strong Carter, his daughter, First Lady of Hawaii in the early 1900s, go Rochester. 

…Strong Museum of Play, it turns out, is a totally different Strong family.   Continue reading →

Blog Post: Eseme Visit (and Bullet Journals)

Sep3

This weekend marked our new tradition of Eseme visiting me for a long weekend each year.  

(Last year was mid-July; the visit before that was several years before and I don’t remember quite when)

It was an awesome visit, of course!  Es and T and I went to Thai Thursday night in Watkins Glen because it was first day of classes for the Uni I work at and, well, that’s not a great day to be downtown in MY town, so we went the other way.   Then we hit one of my favorite ice cream places (also in Watkins Glen) and headed home to decompress (me) and not be driving (Eseme).

(Eseme lives nine hours away from me.  I cannot even IMAGINE driving nine hours on my own.  I don’t even really like driving FOUR hours on my own to see my friends in Troy.) Continue reading →

Blog Post: Antiquing

Apr24

I was noting, in the middle of the Hudson Antique Mall in the middle of a weekend trip this past weekend, that it seemed like we — T and I and our Troy friends the McPivins — end up spending a lot of our visits looking at other people’s old junk. Continue reading →

Storms and Snow Prep, a blog post

Jan22

We had a storm this weekend!

I think it’s possible that, even if you didn’t live in the region hit by Harper, you’ve heard of the storm that hit this weekend.

It was one of those “the snow just keeps coming” sorts, and then, when the snow had settled down, then came the wind.  Huge gusts.

We were lucky: we didn’t lose power, we didn’t need to leave the house.  We were warm and cozy, or at least tolerably warm (Depending on which end of the house we were at).

Continue reading →

My Weekend, with Beets

Oct16

Hello!

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but let’s see.

I have two major non-writing, non-work things going on in my life right now: Getting the yard ready for autumn/winter, and Finishing the $*( attic.

This weekend was mostly yard.  We dug up potatoes and beets (yes, we’re pretty sure that’s a beet).  We chopped down the horseradish and walking onions so that we can dig up the horseradish soon. (“this smells like an angry Polish soup.”)

We planted garlic!  (And hyacinths…)  We cleared out one of the back beds of weeds and planted a cover crop of oats (an experiment).  We harvested mustardseed and eggplants and peppers.
(and that beet….)

We brought the bay tree and lavender inside, the lime tree having already come inside.  We dumped some pots and cleaned them out for next year.  We trimmed back the asparagus.

(The Kale, parsley, and sage will be fine for at least another month).

We put the grill in the garage.  We bought a lawnmower.

(We bought a lawnmower!)

(WE BOUGHT A LAWNMOWER.)

At about that point, T. asked how tired I was, and I could manage about “uh-hunh.”

But now I’ve bought more garlic, I’ve bought some Liquid Nails and some spray foam, and today:  BACK TO THE ATTIC.

I mean, once I get out of work.

But hey, we got some garlic planted!!  We’ve never managed that quite on time before!

 

Blog Post: Last Weekend with Friend Visit

Jul22

I had an Eseme visiting last weekend!

I hadn’t seen Eseme in five or six years (she’ll know the specifics; I just know it had been ~forever~).  So this was a very special occasion, and not just because she drove 8+ hours each way to see me (and the kitties).

(Not that it won’t be awesome if I manage to see her once a year, like we discussed!)

We greeted her on arrival Thursday night with homemade pizza and equally homemade ginger ice cream, both of which I’m rather proud of.  

Friday we let other people do the cooking — my favorite diner for breakfast/brunch, my favorite Thai place for dinner — and in between, because I live in the Finger Lakes, we went out and tasted at a winery, a distillery, and a cidery. (She drinks a whiskey drink, she drinks a winey drink; they skip the lager drink, she drinks a cider drink….)

Oh, and my favorite ice cream place.

Saturday, we spent approximately all afternoon shopping, most of that at Hobby Lobby (there’s only one in the whole state of Maine!) and then at our local ReUse center, which is similar to the Habitat for Humanity Restores ( https://www.habitat.org/restores ).  Between the two, I ended up getting, notably:

* Some Washi Tape.

(This is my new thing.  It’s endless)

(I mean… After we bought washi tape at Hobby Lobby, I went online and bought us both some at Ali Express.  Which, being Ali Express, won’t get here for like 5-30 weeks (yes weeks) so it will be a surprise when it gets here).

(for those of you going “what is this thing?”  – https://www.cutetape.com/creative/blog/2012/6/what-is-washi-tape – Although at this point, many people call anything narrow-ish and decorative and adhesive washi tape.  For instance, one of the ones I bought was a zebra-printed very thin duct tape. Definitely not of the same origins as Japanese paper.)

* Some clearance yarn (of course) and knitting needles.

* a frame for a mini I bought from @Fax

And then from the ReUse Center, another frame (later spray-painted black for my postcard from Antartica), a Holly Hobby plate for Merit (long story, but that’s a cat), and some more knitting needles.

So all in all I’d call that a win for a shopping trip..

We hit the Commons – this is something Ithaca is known for, an area of two blocks long that has been blocked off to car traffic and is just for walking and shopping.  We had a blast there, too (I believe Eseme got a tiny dragon or two and I got some vinegar) and then bac home for dinner and s’mores. (With a pipe torch!)

Phew!

All in all, it was an absolutely wonderful trip!  I sent Eseme home Sunday morning with a good breakfast, and I hope I get to see her again soon.

In the meantime, I can always mail her more washi tape…

Weekend, with planting and… other things.

May29

So, I had a nice 4-day weekend, what about you?

We saw Deadpool 2 (not quite as good as Deadpool 1, but a lot of fun, and Domino was absolutely awesome).  

We planted: 7 tomatoes (2 varieties) 5 peppers (3 varieties), 1 eggplant, 6 kale, a tarragon and a parsley (having planted three roses before the weekend).  We cleared out 4 bags of drywall and insulation from the attic. I cleaned the house. We shopped for cars…

*record scratch*

Oh, yeah.  So I uh. My car and I had a small disagreement with a large truck (someone turned in front of him, he stopped fast.  I stopped…. less fast). My car is — was — a 2008 Yaris. The truck got way the better end of the deal.

So now we’re looking for a fuel-efficient Japanese or Korean car tall enough inside for my 6’4” husband and comfortable for my arthritic bones.

We’ve got it narrowed down to about 8 models…

Anyway! We went to the farmer’s market, grilled outside (asparagus from our own garden!), chilled out a bit and generally had a good time.

How was your weekend?

Internet friends

Apr24
So this is something I sent my mom after we went walking/talking at Birdseye State Forest. She asked if I found that my internet friends were as they acted online when I met them in person, more or less. 
Then Dad sort of derailed the whole thing talking about being true to your genuine self or something and so… e-mail happened. 
We got a little derailed yesterday on one conversation, but I was thinking about internet friends.
I suppose, way back to the first one I met in person (Cap/Sarah), I wasn’t taken aback at all by the person I met, because by the time I met them in person, we’d already had hours and hours of conversation and interactions online.  So it’s… like if you went and encountered Beth on a chat board online for the first time after knowing her all this time; she’d still be the same person.
By contrast, many of the friends I had before my internet people, I first met roleplaying – so literally pretending to be someone else.  In that situation, it does take a little bit longer to figure out who someone actually is underneath all the roles.