Black Friday in Lexington

All ridiculous/awkward/embarrassing/hilarious family moments aside, I managed to do more shopping (honestly more like window shopping and asking my mom for things for Christmas) than I have ever done on Thanksgiving weekend. I was kind of shocked by how cute some of the shops in Lexington were because there is a huge difference between Columbus quirky and Lexington quirky.

This is from one of my favorite stores, The Black Market. No, it has nothing to do with the store on High St that's been closed for a couple of years. This place is amahzing. I would buy 90% of the stuff there if I had the money. Some of it is even affordable. It's like my brain exploded all over the store.

So I needed to include this picture partly because I love a colorful retro shoe, but mostly because I feel like you are the sort of person who can appreciate a store that displays jewelry on a porcelain cat.

Okay, I didn't even go into this store and I don't know what they sell, but it's across the street from the black market in a cluster of cute shops and I was oddly attracted to the idea of a glittery pink tree. There are a few other shops. We went into one that is so jam packed with useless knick knacks, ornaments and cat related decor that I got a little stressed out. My sister picked up a book there called "How to Tell If Your Cat is Gay." I was kind of offended by the blatant connection they were trying to make between being an overbearing cat owner and a hag. Anyway, I have perfectly good gaydar, so I'm sure it works on cats. I also went into a fair trade store called Lucia's Boutique. My aunt of course loudly said something about all the "free trade" stuff. They had some nice stuff, but it was Black Friday, so staying in a tiny shop for any length of time was uncomfortable.
We stopped by a jewelry store called Hand Picked. It's a chain that started in South Carolina and hasn't spread outside of the South. I told my mom it wouldn't work in Columbus. Monogramming is huge in Lexington, so they had equipment at the store to monogram jewelry and bags. I think people in Columbus aren't traditional enough for that. I did take their card though because everything was cheap, but not cheap looking. Think boutique-y, not Claire's-y.

Before all of that, my mom took me to a vintage shop called Street Scene where she had found this amazing coat. She kept calling it second-hand. Technically I know that it has all been worn or used before, but that sounds so low rent and I like to be a little more uppity about these things. The weird thing about this place is that it's in a tiny strip mall behind a bigger strip mall, but it feels like something that, in Columbus, would be in the Short North or Clintonville. This is what happens in cities that don't have enough gays or hippies. There is no obvious place to put things I like.

This is the first thing I saw when I walked in the door. Everything about this is perfect. 1) Who doesn't love a woman decorated like a Christmas tree? 2) What a dignified pose. 3) Yes that is a lime green couch behind her.

The front of the store was full of furniture. I wanted ALL that crap, and yes, I'm calling it crap because I am fully aware of my taste level. It was tacky and beautiful.

Look at this lamp! Look at all the crazy blue crap I could get to go with it!

I promise there were actually some really pretty dresses, but they weren't nearly as interesting as a rubber chicken purse. I could totally see certain girls carrying this thing around the Short North, but in Lexington, it just felt odd. I saw my very first Kentucky hipster there. The cashier was a chubby Zooey Deschanel wannabe who stayed on the phone the entire time we were there talking in a little more detail than I wanted to hear about a "lame" party. It was like seeing a unicorn.

WHAT?! An inflatable turkey?!

We walked through a doorway and were suddenly in a coffee shop. There was way too much cute stuff in there. The first room was just full of coffee and tea related stuff I wanted all of.

I didn't actually get to buy anything from Coffee Times Coffee Shop (who thought that was clever?), but I kind of fell in love with this weird tea mobile and now will be forced to make an uglier, sloppier version for my   kitchen.

So, I managed not to go anywhere truly scary on my first Black Friday off of work in a few years and I managed to remember to post this.... Good job me!

Corn Maze and David Sedaris

I felt how ridiculous my life is when I typed that title...
Anyway, Matt invited me to dinner and a corn maze in Gahanna with his people.

He picked me up from Easton, so of course we went on a hunt for the perfect dark gray coat that doesn't exist. He made me go into Abercrombie, where I had never been before and would happily have avoided for the rest of my life. First issue there: I seriously felt like I was choking on the smell in there. And it lingered on my jacket for about 20 minutes after we left. Second issue: I can't help but be embarrassing, so I walked around marveling at my surrounding as if I were on a safari. I managed to snap this picture while Matt wasn't looking. The mancessory display of ribbony, leathery bro bracelets... behind glass like diamonds or something. I just didn't understand it there.

Then it was on to Los Jalapenos, a Mexican restaurant in Gahanna, because authentic Mexican food always hides in the suburbs. The decor in this place was hard freaking core. I wasn't sure what to expect when the first door we walked through looked like it was stolen it from a cheap model home, but I was pleasantly surprised by the tasteful scenes of authentic Mexican life painted on the backs of all the booths, the tops of all the tables, and on all of the chairs. I got vegetarian enchiladas and realized after eating the first of 3 that they were not, in fact, all filled with cheese, but one had guacamole filling, the other spinach. Food that you have to plan out before eating is just out of my league.

Then we drove way out Morse Rd past Gahanna school district and into the creepy boonies of Ohio to the corn maze. There was a terrifying port-a-potty moment, some naive discussion of winning colorful suckers for collecting all the clues within, and we were off. This was he view pretty much the whole way through. I don't think I ever actually looked at a map, so I did a lot of following and a lot of scooching myself out of the leading position. The big argument among group leadership throughout the maze was whether or not it was a good idea to take a right at every turn until we made it through. We ended up getting 3 out of 8 clues and asking a teenage maze employee how to get out. I almost died about ten times slipping in muddy patches and thunking my foot in holes, but I felt satisfied that I had done something autumnal.

Okay so I followed that hillbilly moment by seeing David Sedaris at the Palace Theater. I realized when we got there that I had only ever been to the Ohio Theater, which somehow in my mind counted as both. I took this picture of the outer sitting room from the inner sitting room leading to the bathroom. Pretty swanky. Their bathroom is bigger than my apartment. I sighed a few times in  there.

I really wish you could see this better. I'm sure you've been there before, but I was really excited by the fire place. There were two light bulbs under a gold grate with big amber rocks on top. At what point in history was this a realistic fake fire? Okay, ran out of steam and my nephew is yelling (joyful yelling, so it's cute).

Federal Hill, Columbus Day Parade, and My Favorite Building in Providence

 Welcome. That is what pineapples mean. This post will be long, but mostly because of pictures. You think you are a picture-taking addict? I've gotten used to taking pictures at all kinds of inappropriate times and inappropriate places. That...sounded bad.

Anyway, Imma introduce you to Federal Hill, Providence's for-serious little Italy. I looked at an apartment near Federal Hill, and when we drove onto Atwells Avenue and saw little old men playing checkers on the sidewalk, I felt certain I wanted to live there. (And then neither of the apartments were available/in my price range and I got it over it a little bit.)

Federal Hill is pretty much just Italian restaurant after Italian restaurant, one after another after another. Apparently the block also features some of the best restaurants in the country (according to some magazine; yes, this is very well-documented stuff I'm talking about.) I've only been to one - when my parents came - Cassarino's. It was pretty swank, but it was so much food that I had three people's leftovers for a week. You can see the sign for it here...

 

Oh, what is that enormous creepy thing waving to you from in front of the sign, you ask? 

Oh, just a puppet. 

A giant puppet.

Another view. He's worth it. He's actually from some kind of puppet-making and performance group in Providence called Big Nazo. You're rethinking this whole "Lexington is so much cooler than Providence" thing now, aren't you?

Let me back up - Providence does not just have random puppets walking the street. I happened to hit up Federal Hill just as they were having a parade for Columbus Day. (Also, who celebrates Columbus Day?) I had known there would be a Columbus Day Festival, but it was just serendipity that I came right as the parade was happening.

More parade stuff:

These guys WITH A CANON followed right behind a group of military guys WITH RIFLES who would just shoot their rifles (on cue) into the air, all at once. The guys with the canon would also shoot canons - they did it like three times in front of me, and my ear drums have not been the same since.

 

I hope you can see this. There were a lot of really random groups dressed in historical costumes. These guys, in Roman ware, followed guys who looked like Revolutionary soldiers. I hope you can see the guy in the middle wearing a bear pelt over his head.

I did  not realize it until now, but I love Shriners. Their hats, their tiny cars, their little-old-man-ness: what is not to love? This is "RI Shriner's Hillbilly Clan" float, which made nooo sense to me whatsoever. They pretended to try to wrestle someone out of the old-fashioned latrine that's behind them and yelled "HOWDYY" at us several times while wearing overalls. It all made me miss the Midwest very much.

So many random cultural floats. This one is about El Dorado and featured four girls in what essentially amounted to Princess Leia outfits. Disturbingly, three of those girls looked to be about eight years old.

More cultural floats. The whole band managed to fit into the back of that thing.

Now for some random pictures of Federal Hill, so you feel like you were walking along next to me, trying not to buy meatball subs and cannoli:

(This is the square on Atwells. Gotta love that fountain.)

I love it when buildings look this tacky.

I went into this place called Venda Ravioli. They're an Italian grocery store, and it's like a tiny, smelly heaven. I promise I took pictures of stuff besides meat; this was just the only picture that didn't come out blurry.

So after I walked up and down the festival twice and didn't buy anything because I'm poor and apparently a sadist (who goes to a festival that is pretty much just food and doesn't eat?), I walked onto Broadway, a street parallel to Atwells, and not crowded. And look what I found:

A reminder of the ole C-bus. I feel like maybe the "Opening Soon" is some kind of message to me, but right now I can't create any really bad metaphor around it.

And lastly, I've been meaning to show you my favorite building in all of Providence, and I finally took a picture of it.

It might be hard to see why it's my favorite building unless you enlarge it. Over the front door-arc thing is this Greek-God-like guy looming over everything. The building is like a soft-angled triangle on the weirdest shaped street possible, and I reach it right before I go into downtown. Every time I see it, I'm in awe. I have absolutely no idea what happens inside that building, but it's got to be fantastic. Or really boring. There's a copy place and a bank on the other side of the street.

Lexington, KY

Okay, a week later I'm finally getting around to posting because it has taken me this long to realize the USB charger that came with my phone lets me get pictures directly from my phone without having to email them to myself. I feel smart.

I will now prove to you that Lexington is cuter than Providence and clearly cuter than Columbus:

First stop, Magee's Bakery for the world's most delicious cake. It's like bathing in a sea of vanilla frosting in there. Had we not been on a mission, I could easily have sat down and eaten every cupcake in the place.

This mural has been there since I was in elementary school and my dad would take us to get a doughnut on the way to school on Fridays. I did not include a picture of my elementary school, which is right around the corner, because it is probably the world's ugliest building and they've changed the playground about 15 times since I went there, and isn't that really the only part that matters?

Next stop: Kroger's on Romany (That's what the sign reads in the same burgundy that it was when it used to be called Randall's... they don't like change in my Grandmother's old neighborhood).

Benedictine!!! The most delicious substance known to man. It's cream cheese, cucumber and onion flavor with a little green food coloring to make it look inedible to people from other states. We got some for sandwiches and I got some to take home because for some reason Ohio doesn't understand the appeal of squishy green cream on white bread.

I included this picture partly because I miss that sandwich and partly to show that everything in my Grandmother's tiny retirement home apartment (of course still much bigger than mine) is cute. She hired a decorator when she first moved. I would have taken a picture of the adorable chair I was sitting in, but she had already seen me take a picture of my lunch and I didn't want to further the impression that I have compulsive picture-taking issues (which I do).

I helped her transfer photos from an old album to a new one, so I got to look at some great family photos. Photos always come with stories, so I heard some good old ones and a couple of crazy new ones. My favorite was learning that my Great Great Grandfather, who was a very well-respected judge in Frankfort completed school only to 2nd or 3rd grade and learned law by reading books in the office of a lawyer he worked for. Keep in mind that my grandmother is 92, so that happened in the mid 1800s. I'm pretty sure Kentucky's educational standards for public figures have since been raised.

This is Old Glenary, the mansion my Grandmother's family owned in Frankfort. It's only called "old" because it burned completely to the ground and has since been rebuilt. Now that I know that I come from the kind of family who names their houses, I have to think of a good name for my apartment. What makes a semi-basement almost studio apartment sound stately? Side note: I found out that the country estate, Lemon Hill, owned by my Grandmother's cousin Ed's family before he died, was purchased by Kevin of the Backstreet Boys... I've been in a Backstreet Boy's house. WHOA! Are they officially NKOTBSB now or was that only for their tour with New Kids on the Block? Not important.

This is the house my momma grew up in. She lived on the most beautiful street in Lexington. The woman who bought this house from my Grandmother when she moved in the 1970s let us come once to see it. People are so polite there. My Grandmother still calls to check up on her now and then. It is enormous on the inside. I think there might have been a fireplace in my mom's bedroom. She told me that when she was a baby, there was a maid who dressed her twice a day because her mother wanted to see her in "two pretty dresses every day" (if you can imagine that being said in an old timey southern baby voice, you'll get the idea). I'm not sure they were always new dresses, but this gives some idea of the difference in living standards from one generation to the next.

We walked around the UK arboretum to see the tree my uncle donated in my Grandmother's name. It was all decorated for fall with scare crows made by different schools, churches and whatnot scattered along the path. I got lots of gravel in the shoes I bought the day before to wear to lunch with my Grandmother so as not to look like a bum in front of all the retirement home residents and took way too many pictures. I shared this one because his old-timey mustache is so very current.

I took this picture on our way out of town. This is the enormous house where we stay whenever we visit. My mom's cousin and his wife own it. That stuff on the lawn is blankets covering my aunt's more delicate plants because she was worried it would frost overnight and kill them, so don't go thinking that even classy Kentuckians leave crap all over their lawns. You can imagine how small my apartment felt when I got home.
What I learned from this post: I am a big fan of run-on sentences that stop making sense halfway through and have to be reread for clarity.

Apple Picking and Theater Going

So I'm super late in putting these pictures up, and I'm also not going to do a very good job of discussing them because I feel like my brain is going to fall out. Beyond working a lot this weekend, I also probably shouldn't stay out until 11:30 on a Tuesday night, even if there is only one hard cider involved in the evening...

So two weeks ago, I went apple picking out in the Cranston/Johnston area, which is really like 30 minutes outside of Providence. It's super odd. You drive to basically where Gahanna would be in relation to Columbus and suddenly you're in farm fields and among pumpkin patches. I suppose that's true of Ohio; it was just shocking to feel like I hadn't gotten out of the city in a month and then to feel like I was in the boonies.

We actually ended up going to three apple picking places. This was the first one:

My heart practically stopped. They had mini apple pies! Pumpkin butter! Apple butter! Make your own peanut butter! But no hot cider and no apple cider donuts. This is why we ended up going to two other places. We never really found hot cider (although yes on the donuts). Sarah, pictured below, ended up swigging cold cider from a jug.

I actually only included this picture to show that I'm not making up friends. This is Sarah, hiding in a tree. She found a concord grape tree after a kid crawled out from under it.

So we got back with just enough time for me to drop off my pound of apples that one does not know what I'll do with, change clothes and hop a bus into downtown. I wish I had taken a picture of my ensemble with my new fall jacket. I was wearing a purple dress and black and white jacket with white shoes and black hose, and I tell you this old woman at the play stared my footwear down. She straight-up judged me. I all pretended like I didn't notice and that I was enjoying being young and wearing brightly colored, potentially inappropriate things to outings that only old people enjoy.

And good god, it was all old people. You really aren't supposed to take pictures of the insides of theaters, but I think people mostly felt bad for me because I was alone in the bench (read: backless, poor people) seats in the back. The theater people kindly allowed me and the three other people who were in bench seats to move to the last row of real seating because the house wasn't even close to full. You know how much that saved me? Somewhere in the range of $20. RIDICULOUS. The play itself - at a big theater downtown - was good but not great. I think though that I probably didn't love it as much because I was hungry. I ended up eating my second apple cider donut in small pieces out of my purse while pretending to look at placards at a far end of the theater.

Yes, my life is glamorous.

Mall Times!!!

So I can't think of a good bus story to save my life. There are just a lot of smells and a lot of uncomfortable touching that is appropriate nowhere else in life. I do, however have much tamer stories of working at the mall.

I wish I had more pictures, but I have no more mall shifts for a month because I have to get a car to avoid all that uncomfortable bus touching on the way there.

This is the world's best representation of mall culture. People are basically Starbucks in expensive jeans (Okay ignore the fact that the tag right next to these jeans proves they're supah cheap... it was H&M, they're meant to look expensive). 

I'm right across from Five Guys, so sometimes it smells like french fries and I often get caught gazing out the window at some guy who thinks I'm actively watching him eat a cheeseburger by himself. I'm sure this makes us both equally sad about ourselves. We get a lot of pre and post bar traffic as well. My favorites are the women who stop in, pretend to look around and fix their hair and or makeup in one of our many mirrors on their way to the bar next door. I already told you about the woman who stopped in to change into her heels before a blind date. "I have the world's worst feet." Okay, whoa, I don't want to know the condition of some stranger's feet. I wanted to say, "then maybe you shouldn't show them to a man who might otherwise like you," but I held back. Why these women always feel like talking to me makes it more okay that they have no intention of buying anything is beyond me. Awkward small talk is not a goal we set for the day.

Last time I worked, no one bought a single thing all day, but someone did steal my pen, so, there's that. He politely asked to borrow it and then just walked out of the store without using it. Later the same day, a woman who had already walked around and checked every mirror we had about 15 minutes earlier came back in and asked to borrow the computer to check her email. I let her because, well, she couldn't very well walk out the door with the computer (or if she did, I would have an amazing story). She told me she had come to meet friends at the bar next door, but they had meant the Arena District location. Then she told me she never leaves the house after 9 o'clock and this was too much to deal with. What exactly do you do when a stranger tells you something so depressing? I might be that woman one day.

Okay, I felt the need to put another picture. These are some baskets. No reason.

The only other really exciting part of working at the mall is getting to go through the secret hallway behind the stores. The floor is concrete, our store's door still says Buckle on it and it reeks of that horrible cologne they pump into Hollister. It's. So. Cool. You only wish you were important enough to travel the seedy underbelly of the mall with such skill and purpose. (Okay so twice I've gotten lost on the way out and had to give the trash I was carrying to some maintenance guy with a big cart, but I feel special anyway). Keep the blog alive: check.

Buses

I've been meaning to write this post for a while.

So where I go is kind of (sometimes) interesting, but how I get there is generally vaguely unpleasant for some reason or another. You know buses. You know the kind of people who ride buses and wait for buses. However, I still have two stories.

First, some backstory. I ride two buses to work every day (unless I choose to walk the first leg, which I do if I miss a bus, it's a nice day, or I'm feeling really adventurous or fat). The first bus is almost always quite nice, mostly because it's not marketed as a bus.

It's a historic trolley.

Yeah, you're jealous. Anyway, this bus is full of college students and business suit-wearing people who scroll through their iPods, comb their hair, and otherwise sit very quietly away from each other.

The second bus I ride is an actual bus, and this is where anything interesting happens. All of my stories involve this bus.

Story #1

I boarded a bus in the morning as a usually do and sat somewhere towards the middle, as I usually do. I watched as the masses of people boarded after me, including a woman balancing two books on her head while wearing headphones and sunglasses. She sat directly in front of me. The bus was pretty crowded, and we started off, at which point the man behind me started to have a conversation on his cell phone.

To be fair to the woman, he was very loud and he had a habit of cussing every other word. Everybody else in the bus just ignored it, but the woman, never turning around, said in a very clear voice, "I have my headphones turned all the way up, and I can still hear you talking, sir. It's Ave Maria, and I've got the Bible on my head. Stop talking on your cell phone."

And the man behind stopped talking for about half a second before saying to the person on the other end of the phone, "This crazy lady just told me to shut up." And then he continued his conversation.

So the woman in front of me took the Bible off her head and slammed it down on the floor. She repeated, "I've got the Bible, now stop talking you Devil man." I'm not kidding, that's what she called him.

So he started laughing or something and she finally reached over - as in reached over MY seat - and straight up almost hit him with a Bible.

I'm not totally sure, but I feel like that's not what bibles are for.

At this point the bus driver took notice and started to call back to this woman. The cell-phone-talking man was actually starting to get a little freaked out now, because the woman had stood up and started to ascend the two steps up. She just sort of stood there, looming in the aisle. The bus driver was still calling back, but one can imagine that over Ave Maria, perhaps she really couldn't hear anything.

Long story short, they had to get a cop to escort her off the bus. The man continued his cell phone conversation.

Story #2

I would like to preface this story by saying that it is totally true and not exaggerated. The foods mentioned are completely accurate.

I was going to a business meeting with a person from another organization (!) and I was waiting for the bus at about 1 pm in the afternoon. A girl with a very young child - maybe 2 - were standing at the bus stop, as was an older man eating cheetos. I took my spot somewhat away from both parties. The man then began to approach me. He tried to offer me his cheetos, which I declined (twice). He may have tried to talk, but it was difficult for me to make out. Eventually he wondered over to the mother and her child and tried to offer them cheetos. The girl - probably younger than me - was talking on her cell phone and tried to ignore the man, so he started trying to poke the 2-year old with this bag of cheetos. When the child didn't respond, the man pulled out a bottle of vodka from his bag and drank the last of it. Thank God he didn't offer that to the child.

This was really only the beginning of the man's generosity though. He started to pull out more things from his bag to offer to the child. He pulled out bologna. He pulled bacon. Raw bacon. Eventually it became clear the no one would take anything from him, so he wondered out to the side of the church that stood behind us and peed. Peed in a churchyard. In broad daylight. Visible from the sidewalk, not even in a bush or anything.

By this time, the bus had finally arrived. I boarded and the man boarded directly behind me and didn't pay for his ticket. The bus was completely packed and about 5 minutes late, and so the bus driver wasn't having it. After the man mumbled that he was homeless several times, some woman in the front paid for him, and he finally took a seat. The entire bus bubbled over with commentary about the whole thing, especially the two men behind me who were trying to decide if because God was watching all the time, did that mean you had to do good deeds all the time? And he probably could have bought a bus ticket if he hadn't bought that second bottle of vodka he was drinking on the bus, haha. (Rough transcription.)

I frankly couldn't keep my eyes off the whole thing too. It just kept going and getting worse. When the busdriver had to strap in a boarding passenger in a wheelchair, the homeless drunk man offered the busdriver bacon. (The busdriver practically kicked him off the bus right then.) Eventually, the homeless man stopped trying to offer his food to other people and just ate a plum in his seat before appearing to fall asleep.

About the same time all of this was happening, a well dressed man with a messenger bag sitting across from me handed a white pamphlet to the man sitting next to him. A few seconds later, his arm wafted - and this is exactly how I mean to describe it - in an arc towards me. Without looking at me at all, he handed me a pink brochure with a lamb on it and a bunch of quotes about hearing voices that are really God. I didn't really know what to do with it so I just held it. Later I got a look at the other pamphlet, the dainty pink one, which turned out to be titled, "Hell: the Destiny of Sinners."


So I know you have bus stories, too - care to share?

Irene: Three Days without Power, One and Half Weeks sans Internet

 

So I know you can't see anything in this picture. I took it during the storm, but because I'm not adventurous and I don't like waiting for the eye of the storm and then walking out to take pictures only to have my trailer blown over behind me, this picture shows absolutely nothing. 

It's probably fitting really. The storm itself - no biggie. A lot of wind, a little rain. It was the aftermath. The eastside of Providence has a ton of enormous trees - like so enormous that when semis wobble through, their tops scrape whole sections of tree. All of these enormous trees meant that as soon as even the slightest wind came whistling through, all of the powerlines were tangled with loose limbs. The storm started on Sunday morning, and I woke up at 9 am to a blank clock face. That was actually the most bizarre and disorienting thing - as if there just wasn't any time anymore. 

The power stayed off all Sunday and all Monday, but Tuesday morning, when I walked outside to go to work, there were two firetrucks flanking my front door. When I put something in my trashcan, a firefighter leaned out of his window and said, "You might not want to stand under that."

I was standing beneath one of those ubiquitous branch-and-powerline combos. First time I had even noticed it. 

So the power came back on after three days, but then it was the end of August and the end of our internet service. I have been dying a little bit every day since.

BUT it's back, so now I have to stuff in some pictures of things I did. Like... 

The Rhode Island School of Design has like a 6 floor museum with a real range of stuff, and I went last Sunday because they had a pay-what-you-want morning. You really aren't supposed to take pictures, but when I saw the Alexander McQueen Butterfly dress from his 2008 collection, well, somehow I thought you'd just appreciate it too much for me not to include it. Anyway, there were a ton of things there that we studied in that art history class: a Sol LeWitt white box structure, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Rothko, Andy Warhol, a post-Cindy Sherman light painting thing... 

This was the same weekend that I went to a farmer's market (and later I went to a grocery store, but that's less interesting). I neglected to take a picture of the market (very small, very depressing) itself, but I did document the bounty:

This includes a cabbage, 4 eggplants, 3 bell peppers, 5 ears of corn, 4 plums, 2 peaches, 1 tomato, 2 cloves of garlic, a bundle of green beans, a bundle of basil, and a bag of squash type things which I decided I didn't really like. 

I went a little crazy.

So yeah, no really interesting stories here. I just felt like I needed to show something for all the time I spent pretending to read and really just surfing my phone for recipes.

Food Truck and Cart Festival (and then some stuff I actually took pictures of)

So, Matt and I went to the Food Truck and Cart Festival at Columbus Commons, but I am a terrible blogger and have no pictures for you. Part of that is because Matt is easily embarrassed and stopping to take camera phone pictures in a crowd would have been more than he could deal with from me. The other issue was that we got there at 8:30 and it was completely dark. There were carts along the edge and these enormous lines of  50 plus people for each, but you couldn't tell what anyone was waiting in line for because there was no lighting. I guess they always park under street lights when they go out into the world at night. We were going to get a beer, but the line was insane and then we realized that the drink ticket booth had officially closed. They were out of beer at a freaking festival. I think that's a worst-case-scenario when planning these things. So we stood around the booth my work had set up. The girl running our booth was drinking booze her friend had brought for her so she wouldn't have to pay for festival beer. I think I may have underestimated the ridiculous amount of freedom my job allows.
I found out yesterday at work that most of the carts had run out of food altogether and people were asking them to make whatever they could from scraps. I am grateful that we left when we did and didn't wait in line for a tortilla with sauce squirted on it or any other such emergency recipe. They need to do this thing more often and with more food and certainly more booze.
Next time I go somewhere more interesting than work and the grocery store, I will make a more sincere attempt to take pictures. Had I not been more timid, I would have had a picture for you of that old bald guy that does interpretive dance with a cane by the music stage at every festival.

Now that I have bored you with my "I'm totally getting out and seeing Columbus because I would judge you for not getting out and seeing Providence" moment, I am super excited that this post has  a theme! Like, if Matt were involved, he would probably come up with reasons why his boat captain's hat would be appropriate, because every theme party welcomes a boat captain. I'll let you put two and two together and figure out the theme on your own.

This is one of the super cute Pattycake vegan cookies in our cookie basket at work. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a cat, but it also looks like a fox. I go with cat only because I think vegans appreciate cats more often than do other people. Take from that comment what you will. The reason I show this picture is because yesterday at work, a man who comes in regularly and, as far as I know, is of sound mind, picked up this very cookie and said, "Well look at that. That's a dinosaur, right?" I am very often at a loss for words at the coffee shop.

I saw this guy in a shop window walking home from work and said "AAAAWWWWW" really loud just as someone walked by me, so I decided I couldn't really make things more embarrassing, so it was okay to take a picture. The weird thing about this display is that it is in the window of Clintonville Outfitters, which is a hiking and camping equipment store that definitely doesn't sell toys or anything lion related. I guess they know what they're doing because no I want a hammock.

So, I don't want to bust your "Rhode Island has fancy cider with cute furry creatures on the label" bubble, but I kind of do. This was on display at Giant Eagle. It was the first thing I saw when I walked in the door. There are at least 4 kinds. If I was the sort of person to drink in a non-bar situation,  I would totally buy this. It is 100% cuter than Strongbow, and i bet it tastes better. The fact that I see hipsters drinking Strongbow leads me to believe it's the worst possible choice of cider.