Nicole’s baby shower and our awesome lake trip.

Okay, well that kind of brings us into August. We made a trip home this past weekend to see our folks and for me to go to my friend Nicole’s baby shower. If you follow the blog, you may remember her beautiful wedding from last June. She’s expecting a baby in the end of September, so I go to visit her and see her all pregnant and nesting. Here is her nursery. It has a cutie monkey/jungle theme:

They even made the cake at the shower fit the theme. It was so cute and amazingly delicious.

That’s the momma, enjoying her cake!

After the shower, we went down to Smith Mountain Lake on Sunday to visit our friends the Olivers. You may remember them from our wedding. Nat and Will were the twin groomsmen.

Their folks had rented an awesome 5 bedroom lake house and were generous enough to let us tag along on their family vacation. One of the best parts was going out on their boat. Smith Mountain Lake is gorgeous and neither Aaron or I had been there before. It was enough to make me think I could become a lake person.

This is the view from their house. You can see the boat dock behind the trees.

Nat and Erin in the kitchen. You can see that Erin is hard at work on a yummy diner of pork chili concoction. If we were smart we would have taken food blog pictures.

Here’s Erin’s face-side from the boat.

We spent much of our boat time tubing. I had never been tubing off a boat, and let me just say, it ROCKED!

Although I am a bit sore today…

And some fancy people went wake boarding…

This is Will looking very extreme…

After watching Will, Aaron and I decided we were too lazy for wake boarding. Although Aaron actually had one of the best tube-wipe-outs of the day, but unfortunately no one was around to record it.

Erin was great on both tube and wake board. This is moments before her plunge into the lake.

Needless to say a fun time was had by all. That’s it for now…

Although, since these last posts have been a bit Virginia-centric, if you are wondering what Aaron’s been up to check out www.svpics.com to see all his fancy new motorcycle pictures.

Virginia goes to the beach.

While Aaron was hard at work in Boone, I got to go to the beach with my family. Now, don’t feel too bad for Aaron. He was invited to come, but he doesn’t really enjoy the beach, especially the way the Pages do it which is without central air.

I don’t have too many pictures from the trip because I was only there for four days, and while we did have a great time there, my memories are a bit tarnished by the fact that I totaled our Honda CRV on the way back. I’m fine and thankfully no other cars were involved. The Honda was a valiant car and protected me from all harm, but it was still quite traumatic.

Luckily Aaron was around to come pick me up in Greensboro (it happened on I40 west). And also our insurance kicked in, but I still feel really bad. I just took my attention off the road for one second to try to block the sun and a swerved into the median. No fun.

So enough about that! Here are some pictures from the beach.

Martha and dad. I’m not sure why he looks so confused in this pic.

Silly one of me running out to rescue the car from the rain.

Me and mom, and of course me and M (who had to fly down from Minneapolis).

Long Over-due post for July… and maybe some August too.

Aaron and I have been pretty busy or at least all over the place this past month. We started July by heading home to Lexington for our birthdays and got to spend some quality time with our families and see fireworks.

I had an eye-infection which is why I look especially squinty in these pictures. But Aaron did take some beautiful fireworks photos…

But first we went to the hometown bike parade, a local tradition involving youngsters on bicycles, not the usual photos of motobikers Aaron takes.

That’s Uncle Sam leading the pack on a super-tall unicycle.

In the evening we gathered at the parade ground to watch fireworks and hot air balloons.

Here you see me modeling my lovely birthday gift, a Jennifer Wells original, www.jennwells.com.

The balloons are quite lovely, no? Also there was a light-saber battle royal.

And fireworks.

Visit to Martha in Minneapolis

Last weekend I got to go visit my sister in Minneapolis. This was my first trip to Minnie-SOTA, so I had quite an experience. Martha got to take a few days off from work and for me, it was like visiting a fairy godmother – she took me to get my haircut, we bought clothes, we went to fancy restaurants. It was like a whole new me.

First here is the Good Day Café Bad Day Bar and our gigantic apple-cake-soufflé thingy. Doesn’t it look big enough to feed to a dinner party?

Then we went to Martha’s cool stained glass shop. Minneapolis is full of specialty stores like that. In addition to the stained glass shop, I saw a cupcakery and a tattoo remover parlor. Lots of niche markets to cater to.

Martha has promised to make me a stained glass window featuring this cool swirly glass:

Then we went to the Global Market in Midtown which is an up-and-coming area of the city. The Global Market featured food from all over the world. We had some delicious Italian ice, and Martha posed with this giraffe.

In the afternoon I got my haircut and we ate cupcakes. Then we went for dinner at Crave, where I had a lovely fresh ravioli with bolognaise – see what I mean by being spoiled?!?

In the evening we met up with some of Martha's friends and went to a beer garden. They even had “Das Boot.”

On Saturday Martha took me to visit the Walker Art Museum. It’s famous for its huge sculpture garden.

 

There were all kinds of super cool modern and contemporary exhibits. One of our favorites was called “The Talent Show.” You could be part of the art by making yourself a human sculpture.

There was also an artist who wanted to draw people together into the artistic space. One whole room was full of hammocks and they played Jimmy Hendrix and projected pictures onto the walls.

Then we went to eat soup and pie at the Turtle Bread Company.

On Sunday we went shopping for a raincoat for me. We had a great time.

I think my favorite part of Minneapolis though was the outdoorsy stuff. Now Boone is pretty outdoorsy, but for a big city Minneapolis was very impressive. Martha actually lives in walking distance of three different lakes. Lakes are a very big thing there. Each lake has a different personality and all have walking and biking trails all around them.

There was also this really cool downtown area with waterfalls where the flour mills (like Pillsbury).

For my last dinner we went to Burger Jones, a really nice burger place where we got a tower of fries (parmesan waffle, sweet potatoes, and traditional) and some awesome sliders.

Until next time, here’s a fun picture of me in a giant chair outside Martha’s apartment.

Welcome to June!

Well… I’ve been a bit slacking with the updates lately, but there’s been a good bit going on. My folks came to visit… or maybe that was the end of May… But.. in any case… we made ribs, we walked around the parkway.. went on top of the Rough Ridge Overlook…

Here’s Virginia and in the background, you can see the Linn Cove Viaduct… So, after getting down from Rough Ridge, we went under the Viaduct on the hiking trail there.

Other than that… it was a lot of eating and relaxing.

The next weekend started off with Leah and Brian coming down. They just got engaged, so to celebrate… we ate. Friday was the Parisian Chicken … Saturday, we did some nice thick rib-eyes and our awesome 3 cheese mac and cheese topped with caramelized shallots… and there was pound cake… and pie… and Leah and Brian brought us some chocolate covered bacon …

This stuff is pure evil… awesome… but pure evil…

Sunday, Leah and Brian took off… but we sent them on their way with a belly full of tasty waffles.

Sunday afternoon, Virginia’s parents came into town after pending their weekend in Abingdon / Damascus seeing plays and riding bicycles.  We relaxed a bit, and then were out walking around again.

This is a bit further up the trail that goes under the Viaduct (we went there on Monday)… so is the following sequence of pictures:

After taking a nice walk, Virginia had to stop by her office for a while… because she’s not good at this whole “taking a day off” thing… so, while she was doing that, Virginia’s folks and I took a nice walk around campus looking at the artwork. We also had a nice little stop at the new frozen custard place in town… that stuff is rather tasty…

Last weekend, Virginia went up to Minneapolis to visit Martha. She tells me that visiting Martha is like visiting your fairy godmother… she makes all of your wishes come true apparently… But… I’ll let Virginia tell that story… I’ll just be a fly on the wall…