• Stuff to eat

    Strawberry Party

    Williamsburg, VA is known for many things, most of them related to super old, white folks who named this or founded that. What they’ve also got, is a pretty good farmer’s market. Williamsburg is full of tourist stuff, but when you get right outside of the area, it’s regular ole’ Virginia farmland, full of yummy stuff to eat. So, it makes sense that the farm market in Williamsburg would be full of various types of fruits and veg from RVA down to the Hampton Roads area. It had been a few years since we went, but we were headed to the antique mall to look for a particular type of…

  • Regular Foods,  Stuff to eat

    A perfect, homemade mushroom & Swiss

    After working in the garden all day and feeling some kind of tired, I angled for the comfort of some Indian food. We had already planned to pop out for a few to find some Sherry for drinking and cocktails, when I decided to hold off on Indian until my mom comes in a few weeks. Instead, my wonderful husband had the idea of doing a burger. We brainstormed and decided on a mushroom & Swiss, which we both love! After rolling through Wegmans to get all the stuff, we headed home and started on the mushroom mix to give it some time to saucify. He makes a cute little…

  • Places to go,  Stuff I love

    Holliday Lake is A Okay

    Sundays are for parks. Well, if you asked me I would say that everyday is for parks. Sunday though, there’s something special about cruising along a windy road, watching the sun move around the sun as you wind your way around the state. One of the things we love is getting in the car and picking a direction. Sometimes we’ve planned it out, but more often than not, we’re just going in the direction that looks good. Often we’ll end up somewhere we’ve been before, but didn’t get the time to explore the first time. This time that drive brought us to Holliday Lake State Park in Virginia. The large…

  • Art,  Scrapbook,  Smol thoughts

    Spring in Nippon

    As you may have noticed by the overwhelming amount of flowers on this blog, I love flowers. I mean, I LOVE them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flower I didn’t like. Even flowers that are “ugly”, see Rafflesia, the largest and stinkiest flower in the world, bring something to the table, botanically speaking. Therefore, even those ugly things are kind of pretty. Anyway, as a return to collage, I went with a frequent Inspiration. Oh, by return, I mean it’s the first time I’ve cut or glued in about 3 months. Something I go back to over and over are the patters, people, and animals of Japan. I…

  • Places to go,  Stuff I love,  Things that grow

    Mysterious Mystery Shells along the Potomac

    One of the things my partner and I love most is traveling to different parks in our State. We’re super lucky to live in Virginia for a multitude of reasons, but our parks and recreation are superb! They aren’t free, but they are well maintained, always have staff, and boast some pretty great campgrounds. In a future post I’ll write about this amazing program that they offer where you can collect enamel pins like the little cutie below. While on one of our recent trips, we took the day and went galivanting a little ways north to a few state parks we hadn’t visited yet. Boy were we greeted with…

  • Places to go,  Stuff I love

    March Date Night at Brenner Pass!

    We don’t eat out a lot. Well, let me rephrase that. We do eat out, but it’s either cheap friend chicken from a gas station, an Italian sub from WAWA, or some fancy ass restaurant where we enjoy the experience that comes along with eating there. I’ve been really lucky to have been able to have some really, really delicious meals in the last decade or so. 1919 and Marmalade in San Juan, Puerto Rico just to name a few. A few years ago while traveling for work, I ate around Austin and San Diego too. Where I live, here in Richmond, there’s a food scene that’s been up and…

  • Stuff I love

    My bathroom rainbow

    A year or so ago, I asked my husband to figure out a way to cover up a small window in a downstairs bathroom. He does an amazon cruise and finds this awesome plastic film looking stuff that sticks to the window. Think the thing that clings to the bottom of your bathroom tub, but cute and no gross feet on the bottom. After you measure out the amount and pop it on the window, it gets colorful right away! When the morning light comes in through the side of the house, around 8am, the kaleidoscope pattern on the cling creates the most beautiful rainbow splashed across the wall, door,…

  • Regular Foods,  Stuff to eat

    Mile High Lemonade Pie, 1959

    One of the many fun things about being an analog collage artist is that I’m constantly flipping through old magazines and finding recipes that jump off the page. Sometimes they are jumping into the trash because they look disgusto-barfo, but sometimes, they jump into my obsessive brain and I find that I need to make them immediately. This time, I’m flipping through an issue of Family Circle from 1959 and being almost all the way through, I flip a page an find the recipe for this beauty, A Mile-High Lemonade Pie with a buttery coconut crust. I mean, what’s not to love? Lucky me, the only ingredient I didn’t have…

  • Stuff I love,  Things that grow

    Peony perfection

    Do you ever see a flower and are stopped by how beautiful it is? It happens to me every, single, time I see a peony. I’m mesmerized by the petals and the colors. I love the gentle fragrance that wafts from the stems. I think they’re my favorite of all the flowers. Being new to gardening, I’ve not taken the time to grow them in my own garden, but I think next year, I might! Let’s learn a little big more about this perfect flowers. Peonies (genus Paeonia) are a stunning ornamental flower with roughly 30 different types of species. All but 2 of the known species are native to Asia…