Homeward Bound

I'm going to Little Rock this weekend and I can barely contain myself I'm so excited! One of my very best friends had a precious little boy earlier this month and I'm going down to meet Mr. Austin in person.

I just have to finish up a tiny little knitting project before I fly down Thursday night :)

Oh the Things You See

Last week was an interesting week for seeing interesting things in NY :)

1) I was waiting to cross the street the other day and standing in front of me was a woman probably in her 60's wearing a backless sun dress, so backless that you could see the top of her underwear.

2) There has been a movie filming a block away from my office all week so I walk by it a lot. I haven't seen any celebrities but what I did see that I thought was interesting was the camera car. They have been filming a lot of street chases on bikes and in cars and the car that they have mounted with all of the camera equipment is a Porsche....really!?!?

This one takes the cake!

3) The building across the street from my office has a really nice roof deck and apparently the person that owns the apartment is a photographer. The roof deck is the same level as my office on the sixth floor so out of our windows we can see whatever she's doing. One day last week she was doing a photo shoot of a naked man! It makes for quite an interesting work day when there is a naked man parading around across the street :)

Sorry I don't have pictures of anything, I never think to take pictures at the time, it's just enough for me to get a kick out of and keep on walking by :)

Birthday Surprise

Last week for my birthday John told me not to make any plans for Sunday because he had a surprise. Today I found out that the surprise was taking a trip up to Tarrytown to visit the Stone Barns farm. The farm is an agriculture education center and supplies two very upscale restaurants with farm fresh ingredients. Blue Hill restaurant has a location on site at the farm and then another location in NYC in Greenwich Village.

We spent the day learning about the history of the farm and touring the grounds. We saw all of the veggies, flowers, and livestock; we even did a class on how to make refrigerator pickles and each got to make our own jar of pickles. Of course our pickles have lots of other things like carrots, red peppers, spices and fresh cut herbs.

The farm was originally part of the Rockefeller estate and the actual stone barns were their dairy farm. The architecture of the buildings is really great, I'm sure it was quite the impressive cow barn!

What I loved the absolute most was just being outside and enjoying the green! John knows I NEED a little time in nature every once in a while. For some reason it's like a little piece of zen for me when there's green everywhere and blue skies without buildings and definitely the quiet, oh the quiet! I guess you can take the girl out of Arkansas but you can't take Arkansas out of the girl :)

I'll leave you with my favorite photo from the day.....

Beach Week

John's mom rents a beach house down on the Gulf Coast every year for the whole family to get together. The really nice thing is that she also invites my mom and sisters so we get to see both of our families in one trip! This year there was a lot of concern over the oil spill. I think everyone was a little nervous to see what the beaches actually looked like but it turned out they were in pretty great condition. Here's a picture of one of the few tarballs we saw.

After a lot of trouble getting down to the coast and detouring through Philadelphia, we had a really nice time visiting with our families. There were about 20 people all together. It's so fun to get to hang out with some of John's family that we don't get to see any other time of the year.

John played lots of golf while I did a little more relaxing and playing on the beach. Here's a picture of a sandcastle that I would love to pretend we built :) It was just too awesome not to take a picture!

I wish we could have stayed longer; I was amazed at how quiet it was compared to the city. It was really nice to get away from the super fast paced style of NY, for me at least, I think John misses the city when we leave :)

Philadelphia

I've been wanting to take advantage of living in the Northeast and get out of the city on the weekends and see things besides NYC. I don't think I meant ike this but oh well….

John and I were supposed to fly out Tuesday night after work a couple of weeks ago to meet our families at the beach near Gulf Shores. Unfortunately our flight was cancelled and the airline wasn't going to be able to get us on another flight until the next evening. John somehow figured out that if we took the bus to Philadelphia that night we could catch the very first flight out, so that's what we did.

We took the bolt bus for $15 each and arrived in Philadelphia around 7pm. We had a very lovely evening wandering around the city, unfortunately we had to get up at 3 in the morning to catch our 5 am flight!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is my 28th birthday :)

I know I say this all of the time but how in the world is it August....I have no idea where July went! The sad part is that work has been so crazy I'm too tired to even celebrate. Luckily John took me to dinner and got me my favorite dessert, banana pudding from Magnolia Bakery!

Hopefully things will calm down and I can catch up in the next couple of days and post all of the things I wanted to post in July.