The weekend is never long enough. Holiday weekends are never long enough either. Obviously. Here’s what we did:
On Friday night, we invited two friends out for Mediterranean food. They’ve never eaten much foreign food but expressed interest in trying all sorts of things, so it was fun to introduce them to something new. When we got home, I walked up to the front door only to be stopped short by the sight of a SNAKE on our porch. Nice. My manly husband killed it. I know, I know, we could have shooed it away with a broom or something, but as Jose said: “the only good snake is a dead snake” and when said snake is right next to my front door, I’m inclined to agree with him. We tried to identify it using a brochure my dad bought us in June (after our neighbor told us to watch out for snakes when they cut the tall grass on the empty lots in the neighborhood) and couldn’t definitively figure out what it was. It wasn’t too long, but the coloring indicated it was probably something more than an ordinary garden snake — maybe a young snake? We eventually decided it was most likely a (nonvenomous) blotched water snake. The coloring was similar, and the brochure said they are often in residential areas to eat frogs. And we have seen many frogs on our front porch.
On Saturday, we made a yummy breakfast and lounged around all morning. We ran a bunch of errands in the afternoon, including another search for an entertainment center for the family room. (See picture above.) We want to replace that bookcase and the old Ikea TV stand with something nicer. The wall is HUGE — something like 14 feet wide by 11 feet tall — so ideally, we’d find a big entertainment center that fills the wall but doesn’t look too stale. (If you are curious about the wall art, see here.) We’ve looked at 4 different furniture stores now and have only found two that we like — one is a console/credenza, and one is a wall unit. We prefer the wall unit, but it’s more than we wanted to spend. So…we’ll keep looking.
On Sunday, I got up at the crack of dawn — actually, EARLIER than the crack of dawn — to go running with Melissa, Kelly and Laurie. They were doing 10 miles since they have a half marathon coming up in a few weeks, but I wanted to run 6. I ran with them for the first 4 miles, until their pace got to be too much for me — it was easy pace for them but tempo pace for me. That, and my stomach was giving me fits. I’ve been running for almost 10 years and still haven’t solved the problem of occasional tummy troubles while running. Sigh. Anyway, I slowed down a bit and did another 2.5 miles on my own for 6.5 total.
That afternoon, we went down to Galveston with Jason and Debbie to check out the Beer Festival going on at Moody Gardens. Unfortunately, it was a HUGE disappointment. The only event going on that day required an $80 ticket. There was a tent set up on the patio that you could hang out in for free, but it was tiny and they only had 5 different kinds of beer — all of which I could have bought in the grocery store. You could also get a $10 hamburger. No thanks. We bailed on that and had an early dinner on the sea wall instead, and the weather was great, so the trip down was not a waste.
We spent Monday taking care of a few more errands including the grocery store and getting this lovely cabinet for the living room. Hey, we were in the mood to buy some furniture, and if we couldn’t find an entertainment center… Seriously, though, we’d been looking for something small to go in this area to provide some storage, and this was a World Market find that fit the bill. It took forever to assemble, but actually looks quite nice now that it’s done.
And voila, the weekend is sadly over. Today is a Tuesday, but BOY does it feel like a Monday.