Country Jaunts

While most people probably head to the city when they want to find something interesting to do, Ryan and I head the opposite way whenever possible. We can't get enough of the country. The green trees and rolling hills of Virginia are captivating and relaxing to us. We can get out the the hubbub of the city and take a walk. It's what we do a lot of times on the weekend. Virginia is also such a historic place that there are all kinds of small old historic towns that are really fun to visit and explore. 

This Sunday we went for a drive and thought we'd head out towards Middleburg since we hadn't yet explored out there. But before we got there, the road passed through Arcola, another small town that has stayed small and has modernized even less than Middleburg. They had an old mill and it appeared to be open, so of course we stopped in to see it. 

Inside the mill and learning about the machinery

What was really cool was that there were a couple of guides in there to tell us about it and even crank it up and show us how it worked. They opened the waterway to turn the water wheel, which turned the stones and ground corn into cornmeal. The mill was pretty well mechanized and gears created a system that then moved the ground cornmeal up a belt and into a storage bin. It was really cool! 

The corn goes in the hopper on top and they can control the coarseness of the meal by raising or lowering the upper stone. 

We learned a lot too about how a mill works and why the stones are grooved, etc. Not to mention, it was just beautiful there. The leaves had all changed colors and had mostly fallen to the ground. We got one of the guides to take this great picture for us.  

A most wonderful Sunday afternoon with my sweetheart

Erin's Incredible Birthday Cake

This is perhaps one of the most delicious cakes I've ever made. Or eaten. It's a cake I've been wanting to make for a LOOOOONG time, but finally had an occasion, as well as all the ingredients in my house at the same time! It was my new sister-in-law's birthday, so Ryan and I went over to wish Erin a happy birthday and celebrate with her and some friends.

Chocolate Mousse Toffee Crunch Cake

I didn't create the recipes for all this, but cobbled it together from a few places. It was inspired by a recipe in my Our Best Bites cookbook, which is one of my most favorite cook books. However, that recipe said to use a box cake, and the mousse recipe called for ingredients I didn't have. So I took the idea, and used this Extreme Chocolate Cake recipe, and this Martha Stewart Chocolate Mousse recipe. It was layered in this order: Cake, chocolate mousse, toffee bits, cake, chocolate ganache, toffee.

Old Fashioned Small Town Festival

Waterford is a super historic town about 30 minutes away from where we live. It was founded around 1730, so it's one of the oldest communities in the country. We went out to their annual festival, which is a big deal. Everything in Waterford is historic, so the festival is like a revival from the past. This one man band was set up outside the corner store. The corner store was like an old fashioned bake sale of all kinds of home made goods--pies, breads, cakes, etc.

Across the street there was a man who was selling historic maps of the area. He researches stuff and does handmade drawings of the area as it once was. It was fascinating.

There were a ton of vendors, or really, master craftsmen who had tents and were exhibiting their talents. There was a guy using old fashioned equipment and crafting shingles for vintage chicken coops, potters with their wheel and clay, custom furniture builders, and so much more. They had art shows and food vendors. One person had these old versions of washing machines on display.

I'm so glad this is NOT the way I do laundry!

Walking down the streets of town was very cool as they had some people dressed up in costume. This guy was an organ grinder and was playing music on the street. (When I told Ryan we should go see the organ grinder he asked if I was hungry. What? He was confused why I said organ grinder, but thought I meant a sausage maker. Haha!) They also had some of the historic homes open for touring on the main street. It was a beautiful day to be out, but way hotter than you would have expected for October.

I wished the organ grinder had a monkey.

End of Summer

Finding time to have fun adventures is tricky. Finding time to blog about them is even trickier. Here's the sum up version of the rest of the summer.

 I taught a summer music camp for 4 year olds at the private school where I teach piano lessons. Two of the kids were great. The other two had the attention span of a chipmunk. Can you guess which two were which from the picture below. Needless to say, the camp was kind of a disaster. I had all kinds of great activities planned, but really what they wanted to do was just bang on the piano, and play ninja turtles. So that's kind of how it went.

Some kids have short attention spans. 

 We went on a great trip with the youth in our ward to Cape Henlopen State Park for a beach trip the weekend before school started. It was a perfect day!

Ryan's parents had tickets to the Chicago concert at Wolf Trap, but weren't able to make it. They gave us their tickets and we had a great time! The band was awesome. They played a bunch of their songs, but what I thought was really cool was that a lot of the time they just jammed. It was so fun to hear what incredible musicians they are!

Hard to get a great photo, but the band was great. 

Classic music...

 Ryan and I were asked to go chaperone a stake dance. Wow. Those have changed. I thought they were bad when I was a teenager, with not enough people dancing, but this was something else. None of the youth danced. Really. None. EXCEPT when the Dance Party video game was up on the screen. Then the youth would line up and follow the dance moves. But that's pretty much about the only dancing I saw, other than one slow song, with about 5 pairs dancing. Crazy...

Dance Party video game in the church parking lot

One of the highlights of the month for me was getting to fly to Houston to see my best friend get married! It was wonderful and I couldn't be happier for her. Brianna and TJ make a great couple. I only with the distance was shorter and I could see them more often. I got to help Brie get ready and also follow them around the temple to help with pictures. It was fun to be in Houston, but it was HOT! I left perfect Virginia weather and spent the weekend in 100 degree temps with humidity! Still, it was so great to be able to be there for her big day!

 

Labor Day weekend turned out to be a fun one. The day after I got back from Brianna's wedding, Ryan and I drove down to Williamsburg. We met Curtis and his girlfriend Melinda down there at Melinda's aunt's house. We spent the night there and then the next day went to Virginia Beach together. As you can see, it was a perfect beach day.

More fun to come, but Labor Day marks the end of Summer. Can it really be fall already?!

My Husband's a Ninja

New ninjas with supportive family and our instructor, Kevin Stuart

For months Ryan has been questioning whether or not he's ready to take the black belt test. "It's brutal," he'd tell me. "Yea? It can't be that bad. You're one of the best in the class. And look at all those other people who've got their black belt--you're in better shape than them," I'd tell him. But it's true--he was right--I said all those things before I ever saw the black belt test. If you ever thought P90X was intense, this is like doing 3 or 4 of those workouts back to back. It was crazy. 

It started with various exercises, every other set of which were push-ups of some sort. I swear they did over 400 push-ups. And it was non-stop. For about an hour and a 40 minutes. No water breaks, no chance to really catch your breath. I think it would have reduced me to tears after about 30 minutes. The closest thing to a break was when they demonstrated their forms and self-defense techniques.

After this insane workout, it was time to pad up for 20-25 minutes of sparring. They were in groups of about 6 and one person had to spar everyone, one right after the other. Then they'd rotate out and get in the line up to spar the next person. It was so much sparring. Good thing Ryan loves a good sparring match. In the end, Ryan and his brother Michael both came out victorious as newly minted Black Belts. 

Exhausted, but completing that test put a smile on their faces. 

Doing, Instead of Just Learning

Over 2 years ago I graduated BYU with a BA in Humanities. "Cool, so what does that mean?" seems to be a fairly common question. Well, as I spent 4 1/2 years working on it, it actually means a lot more than I'm able to explain to people in the short answer they want. In a very, very small nutshell, I studied the arts. Not DOING the arts, just learning ABOUT the arts. It typically sounds like a useless major to people who don't understand that what I really learned was how to think, how to look for connections, how to see the way things fit together, how to formulate ideas, how to communicate effectively, and how to write. Really, there was so much good, useful stuff I learned that makes me such a better human being. That being said, what this post is really about is not the validity of my college major, but rather the fulfillment of a dream I've had for a long time. Sometimes it felt that while I spent all kinds of time in classes and in the library learning about the arts, and it always made me itch to learn how to create art.

I'm lucky to have made a good friend here in Virginia who is an artist, and she and I worked out a great deal. She wants to learn to play the piano, and I want to learn to paint. We are swapping lessons with each other to reach our goals. I've been working on a painting for a couple months and I've finally finished. It's an irregular size, so I'm still working on a framing solution. But it already has an intended place on a wall in the master bathroom.

This painting went through a few redos. Here's an early version:

 While this was looking ok, and I was happy with parts of it, in the end, the background was just WAY too drab for me. So I very carefully did a repaint of the background which I was much happier with!

This was done in acrylic on a piece of masonite. I found that the acrylic was more difficult to work with than I expected! It takes time to mix the colors and get them looking the way I wanted, but the paint dries SO FAST! It was always a struggle to know how much to mix up and how fast it was going to dry because it's super difficult to match the color if you try to mix it up again. Though it's far from perfect, I'm proud of my first project!

Summer Squeeze!

It's Mid-August, and I'm sitting in my front room at 5 pm with the door wide open because it is the most gorgeous day outside. Clear blue sky, a light breeze, and I'm in shorts and bare feet. I wish everyday could be like this. Even the business has been a little more mellow today. Stuff to do of course, but sailing rather smoothly. It amazes me to think that summer has come and almost gone. It's been such a busy one that I haven't even had the chance to squeeze in post about some of the really fun things we did!

At the beginning of June I bought us tickets for half price to see The Mikado at Wolf Trap. We doubled up with Curtis and Melinda and hung out on the lawn. We packed picnic dinners and staked out a spot early to get a good spot to see the show. Although visibility isn't as great on the lawn, it's good enough and it's nice to enjoy the weather with my handsome man.

We've also been dying to go to the drive-in movie ever since we found out there was one near Winchester. It's always a double feature for $8 a piece. What a steal! Especially in this area. They change the movies every week, so it's hard to find a week we are free AND that we want to see the movies they are showing. When we did go, they were showing Despicable Me 2 and Monsters University. We loved them. They were really fun shows. I forgot to take any pictures of us at that date night.

Sometimes the stresses of the business can really get to us, and especially to Ryan as he bears the brunt of any difficult situation. It's not an easy job, by any means. We miss doing fun things because we don't have time, and when we do have time, we are usually too tired. But a couple weeks ago, Curtis and Melinda called us up and invited us on an impromptu canoeing adventure. We actually were free, so we jumped on it. The canoe struggled to hold all 4 of us afloat, and we struggled in the shallow areas as we put so much weight in the boat we couldn't get over some of the rocks! We canoed down a tributary to the Potomac and then found a place to dock and explore. As we were doing so, we could see the sky was getting dark, not only with evening, but with oncoming rain. The lightning started and we decided we ought to head back to our starting point. We struggled with the shallows even more this time as we were going upstream! Melinda and I ended up pretty wet from having to pull the boat and the guys ended up getting a pretty good workout rowing the boat both ways for us. We made it back and got the canoe back to the house just before the storm broke and the rain started to come. It was exactly the kind of adventure we needed that night.

This last weekend we did a camping trip with some of our friends up at Harper's Ferry. Harper's is probably one of my favorite places to go from where we live. It's only about 45 minutes away, and it is absolutely beautiful! The first campsite we tried was a total fail. It ended up being a big muddy field at the end of a street of houses! We drove around and ended up asking in at a bar where the nearest campsite was. We camped that night in Antietam, the site of the civil war battle. I'd have loved to drive around and explore there, but I got outvoted. We headed into the town of Harper's and Ryan and I took the crew to see this old abandoned hotel that we found last year. It's absolutely beautiful and it sits on an overlook right above the Potomac River. It's a shame it's fallen into such disrepair. Ryan has been dying to explore it, so we poked around it a little more than before. We also found some other old abandoned houses that were super fun to explore around. Everything is locked up of course, but it's fun to look in the windows and stuff.

Then we went into another part of the town and grabbed some ice cream and walked around. We found a tunnel that the guys were quick to scale a wall to reach. I'm curious what it was for.

Shoes are not necessary to scaling rock walls

Why would a tunnel possibly dead end 18 feet above the ground?

We crossed the river on a foot bridge that parallels the train track. There was so much left to explore still, but time got late and we all had to head back home. Though the trip was short, it amazes me how helpful and necessary it is to sometimes escape everyday life and have an adventure to clear out stress and feel rejuvenated.

Tim, Alisha, Curtis, Melinda, Shauna, Ryan, Dan, and Erin