Memphis TN Vacation– 1st Day – 6/11/2016 (Mr. Kim’s comments in italics)

Other than our anniversary trips, we don’t do a lot of vacations, except to visit family.  So I was thrilled when Mr. Kim suggested a trip to Memphis.  BBQ and Blues – two of our favorite things.  I have a very slight connection and memory of the city.  Momma was born there and my Granddaddy’s parents, Ma and Pa Easterwood and his sister, Mildred Vann lived there.  Granddaddy and Grandma Jean took me there a couple of times when I was a little girl, but my memories are limited to their house and the Fairgrounds.

We left at the crack of dawn on Saturday, the 11th.  We stopped for breakfast at Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant just outside of Staunton, VA.:

While we looked over the menu, we became aware of an overloud traveler sitting right behind us.  Among his many topical digressions with his wife, he asked the teenager waitress how far it was to New Market, a well-known civil war battlefield in Virginia about 45 minutes directly up the highway from where we sat.  The waitress awkwardly tried to tell him she didn’t know, and he responded that he had a GPS in the car, but it was just easier if she could find out for him.  I know that sounds mean spirited and patronizing, but the more I listened the more I realized that this guy was just being stream-of-consciousness straightforward.  That was when the harmonicas came out.  He decided to bless the waitress with a demonstration of his prowess playing two harmonicas at one time.  I watched the owner across the room assess him and decide that he was a harmless nuisance.  The waitress skittered away, and the gentleman stood to leave.  As he pivoted toward our table, he decided that we too needed a serenade and away he played again, those two harmonicas just flashing in his hands.  No discernible tune could be identified, but he was obviously pleased with his own effort and awaited our praise.  He called himself Frank, and told us about his patient wife (who had already run from the building and sat in the car) and her passion for dog rescue.  After he departed and our waitress again found it safe enough to emerge from the back, she brought our bill.  I begged her not to make me play an instrument to be able to settle the bill.  Too late, I realized that my “dad humor” was not what she needed after the last patron.

Lots of good, country food.  And the beginning of our grits odyssey!  We tasted grits at almost every single breakfast on the trip.  I even bought a bag in Tennessee that was from Oxford MS.  The country ham was just swimming in deep, rich red eye gravy:

And the apple butter was nice and sweet to go with the wonderful bread!  We bought a jar to bring home. 

I am enamored of side roads and Mr. Kim loves to indulge me, so we took Rt. 11 from there instead of the quicker and infinitely duller I-81!  This took us through many small towns and almost towns… Natural Bridge, Christiansburg, Radford…. and our old hometown of Salem VA where we lived in during the early 90’s.  This was our church:

St. Paul’s Episcopal on Main St.  This was a wonderful church – great priest and very welcoming.  I worked at the Food Pantry and The Child sang in the choir.  After church, we’d drop her off at choir practice and go down the street to a rib restaurant we liked, sit at the bar and watch football while we waited for her to be finished so we could have lunch.  One of us would walk down to church to pick her up.  I’ll never forget my angelic looking little girl, straight from church, swinging up onto a bar stool and asking politely for “some bar munchies, please.” 

We wandered around Main Street and the farmer’s market (new since our time) and then drove to see our old home.  On the way we passed one of our family’s favorite streets:

Which, because we are all emotionally 12 years old, we always called “Butt Crack Road”.  Yes, I was the one who insisted on the picture.  Our old house looks the same as always:

How sad I would be if it were to be substantially changed when we saw it.  The house was the original farm house and owned most of the surrounding property that is all brick ranchers now.  It is all stone with TONS of windows and heart pine floors.  The living room has a huge stone fireplace.  It was about 70 years old when we bought it (almost 100 now!) and I fell in love with it the minute I saw it perched on that hill in the foothills of the mountains that start north of Salem.  I’ve always said that most people don’t ever get to own their dream homes and that almost no one gets that dream home as their very first owned home.  But I was that lucky. 

We continued down Rt. 11 to Wytheville, a cute little town with a nice looking Main St.:

 Lots of character, but not a lot going on, sadly.  I love driving through these little towns, but grieve at the empty storefronts, the closed theatres and shuttered cafes.  One place that was NOT shuttered was Skeeter’s:

Skeeter’s is a typical little Southern café, famous for their ‘Skeeter Dogs’, which were delicious.  I swear some day I’m going to break the code of café chili dog chili.  I’ve made a hundred different recipes, I’m sure, and I’m still not close.  But they were great dogs.  And the place is charming with friendly people and all kinds of vintage tchotchkes.  Mr. Kim in Skeeters:

The place is no frills, and hasn’t changed much in the 90 years it’s been open as a restaurant.  Everything is prepared up front.  I asked if they had French fries, and the response from the waitress was “Not yet.”  After 90 years, not yet.

Upstairs from Skeeter’s is where Edith Wilson (Mrs. Woodrow – one of my favorite First Ladies – right after Eleanor) was born and raised.  One interesting thing is that she was a descendant of Pocahontas and John Rolfe.  According to Younger family lore, so am I. 

Some travelers on the highway:

They were very interested in us. 

Some cool signs near Abingdon VA:

All seemingly defunct.

We passed by the Barter Theater in Abingdon.  It has been around since the Great Depression, when they accepted produce as the price of admission.  For forty cents or equivalent value, the local folks could see a show.  It’s still in operation, and for $20 or so (sorry, veggies no longer accepted) one can see live stage shows.  Greater Tuna is now playing.  I actually attended a performance there in 1977.  Momma and Gerry were taking me to college – Clinch Valley College in Wise VA – now called University of VA, Wise Campus.  We had a last blast of culture – stayed in the beautiful Martha Washington Inn and saw a show at the Barter.  It was a wonderful send-off to my first year of college, majoring in Theatre!  We continued on through Bristol, a city of some size that straddles the Virginia / Tennessee border.  We really wanted to find the painted line on Main Street and stand in both states as Kim had done in earlier times.  But Route 11 betrayed us and we found that we had somehow crossed over to Tennessee without notice or fanfare.  So we decided to go ahead and climb up on the interstate for the rest of the trip.  But first we snapped this pic of Kim in front of an unusual looking fast food restaurant:

No, we didn’t eat there.

The plan was to stop for the night in Nashville TN, which would leave us with just about 3 hours to travel to Memphis the next day.  But when we tried to find a hotel, there was no room at the inn.  Finally, some nice lady took pity on Mr. Kim and told him that he wasn’t going to find a hotel room in Nashville.  What we didn’t realize was that that weekend was the CMA (Country Music Assoc.) Music Festival and Nashville was PACKED for miles around.  She suggested that we start looking in Dickson TN – almost an hour beyond where we were.  We finally arrived - worn out, at a crappy Quality Inn just off the highway that smelled like years old smoke.  But they had a room and a refrigerator to put stuff in and all we really needed was a bed!  We had sweet dreams, at least!

(Mr. Kim blogs) Confessions of a Neurotic Backyard Cook

Okay, here is a seriously random blog entry from Memorial Day weekend.  No serious discussion or insights into the soul or political fight picking this time.  Just something to memorialize an experiment I undertook this week while on vacation.  So this is an “old school” entry – about cooking.

I make some seriously good smoked pork barbecue.  It’s my one cooking claim to fame, and I am proud of what has become a reliable touch after years of tweaking things.   Over the years in addition to pork butts, I have also managed a number of hams, lamb roasts, turkey breasts, sausages, chickens, and a few briskets.  (The Mount Everest in front of me this year is to finely try to plank-smoke fish.)   Although I have long since customized my own rubs, sauces, and woods for various cooking projects, virtually all of my initial forays into various smoked meats were guided by the instructions of Chris Allingham, master of The Virtual Weber Bullet website . Chris is a recipe god for the smoker.  His tried and true approaches inspire me when I want to cook, keep me calm when I am uncertain whether I am on track, and keep me hungry to try to do more.

In my barbecue dreams, I see myself in my retirement days, now eight years away…..  making Q on the weekends, selling it in a food truck during the week.  Or better yet, wholesaling it to a food trucker and let HIM sell it during the week while I play golf and chase Kim around the house. I know such ideas are not likely to come to fruition, but they are fun to think about.  But even if I never make my Q for more than family and neighbors and the folks at church (I cooked 150 pounds of pork for a fund raiser last year) I know I am doing something well.  That knowledge is something I treasure. 

Recently, I have become really interested in other uses for the smoker and other ways to prepare the same meats to achieve different results.  I mean, pork butt doesn’t get much better than smoked to BBQ perfection.  But take the lowly brisket, pride of Texas BBQ, which has been a source of some consternation for me.  I have made good brisket BBQ, but have found that unlike pork butt it freezes rather poorly after the initial serving.  So with it being onloy Kim at me at home, I haven’t made much brisket over the years.  Over last winter I began to study up on various ways to make homemade pastrami.  There are injection methods, and brining methods, and salt curing methods, and quick methods, and why not just got to the local deli and buy the stuff methods.  (I’ll stop there, lest I begin to sound like a scene from Forrest Gump.)  Why did pastrami capture my attention?  Who knows?  It was another use for brisket.  It was there. And I have never talked to anyone who has actually made their own before.  So of course I had to. 

After spending time looking at the various roads that arrive at pastrami, in the end I came home to Chris Allingham’s recipe for dry curing the stuff.  After all these years, I have come to trust his techniques on other things, so “go with what you know” seemed to be prudent.  So here goes nothing. 

I made one critical mistake before taking even the first step – I told people at work what I was doing over my stay-at-home-vacation.  So of course, with a dozen of them being fans of my BBQ and ALL of them being worshipers of Kim’s cooking, I had ready demands for tastings once the pastrami was ready. Nothing like pressure the first time out!  Alas, it was a self-inflicted wound.  But this meant, in my mind, that I had to start with two briskets instead of one, in order to have enough to share, and also to hedge my bets in case one turned out and the other crashed and burned.  As Chris points out in his recipe narrative, a lot of cheaper pastrami is made from bottom round, but the best pastrami is made from the flat portion of a brisket.  So step one – I bought two brisket flats, one weighing 7.9 pounds and the other weighting 5.5 pounds.   I tried to buy them with good fat caps as instructed.  One had a great cap, the other not as much.  

The first instruction is to trim the fat down to 1/8 of an inch.  As you can see, I went ape-s*** and took off way to much fat.  One of the briskets (the one with the best cap) gave me a fit trying to trim it, and after an hour I found that I had gone too far.  The other did not start with much fat, and was cleaned up in fifteen minutes.  Again I overdid this one as well.  

So Anxiety #1 – too much fat removed.  But as I told Kim, I am approaching this the way many parents approach their second child – with a degree of perspective that replaces the sheer panic of the firstborn’s arrival.  My crisis of birthing my “firstborn” -- smoking my first pork butt -- is well documented much earlier in one of these blog entries.  So an over-trim of my latest project was not going to excite me overly.

I applied a rub consisting of Tender Quick, garlic, pepper, coriander, and light brown sugar (didn’t have the dark in the pantry that the recipe calls for).  I made it in the proportions called for, but found that I had used ¾ or more of it on the first brisket and so I had to make more for the second one.  So insert Anxiety  #2 – too much rub, perhaps.  I wasn’t as comfortable with this, because Tender Quick is a curing salt and I didn’t know what the impact of too much of it might me.  But it couldn’t really be helped.  After the rub, I put the briskets to sleep in the fridge, each in its own 2.5 gallon Hefty bag.

Chris’s recipe calls for the bagged briskets to be turned over and squished around twice day for three or four days.  The fluids drawn out of the meat by the curing rub supposedly become a slurry that marinades the meat.  The first morning after bagging (15 hours or so into the cure) I went to turn them over and discovered a mess.  The Hefty bags – BOTH of them – had not closed properly.  They are the zipper type, and upon checking them they had opened behind the closed zipper, and no amount of zipping back and forth resulted in them closing.  What DID result was all that raw meat fluid drooled all over the shelf of the fridge.  So quick clean up and sterile wipe, double bag the briskets, lots of muttering under my breath at Hefty, and keep going.  (I did send a complaint to Hefty.  They deigned to ignore it.) 

Chris’s recipe says by day two I should see a goodly amount of fluid/slurry.  Beyond that first night of drool, each turn of the brisket yielded more and more concern – not a drop of additional fluid was to be seen (until the last morning, and even then it was de minimis.)  So Anxiety #3 – had I done something wrong? 

At last smoking day arrived.  The meat had been in the rub for 3 ½ days.  So after a thorough rinsing, they were each put into a cooler full of water for two rounds of soaking,  Kim had been a dear and bought me two new styro coolers since the meat would be in there all naked.  These coolers were the new earth-friendly stuff.  How was I to know that this meant they were water-permeable?  I had to laugh as the water started visibly weeping through the coolers in a million little spots and started rolling across the kitchen floor!  So quickly each cooler into its own side of the double sink, and then a mop up and then several judicious refills of the soak water to keep the meat submerged for an hour.

Finally everything was ready!  After an application of a cooking rub (no Tender Quick or brown sugar this time) the briskets went onto the smoker.  Two chimneys of coals and three large chunks of pecan wood.

Now, Chris’s site not only gives you recipes, it also provides a helpful cooking log of of his experience as he smoked the meat he's explaining about.  This is very helpful when I am hours into a smoke and wondering if something is supposed to be taking as long as it is.  His log for the pastrami said that during his smoking the meat reached the desired 165 degree internal temp in about 3 ¾ hours.  This provided a good sort of guide for my planning.  Mine was getting close at about that time – 150 degrees.  So I figured it wouldn’t be long.  I started checking every thirty minutes or so.  Four hours.  Five hours.  Still the meat was holding at 155 degrees.  What the heck was going on?  The thermometer on my smoker was reading a constant and perfect 245 degrees, and it had never misled me.  So was my meat in some sort of a stall?  (This happens with pork butts in a smoker as the collagen breaks down, at about 165 or so, only to start climbing again after an hour or two.  But Chris’s recipe didn’t mention it happening with briskets at this low a temp.)  At the six hour mark, the meat temp had dropped to 145, but the smoker temp still said 245.  Something was definitely wrong.  So I grabbed Kim’s instant read thermo-gun and began shooting the various surfaces.  Sure enough the internal temp of the upper smoker was about 150, not the 245 it continued to promise.  So the kettle thermometer that had stood by me for six years had apparently gone gaga in its old age.  I fired up another chimney of coals and added them to the smoker.  The meat was done in another 30 minutes or so.  But the extra time on the heat – how dry had I rendered these poor briskets?  (Anxiety #4 giving way to Depression #1.)

As I pulled the meat, I realized one step that Chris had mentioned that I hadn’t followed – I had left a portion of the “point” muscle of the brisket attached to the flat, so it was much fatter on one end.  I mentioned it to Kim, who said oh well, even if that portion is under-cooked it won’t affect the rest.  Gotta hand it to her for her pragmatism.  So with a sigh, the finished meat was wrapped in foil and placed back in the now-dry hippie coolers for two hours’ rest.

Now, this stuff was supposed to be done by early afternoon.  It was NOT supposed to drag on til four family members arrived to eat dinner with us.  A dinner that had nothing to do with pastrami.  But after all this effort, I was not going to wait to see what the results were.  So we stood there and carved it in front of all of them, while they awaited a more traditional meal.  Here is a pic of the finished product:

The verdict: I think it looks great!  This recipe yields firm and tasty pastrami.  All of the mistakes sort of smoothed themselves out.  It is moist and spicy from the rub, but not overly so.  The flavor is strong but not over-cured, the smoke is gentle.  Now, of the four family members who watched us slice it up, one loved it, another liked it, another tasted it and couldn’t get rid of it fast enough, and another acknowledged that although she likes pastrami, she didn’t even want to taste this stuff.  If you factor in Kim and me for liking the result, and the vote of confidence from my wonderful neighbor, I am will to rate this as a qualified success.  Is it better tasting than commercially prepared pastrami?  I’d say it has a comparable flavor, with a bit more peppery-ness.  Kim says it tastes much better than anything from a deli.  But Kim loves me.  Cost-wise, it’s probably only a little cheaper than buying the comparable weight from the deli.  But it is homemade.  By me.  And it doesn’t suck.  YAY!

So yes, a very boring blog entry.  But at least it is not an unpleasant topic like politics or the upcoming Washington Redskins season.  Now, let's see how the hordes at work like it tomorrow!

(Mr. Kim blogs) Blessings

I had planned out a blog entry to write today, all about the wonderful day Jess and Kim and I had at the French Food Festival yesterday.  Took a lot of pics and everything.  But that post will need to wait.  Today I am dwelling on a different topic. 

We all take things for granted.  It is our nature to focus on things that have changed, not things that are the same over and over again.  That probably is hardwired into us since the days when our ancestors watched the distant horizon for storms, and the ground for signs of possible food, and the nearby brush for the slightest movement of a predator.  But in following this instinct, we can fail to appreciate the tremendous things that are in our everyday lives.  Things that supposedly will always be there.  And sometimes it turns out they just aren’t any more.

We arrived at church this morning and after hugs in the hallway with folks we haven’t seen in days, we took our usual seats – right side, row 10, next to the aisle.  Creatures of habit, we.  And we have been at St. Martin’s long enough that usually no one is in “our” seats.  We sang and said the traditional prayers from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, listened to the bible readings and the sermon.  Today’s sermon was being vigilant and observant of the needs of those around us.  Then we had shared The Peace and sat to listen to morning announcements.  It was then that we learned that there had been a small fire at the church.  Most everyone looked shocked and concerned as Father Lee explained that apparently someone had been smoking a homemade marijuana water pipe in the breezeway that separates our sanctuary from the administration building/fellowship hall, and had apparently dropped a burning something-or-other along with the water pipe just outside of the sanctuary door.  Father Lee assured everyone that steps were being taken – additional foot patrols by the police, motion cameras – and that the damage would be taken care of after our vestry has decided on a course of action.  Apparently, this was the second time in a week that drug paraphernalia had been found at our church doors.  A church in the woods, with many tuckaway areas away from the road and the parking lot, must be very convenient for folks who need time and space away from prying eyes.

Leaving the church after services, looking just a few feet from the door, the damage was obvious to see – a 6x6 column supporting the breezeway was missing the bottom 9 inches or so with char up the column and a 4 foot square area of mulch in cinders around it.  Kim and I had walked by it on the way in to church and had never noticed it.  I guess we really needed that sermon on being more observant!

Looking at the damage, I realized how hot the fire must have been to actually burn away a 6x6 treated wooden column.  And I looked at the wooden breezeway it supported, and thought about the sanctuary with its wooden ceiling, just 8 feet from the column.  And I realized just how close this whole place was to being gone.  What would it have taken for the fire to spread to the breezeway roof and then to the church, another 30 minutes?  15?   5?  If the fire department had not been alerted when they were, this could have been a terrible fire.

All day my mind has returned to that image of the dangling post.  And I realize just how blessed we are.  We did not lose our church building.  Yes, I realize that even if the fire had consumed it our church is not made up of a building but of its people and the church would have stayed strong.  But that does not diminish the turmoil that would have occurred.  St. Martin’s has become the focal point of our Christian life.  It is not essential to our faith but it is central to our expression of that faith.  And we were given a subtle reminder that not all things we take for granted will be there forever, that we need to appreciate the gifts we have before us.  And that lesson requires no sermon.

May God continue to bless our church.  And may He protect and bless the persons whose choices resulted in this small fire.

March 2015 Anniversary Trip to Fredericksburg

(Mr. Kim’s contributions are italicized)

We usually go to the Outer Banks for our anniversary each March.  But this year we decided to try something new.  We ended up in Fredericksburg on a weekend drive back in February and had dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, The Bavarian Chef.  The drive home was so easy that it occurred to us that a weekend trip less than an hour from home might be a really nice way to spend our anniversary – no exhausting drive home! 

Friday, March 20^th:

We checked into our lovely room at the Courtyard on Caroline Street:

Perfect location – right in the Historic District and within walking distance of almost everything we wanted to see.  First things first.  Carl’s Frozen Custard:

It was still midday, so there was no one in line but this lone gentleman who told us that he HAD to stop.  We understood completely:

Frozen custard is my favorite form of frozen dessert.  I grew up going to the Frozen Dairy Bar on Route 50 in Falls Church VA:

(Internet photo)

This place opened in 1950, so I knew it my entire life.  Carl’s tastes like my childhood. 

We wandered around town and ended up at The Bavarian Chef for dinner.  The Madison location has been one of our favorite places since we lived in Charlottesville when Mr. Kim was in grad school.  Everything is delicious, the people are incredibly welcoming and the atmosphere is cozy.  You always worry when a restaurant opens additional locations – will it dilute the quality?  This is NOT the case in the Fredericksburg restaurant at all.  It is everything we want it to be.  And my favorite dish there (one of my top 10 favorite meals in the world) is exactly the same:

This is what they call “Snails in Beer Batter Provencal”.  In other words, escargot fritters!!!  Drenched in garlic butter!!!!  Escargot has been one of my favorites since I was a little kid, believe it or not, but this version is the best I’ve ever had.  We had a lovely evening – being treated royally, as always.  You can see how happy we are:

Luckily we were close to the hotel, because we were so full that there was a real danger of falling asleep on our feet!

Saturday, March 21^st:

We had passed this place going to Carl’s the day before and thought it looked like our kind of place for breakfast:

Instincts proved not at all faulty!  Very cool and friendly place, owned by Greeks and with a great breakfast menu. 

Mr. Kim had a Greek omelet:

And I had this crazy plate of eggs, potatoes, sausage, and creamed chipped beef on toast:

I can’t even find it on the menu, so I obviously ordered a SIDE ORDER of the creamed chipped beef.  I don’t thing I even finished half of this.  Everything was fantastic.  Mr. Kim’s omelet was so good that the next morning (yes, we ate there TWICE), he talked the man sitting next to him at the counter into ordering it, too!

We took one of our aimless drives – following interesting signs and country roads - and ended up in a cute little town on the Potomac called Fairview Beach (pop. 391).  Really not much more than some houses, a marina, a general store and this restaurant:

We had a drink (which the bartender comped as a way of saying welcome), wandered the dock and gazed at the water.  Lovely.  We also drove around collecting ‘For Sale’ signs and dreaming of a retirement beside the river.  We came back to earth when we found that even the shacks were well over $2K!  Back in Fredericksburg we puttered around antique stores:

And had lunch at Goolrick’s Pharmacy, an old fashioned place with a lunch counter:

(Internet Photo)

We have our good friend, Julie, to thank for recommending both Goolrick’s and the Gari Melcher house & Studio to us (more later about that).  Mr. Kim had a chocolate malt and I had an ice cream soda.  BLTs and a tuna salad completed our lunch.  Their menu is truly old fashioned, with sandwiches like chicken salad, egg salad, liverwurst, etc.  And the soda fountain choices are perfect.  Like being a kid in the 1960’s and eating out with your mom after a doctor’s appointment at Drug Fair!  And because we are 12, this old sign gave us a giggle:

We puttered some more and went back to our room.  We had great plans for dinner, but ended up falling asleep, being the old farts we are.  I woke up after 9pm starving.  I knew it was too late to go to any of the places that we’d been thinking of and had the idea that, being a college town, Fredericksburg MUST have a good sub place.  Then a little idea trickled into my head.  We were only about an hour away from Arlington.  I actually KNEW a place that had subs and was open until 3am.  Plenty of time to get there.  I woke Mr. Kim up, detailed my plan and he was ready to go in about 3 minutes.  Approximately an hour later we arrived:

(Internet Photo)

I’m sure I’ve posted about Mario’s before.  It opened in 1957 – which means that I ate Mario’s before I was born.  It was one of Momma’s pregnancy cravings.  They have the best subs I’ve ever tasted in my life.  We’ve even taken Philly folks there who have become addicted.  The thing to get is a ham, steak and cheese:

I love this sub, as you can see:

One of my 'last meal' items.  As I said, I was eating this stuff before I was born, which is the only explanation for the fact that I love their pizza, too:

I don’t think anyone who hasn’t grown up with Mario’s pizza would love it.  I am a total pizza snob and won’t eat the evil three (Domino’s, Pizza Hut or Papa John’s) and yet, I love Mario’s.  It is a perplexity.  We made our way back to Fredericksburg, replete and sleepy. 

Sunday, March 22^nd:

Our last day.  After breakfast back at the 2400 Diner, we went a little farther afield for the day.  We wandered around the Fredericksburg City Cemetery and Confederate Cemetery:

It is a lovely setting.  Old enough (established in 1844) to be peaceful instead of creepy. 

Even some beads ala New Orleans:

There was a plaque in the Confederate cemetery dedicated to the memory of several named soldiers whose remains had been buried elsewhere in town but had been dug up and booted out to make room for Union veterans several years later.  But instead of relocating the Confederate remains here, they were simply discarded.  People carrying the symbols of that war in their hearts are nothing new to this current century.

March Madness always is a part of our anniversary weekend.  Luckily, we both love college basketball and UVA was playing, so we stopped at a bar and had a snack and watched:

Note the score.  This was the last time Mr. Kim was happy during the game.  We lost to Michigan State 60-54.  Mr. Kim is not happy:

We cheered ourselves up with our last Fredericksburg excursion of the weekend.  As I said before, Julie had suggested that we go to the Gari Melcher House & Art Studio.  I confess, I’d never heard of Gari Melcher or the home.  Neither had Mr. Kim.  Thank you to Julie for correcting that.  We were charmed by the home and overwhelmed by the talent of the artist. 

The house:

The studio and gallery:

Some of his work:

(Internet Photos)

The tour of the house is guided, but you can wander the garden and the studio/gallery freely.  We will most definitely go back.  We were the last tour of the day, so we didn’t get to spend much time in the shop.  I want to choose a print – this art is something that I need in my home!  The website give lots of good information about Melchers and his home and art: http://garimelchers.umw.edu/

Cheered up considerably, as you can see,:

we made our way back to Richmond with yet another wonderful trip and another wonderful year of being together under our belts (and perhaps a couple more pounds).  I am uniquely blessed to have the husband that I have.  We share and enjoy one another so much.  I know how lucky I am.  Most days.  Sometimes I take it for granted, but I try not to.