Weekend Basics: Dads & Grads

It was a big weekend for us with milestones and celebrations for my son's high school graduation and Father's Day all falling within the same weekend!

We started the weekend Friday evening hitting up a Blanchard's coffee tasting at Ellwood Thompson's where we learned more about their partnership with Thrive Farmers and how certain food pairings can really bring out different flavors and tastes in the coffee you'd never expect.

Saturday we were up and out early along with my parents to attend my son Brandon's high school graduation:

 

It was such a surreal and proud moment at the same time. Brandon walked across the stage with a huge smile on his face and more accolades and honors than I can list. I could not be prouder of him at this stage in his life and am already looking forward to all the college prep work we'll be doing this summer as he begins the next stage at JMU this fall.

On the drive home from the graduation, we hit up a few roadside country sales (which are always the best — remember this one?) and came across some of the coolest antique industrial sets of metal letter and number punches:

These are the real deal and newly listed in the vintage shop here.

Since my parents were with us for Brandon's Graduation, we planned a Father's Day cookout at our house that evening and had Mary's dad over to celebrate too. We had fun firing up the grill and having a low-key family evening around the table.

In garden news, the summer plants are coming along! We've been having fun seeing the beginnings of tomatoes, some squashes and let me tell you how well the grapevines are doing — we'll update on all of those plants soon, but over the weekend we enjoyed still being able to take a pair of scissors out back and snip fresh arugula leaves from our trough planters for the salads we'd be making:

And! Our mouse saga has finally come to a close (yes, it's been a saga). After many months of teasing Mary for thinking there was a mouse or mice in the house, she has finally been vindicated. We decided to do a seasonal clean of the fridge, which involved pulling it out from from wall and as you can probably guess, once we did, we had a little surprise waiting for us that was past its prime. We decided not to take a photo and while we were sad this little guy didn't make its way into the live trap I'd set over the winter (so we could set it free), we were glad to finally have an answer to the puzzle.

We hope each of you had a nice summer weekend and Father's Day!

P.S. We just started season 7 of Dexter on Netflix! We don't get Showtime so are always a season behind, but are stoked to finally be catching up. We can't believe season 8 will be the end — are you watching?