Weekend Basics

We got back from New York last week late Thursday night excited to see Basil and head straight into a busy weekend, filled with the feeling of cooler fall weather.

Early Saturday morning I helped open up the South of The James Market, representing the Richmond Food Coop. Later that afternoon, I headed down to Shockoe Bottom to help shuck oysters at Shockoe on the Half Shell...

You guys know how big of an oyster fan I am, so when the chef behind the new Pig & Pearl restaurant asked if I'd like to help out for the event, I was there — lickety split.

It was amazing to me how empty and clear this market is just before 8am strikes and the masses come in to shop:

Sunday morning we threw on some long sleeved shirts (loving this cooler weather!) and headed out to the same foresty park where we'd foraged for mushrooms before. It's late for chanterelles, but I did have fun trying to identify different mushroom varieties while Basil got some good running in all around the park:

We'd hit the park right at the optimal time in the morning where all the different spider webs were in clear focus. Mary and I even stopped to watch this one spider in the middle of making its web:

It's pretty fascinating to catch glimpses of nature at work like this every so often — reminding us how we are all part of something so much bigger.

On the way back from the park we spotted a bright red sign for an estate sale and just had to pull over:

This one turned out to be pretty awesome and we left with some great finds that we brought home to clean up. The photo above shows a giant crock we picked up and will detail out more in an upcoming post.

While out in the garage, we played around with cutting into some of the different deer antlers we have to see if we could come up with some new ideas for jewelry — we'll let you know how it pans out:

In other news, we had an accident with the money tree:

It was all my fault — dang it. More on this to come...

And we'll leave you with this little curious gem to help get your week off on the right foot, I mean paw: