I know I went poof for a few more days, but I have some good excuses for it.

Firstly, isn’t this weather great?  I love the fall, everything seems crisper and brighter and better.  And sure it has been a little rainy these past few days, but who cares?  Fall, guys, fall.

Jon’s birthday was last week.  I got him this cake from Whole Paycheck Foods.

I also got him the Carnivorous Plant kit about which I wrote.  I’ll update on that later this week.  Unfortunately we won’t see any actual growth for a few months, so the first few updates will probably just be pictures of dirt.  Life takes time y’all.

On Friday Jon and I volunteered to help out our friend Heather Gordon at the Golden Belt Third Friday Artist Demo Night.  A number of the artists in the studios were doing fifteen-minute demonstrations of their work throughout the night and Heather, who was organizing the demos, needed some extra hands to help out.  Jon got off easy, he just had to film a few videos.  Me?  I had to wear a sandwich board:

So stylish.

Here’s the video Jon recorded of Heather’s demo.  You should watch it, her artistic process is so inventive and creative and she does things with language and visuals that just boggle the mind.  She’s really incredible.

The artist I work for, Beverly McIver, also did a demo.  She showed us how to paint a lemon in fifteen minutes.  It was great, oil paint is such a luscious, fantastic medium, and Beverly is really charismatic and such a joy to watch.

The demos went on for about two hours and it seemed like there was a great turn out.  My job in the sandwich board was to hand out schedule flyers, which we ran out of pretty quickly.  So I spent the rest of the night running around from demo to demo, making sure that Jon and Heather and Beverly and the other artists were happy people and doing a bit of networking.  I managed to set aside a few minutes to eat a quick slice of pizza from Pie Pushers and to grab some ice cream from The Parlour.  Oh also it was raining, but I don’t think that that hurt the turn out.  I hope that Heather organizes another demo night during a future Third Friday.

Here’s one more shot of an artist demonstrating water color techniques:

Saturday we went to Charlotte to attend the wedding of two of Jon’s friends from college.  I’ve met the groom a few times but this was my first time meeting the bride.   They held their reception at the Mint Museum of Art.  There’s a Chanel show happening there right now; I wanted to sneak into the exhibit but, alas, not allowed.

First dance, isn’t that cute?

They had a koi fish motif and that extended to the incredibly creative centerpieces:

I wonder what happened to all the fish after the reception.

Many people Jon knew from UNC were there.  I’d already met a few of them, but it was mostly a night of me meeting people about whom I had heard stories.  Also, some dancing happened.

The whole party was extremely fun and lovely and it continued in downtown Charlotte until the wee hours of the night.  Luckily Jon and I looked pretty snazzy throughout the whole event:

I know, it just isn’t the same without the stage blood.

We straggled back to Chapel Hill this morning after far too little sleep and promptly made a giant pot of butternut squash soup, our first batch of the season.

Then we watched a bunch of Dr. Who (farewell, Christopher Eccleston, but hello David Tennant) and now I am watching the Emmys.  Peter Dinklage totally won an Emmy guys!  That’s awesome.

Oh also, Jen over at EPBOT (also of Cake Wrecks fame) let me know that Portal is available for free download through tomorrow night.  I’ve heard a lot about Portal, mostly from Dragon*Con, so I decided to go ahead and download it.  Jon also downloaded it and has been playing all night.  He seems super thrilled.  I’ll probably give it a spin sometime this week.  I’m less into video games than Jon is, so we’ll see.  In the meantime, go download Portal!

I hope y’all are enjoying the beginning of fall as much as I am!