Artwork Has Been Hung!

As predicted on Friday, we did indeed sleep in both days this weekend and it was GLORIOUS!  After our fun night out on Friday (good food, company, bubble tea, beer, and cars), we were total bums on Saturday morning.  We were awake by 8 am, but we had breakfast in bed and then proceeded to read (books! we read actual books!) and chat in bed until 1:00 in the afternoon!  We haven't done that in ages and it felt so good!  After getting up, we were majorly productive.  I finished organizing in the guest room and managed to actually get the guest bed set up and the furniture arranged.  It's a real, functional bedroom now and ready for its first guest next month!

This picture was taken after the bed was set up, but before my stacks of artwork found their way back into this room.  By the end of the day, the top of the bed was completely camouflaged with frames and paintings again.  But I was too exhausted from lifting boxes and furniture to do anything about it then, so we took a break and headed to the grocery store to stock up on tasty food for the weekend.  When we got back it was fairly late (7:15ish) and I was just starting our dinner of honey soy salmon (I broiled mine instead of pan frying) and roasted okra with fish sauce vinaigrette (inspired by this momofuku recipe).  I have to say, that fish sauce vinaigrette is INSANELY delicious and I highly recommend pouring it over any and all roasted vegetables from here on out!  However, the okra took at least an hour to roast in order to get rid of the slimy-ness and get the edges super crispy, so I do not recommend this recipe if you are starting your meal later in the evening.  We didn't eat until around 9 and by the time we were finished eating and then doing the dishes, I was exhausted.

On Sunday we slept in again, though not quite as late.  We had breakfast in bed and then I think we were up and about around 11ish.  I immediately headed out on some errands while S worked on cleaning out his desk and adding my piles of office supplies to his.  My first stop was Joseph's Nursery where I bought a Persian Lime and a Meyer Lemon plant!!  They will eventually be planted in prettier pots and flanking the front door similar to how they are in the picture above.  The nursery was great, they had so many different varieties of citrus trees and most of them already had fruit growing on them.  Such good prices too - I highly recommend!  I would love to go back and get a satsuma orange tree, blood orange tree, and grapefruit tree too, but S wisely recommended that we see if I can keep these 2 little trees I already purchased alive before I risk the lives of more...  After the nursery I swung by the Asian food market to stock up on weird vegetables, quail eggs, fish sauce, and dumpling wrappers and then headed home.  My mission the rest of the afternoon?  Hanging up artwork!

You can see in the first picture of this blog post that I hung some quirky pieces of art above my jewelry station in our bedroom.  I also started on a grouping of pieces in the living room, although it's not complete yet, and I've finished my decorating extravaganza off by hanging the rest of the art in our new "gallery" hallway.  We've had blank halls since S bought the house, so it's a little weird for us to see artwork gracing the walls now, but the pops of color really do bring that space to life now.  I lost track of time again while hanging all of the art and didn't start on dinner again until about 7:30 - whoops!  Our dinner was loosely based off of this recipe for miso butter green beans, but I just mixed the miso butter directly with the beans and skipped the poached egg in favor of a seared strip steak topped with miso butter sauteed mushrooms and shallots. Miso butter is one of my new favorite condiments, we've used it on corn on the cob too with delicious results.  Luckily none of this took nearly as long to cook as the okra from the previous night, so we stayed up for a while after our meal sipping red wine and binging on Season 3 of Downton Abbey.  Somehow we had a combination of both an extremely relaxing and simultaneously extremely productive weekend!