Summer's End??

I find it funny that everyone all over the internet seems to equate Labor Day Weekend with the end of summer and start of fall (nevermind that my handy dandy planner tells me that the official start of autumn is September 22), especially when it's still a stifling 90-something degrees here in Houston.  Is it the mandate to remove white from your wardrobes?  The start of school?  What exactly is signifying that this is all of a sudden autumn, because from what I can tell it's certainly not the weather?

My long weekend was quite fun and productive.  On Friday night S and I joined J and B for dinner at Caracol, our 2nd stop of the month for Houston Restaurant Weeks.  We all very much enjoyed our dinner there - the decor was cool and modern (with artwork by a recent favorite of mine, Charlie Harper!), the service was attentive and top notch, and the food was delicious!  I highly recommend!  On Saturday, S and I slept in, ran errands, got stuff done around the house, and were just generally productive.  S cleared out our old desk and finished organizing all of our office supplies.  I snagged cleaning and organizing supplies from Target and picked up groceries for some yummy meals over the weekend, managed to clear out a number of random bags and boxes still leftover from my move, vacuumed all of our carpeted areas, polished off another book (I may have also bought the third book in the trilogy while at Target as well....) and cooked up a yummy dinner of burgers, Indian spiced sweet potato fries with curry ketchup, and corn on the cob! 

Sunday we started off with another Houston Restaurant Weeks stop (our third and final) at White Oak Kitchen + Drinks for brunch with our friends J and Iv.  We'd known the restaurant was in the Galleria Mall area, but we hadn't realized it was actually IN the mall on the third floor.  Once we figured it out, we settled in for a tasty brunch.  The service wasn't phenomenal, but the food was yummy, and the company was fantastic.  After brunch I dragged S to a few stores, but my willpower was strong and I managed to leave without buying anything.  We then hit up Buffalo Exchange so I could sell some clothes I no longer wanted and then backtracked to Central Market where S discovered they serve beers in the store and I stocked up on lots of delicious food-stuffs for the week (win-win!).  We just relaxed for a bit once we got home.  For dinner I whipped up a quick meyer lemon pasta and S's favorite kale salad and we watched the new Spiderman 2 (movie was not great.  in fact, it was pretty bad....)

On Monday we slept in again and then I worked on a power point presentation that I am giving at the retirement home that my Aunt B works at as the activities director about what it has been like working on both the space shuttle and ISS programs.  The presentation definitely took longer than I'd planned, but there weren't any requirements for it, so it was really just my own Type-A overachiever goals that were at fault.  Definitely had some nostalgia going on all afternoon while I worked on it too.  While I worked on the presentation, S got to work putting together our new desk!  Everything in the house is definitely starting to come together and I owe everyone some pictures sometime soon.  That evening we headed to S's brother's house for a grill out with the family, complete with corn on the cob, watermelon, chips and salsa, and a couple of beers.  It was nice to relax since S and I had pushed ourselves so hard during the day. 

This coming week is looking busy already.  I'm presenting my NASA/Shuttle/ISS charts at the retirement home tonight, we have a few more things that we need to get organized furniture-wise in the house, I'm trying to fit in regular exercise sessions, and I have a haircut appointment on Friday (nothing drastic, but I'm excited for something new!).  How was your long Labor Day weekend?  Are you feeling like it's already Autumn?

 p.s. Speaking of NASA, check out the Astronaut's cool view of Earth's clouds from up on the ISS...

(picture from here)