un-pinterest-ed

According to my facebook news feed and google reader blog list, pinterest is all the rage right now.

I purposely avoided this website for months because the last thing I needed was another internet addiction. I got a few invites from friends and everyone I knew who joined absolutely loved it. I just ignored them and never visited the actual website, knowing it was for the best. If I didn't know what I was missing, it would be easy to stay away from it. You could say I was un-pinterest-ed.

That is, until one day last week. My co-worker was talking about her upcoming wedding and mentioned all the fabulous ideas she found on pinterest. This piqued my interest. Ideas? Inspiration? Yes please. She pulled up her boards and showed me a few things - and just like that, I was hooked. I had to join. I'm not really sure what I thought pinterest was, but this was not it. I expected it to be something like sharing photos on facebook, except of stuff not people - which didn't seem all too thrilling. But it's more like a virtual pin board so that when I see something and think "wow that's really cool, I should try that" I can just pin the picture to one of my board instead of forgetting about it forever. Genius! I waited until the weekend when we (for once) didn't have a lot going on. I signed myself up and spent a few hours just browsing all the pictures, setting up my boards, and finding people I know and wanted to follow. I went through all kinds of pictures - travel, home decor, crafts, DIY projects, clothing, shoes, accessories, weddings, bridal showers, baby showers...on and on and on...

      

              

         

...so, yea. It's official. I'm addicted.

Little Helper

If only my husband was so eager to help with the dishes

Festival-Filled Weekend

I've mentioned before how much we love festivals. Especially in the fall when the weather is perfect to be outside all day. Last weekend was no exception.

The Decatur Craft Beer Festival is our absolute favorite of all festivals. Tickets sold out online in less than 2 hours this year - that should tell you how awesome it is. There are over 100 beers to taste, and for as many as we tried, I don't think we even made a dent.

a few of the guys - Bo, Andrew, Drew, Josh and Shawn

 

me and Stacey at our annual beerfest reunion!

souvenir tasting glass

While we were at the festival, we had chili cooking in the crockpot at home. I love coming home and already having dinner made. It was a perfect fall day (minus the loss to Auburn later that night...).

The next day we headed to Stone Mountain with our friend Josh and his girlfriend, Jessica for the Highland Games Scottish Festival. Josh's grandma (Nana) goes every year and invited us to join even though I don't think either of us are Scottish.

Josh's family is from the MacLaren clan so we camped out at their tent for most of the day.

Bo and I eventually walked around to see all the different tents and activities going on. It was a huge festival!

Sword fighting demonstration

King and Queen watching the fight

spectators

Atlanta Pipe Band

just a few of the tents

The Boyd clan tent - maybe we are Scottish after all? (Bo's middle name is Boyd)

Caber Toss competition

Sheaf toss competition

One of several bands - this band played rock music on the bagpipes!

Our coozies for the day. Bo got them in Scotland when he went with his sister a few years ago. Perfect!

Baton Rouge

After three very long and very awesome days in New Orleans (see previous posts: Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3), we started Saturday morning bright and early in Baton Rouge. One of my co-workers, Jeremy, went to LSU so he gave us a lot of great suggestions and recommendations, which we were very grateful for despite his subsequent corruption of my desk decorations. He gave us directions to free parking on campus, which was awesome.

The game was at 2:30 (central time) so we didn't have a lot of time before the game. Since Bo had never seen the campus, we walked around to check out the tailgating scene. We love a good tailgate, and we were really impressed with how intense everyone is at LSU. It seemed like everyone had the works - grills, TVs, large speakers, multiple massive coolers, chairs, games, etc etc etc.

We had a blast just walking around and checking out everything with our portable tailgate (aka styrofoam cooler, bottle of Jack Daniel's and two large re-fillable coke's).

it was a good day with Jack

On our way towards the stadium, we stopped by Mike's (the Tiger) cage but he never came out. I like to think he was afraid of the Gator Nation, even though his football team, clearly, was not.

The have a Tiger Walk about an hour before kickoff, so we watched that before heading into the stadium. We were hoping to see the team but apparently they went in a few hours before that.

We had great seats for the game - thank you Kristin and Mark!

Tiger Stadium

Mike the Tiger

Go Gators!

Best score of the game... 0 - 0

Albert & Alberta

heeeeere come the Gators!!

After the terrible loss the previous weekend, we weren't expecting much better against LSU. So that helped the pain...just a little. It's still sad to watch your beloved team lose so we tried to make the best of it. Once the inevitable loss was over, we headed out to grab dinner. First, we found a food cart selling jello shots and boudin - perfect.

We went to The Chimes for dinner (great suggestion from Jeremy) which was on the corner of campus. We ordered a bunch of appetizers and hung out for a few hours - it was very similar to The Swamp in Gainesville, except it was a lot bigger and the food was infinitely better.

Grilled Gator nuggets

crab claws

Not your typical spinach & artichoke dip...served with fried bow-tie pasta chips

cheers!

Sunday morning we packed up to head back home. We had lunch in downtown Baton Rouge at Capital City Grill (another great suggestion from Jeremy). Afterward, there was a music festival going on across the street from the old capitol building, so we hung out for a bit before we had to get back on the road.

So in summary, we had 14 different kinds of meats/animals: beef, veal, bacon, pork, chicken, shrimp, oyster, crawfish, turtle, duck, rabbit, alligator, crab, and mahi mahi. In our opinion, that is a successful trip!

When we got home we added the new pin to our world travel map, so the US portion (minus Hawaii/Alaska) now looks like this (clearly we still have quite a bit of work to do!):

We had such a terrific time in New Orleans and Baton Rouge - already looking forward to our next vacation!!