The Sweatshop and the Long Weekend

With the exception of theater tickets on Saturday, for the first time in nearly six months, my husband and I found ourselves with a completely free weekend. Nay, not just any weekend. A completely free *long* weekend. Excitedly, we danced around in our underwear (to the chagrin of our neighbors, I assure you), and shouted out what we wanted to do for the weekend:

"Let's have crabs for dinner!"

"I want to invite AG over for sewing and wine!"

"Let's work on the house and yard and stuff!"

"I wanna stay up until 3am!"

"Let's make that green chili that you were talking about!"

Quickly, I jotted all of this down on a list:

I love making lists!

Fun, yet productive. Well...productive if it wasn't for Fate's sense of humor, and our natural Sweatshop tendencies.

Friday night, I was able to get together with the aforementioned AG for an evening of sewing, crappy American-Chinese food, Hello Kitty First Aid, and totally embarrassing sewing-fail. After AG left, demoralized and in a semi-stupor from the gluttony of dinner, I sat on the couch and proceeded to watch horrifically mindless TV. Made more horrible when I realized that it was nearly 3am and I had just watched 4 hours of "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding".

Well, that's that! I thought, looking down at our "To Do" list.

Check and check.  Kinda.

Now, one would think that after crawling into bed at 3am, one would sleep like the dead until 1pm. Well, clearly, that person hadn't been on the go constantly for the past six months. My body has forgotten how to sleep in. I was up at 8, and after some tossing and turning, I "checked" to see if J was awake (by "checked" I clearly mean, I repeatedly poked him until he was up).

After the post office run, J's mood brightened considerable and took me to our favorite Sunday breakfast spot...even though it was a Saturday.



 

                                Before the devastation                               After the devastation

 As we  ate  gorged, we decided to run some errands and pick up brick pavers so that we can get started working on the yard. I'm not going to lie...our epic 4 hour home improvement shopping trip quickly devolved into 3.5 hours of buying crafting/sewing/Sweatshop stuff. Oops!

When we got home, we felt that it was too hot to do the manly-yard work that we had originally planned...so instead we headed inside...where J worked on ottomans, and I worked on making fascinators.

The key to any good list, is the ability to adapt!

By the time evening rolled around, we were both deeply engrossed in our projects and had to quickly change to make our dinner reservations before watching the Shakespeare Theater Company's performance of "The Merchant of Venice" which was *brilliant*.

Clearly...no home improvement work actually happened on Saturday. *BUT* we did purchase the brick pavers that we needed...so we counted that as a partial win. Right?

                                                   It's been 7 days and the pavers are still there. 
                                                But at least it's in the yard...that's progress, right?

Sunday morning, we blithely awoke and decided to run to the market to pick up crabs for dinner. Naturally, I dragged J to an Asian market, where they had Dungeness, Crystal and Stone crabs as well as the ubiquitous Maryland Blue Crabs. J's eyes nearly popped out of his head, and we walked away with all four types of crabs for an evening of feasting!

Crystal Crab                         Maryland Blue Crab

Dungeness Crabs                        Stone Crab

Again, it was really hot out (or at least, that's what we kept saying to each other), so, again, we retreated into the nice AC climate of the house to continue working on ottomans, fascinators and other Sweatshoppy projects. Just as we were starting to give the crabs the hungry eye, my parents called to invite us over for an evening of gorging (as all my family events tend to be). We hadn't been over for dinner in a few weeks, so we quietly put the crabs into a cooler filled with ice, and headed to my parents' home for an evening of steaks and ribs.

Monday morning, we woke up and determined to knock *something* off our "to do" list, we both vowed to work on our projects and once we were done, we would head outdoors and work on the yard.

Now, if you think this story is going to end with "and we finished all of our projects and made our yard the star of the neighborhood", you clearly don't understand our love of crafting and sewing and furniture making! We ended up spending the rest of the day (even skipping lunch) to work on the Sweatshop. By 5, when the weather started to cool off, we were ravenous and went to the fridge to cook us up some crabs.

Sadly...the Dungeness crabs did not survive the night. For a while, I thought that J would also lose his will to live, as he simply *adores* Dungeness. The last time I saw him this sad, was when my I ate the last bite of his hazelnut chocolate gelato (I thought he handed it to me to finish...I didn't realize I was to just hold it for him). However, the rest of the crabs survived and they were *delicious*!

Get in my belly!

As the crabs were cooking, J started the green chili. Alas, as he was preparing it, he realized that there wouldn't be enough time to finish it off for dinner that night. And then, I was sad too.

After we finished decimating the crabs and feeling pity for ourselves while the green chili bubbled away, we sat on the couch and we confusedly looked at our "To Do" list and wonder how we accomplished so much, yet nothing on our list.

So we did the only thing one could do in a situation like this...we threw away our To Do list and just basked in the glory of our Sweatshop...