Reindls Visit St. Louis

Q: How far behind am I on this blog?
A: 1.5 months

Sad, I know. In my defense, it has been an absolutely crazy few months including no less than two wedding cakes, multiple 12-hr work shifts (and working straight threw a few weekends), car issues, visitors, a Birthday (which I did manage to blog about), medical tests (nothing serious, thankfully), and a few other things that we'll get to later on in the blog.

Now, to get caught up. Wish me luck.

Back in the beginning of August Tom and Ginny drove out for a week-long sort-of visit. I say sort of only because they actually stayed an hour and a half outside of the city so we didn't spent the whole week with them but got some great shorter visits while not feeling guilty that we still had to go to work every day.

Our first visit with them was a overnight trip down to visit them and the wine region that they were conveniently located near.

Of course, I took no pictures.

We did have a great time though, as we always do, visiting wineries, breweries and driving around the picturesque town of Ste. Genevieve.

A few days later, I had a day off  so they headed up to the city for a visit. That first evening we all headed into the city for the first trip up the Gateway Arch for all four of us.

We did get some great views, especially on the East facing side (less weather), but the way up was a bit too rickety for me. and what they say is true, the viewing windows are incredibly tiny.

 We posed outside in the beautiful (if horrendously hot) weather then I'm sure headed off to eat something.

 The next day was my day off so we hit up the Missouri Botanical gardens for the second time with the Reindls. They liked it so much they first time, we had to go back. Not to mention the fact that it was very early spring during our last visit and we were all anxious to see how everything had filled out. Not to mention the fact that Mo Bot is free to residents on Wednesday mornings.

That visit made me realize just how much I would love to live in their greenhouse. Who wouldn't love the beautiful brick and beautiful view?

After the gardens, we went to one of my favorite restaurants Farmhaus for their blue plate lunch special then killed a few more hours at the St. Louis History Museum.

Our last visit with the Reindl parents was a very chill Friday night. They came back up to stay with us before making their way home on Saturday and we spent a nice evening eating Cicero's pizza and playing with Pepin.

All-in-all, a great week of visits. We can't wait for the next!

Where to Begin?

I know, it's been forever since a post. 

We returned from our PA hometown over a week ago and I am only now just starting to feel like life is back to normal...whatever normal is these days. 

I have lots to catch up on here so you can look forward to many posts in the next few weeks involving everything from brothers and sisters to nieces and nephews with a few cakes, ripening tomatoes, growing jalapeños, pickling beets and sharpened knives thrown in for good measure. Notice please that all topics mentioned above, aside from family, has to do with food. 

That's just how I roll.

In the meantime, here a few lovely pictures from the mess I came home to find in the frantic day before flying to PA with a frozen wedding cake. 

That, my friends is wine from a bottle that popped its cork. It's hard to see in these photos, I know. It was much more vibrant in person, and the smell...oh the smell; my first concern was that Pepin had been boozing it up while I was out (kidding, kidding -- I'm not that crazy!). 

Again, it's hard to see but the wine shot from the bottle on the far side of the dining room, through the dining room and almost to the far side of the kitchen; 15 feet. I measured.

And it managed to touch on everything  nearby as well: the walls, the dining room table, even making it to a far wall to the left of where this picture was taken. 

Needless to say, it got cleaned up but only after I let it sit for an hour until Michael came home from work so I could show him. It was too funny and amazing, really, not to show him.

And that way he had to help me ;-)

tea, kitties and wine

 Those three things are mostly what our weekend consisted of. Well, those and lots and lots of Netflix Instant View since our TV has been dead over a week now and the new one won't be here until Wednesday. It's not even like we are TV-aholics, we're still using an antenna, in fact! But we do like to watch the Sunday morning fare, the local realty show, and the occasional episode of Jaques and Julia on PBS (Jaques Pépin and Julia Child in one show = BRILLIANT, if you want my humble opinion) and we were a bit lost without them this weekend.  

 Back to the point of illustrating our weekend. On Friday I baked some scones for Michael to take to work to commemorate the Royal Wedding and so when he got home from work I made him eat some more along with a "spot-o-tea".

And, that was about it for the day. I guess we watched The Office too, but that's not very exciting to blog about. 

 On Saturday, Pepin practiced his rendition of "Thriller"

 And hid by the balcony door in hopes that we would open it so he could jump off of the balcony and attack the squirrel in the front yard. No luck for Pep though.

 On Sunday we actually accomplished something: we bottled some of this year's wine!

 At first, Pep was all excited to help.

 But he soon opted for a cat nap when he realized that you need opposable thumbs to work the corker.

Here are the 28 bottles that we finished yesterday (well, they still need labels, but they are at least drinkable). That's a little more than half of the wine we made this year. The plan is to bottle 6 more of both the Niagara (white) and Foch (red) then to blend the two for the last 10 or so bottles. Thanks again to my Dad for keeping us stocked up with grape juice and making sure that the partially fermented wine was well kept until we returned to the states.

We didn't sit down for a minute...(cont)

My parents and Grandma set out on the 800+ mile drive on that Friday morning. The original plan was to stay the night along the way and arrive Saturday afternoon. I called it though, I told Michael the night before to expect a phone call saying that they were just going to tough it out and drive straight through on Friday. And the phone call came, happily, meaning one more day with the crew all here.

As you can see, Pep warmed up to the visitors quickly.

I'm not sure what we did on Saturday...I think we were a bit lazy, which was understandable for those who had spent 12.5 hours in the truck on the previous day. We did however manage to get out of the house and to the grocery store to pick up dinner supplies and tulips to adorn the table for our first meal at it.

Everyone is smiling in this picture but really, they are probably cringing from the pain of sitting on seatless chairs since up until this point, we still only had one solid chair that included a seat (Grandma is sitting on that one).

Sunday morning we hopped in the car and headed out MO rt100 towards the wine region. Grandma claims she was falling over from exhaustion in this picture but I think she was just being camera-shy.

Here's the group taking a tour of the wine cellars at Stone Hill Winery in Branson, MO.

And here we are during the post-tour wine-tasting. We cut Grandma off at this point (kidding...kidding).

I don't know what we did up until the afternoon on Monday but when Michael got off of work we met at an unfinished furniture store to fill out our dining room set with some chairs (with seats). We bought four for now and plan to get two more in the near future (although, since our TV just crapped out, I don't know when we'll be able to afford two more chairs).

I'll post more on the finishing process in another post.

Anyway, on Tuesday, we realized that our hometown Pirates were in town playing the Cardinals and get this: the Pirates had won the previous night's game against the Cards!

Sadly, the Cardinals won this game (but lost the next night's), but we did have a great time with a great view. I am anxious to go to another game to cheer for the Cards. I really tried at this game, but I just couldn't bring myself to root against the Pirates.

On Wednesday we loaded up into the truck and drove across the Mississippi river into Illinois to visit the Cahokia Indian Mounds.

Here we are at the top (Grandma didn't bother, there were lots of steps up). Dad and I may look a little tired. This was taken seconds after we raced up the stairs. Unfortunately Michael wasn't able to come along on this trip since he had to work. (boo.)

We may have been miles away but from the (relatively) high viewpoint on top of the mound, we were able to pick out the arch in the distance.

On our way back from the Mounds we stopped off at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.

The walls, ceilings, floors, everything is covered with 41.5 million mosaic pieces.

Coincidentially, after posting these photos to facebook I was told by Michael's Aunt Susie that "Many of these were done by the Frei Studio or Ravena (sp) Mosiacs...Joe's (Michael's Uncle Joe, that is) grandfather's/great-grandfather's company."

We have an exciting familial St. Louis claim to fame.

I particularly loved the red on the ceiling in this chapel, made to symbolize the blood of Christ.

And in this chapel we have the Cardinal hats, left to hang until they turn to dust. Literally.

After the day's excitement, Mom and I did more work on the chair we had been caning all week while Pep drank our cane soaking water.

On Thursday, while dad whipped up a balcony planter box for us, Mom, Grandma and I hit up the botanical gardens. There was much more color on this visit.

It looked as if an Easter basket had exploded.

I love tulips.

We visited the local gardening center at the Botanical gardens so I could drool over the raised bed gardens,

And the cold boxes.

And on Friday we hit up the free (with the exception of the 12.50 parking pass, unless you want to walk 1 mile for free parking, which is what we did) Zoo where we had the pleasure of seeing some incredible birds,

A tiger losing his lunch,

This rather large giraffe,

Pairs of penguins,

And an elephant coating himself in mud to stay cool. (I missed this one, I was busy fetching the truck from a mile away.)

And after the swealtering heat (something like 85°) at the Zoo, we were in need of some lunch and cold beer, so we headed off to Schlafly Bottleworks. After an excellent lunch we took the tour and...

(You guessed it!)...tasted!

And on their last night here we ordered take out BBQ from one of the highest rated St Louis BBQ joints and spent the evening finishing up the chair.

And we moved this beautiful family piece to it's final placement and filled it with all of our (mostly wonderful hand-me-down) china. I forgot to mention earlier that this China cabinet, my Grandparents' (first belonging to my Grandpa's parents) China cabinet, came with my family in the truck so that we wouldn't have to keep all of our special dishes in boxes in the corner of the dining room. Thanks again Grandma!

And thanks to all three of you for the visit, we had a wonderful time!

Last Sunday

Sorry for the delay readers -- I do not intend to give up on blogging now that we are no longer "Metzing Around" but if you are a Facebook friend, you are well aware of our travel troubles when returning to the US (3 flights in 3 days but more on that later) and I just now am feeling settled and calm enough to sit down and look through all these pictures.

Our last Sunday was spent again in Nancy with our blogging/real-life friends Megan and Joe. Not only were we anxious to see them one last time before moving back but we also had a home-goods delivery to make.

Pre-departure, we made a giant list of all the things we had accumulated after 1.5 years in this tiny apartment and put them up for grabs. And since Megan and Joe are car-less and live 45 minutes away, we offered to drive them to Nancy in return for a fun evening at their place. 

When we arrived, Megan was ready for the delivery with crust and batter for the scrumptious French burnt cheesecake, Tourteau Fromagé (which we mentioned here awhile back) to throw in their newly acquired oven.

We had a wonderfully light and very french meal complete with chewy bread, smoked salmon dip, ratatouille, the tourteau fromagé (isn't that a great cross section shot? we were seriously impressed that our little toaster oven managed to burn the top!) and a batch of Alton Brown's amazing brownies. And wine. Of course, there was wine.

And after another enjoyably long evening of chatting and reveling in how many strange things we have in common, we took our parting photos...

...and reluctantly headed home one last time (which turned out to not be the last time since I somehow ended up with their apartment keys in my pocket and had to run back the next day to return them).

And to make the night even sweeter, a few days later they were kind enough to send on a pdf file filled with all their favorite things and suggestions on Saint Louis where we will be residing in the near future. Here's hoping the we end up somewhere close to these wonderful new friends.