My New Life

Wow.... Three weeks since my last post. That is just unacceptable. I feel like all I do anymore is sleep and work. I'm really going to try to get back into cooking and baking and all that jazz. Lately, I've been doing a lot of PB&J's, Easy Mac, and buying supper at work. I'm going to attempt to start trying one new recipe a week and blog about it. Ideally, I'd be doing two or three posts a week, but come on. At this point in my job, that won't happen. One post a week is a heck of a lot better than one post a month, right?!

It's not even that I'm working 12-hour days or anything... well, most days. I'm scheduled till midnight, 6 days a week, but some nights there's nothing to deal with and the park clears quickly and I get out at 11PM. Some nights there are major things to fix or the park takes forever to empty, so I don't get out till 2 or 3AM. The whole issue is that no matter what time I get done, I end up sleeping till noon or later the next day, and I have to start getting ready for work around 2PM, so there's just no time to spend in the kitchen. Hence the lack of recipe-sharing. I do have a Christmas project that I've been working on that I'll share once I'm finished. (I know it's July. Shut up.)

So until I make myself get on as normal a sleep schedule as possible, and get back in the kitchen, I thought I'd share some stuff that I've been doing. My mom and her friend came down to visit me for a few days and we went and saw some sights on my day off and in the mornings before I had to work.

On Saturday, when I had the whole day off, we visited some wineries in Yorktown. The Vintner's Cellar Winery and River Fruit Tropical Wines. They were just wine shops, not vineyards, but we got to taste about 25 different wines at Vintner's for $10, and we got a free tasting of as many as we wanted at River Fruit. I ended up getting a Pineapple Riesling at the first one and a Florida Grapefruit wine at the second. I'll definitely be going back to River Fruit. They had a Banana wine that tasted like Laffy Taffy and a Kiwi wine that I need in my life.

In Yorktown, we walked along the river for awhile and checked out some shops.

It's beautiful there. There are little shops, restaurants, museums, coffee shops, the winery, and a beach along the river. It's just a little ways from colonial Yorktown. I'll definitely be going back there to poke around. The day we were there, it was over 100 degrees, so maybe I'll go back when it's not so boiling.

The rest of their trip, we went shopping, tried some new restaurants, and went to the Lee Hall Mansion.

It's an old plantation that was used as a Confederate base during the Civil War. I'm not a big Civil War buff, or big on the whole history thing, but I love old houses and stuff like this. It was pretty great! The basement is kind of a walk through the war and what was going on in the area and with the soldiers who occupied the house. The top two floors are a restoration of what the house might have looked like, so there's reproduction wallpaper and period furniture and it's all set up like it might have been at the time. It's definitely worth a look if you ever happen to be in Newport News and looking for something to do!

My mom is coming back down in August with my cousin, so I'll have to start looking for more stuff to check out. Anyone familiar with the Newport News/Williamsburg/Yorktown area and have any suggestions??