Labor Day and beyond……

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Well, hello!  We had a wonderful Labor Day weekend and first week of September.  Two of our children came home for the holiday, our Kansas City favorites came down and there was a football game in town!  The town was hopping, the weather was pretty good and the Razorbacks won.  That, my friends, describes a great weekend.  BUT, if you order now, you can also get a party.  Okay, shipping is free too.  No really, we had a party.  We invited our neighbors, the family, a couple of new friends and several “older” friends.  Two of the group were classmates of mine back in the day at college.  The menu was fabulous.  I can say that because I did not do much of it.  My brother, James, brought his grill and commenced cooking 12 pork tenderloins!  You have not eaten until you have had his tenderloin.  It has been a favorite for years.  One sister brought yummy guacamole and cookies, one sister brought a corn and pecan dip and then cooked deconstructed street corn.  Between the three of them, we ate like royalty.  I threw together some heirloom tomatoes, mozzarella and balsamic vinegar.  I think we also had green beans, baked beans and some smoked salmon, but I cannot remember the details.  Patrick was the corn master!  He shucked the corn, washed the corn and took it off the cob.  I actually caught a picture of the corn guy!

I was busy during the party, but did manage to get a few pictures:

Check out the two tables in the dining room!  We had a crowd for such a small house.

After a great holiday, Randy and I spent the week running around.  We hit the Farmers’ Market, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Fayetteville’s First Thursday celebration on the square downtown.  Here are a few pictures of the market and the celebration on the square:

Randy and I had not been to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.  Here is a link to their site.  We toured the permanent collection first.  All my favorite artists were there.  I love Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt and Andrew Wyeth.  The art is varied and broken up into centuries.  I really enjoyed it.  They also had two special exhibits that we toured.  One was on George Washington and was excellent.  The second one was the Angels and Tomboys exhibit.  This is how they describe the curated event:

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the American girl seemed transformed—at once more introspective and adventurous than the previous generation. Although the culture still prized the demure female child of the past, many saw a bolder type as the new, alternate ideal. Girlhood was no longer simple, and the complementary images of angel and tomboy emerged as competing visions of this new generation. For the first time, girls claimed the attention of genre artists, and girlhood itself seized the imagination of the nation. Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in Nineteenth-Century American Art explores the myriad ways artists portrayed young girls: from the sentimental, innocent stereotype to the free-spirited individual.

You can go here to learn more about the exhibit.  It runs until the end of September and is well worth visiting.

The museum buildings are also impressive.  You can read more about that here.  I did remember to take a couple of pictures.

Okay, this has worn me out!  I am off to Chicago this week for a leather workshop.  I will have pictures next week.  Until then, goodnight…

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