Hot pot, free mirrors, long walk.

Wed night we went out to hotpot to celebrate Ginny’s birthday. This was just 1.5 miles from the house and we’d never been to this restaurant Hot Pot City. We were impressed – they had induction stoves for the hot pot, the service was lovely – we ordered on an iPad and every once in a while a robot would come over and sing happy birthday and deliver some red bean fried deliciousness.

That afternoon, I had gone to my parents’ house to help them declutter. Earlier in the week, I had asked my mother if she had any wall mirrors and she thought about it for a while and said – no, I have no wall mirrors, but I will go to IKEA and buy you a new one. And I said – absolutely not. No new mirrors. While decluttering, I found FOUR mirrors. FOUR. To which my mother looked at each one as if was a completely new item to her. Anyways, I brought three of them into my house. One I put up in the front foyer. It’s a little distorted – not the most perfect mirror, but it will do. Look at our front foyer – the table Jeremy and I made in a woodworking class that we took together when we first met. The mirror from my parents’ basement. The glass jar for the dog treats – also from my parents’ house (I’m basically shopping there now for home decor). The basket is from Alice’s estate, the pink box (holds scissors and box cutters for boxes from Amazon) from Katherine’s house. I have been watching home decorating videos – not really to find decorating inspiration in the regular way, but just to encourage me that it’s actually not that hard to hang things on a wall or move things around the house or replace lighting fixtures, etc. So I’m trying.

Today, Kristen and I took a long walk in nature with Elka. We crossed rivers and threw rocks on a frozen pond and Elka rolled in a lot of shit. Then we went to lunch at Cava Mezze which is the upscale, sit-down version of the Cava fast casual restaurant. Kristen is vegetarian and we ordered so many things and, at first, I thought that we couldn’t eat it all, but we ended up finishing the entire meal.