Art Festival in Old Town

Last Sunday while Ansell while out getting drunk with his college program on a winery tour I was enjoying the big Art Festival in Old Town.






I started the day off with brunch at my new favorite brunch place Bread & Chocolate. For $15 you get tea or coffee, juice, a breakfast entree, and a little basket of baked treats from their bakery. I really love the omelette there. It's delish!

The Art Festival was huge and extended several blocks down King St and traffic was blocked off. They had various different artists but I was only impressed/interested in about 5 of them. 

However, I was really glad that we get to have events like this and throughly enjoyed myself!

By the way, I looked fab with slicked back hair, a fedora, and red lips (although mostly worn off after brunch). :)

Edible Worlds by Christopher Boffoli

Christopher Boffoli – Edible Worlds

Once again owning an exotic pet was proving to be
nothing but trouble.

In New York Ansell and I visited several galleries. My favorite by far was the Winston Wachter Gallery, which had a solo show for Christopher Boffoli’s Edible Worlds.

It didn't matter how much overtime was needed. The pancake
producers were determined to catch up with their
orders before brunch.

“For this show, Boffoli features a series of crisp and vividly colored images. The viewer becomes voyeur in each captured moment and is privy to scenes of work, play, and conversation. Snapshots of saturated color and massive food items allow the miniatures who stand in Boffoli’s surreal scenes to come to life.

With his history, no one would have believed it was an accident.

This juxtaposition of scale has been inspired in party by the heavy use of this visual device in films and television from the 70’s and 80’s and the 18^th century fable, Gulliver’s’ Travels. A wide range of human interaction is captured throughout this series within a dizzying array of produce and prepared staged foods.”

Blackberry CSI

I loved this show and its art. I thought the images were fun and the little one-sentence stories added a whole story to the images. I also liked how colorful and fanciful the images were.

This was my favorite one, for obvious reasons! It was also Ansell's favorite because it involved scuba diving.

Eric always had a healthy amount of anxiety before a deep tea dive.

NYC - Day 4 Friday 8/17

Last Day!

On our last day, we said goodbye to our nice Harlem apartment, dropped our stuff off at the luggage-holding store near Penn Station, and set out to Soho.

 The Soho area is pretty cool. It had some really interesting stores that I have never seen anywhere else. One of which was called Evolution and had everything to do with animals, insects, and humans. So, it had fossils, every kind of beetle, moth, and butterfly imaginable, bones, globes, rocks, etc. It was such a cool place and won Ansell and I’s best store in New York award.

Soho also had a little shop called Mini Cupcakes. It is exactly how it sounds. I chose the Cookie Dough one although I think the Smores would have been fun as well. It’s $1 for one, $3 for 3 and I think $5 for 6. The next time I might just get all the flavors to try it out.

These cupcakes are so small that even 6 of them probably wouldn’t add up to a full cupcake. :)

We also visited this fantastic boutique hotel/restaurant called Isola. The restaurant part is like an indoor/outdoor space. The walls and ceiling are all glass and they incorporate a lot of greenery and open space so it feels like the outdoors but temperature controlled. Ansell and I really loved it and we spent some time enjoying a drink (beer for Ansell and tea for me) while doing some quiet reading. 


I really appreciate when places allow us just to hang out and sip drink quietly while reading. The wait staff didn’t bug us much and didn’t pressure us to buy more stuff.

This is what we get in Portland.
Yeah...it's hard to top.

For lunch, we passed a cabaret place doing a $10 lunch deal and took advantage. We actually got a lot of food and it was pretty good quality for $10. It was obviously a “get-them-in-the-door” tactic though so you could meet the girls inside. I wasn’t that impressed though. If I wanted to see bored attractive girls dancing to music I’d go to a club, at least there the girls would be having fun. Besides when you used to live in Portland, OR and got to see fire dancers and gymnastics just taking off your clothes isn’t very impressive, just boring. So we ate cheaply and left.

These are all paintbrushes stuck in clear gesso.

We rounded out the day by meeting up with another of Ansell’s friends, Mitch, who is in art school and visited the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA. We timed it to coincide with their free entry period and it was packed. Despite that we had a nice time looking around. I’m not a big fan of modern art and I really appreciated Mitch filling in some of the back-story and interesting details about certain paintings, styles of art, and artists. I also appreciated how low-key he was. He never came across as those artists who are so into themselves and what they’re doing that they’re a chore to be around. Instead he was refreshingly honest and down-to-earth. You can check out his artwork at www.mitchpaster.com.

After that we went to a cool divey diner and I got way too many pancakes. I downed those pancakes like I hadn’t eaten pancakes in months, which is kinda true.

Full on pancakes & happy from our time in New York we caught the bus home to DC.

We had such a wonderful time, Ansell got to visit some old friends and I met new ones, we saw amazing things, ate lots of food, drank lots of tea and overall had a great vacation. I can’t wait to go back!

See you soon New York!

Empowered Women International

Since June I have been interning part-time at Empowered Women International, a local non-profit, as the Non-Profit Management Intern.

In a nutshell EWI focuses on providing immigrant, refugee, and low-income women who have basic artisan business ideas, with a 4-month intensive business and entrepreneurship course to move their idea into reality.

We then follow with additional mentor support and resources to make our entrepreneurs artisan business a success.

This falls in line with a lot of my beliefs about where non-profit work should be heading. I believe traditional aid is failing. Millions of dollars has been donated in poverty relief but the poverty issue is still just as bad.

Our dollars should be going instead to fund education, vocational training, and microfinance so people can create or expand on their own businesses. Creating a sustainable increase in income for disadvantaged people is the only way to have a permanent solution to the poverty problem.

This is why I support EWI so much. It helps to create economic, and career opportunities for low-income, immigrant and refugee women and raise awareness and increase appreciation for the cultural contributions that immigrant and refugee women make to our country.

I don’t want this post to run to long so I will close now.

Please read more about EWI at their website www.ewint.org and check out their FaceBook!