Another weekend

 This weekend has been jam-packed! On Friday night, Justin and I went to the opening night of Paul Simon's tour for his new album. I'm a huge Paul Simon fan so this was a special night. Justin was really amused to be sitting amongst a sing-along-er in every direction. He had no idea that there were so many people cut from the same cloth as me! This may be the last time ol' Rhymin' Simon tours; he's going to be 70 this year. I'm super happy that I got the chance to see him one more time.

On Saturday, we had a birthday party for Justin which entailed spending the day sprucing up the house and cooking up a birthday feast. We made banh mi sandwiches for the party and they were a big hit. These are Vietnamese-style sandwiches: marinated meat on a crusty french roll with pickled veggies, jalapeno, cilantro and spicy mayo. If you haven't had one, your most exciting discovery will be the price: usually < $3 for an 8" sandwich that is truly delish. We made ours using a great recipe from last year's Bon Appetit magazine.

And on Sunday, we were planning a day of rest but I had ants in my pants and couldn't help digging into a timely project. I've been planning to re-purpose the security grates that we pulled off the windows when we moved into the house as a trellis. I've planted sugar snap peas along the garage and now that they are poking out of the ground, I need a trellis for them to climb up and flourish. I spent the afternoon scraping rusted metal off the old grates, washing off the dirt and spray painting. We ran out of spray paint so I'll need to pick up tomorrow where I left off but I'm hoping to have a homemade pea trellis on the side of our garage before my little pea vines grow another inch.

Scraping off the rust: