Friday Sarah and I hit the road to St. Louis to attend an etching workshop, sponsored by the Society of Midwest Metalsmiths, at Maryville University. We left around 1:30 p.m. so we had time to check in to our hotel and hit the town to do some shopping. I promised Sarah a trip to the J. Jill store which I’d mistakenly thought was in the Galleria shopping mall. Oops! Fortunately, we both found some cool sale items at the Gap and the Lucky Jeans stores. The funniest part was the line of people at the Apple store waiting for the new iPhones. I needed a replacement iPod and was hoping I could get it while I was in town. All the Apple employees were really nice and one even took time to help me with my problem. The bummer was they didn’t have the exact replacement but they wrote up a trouble ticket for it so next time I’m near an Apple store I won’t have to wait for the diagnosis.
We were getting hungry and decided to eat at the mall (which I rarely do) but we did find a nice restaurant where we could get grilled salmon salads and a glass of wine. Afterwards, we headed back to the hotel to relax before going to bed.
Saturday was the workshop and, well, it wasn’t exactly anything new to either of us. We suspected it would be a bit too remedial when we received our detailed email earlier in the week, but decided to attend anyway. It was good to revisit etching and do some samples, but we were done about 4 hours earlier than expected. Good thing as Sarah and I had more shopping to do! We stopped at [Penzey’s](http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/shophome.html) to stock up on some of our favorite spices then had time for [Trader Joe’s](http://www.traderjoes.com/) and World Market. Now I’m fully stocked on spice blends, raw almonds and white wine. We headed home around 4 p.m. which meant I was home in time for a nice dinner with Steve.
Steve did not get bored while I was gone. He managed to get up Saturday morning at 3 a.m. (yep, I said “a.m.”) to camp out at the AT&T store for a new iPhone. Being the cool guy that he is, he scored a rare white iPhone that’s 16 gig. I will be inheriting his 8 gig black phone, which is fine with me.
Today is catch up day with laundry and housecleaning to do. Then I have two days of work and the rest of the week off. Good thing as I have a lot of metalwork that needs to get done!
Pretty Pretty Bang Bang 