Friday, February 11

Valentine's Day & pie shops

I'm slowly going through the photos on my cell phone and saving the better ones.  Here's a pretty Antigua shot.  (I WANT WARM WEATHER!)







Last week I saw the movie "Norma Rae" for the first time and loved it.  It was filmed right down the road from Auburn in Opelika.  Sometime soon I want to take a mini road trip and visit some of the old textile factories and neighborhoods.  


Shelley was talking to our friend about the movie and about Southern towns that've lost lots of people and charm since factories shut down, and our friend told her about Pie Lab in Greensboro, Alabama.




Pie Lab is a creative restaurant, an artsy community development experiment started by recent college grads.  The graduates were part of a social change/design group called Project M.  I love one of the girl's comment about the brainstorming phase:  "We realized we couldn't solve global warming.  And we couldn't fix the plummeting economy.  Before pie came to us, we were kind of paralyzed."  (Quoted in NY Times article "Pie + Design = Change."  Another good piece from al.com:  "The Pies That Bind."


I want to take a mini road trip to the Pie Lab, too.  It sounds like a fun and tasty (and meaningful) place.  I like the idea of pie bringing people together.  


This weekend I have lots of reading to do - I'm trying to finish all my schoolwork by Sunday so I can cook and consume an epic Valentine's Day feast, guilt-free.  


Speaking of Valentine's Day, excuse me while I spend a brief moment on my soapbox:  nothing irks me more than moaning about "Single Awareness Day" being S.A.D and depressing.  I've celebrated twenty-one Valentine's Days in my short little life - all of them without a significant other - and I love the holiday!  Cards, rom coms, an excuse to eat chocolate, an excuse to go out for a nice meal (it probably helped that my parents gave Melissa and I gifts every year, too)... 


One time a boy gave me jewelry on February 14.  


It was pretty traumatic.  


We were in the fourth grade, I didn't know him well, my ears weren't pierced, my mom made me invite him to my birthday party at the skating rink (ah, the 90s) and I couldn't forget about the incident because family members asked me about this boy for weeks.  (Weeks!)


Flashback to 2007: the first group Valentine's Day dinner I organized.

To conclude, I hope everyone has a lovely, trauma-free Valentine's Day.  Rent a movie and cook yourself a steak or something.




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