Juliana Moves

Happy Tuesday! I have to say right off the bat: I had a really fun weekend. It was full and busy and I was tired by the end of it, but it was just a blast. Let’s get into it.

Friday afternoon

I finally tried my hand at arranging a bouquet of flowers! I bought carnations, baby’s breath, and some random greenery from Trader Joe’s, roughly (emphasis here) cut them to the same length, and then tried to arrange them! I started with the greenery, then added in the baby’s breath, and finished up by trying to evenly place the flowers.

I should’ve cut the flowers shorter, but oh well. I had fun! I definitely want to try again, too. I feel like doing it even once helped me understand how I could do it differently. I also looked up the original post that inspired me to do this and realized I was supposed to use four plants, not three. Oops! 

Selecting them from Trader Joe’s was more overwhelming than I expected – LOL. I think next time I just need to pick flowers I like and see what happens! I also listened to a Rolling Stones playlist on Spotify while I did this as I am trying to explore more music. I really enjoyed Gimme Shelter.

My dad’s flight arrived later that evening and then it was really party time!

Saturday

Patrick and I both got up early to get our long runs done before all the excitement of the day. Man, running at 6 am is a tough wake up call, but it was sooo nice to be done with a long run by 9:30 am. 

As soon as we finished, we all went down to Old Town Alexandria to pick up Call Your Mother for breakfast. You can’t go wrong with a bagel sandwich. Erica and Derek arrived a little while later and then we began the dance of avoiding the rain. It was such a weird weather day. It would rain for a while and then it stopped and the sun came out. Then it rained again!

We went to a coffee shop (that I had run by that morning!) to kill some time and ended up strolling around Del Ray and visited a strange flea market. In the evening, we started preparing for Patrick’s birthday party! A pizza party! 

Patrick grilled 12 little pizzas on the pizza stone on the grill. It was so delicious, and the weather had finally improved for good! We made pepperoni pizzas, pizzas with prosciutto and arugula, Hawaiian pizza, pesto pizza, and BBQ chicken pizza. 

After working hard on cranking out those pizzas, Patrick didn’t even get to blow out his birthday candles because the wind beat him to it! Whomp whomp. All in all, it was super fun. Patrick commented, “this is my favorite thing we’ve ever done.” Seems like a good birthday party to me!

Sunday

We had another early alarm clock on Sunday, but this time my dad and Erica were running the Alexandria Half! Unlike our sweaty, humid runs the day before, the weather on Sunday was pristine – even a tad bit chilly!

Once they were off, Patrick and I moseyed over to mile 2 to cheer for a while and then we sought out some breakfast. This course has a large out and back, so it was difficult to spectate without bikes and more running ourselves. We felt lazy that day! For breakfast we ended up at this teeny tiny diner in Old Town called Jack’s Place. It was fun and I LOVE diner coffee. 

We headed to the finish line post-breakfast. Our friend Madi was also out there absolutely crushing her first half marathon! It was truly awesome to see everyone coming through the finish. I kept getting so emotional watching people haul it to the finish line. Running is the absolute best!

After the race ended, we hurried home to eat lunch and let the runners shower because we had to get to Nats Park for a baseball game! It was the best baseball game I’ve ever seen. I’m not even a sports person but I was all in. The Mets were putting the Nats to shame for the first half of the game, but the Nats came back and beat the Mets with a walk off. I thought I was going to lose my voice with all my cheering that day! I did end up with quite the sunburn after sitting in the stands for 3+ hours. Worth it.

Finally, we rounded out an excellent spring weekend by grilling turkey burgers and dining al fresco. Is there anything better? I think not. 

This weekend just made me so excited for summer. It’s going to be such a blast!

I hope you had a really lovely weekend and an ever better week ahead.

Love,

JN