Instant Grat Instagram: Excuses for Slackness

While I swore I was going to be better at posting in 2016, I’ve let a few weeks slide past without writing a blog. “Dammit, Kim!” 

Of course, I’ve got a gazillion things going on – work, school, family, condo board, chairing a community service committee, Spanish lessons (blah, blah, blah fishcakes) – but it’s not much of an excuse for slacking on something I claim is so important to me.

Trust me,  I bring  the “overload” entirely on myself.  I just like doing stuff – being busy, being part of things; or, as we say in the South – “soppin’ life up with a biscuit.”

So in defense of my writing “slackitude,” I will bring out my trusty instant blog buddy (just add photos and stir) Instant Grat Instagram, where I will amuse you with photos of what’s been going on in the World O’Kim, pulled from the one social media platform I tend to keep up with: Instagram.

Ta da!   Fun times from this weekend.

World IA Day

On Saturday, my husband produced the live video and audio streaming for the Atlanta “celebration” of World Information Architecture Day, held at General Assembly in the Ponce City Market.  It seemed like a fun experience, so I tagged along and offered to help out however they needed me.  My catering and event management skills actually came in handy for all the non-information architecture stuff involved: like setting up chairs and food and dragging trash bags to the dumpster afterwards.

Everyone was very nice, there was awesome food and an abundance of coffee and I was able to chill in a corner, working on some on-line classwork while my husband handled the audio/visual production, and …

Afterwards, there were cocktails.  Yay.

How many hipsters can you tag in this photo?  Your prize will have a bird on it.

The aforementioned cocktails were enjoyed at a super hipster joint in Ponce City Market (well, as almost everything in Ponce City Market is super-hipster, that’s not a truly valid distinction).  It was so artisanal, I suspect we were paying to breathe small batch air. Identifying the clichéd hipster stereotypes mise–en–scène  (see what I did there?!) became a source of enormous amusement for my friends after I posted this picture on Facebook:

I should add that while you can’t see all of the bar staff in this photo, we did in fact have the Lumbersexual, Man-Bun, Hardly-Necessary Suspenders Guy and Eurodude on occasion deigning to bring us food and drink.  The cocktails were pretentiously retro-Italian and of course, hand-crafted from ingredients sourced from obscure monasteries and served over ice prepared in minuscule quantities from single-origin, glacier-driven springs, but pretty tasty when you could get your hands on one.  For snacks, we enjoyed roasted organic root vegetables with Vegan pesto dip and a locally-sourced cheese and charcuterie platter, that while certainly different than your typical bar kibble, were still pretty delish.

Sunday found us ambitiously social as we stacked two completely different events into one afternoon: the quarterly book club meeting for my professional women’s group followed by a home-crafted beer and cheese tasting with my best friend L and her fiance.

My friends have become quite the sophisticated home beer brewers, offering up a Belgian Saison, a Chocolate Oatmeal Stout, a German Wit, a Dubbel and a Porter, along with a wonderful cheese pairing (including a wildly amazing Humbolt Fog) for their day-drinking soiree.  Most importantly, they served their now famous Butter Chicken, which is to-die-for-divine, but on later reflection, probably didn’t mix so well with all the beer and cheese I inhaled.

Well, that’s it for the fun stuff.

The rest of the week has been meetings ::yawn::

And work.  ::bleh::

I try not to take pictures of work, so it doesn’t muck up my otherwise charming Instagram feed.  Just visualize a small cube farm perched on top of a very tall building.  Now it is occasionally surrounded by awe-inspiring sunsets or extremely photogenic clouds, which I do capture and subject you to; but mostly

it’s just work.

So that’s all the excitement I got! I hope you enjoyed my media moments and that your week is picture-perfect.