Toaster, water bottle, postmarkchef

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What a cool day at Eat, Write Retreat. I am ass-tired right now but am heading home with a Calphalon 4-slot toaster, a new BPA-free and well-designed water bottle from OXO and a meal kit from the very cool Postmarkchef Co. The sessions today were enormously interesting, educational and humbling in some respects. The Food Styling & Photography class with local power duo, Renee Comet and Lisa Cherkasky was great, and I have lots of good new ideas as well as a reignited determination to take a photog course ASAP. What's an f stop, again? I don't ever want to use my flash when snapping food pics? Shite!

Then lunch at Elizabeth's Gone Raw... Oh man, t-30 minutes. Gotta frost the cheesecake with lime curd, brush my teeth and find a second wind. More later!

Swag from and dinner at Eat, Write

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What a fun night! I checked into the Eat, Write Retreat just before 5p last night and was immediately struck by the warmth and friendliness of everyone as well as the monster swag bag I received. A wine tasting from Barboursville (love the Pinot Grigio, Viogner, Cab Franc and Octagon) followed as well as samples from DRY Soda and Jarlsberg and then a fantastic Cinco de Mayo dinner: guac, tamales, carne asada, rock shrimp ceviche, black bean soup (chock full of TVP [textured vegetable protein] which I swore was really mushrooms- so good), chili and salt seasoned fruit and so on. Then a chocolate tasting from Zoe's Chocolates, a PA chocolate co whose sesame chocolate was the bomb. I was stuffed. I also learned that I should, all this time, have been tagging my posts AND what a hashtag is. Oops. Into modern tech times I'm jumping albeit slowly and skeptically at times- still like my newspaper on the the newsprint but I can learn more about twitter and pinterest.

Today's sessions include food styling and photography, food writing, making money in this gig and so forth. And I'm super excited about our lunch at Elizabeth's Gone Raw.

Oliver woke me up at 5:15 so I'm not feeling terribly fresh but a giant latte is by my side, so that'll help!