I am very tired of driving.
On Friday, after work I left Walwood and the overzealous front door swung back too fast and destroyed a piece of pottery that I bought for myself for Christmas. So already I was starting the weekend a little grumpy and bent out of shape. Thankfully it was the only thing that suffered damage so that’s at least a blessing in and of itself.
On Friday we attended ArtHop in Kalamazoo. ArtHop is a frequently held Friday event throughout downtown Kalamazoo. Many downtown galleries and art installations open up and host residents and tourists alike. Many places provide snacks and some provide complimentary glasses of wine. On most wintertime ArtHops it’s bitter cold outside and blazing hot once you get into these art installation galleries. Even with the front door open a shop can be jammed packed with people and be significantly warmer inside than you think. Dressing for these events is a challenge because you want to make sure you dress properly for the bitter cold and have a way to throw off layers if you are going to spend more time in the thick of a gallery or browse some curio shop. This season the weather has been off. Winter ArtHop was in the middle of mid-40’s temperatures, so that changed the playing field a lot and made the whole layer-up/layer-down switch almost pointless. There were lots of interesting art to see and all of it could be purchased but I didn’t see anything that I thought I had to have, or anything I wanted to give as a gift. Some places show off their interiors or use ArtHop to push their services. Some places just have unexpected things inside them, such as this:
And other places don’t actually have any art to sell, but use it to push their business. A few of these included salons downtown that specialize in fancy personal styling. The people behind the desk have exceptionally fancy hair and other places just push DJ’s:
After we left these places and started to traverse the walking mall right smack dab in downtown Kalamazoo we realized we had run out of time to do the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts or Park Trades Center. So we instead toured the one place that didn’t have running hours because it doesn’t have walls. Bronson Park, right in the center of town (image by youngavenger) :
Right along with this tour it struck me that I was outside at night and it was a cloudless night. Unfortunately the environment wasn’t good for actual skywatching. There were really only two objects visible in the entire night sky and that was the Moon and a very bright star. Originally I thought it was Venus, but after I used my iPhone’s StarWalk app I discovered to my chagrin that it wasn’t Venus but rather Jupiter.
After our time downtown and not seeing any convenient place to find a restroom we went back to Walwood Hall and dealt with our need of restrooms there. We were originally going to head to Red Robin down in Portage but since we were so close to downtown we changed our mind and went to Olde Peninsula Brewpub instead.