Happy February

But first...there was Chinese New Year! It began on a Friday this year and we thought that made it a great opportunity to go out for Chinese food. We decided to try a new place for us. It is located just one town away and has been around for a long time. The outside has definitely been refaced but we wanted to try this place out and so we did!

The inside of the restaurant looked pretty outdated (this is a GOOD thing) and this room divider was definitely old school Chinese! 

And...they had Tiki mugs. We shared a Volcano and a Mai Tai ! 

Great food and great company! 

Then came February. It was Saturday and it should have been a day where we planned out our stops and went to estate sales but there weren't any. Well, there were a few but none of them were our type of sales. Except for those weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year's Day, we always find some sales but not this week. So, we decided to go thrifting.

 Our first stop was an old favorite which we refer to as "The Ethel Church", affectionately nicknamed by Monica because the original founder of this Thrift Shop was named Ethel and a picture of her hangs inside. They are only open twice a month and we have not been there in almost a year. We usually find something here and this trip was no exception. We picked up ten records, a Christmas mug (for free...they were getting rid of all Christmas items for free), a pair of pants for Monica and a few other things. 

After stopping for breakfast, we arrived at our second stop. Monica was energetic after her cup of coffee! This Thrift Shop isn't open as much as we would like and it has been awhile since we were here too. We found four records for $1 but nothing else worthwhile. 

Down the road was our targeted third stop but, before going in, we decided to take a picture of The Farmingdale Meat Market sign which we have admired for years. It has been around since 1946 and we believe this to be its original neon sign! 

This is the sign hanging outside of our third stop and the description is accurate. Most of the items are always new but, occasionally, we have found something good here. For today, our only purchase was a dress shirt for Rob.

On our way to the next stop, we passed Island Thrift, a huge chain thrift Shop which is woefully overpriced. We saw one or two things of interest until we looked at the price tag. We left empty handed. 

We arrived at our next stop, not sure whether they would still be open when we got there, but the sign told us they were...

...and there was a snowman to greet us outside! He had a pine cone nose! This was only our second visit here ever. We had only discovered it a few weeks before and found lots of stuff on our first visit. Today, there was nothing for us. We decided to go home at this point with what we had so far.

Here are some of the things we found today:

Some Christmas records

Some more Christmas records

More records

A few more records

A cookbook, some bamboo handled utensils, a Santa mug and some rubber ducks

It may not have been a great saling day but we had fun together and there is so much to look forward to this month

It is the month of Valentine's Day. Monica started early by taping this to the bathroom door for Rob to find when he came out of the shower. <3 

And we are one step closer to Spring. The groundhogs around our area had differing opinions on how long winter will last. It was warm today and the remaining snow started to melt. 

When the day began, our flamingo was covered with snow. By day's end, he had poked his head out of his snow covered home. He missed most of the sun today and he did not see his shadow. We think this means Spring will arrive early. We like the groundhogs but we always trust the flamingo!