Unemployed Burger Biker with No Bike or Money to Go Out for Burgers...

I never claimed to be a professional blogger, so I feel no shame for letting this blog go after only 5 posts! Whatever.

I've recently (and by "recently" I mean at the beginning of the summer) found myself unemployed (and by "found myself" I mean I quit my job!) Needless to say, I have a lot of time on my hands. I spent most of the summer traveling around, because when you're unemployed and have a limited income what better is there to do than spend it all traveling up and down the east coast!

I got back from my last trip of the summer on August 16th and have spent the time since then looking for jobs. Here's a little rundown of what my job search routine has been:

• Filling out my name, address, phone number, email, education and job history, references, and skills on about 1,000 different websites on the slim chance that the company actually uses the internet to fill positions and not employee recommendations or hiring from within!
• Checking about 8 different job websites to see if any new jobs have been posted and if I'm even loosely qualified for a job, send in my application. Luckily on these sites the info listed in the previous bullet is saved, so I only have to tweak things!
• Writing cover letters: I hate them and they hate me.
• Googling what jobs teachers can do that have nothing to do with teaching. Slim pickins.
• Rewriting my resume eight different ways so that I can show that I do have experience with customer service, or with libraries and not just babysitting all day. Cause lets be honest, I'm pretty sure that's what most people think teachers do, but don't get me started.
• Informing every person I come into contact with that I am no longer an Elementary School teacher, have no real idea what I'd like to do (Librarian? Publishing? Farmer?), but that I'll pretty much take any job that will pay my bills and I don't have to go back to school for!

Now, there is only so much time you can spend on job searching, and with 24 hours in each day (fact of the day), I find that I have quite a bit of time left over. Here are some things I do in between the hundreds of interviews I go on:

• Puzzles! Specifically one puzzle that is really difficult for two main reasons. All of the pieces are basically three colors: green, brown or blue; and because we play DnD every week (I know, NERD) and we only have one table big enough for either, I keep having to put away my carefully organized pieces. Sorting puzzle pieces is starting to take up a lot of my time, but putting them in plastic bags so they stay sorted just seems like a bigger commitment to a puzzle than I'm ready for yet.
• Brewing Polyjuice Potion (double NERD! Really triple NERD considering in the last bullet I mentioned puzzles and DnD). I'm not even going to explain this one because if you're not familiar, we probably aren't friends anyway.
• Reading - I'd love to say that I've been catching up on lots of profound reading I haven't had time to focus on before, but really I've been mostly reading teen dystopia novels. I did read Unbroken and am currently reading Emma so I feel like that balances it out, right?
• Going to the gym? Maybe. Sometimes. At the very least I'm not showering until later in the day just in case I end up going...
• Destroying the world. Well, ok, just on my iPad. Cory introduced me to the game Plague, Inc. and it's possible that I have gotten very excited about destroying the human population with a little virus (or bacteria, or parasite or nano-virus) I like to call SuperViru (or SuperBac or SuperPara or SuperNano). So I'm not very creative with the names and I play on the easiest setting, but I can pretty much destroy the world in 20 minutes.
• Organizing our apartment - I'm a little bit of a pack rat and I've been told it's very freeing to scale back and not have so much stuff, so I'm attempting to go through everything in our apartment and throw or give away things we haven't used in a while. This mostly means getting rid of all of the birthday, holiday (yes, Easter and Halloween, too) and just because cards that I've saved my entire life. Seriously, my mom sends a card every holiday of the year and some of them just say "Happy St. Patrick's Day! Love, Mom and Dad" and I still have them. Well now they're in the recycling bin. I'm working up the courage to actually take the recycling out one of these days.

Honestly though, I shouldn't complain considering I have it a much better than a lot of people. But for real, if you know of any jobs out there, I promise I can do it whatever it is!

The Arrival of Lilberg

I'm finally a Burger Biker instead of walker or driver! I decided for my first actual Burger Biker adventure I would meet my friend Sandy at Carytown Burgers and Fries. Sandy has been equally enthusiastic about Burger Biking, but is only just joining me because she's been planning and having her wedding and honeymoon for the last two weeks! Sandy has dubbed herself Lilberg, and will be joining me a lot in the future! Here we are at her family's house in Smithfield on the rivah.

Now I haven't ridden a bike regularly since I was about 12, so riding a bike I'm not familiar with through the city of Richmond made me a little wary. First challenge, however, was getting the bike out of the apartment. If you've visited Cory and I, you'll know what a problem this is. We live on the third floor of an apartment building with high ceilings.

The hardest part was holding the bike on the stairs with one hand, while trying to open the doors with the other. It was not graceful. Once I got on the bike, things went a little bit better.  I had Googled the directions to Carytown Burgers to give myself an idea of how long it should take me. The directions said it would take me about 15 minutes. This seemed reasonable to me. How quickly I learned my lesson. The gears need some work, so I was a little nervous about trying to change gears, even though they were stuck in the gear that makes it really hard to pedal. About half way through I decided that being able to walk the next day was worth trying to change to a lower gear, only to have the chain fall off and get stuck. After about 10 minutes of trying to find where it was stuck and then finally pulling the chain out and getting it in the right place again, I was back on the road! Only to realize that I had ridden to Burger Bach (another Carytown burger place), not Carytown Burgers and Fries. I guess I should have looked at the directions rather than just the time. Luckily Carytown Burgers was just around the corner.

I'm not sure what Sandy must have thought when I pulled up twenty minutes late. I was SO sweaty. And coming from the wrong direction. I also realized that I didn't have a bike lock. Needless to say, I was ready for a burger. Sandy went with a basic bacon cheeseburger and I went with "The Smoky," which had BBQ sauce, grilled onions and pickles. We got beers, found a seat where we could keep an eye on the bike and waited for our burgers while I tried to cool down and dry off. Once the burgers came, I was starving and even though Sandy and I had talked about the right way to reheat a leftover burger from a restaurant, I knew I would eat the whole thing. With that said, this was the biggest burger I've had so far. It didn't even fit in the little cardboard boat they put it in. The BBQ sauce was perfectly tangy, the onions were smooth and not stringy and the pickles gave it just the right amount of crunch. I devoured the whole thing.

Like the paper says, it was delicious. Here I am eating my last bite.

Two giant burgers (Sandy was good and decided to half of hers home), two baskets of fries, six beers and 20 napkins later, we decided to walk back to Sandy's apartment and start the second part of our summer together - day drinking and watching Scandal. All in all a great day for Burger Biker and Lilberg.

PS I'm not sure why the comments haven't been working. I've tried a couple different things and still nothing. I'll have Cory take a look and hopefully they'll be back up soon! Sorry!

PPS I thought getting the bike out of the apartment was going to be the hard part, forgetting that I'd soon have to get the bike back into the apartment using those same stairs. UGH.

Beer Frog

I have two more burgers to add to my list from Station 2 and Legend Brewing Co. Last Thursday, I met my friend Tricia at Station 2. The bike still wasn't ready and it was raining so I drove. Sorry. Station 2 is an old fire station that's been converted into a restaurant. They have lots of different burgers on the menu and beers on draft to go with them! They were one of the restaurants participating in RVA Burger Week, so I decided to try the burger they had selected for it. It was called the "Chow Bella" and here's how they describe it: "roasted sweet peppers, bacon, mozzarella, Manakintowne (VA) arugula, onion, & garlic aioli."

I thought this was a good choice because it seemed healthier than the bacon burger I'd eaten the night before. Tricia got the "Beerfest," which I think might have been the better decision. Sometimes with burgers I think it's important to realize you're already forgoing healthy, so you might as well just smother it in beer cheese. Lesson learned. With that said, the "Chow Bella" was really good. The times I could manage to get all the ingredients in one bite were amazing. I wish there had been more of the peppers and aioli, because those were the flavors that really made this burger. Next time I'd ask for some aioli on the side. Who am I kidding - next time I'm getting the "Beerfest." Another interesting fact about this restaurant is that they have lots of art for sale on the walls. This seems to be pretty common in Richmond, which makes sense with VCU Art students everywhere! There were a couple of pictures of tree frogs on the wall, which didn't seem so strange until you really looked and saw that it was a tree frog sitting on a PBR logo. Tricia and I decided that if it was for sale for $35 or less, it would be totally worth it. We forgot to ask.

 Almost better than the PBR Frog, is the picture on the right of a giant black blob eating stick people.

Finally, on Saturday Cory and I went to Legend Brewing Co. for my final stop during RVA Burger week. They were offering an "Avacado Black Bean Burger." Now this is only the third burger I've had this summer, but so far it was the best. And part of me feels badly saying that since it didn't even have any meat, but as I've said before, I don't discriminate when it comes to burgers. And thank goodness, because this burger was amazing. It had great black bean flavor, a little bit spicy, really hearty. Yum. My cousins taught me a recipe for black bean soup, and if you know me you've probably eaten it because I make it ALL the time. This burger was like that black bean soup in burger form.

I realize that the pictures from these two places are awful. I'll try to do better next time. Which is actually in about 45 minutes with my friend Sandy at Carytown Burgers and Fries. Plus, the bike is ready to go, so this will be the first actual burger biker experience. I'll probably be really sweaty. You're welcome :)

Shouldn't you have a notebook?

Disclaimer: The bike I'm planning on using this summer is not yet able to be ridden, so for the first few posts I'm actually the Burger Walker. Sorry.

I quickly realized after my first post how very little I know what I'm doing with this blog. I have no real plan besides eating. First of all, I found out that this week is actually RVA Burger Week! Meaning 27 restaurants in the area have burgers available for $5! Seems like something I should have known about. Luckily, I found out on Wednesday, so I still have 4 more days to eat burgers for cheap!

Cory and I decided to kick off our burger week and the blog with dinner at Popkin Tavern. It's right across the street from our apartment and it was raining so we decided not to go to far. Popkin was offering their Bacon Burger for Burger week, which according to the RVA Burger Week Website is "house-made 50/50 bacon-and-beef burger, caramelized onions, aged cheddar, local artisinal bun, more bacon." Sounded like a good place to start. I'm like everyone else in the world and like bacon. Here I am taking my second bite of the Bacon Burger.

We probably took about 10 pictures trying to figure out what was the best way to take a picture of someone eating a burger. I'm not sure we're there yet. Taking a picture of the burger itself was much easier.

Here's where my plan falls apart. Cory asked me as I was eating what the plan was. "Shouldn't you have a notebook?" he said. Whoops! He's probably right. If I was a professional, or cared about anything other than eating delicious burger, I probably would have had a notebook. Oh well. Here's what I have to say about this burger. It was delicious (I'm realizing I'm going to have to start finding some synonyms for that word). If you like lots of bacon, this is the burger for you. It was juicy and the bun was soft. It had mixed greens instead of iceberg lettuce, which I appreciate not only for its nutritional value but also because then you don't get that giant lettuce rib in the middle of your burger. It just makes it hard to eat. The only bad thing I'll say about the burger is this. You know how when you cook bacon and then your house smells like it for the whole day, maybe two. And after awhile you just want it to go away? That's how my mouth tasted until I brushed my teeth before bed. Now I realized this was happening about two-thirds of the way through my burger and still finished it, so clearly it didn't bother me that much.  Cory, however, did not finish his.

If you know anything about Cory, you'll know this is not a surprise. I think in my 8 years of knowing Cory, I've seen him finish maybe 3 meals. He only eats until he's not hungry anymore. Whatever.


The last thing I want to say before I go meet my friend Tricia for another burger is actually a confession. I had to pause halfway through writing this post because I'm watching Flipping Out with Jeff Lewis on Bravo and he just had to put down his cat and I couldn't help but cry with them.

And so it begins...wait just kidding...

Let me start by explaining what I'll be doing here. First off, I'm a teacher. The only reason that is relevant to this blog is that I have the summer off! It is a blessing and a curse. My husband, Cory, and I only have one car, so while it's wonderful having so much free time, I'm limited in what I can do and where I can go. I found out my first summer off, that without some sort of goal or plan for the summer, I get anxious and spent most of my time laying in a heap on the couch, showering 30 minutes before Cory gets home so that my hair had time to dry and he would think I was productive...

Last summer was filled with looking for teaching jobs in Richmond, packing and looking for apartments when I had the car. Background: We used to live in Northern VA.  A couple of weeks ago, Cory and I were at dinner at a restaurant near our apartment, Saison, eating amazing hamburgers and talking about the upcoming summer. I was telling him that our friend Tiffany had offered to lend me her bike for the summer while her and her boyfriend (and my friend too!), Matt, were road tripping across the country. I told Cory that I planned to spend my summer riding Tiffany's bike around Richmond to explore the city, and, as I took a giant bite of my delicious hamburger, I decided that all I wanted to eat was burgers. Duh. Cory suggested I put the two plans together and ride my bike around Richmond, and try burgers from all different places in the city. Burger Biker Blog was born. Also, I love alliteration, so it was meant to be.

I decided last week, my first official week of summer, that I should start my burger adventure at the place where it all began, even though I wouldn't be riding my bike there as it's only a parking lot distance away from us. So on Cory's day off, we walked to Saison for burgers. I don't know if this is a bad sign for this blog, but after we'd ordered drinks and fancy cheese fries for an appetizer, we ordered our burgers only to find out that they were out. WHAT? I didn't think that even happened. Side note: Cory and I seem to have this problem a lot. In college, we went to KFC on two separate occasions only to find out that they were out of chicken. That's right - Kentucky Fried Chicken was out of chicken. So really, we shouldn't have been surprised.

Anyway, because of that and a wonderful wedding we went to this weekend, I've yet to go anywhere else to try a burger. This blog is off to a great start...