Danny and Annie on StoryCorps

Danny & Annie from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Have you listened to some of the stories on StoryCorps? This is one really great one.

"Brooklynites Danny, an OTB clerk, and Annie, a nurse, remember their life together—from their first date to Danny's final days with terminal cancer. This remarkable couple personifies the eloquence, grace, and poetry that can be found in the voices of every day people if we take the time to listen."

San Francisco!

To celebrate our first anniversary, we went to San Francisco. It was a longer drive than either of us anticipated, but we enjoyed a full day Saturday and half a day on Sunday - mostly riding our bikes up and down hills, eating at YUMMY restaurants, and seeing a few sights. It was my first time to visit the bay area, and I now see what all the hype is about. We are going to have to find another weekend to visit to see more!

One Year!

Sunday was our one year anniversary! Pretty hard to believe. I was away for the weekend. When I came back on Sunday afternoon, I noticed Colin's gift to me right away:


He sanded down my desk and repainted it! I couldn't believe it. He painted the chair to match, too! I had this project on my long list of projects ever since he found the desk (for free) almost a year ago. I didn't think I was ever going to get around to doing it, since my list of projects just gets longer and longer.

I love it and I'm super excited to get to make some fun stuff at it soon!

We got dressed up and went to dinner and a Flamenco show in LA, which was fun. We took our letters that were written to us at our wedding and reception a year ago and read them over dinner. It was a great way to remember our wedding and think back a little on the year. We also found two surprise wedding gifts in the envelopes!

It was dark, which doesn't make for good pics, especially since my good camera is broken, but we got a blurry shot to remember our one year mark. We're going to San Francisco this weekend for a little more celebration. Yay!

A True California Birthday

Colin made pancakes and eggs for my birthday brunch, and even more incredibly, had studied how to make coffee using my aero press.



He planned a little gathering at Corona del Mar beach where half of the greater LA area also was, I guess because it was the first really hot weekend of the summer. The water felt so good, though, and it was nice and cool at night on the beach.

We roasted chicken sausages for hot dogs, Colin had a chocolate muffin birthday cake for me (and had the rest of the crew blow bubbles as I blew out the candles), and then he made his world famous s'mores. We ended the night with ceviche accompanied by margarita and a lemon martini compliments of a generous mutual friend at Las Brisas. Good times.

6 months!

To mark our 6 month anniversary, I made this cake.
and this chicken and potato salad
and a new journal for us, inspired by #3 from this list.

I also got this movie, which is a thinker (what I like), but a for sure downer. Not really sure what I was thinking when I picked it. Colin said, "Yeah, maybe next time a romantic comedy or something?"

division of labor

Since I started nanny-ing, Colin and I have been sort of taking turns on the cooking front. We should have figured out some sort of division of chores from the beginning, but it felt sort of artificial to me, and I was the one who didn't have a job, so I felt like I needed to contribute the most to laundry, cooking, and cleaning. But, because I'm stubborn and want to make sure things aren't unfair, I got grouchy a lot, feeling that Colin should contribute more. Then, even when I was okay with what I was doing, I would sometimes think ahead to the future and get upset about what might happen when I got a job and was still expected to do all the house stuff. Colin is really patient, though, and good about getting me to talk about why I'm being a grouch, even when I don't want to.

Anyway, one morning last week as I left the apartment, I asked Colin to put the chicken in the crockpot and I came home to a fancy cooked chicken with lemon, vegetable chowder, and Colin's famous cottage cheese dill bread. He's great.

our minimoon

Suzanne asked me recently if I had pictures from our honeymoon. I do. Here they are. We originally planned on going to New Zealand, as it's been my dream honeymoon spot in my mind. (Never really had a dream wedding in mind, but I did have a dream honeymoon spot!)
However, wedding planning got complicated, Colin was busy with work, and I was not excited about planning a honeymoon on my own. Plus, plane tickets were expensive because it was summer in New Zealand. So, we decided to plan a New Zealand trip for later. We're saving up our wedding gift money for that. Yay!

We did have a lovely honeymoon on the way back from Texas to California. (We drove from CA to TX for the wedding so we could have a car there for the wedding prep and because we were there for a few weeks.) We stopped in Santa Fe at a bed and breakfast called the Hacienda Dona Andrea. We were the only ones there, so it was like we had our own mansion with a breakfast chef.


The night we were driving in, it started snowing. The next morning, there was plenty of snow on the ground. We used the top of a storage container to try to sled, but it didn't really work. :)

We spent four nights there. Mostly just relaxing in front of the fireplace, taking walks, naps, reading, watching movies, enjoying the coziness. Most people go somewhere tropical on their honeymoon, I guess, but I really enjoyed the low key relaxed version that we took. We called it a minimoon because we are saving a more deluxe version for later.

We did go in to Santa Fe for a day - to the Georgia O'Keefe museum and a Japanese style spa, which was nice too.

tulip poladroids

Colin got me these tulips Friday at Home Depot when he ran in to get a an air pump for our new bikes. I think having flowers for sale at Home Depot is a genius idea.

This morning, I saw this shadow on the wall in the living room made from the tulips and loved it. In my wanderings this morning on the internet, I found this free program that turns digital pics into "poladroids" on your computer. It even takes a while for them to develop from brown to the vintage look you see here. Another genius idea!

my internal reset button

When I went to Kentucky around Thanksgiving, I'd been living in the California suburbs for a few months. I felt out of place in California and kind of resented that Colin didn't move to Texas instead. I was doing an inside workout program pretty faithfully and occasionally would take a jog outside to mix things up, but the area around the house where I was living didn't hold too many surprises. It did offer an occasional view of the mountains or some rolling hills, but mostly it was suburban America.

In Kentucky, as I got outside more often to spend time alone, I felt like my internal reset button had been pressed, that I was like a phone that finally got back into range where the clock could reset itself with the satellite to tell it what time it is. The expanse of the hills and long country roads put some spring back into my step. I went outside to find space for myself and took deep breaths of what nature had to offer.

In this journey of knowing another person more deeply than anyone else, I've found that I need to make space to release. Time to go out and run is sometimes more about personal therapy than exercise, but I'm glad it can serve both purposes. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, there were days I would work on wedding stuff until I got tense and then go for a jog. It worked pretty well to take me back to a state of near normality.

Now, for a month or so, we're living in Pasadena, in a real neighborhood! On both jogs that I've been on this week, real people have actually talked to me. (In contrast to the suburbs where it seems like people are rarely outside, and if they are, seem somehow still distant.) I jog by houses with character and independent businesses with their doors open and it makes me happy. I jog by palm trees in the foreground, setting my sights on mountains in the background, so close that it looks like I could jog right to their base. Enough writing then. Time to reset.

plotting to make me happy

I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
- J. D. Salinger

Today is day three of being an unemployed newlywed. Well, it's more than that if you count the honeymoon, but I don't think I have to count that. We moved in to our first apartment together on Sunday, and it has been kinda fun getting settled. We are only living here for two months or less, while our friends are overseas. We are using their furniture and their kitchen stuff, so the settling in step hasn't been much of a hurdle.

Catching up on laundry, sorting through our stuff, making simple meals. That's all enjoyable for me. Even writing thank you notes for our wedding gifts is an enjoyable task. But looking for a job is the thing that I'm putting off. I really want a job. I just kind of dread looking for one. I don't want to settle for any job, but at the same time I'd like to start working sooner rather than later.

So, I ran across this quote just now and it's making me smile. That I could suspect people of plotting to make me happy is a good thought. That I seemed to have switched from being a general optimist to a too-often pessimist since becoming involved in a serious relationship is fodder for another post (writing that holds me to it). That's not to say that I am not happy now, because I am enjoying this new stage of life, but just that looking for the positive is something I am training myself to do again. And that is a good thing.