Delaney's Delusions

One Year Later

2011-05-22T09:10:00.004-05:00

One year ago today, an entire day completely saturated with love, support, family, community, laughter (no seriously, the laughter), the very best music, amazing food, no-holds-barred dancing frenzy and plenty of happy tears as well, I married the best man I know. I'd say the best man in the world, but people tend to want to debate this point, and that's not what I'm saying. I know what I know. I know he is the best, my best, and makes me better as well.

It's been a year of limited drama since the madness of May 2010. We went to Ireland, it was glorious. We spent Thanksgiving in Los Alamos with my family, it was an (exhausting) delight. We journeyed to a cabin in East TN for New Years Eve. I got a new position at Emma; Austin has won some impressive awards for his work. Our pets have kept us busy and laughing and occasionally baffled. We've discovered The Wire and powered through the first three seasons in the last month. Today, we're cozied up in a condo directly on the beach in Navarre, FL. It is perfect. Tonight we'll grill pizzas and drink Pimm's cups on our balcony.

Everyone keeps commenting, "I can't believe it's been a year! It doesn't seem like that long ago." I was sharing this discussion with a friend whose wedding was a few weeks before ours. He says, "I sure wasn't expecting this first year to be so hard." I nodded and didn't argue, but I couldn't feel less in agreement. For one thing, he's really referring to how hard the first year of cohabitation is, and we got that out of the way many moons ago. And I'm always glad that we did. In the weeks after the wedding, we were often asked, "Does it feel any different?," and I'm sure if we hadn't already lived together, no one would have asked that. But my answer was always, "Sure, it does, a bit. We just feel like more of a team now." When I think back to May 22, 2010, and all the beauty I described in the first paragraph here, the truest memory of that entire day for me is just the peace. The peace in my heart and in my mind and in my hands when he was holding them, saying "I do." This peace wrapped me up and has not departed. Every day, our marriage is my peace.

We were standing in the front entranceway of Houston Station, sometime late in the evening in a break between photos and dancing and catching up with wedding guests. Austin's cousin Jason had brought his whole family, and his little daughter Sophie grabbed my hand and wanted to talk to me. I knelt down and she asked, "When you were up there, why were you crying?" She was referring to when I nearly sobbed my way through my vows. I said, "I was crying because I love him so much." She considered this, head tilted, then put both her hands on either side of my face and said, "I know you do."

A Moment in Song, v. 4

2010-12-07T21:51:00.003-06:00

Sure, some songs are going to always take you back to the first time you heard them, or that summer they were ubiquitous (see previous Moment in Song posts...). But sometimes, if you're really lucky, a song you loved for old reasons gets repurposed into a song you love for all time.

Back on the Chain Gang, The Pretenders:

This song originally took me to a sad old place. I first learned The Pretenders with Brandes, we had the Best Of CD so he could learn "Brass in Pocket" as a cover song for his band. There are very few low points in the Pretenders best-of catalog, and certainly the highlight is "Back on the Chain Gang." On the Pretenders episode of Unplugged, she says she cribbed the song from "Working in a Coal Mine," and if you hear her tell it, it makes sense. I mean, is Chryssie Hynde the coolest woman on earth? She might be. Tracy and I saw them at the Ryman a few years back, and Chrissie was in white leather pants. She was like fifty-five. Truly a rock star.

After Brandes and I split, before things were easier between us, I saw Guilty Pleasures play "Back on the Chain Gang" (Kat sang it, of course). Suddenly that line came to life for me: "I found a picture of you, those were the happiest days of my life." At that time, it was a punch to my gut. I'd just packed up our formerly shared home and stored boxes of pictures, what do you do with all the pictures after it all goes to hell? I still come across them, and am shocked by how young we were. And maybe in the fall of 2002, I heard the song and the past would have seemed like the happiest days of my life. Certainly not the present, and the future was not just foggy but blank.

That was eight years ago. Longer than we were together. And as these years scroll onward, I'm glad he is my friend, and glad he is not my husband (he shares these sentiments). It certainly seemed like it at the time, but those weren't the happiest days of my life. The happiest days are everywhere, they aren't crammed into the good times of a seven-year relationship. We certainly were happy, sometimes, just as we were sometimes contentious, and sometimes deceitful, and sometimes selfish, and sometimes just fools.

Fast-forward to May 2010, the month I marry the man I didn't know existed way back then. It's Wedding Week, and it's a blur, although not so much a frantic one as a smiling one. The day before the wedding, we've got a crew of helpers coming to the venue to set up tables and chairs, put out the plates, hang decorations. I spend the morning running errands with my sisters: mani-pedis, a quick lunch and then we head to Sylvan Park to pick up the flowers for our bouquets. There are plenty of people I will be glad to see and spend time with over the weekend, but just for these few hours, I'm so, so happy that it's just me and my sisters, how it's always been. I'm driving us around, and the car is chock full of party paraphernalia. As we're riding down Murphy Road, "Back on the Chain Gang" comes on the radio, and we take a break from the constant flow of conversation that has always existed in our three-sided circle, and we sing along at the top of our lungs, "Those were the happiest days of my life..."

P.S. I've spent this week going back through the history of this blog adding tags. Now, if you want to browse through all the food-related posts (don't worry, there's a lot of them), you can do that here. Or if you're wanting to start at the beginning of the Wedding Story, now that's easy! Was that the best use of my spare time this week? Nope. Am I glad it's done? I am.

lost the plot

2010-12-06T21:44:00.003-06:00

I feel like at least once a week, an apology blog comes up on my Reader. You know the drill: "Wow, I can't believe it's been xx days since I've posted last. I've been busy, the weather is cold, I have a social life, blah. I'm definitely going to start writing more." I think we all just have to put some kind of anonymous external pressure on ourselves to write, and then some of us (like me, the kind who did the same thing with schoolwork) use that as a reason NOT to write. I'm writing in my head, all the time. But since the wedding especially, I'm trying to apply a structure to the blog that doesn't exist, and, in the case of my cooking blog that I haven't even started yet, have all my ideas in place ahead of time. That isn't a blog, it's a novel. I'm not writing a novel; I'm never going to write a novel. I just need to keep coming back to this place.

So why haven't I been transcribing the wedding details, the honeymoon tales, the cooking triumphs? I am addicted to word puzzles. I've loved to do them since I was a kid, and it was always especially a treat for vacation travel. I'd pick out a fat paper book of Penny Press Word Games and work through it over the course of a trip, or during school breaks. Over the last few years, though, it's become my default before-bed activity, cutting heavily (okay, almost entirely) into my book reading. I occasionally justify the timewasting on these puzzles as a way to ward off early Alzheimer's. I've heard and read that keeping the brain nimble with word games can help prevent the disease from taking hold, but the truth is, it didn't help my Grandma, who worked crosswords religiously with her morning toast and coffee, and of course she is the reason I am morbidly obsessed with my own failing memory. I really just do these puzzles because I like them. It's quick, gratifying work, suits my diminishing attention span and somehow seems to actually take less brain energy than simply reading. I particularly love the puzzles like Places Please and Fill-Ins, the ones that are the written word equivalent of packing a suitcase (this fits here, this fits there, done!).

So there's my apology blog. I'm not writing on Sundays. I'm doing logic problems. And baking peanut butter cookies. And wrapping Mischa up in blankets with me on the couch. It's wintertime in the Gray household, complete with logs burning merrily in the fireplace, a new 12-quart stock pot purchased specifically for a big batch of chicken and dumplings, and plenty of quiet and peace in the company of my handsome and funny husband. Okay then, I'm not really apologizing. I'll just get there, and I'll keep trying.

and now for the rest of the story...

2010-11-09T16:15:00.002-06:00

As promised (long ago), I've got the photos of the invites sorted here. They aren't great photos but you get the idea (and you saw the copy in detail here).

Aaaaand so many more photos up as well. The best of them are here, and I'll share on the blog as I go along as well. Where shall I start?

Obviously, we'll start with the food! How did we choose our caterer? Well, that was easy. I've enjoyed B&C BBQ at the Nashville Farmers Market for a couple of years now, and was eating it (mmm, brisket) the day we had lunch in the Market House and decided that's where our wedding would be. Of course, we know now that wasn't meant to be. But after doing a bit of research I learned that B&C is short for Bacon & Caviar, and they do much, much more than BBQ catering. Luckily for us (and our budget), barbecue was right in line with our vision for our wedding dinner, so it all worked out awesomely, and I came out of it with a good buddy as well. Paul was a champion for us throughout the entire process. He answered the phone when I called, his demeanor was always warm and helpful and he totally "got" the atmosphere we were trying to cultivate without ever pushing back at our budgetary limitations.

What do I mean by that, the atmosphere we were trying to cultivate? Well, for the entire planning process, we really worked hard to eliminate every wedding "requirement" that had no meaning to us. This is pretty much explained in list format here. Instead of going through all the traditional paces, we were hoping to recreate the dinner parties that we love to host in our home. They start with visiting, usually over snacks while we finish cooking, then we have a big feast, then we end up dancing in the kitchen. That's a standard night in our home, for serious. Our friend Nick told Austin during the reception, "It's like you guys eschewed everything that sucks about weddings, and only kept the awesome parts!" Thanks, Nick! That pretty much sums it up. In reading back over that list from November, we pretty much got away with it! The only thing we didn't do is take a cab home. My car was at the venue, so we drove it home at the end of the night. Very romantic and very "us."

So, back to Paul. As I mentioned before, he was the one who finally made the call that Plan A was a no-go. His voice of sanity and reason was so appreciated and reassuring. He didn't blink an eye when we plowed through Plan B and right onto Plan C, and honestly I don't remember if I even went through the new venue with him before the wedding. I just knew he'd be fine. He handled the entire transaction with our rental company, Liberty Party Rentals; all I had to do was provide basic direction (white chairs, white linens, clear glass plates and glasses, simple silverware). I didn't go through a catalog, I didn't even have to think about it. It was handled, and beautifully.

Throughout the planning process, one of the ideas I was majorly hung-up on was of a seated, family style dinner. From a catering perspective, I know this is a nightmare. Buffets are the easiest thing for parties over 100, and we had 240 guests expected for our shindig. Early on in our discussions, Paul encouraged me to consider a buffet, and had wonderful suggestions on how to make it user-friendly for our guests (I was adamant that no one should have to wait in line for food). As soon as he could tell how important the family-style supper was to my vision of our party, he completely went along and, obviously, pulled it off incredibly well.

One of my ideas for how to ease the process of serving that many people at one time was to have a plated salad already laid out before folks sat down. We alternated at each seat, a spinach salad with a black-bean cake or a spring greens salad with a salmon cake. I love the idea of alternating plates, it sparks conversation and sharing (I hope). I'm allergic to raw spinach, but that's the salad I got, so Austin traded with me (our first act of shared property rights). He wanted the salmon cake, so we switched cakes and both LOVED our salads. Ali poured some of the white barbecue sauce on hers, thinking it was ranch dressing, and said it was awesome (ha!). There were already baskets of corn muffins and tubs of whipped honey butter on the tables as folks were sitting down, so it felt very much like family supper; just sit down and dig in!

I think this picture captures it best (and I love that I'm running my mouth right in the middle of it). The incredibly cheerful and warm staff of servers that Paul brought in kept the goodies coming all throughout supper. We passed big glass bowls of pulled pork, pulled chicken, cole slaw, baked beans, marinated cucumber salad, baked macaroni and cheese (easily the hit of the night) and chipotle corn salad. We brought home a big vat of the leftover corn salad and I swear Austin ate it every day for the next week. We had dozens of wedding guests tell us, that night and since then, that it was the best wedding food they'd ever had. Seriously, that's music to this foodie girl's ears!

okay, for real

2010-10-12T12:03:00.005-05:00

I know. It's been four long months since I've posted. And I left off right in the middle of the Big Wedding Dissection. I swear it, I swear, there is a good reason. And no, I'm not pregnant (knock on wood). I've just been waiting for this:

Today, we're the Featured Real Wedding on MarthaStewartWeddings.com.

If you've been following all along, you know that, for me, this is pretty much it. I've been (emotionally) planning my wedding day since I was six years old. I know it's not fair to call it "my" wedding day, it was OUR wedding, through and through. But the truth is, I've been fixating on this day, on the details, on the dream, way before this man turned up and turned out to be the answer, the very clear picture of a man to finally fit in that blurry spot where a groom would be.

And throughout the years, since high school, this wedding obsession has been fostered and furthered by my dear friend, Martha Stewart Weddings Magazine. I've mentioned this before; I have every issue since the inception of this publication. It is the World Cup of weddings. It is, quite literally, my dream come true to have our celebration featured by this esteemed establishment. I didn't know how it would ever come about, but way back in January of this year, I clicked the link to "Submit Your Wedding" on the MSW site. The wording of the little form seemed to imply that you would submit after your wedding was over, but I figured, Why not just go ahead and try now? I filled it out, including all the DIY details and mentioning the role that Hatch Show Print played in both our courtship and our wedding planning, because I know those folks at MSW love that kind of stuff. To my great surprise, I almost immediately got a response from the Real Weddings editor, asking for more details. Thus began an eight-month process of continuing the conversation, exchanging emails, links and photos, all the while knowing that it meant our event could possibly be featured.

I admit this: once it was all said and done, I knew that the flood, the saga of how we triumphed over this giant roadblock, made for one heck of a story. When I was finished panicking and scrambling and shrugging and sighing, after the whole party came off more beautiful and fun and meaningful than we could have ever hoped, I sat back and thought, "Well, if THAT doesn't get us on MSW, nothing will..."

A few months later, I got an email saying that our wedding had been chosen to be a Featured Real Wedding Gallery on the MSW website. That was the night that I posted "...doing the happy dance on Sandy Drive" as my Facebook status, prompting many suppositions (still not pregnant). I've told so many people about this possibility, more than I should have, really, if I was going to be superstitious about it, and I always am. But I didn't want to WRITE about it until it was literally A GO. I also didn't want to scoop Martha's people. So I stopped with my wedding-rehash posts and dropped off the face of the (blogger) earth. In the downtime, I found out I have followers other than my immediate sphere of friends and family (HI! to Kathleen and Mike in MA!).

What else happened in the interim? We went to Ireland! Mischa's sweet face swelled up to twice its normal size and took a few days to recover (she go to go to work with Austin in the meantime, so she was pretty happy about that). My handsome husband (boy, is that word still new!) turned 30. I fell in love with Glee and Sookie Stackhouse, as well as with the majority of the New York Jets (we watched Hard Knocks). We said a temporary goodbye to Brandes, who moved up to Long Island for grad school, and will soon be saying farewell to Badness as well, as she is moving to Oregon this weekend. Not going to let myself think about that too hard. We welcomed the newest Book Club member on Sunday night when Kat (finally!) brought Molly Kathleen Wright into the world (yay!). And I cooked up a storm, all summer long (grilled whole bluefish!), and have lots more to report on the foodie side of things.

So that's all to say, so much more to come. One (surprising) bonus to being so sucked into the Sookie books is that I'm writing in my head now, all the time, which means I'm bound to start actually typing those words, sooner or later. I'll get back into the wedding details, now that our story is out there in the world. I've got photos from Ireland, really lovely ones, and summertime stories to unwind as the warm weather comes to an end for 2010. And in case you missed it, here's the full photo gallery that is linked in the MSW blog post.

The Invites

2010-06-09T17:15:00.006-05:00

As with most of our wedding plans, we knew we didn't want to do anything particularly traditional for our invitations. I've always been a fan of the long, thin business-sized #10 format, and Austin had a vision for a stacked tag-shaped invite that was held together at the top and fanned out. I knew the basic information that needed to be communicated, but was really struggling with the wording. I tried a thousand different versions of "Together with their families..." and it was never exactly what I wanted.

Then one night in February I woke straight up and had the entire copy for the invite written out in my brain. I got out of bed, wrote it all down, and went back to sleep.

It went like this:

Dearest Family and Friends
After six charmed years
of
pre-wedded bliss
Delaney Mae Gill
& William Austin Gray
have determined that
this has worked out.
We would be honored
if you would join us for our
wedding celebration
in downtown Nashville
on May 22, 2010
(page 2)
Here's the deal
at 6:30 pm
on the stage of the amphitheatre of the
Bicentennial Mall Capitol Hill State Park
We will be wed.
After the ceremony
we'll all gather on the adjacent lawn to visit
with lemonade and refreshments in hand.
Pace yourselves
because at 8 pm we'll all walk across the street together to
the Market House of the Nashville Farmers' Market
We'll feast on barbecue
enjoy
a bounty of libations and homemade sweets
and then we'll dance
until we can dance no more.

On the RSVP (page three), we referenced our website for travel and event information, and then gave folks the option of telling us they "Wouldn't miss it for the wide, wide world" or "sending our sorrowful regrets." For the fourth page, Austin did a gorgeous map of the Bicentennial Mall, with helpful indications for where to park, where there is a giant map of Tennessee and where you might find some fountains.

Austin designed them (beautifully, of course), as well as a sticker label for the envelopes. We found the envelopes at Paper Presentation, which was both fast and reasonably priced (two thumbs up!). We had originally talked about getting envelopes with a string-and-button closure, but holy cow those are expensive! Totally ended up not mattering. We had the invites printed at Advocate Printing in Cummins Station, and they also get our enthusiastic positive review. Austin printed the labels on crack-and-peel paper.

I was hoping to mail them 10 weeks before the wedding, and we got pretty close. We picked the printed & trimmed invites up on Friday, March 12th, and Casey, Agnes, Ali, Anna & Brad came over that night to help us assemble everything. Austin and Brad set up shop cutting and trimming the labels in the living room. All the ladies gathered around the kitchen table to attach brass brads to each invite stack, fan the pages out so that the back of page 3 (the RSVP card) was exposed, rubber stamp our return address on the back of that page and apply a postage stamp to the corner. Then we hand-addressed every label, and then labeled, stuffed and applied postage to each envelope.

Monday morning, we were told by a very chipper fellow at our neighborhood post office that a single first-class stamp was not sufficient for our invites. Apparently a brad, a simple office supply, counts as an "object" to the USPS, so we were charged extra for that, as well as the whole thing being just slightly over one ounce in weight. So I doubled our postage investment and sat down on the floor of my office with some other girls (who will remain nameless because I'm sure they had other things they were supposed to be doing...) to get those suckers ready to MAIL.

I've got pics of the invite-stuffing party here, and am hoping, hoping, hoping that Jonathan took some shots of the finished invite when he was capturing the details of our wedding pre-ceremony. If not, we'll take some shots soon and share them, because they came out simply gorgeous!

Things that kept me happy during the wedding planning process

2010-06-08T12:58:00.003-05:00

1. How I Met Your Mother: I had never watched it before this spring, but started taping syndicated episodes off of Lifetime and eventually started back at the beginning. I love Barney Stinson. Love him. Austin does not participate in this guiltiest of pleasure.

2. Patient coworkers: I work at the coolest company in the world, where no one ever once said, "Are you sure you need to take that 9,000th personal call?" in the midst of the planning and re-planning frenzy. Jesse especially was so, so awesome about never giving me a hard time when I was constantly having to leave early, step out for calls or just gripe.

3. (On a related note) Anna Talley: Not only do I work at the coolest company in the world, but I get to work with some of the nicest, smartest, most clever people on the planet. One of them is Anna Talley, who is so crafty, patient and generous that I'm not sure anybody, except her lovely husband Brad, deserves to be in her presence. Anna listened to every one of my crazy ideas, went crafty shopping with me, gave me advice and did independent research on projects. She made all of our fabric boutonnieres, made 15 six-foot-long table runners out of brown burlap fabric, and painted window shutters (from her own house) for our place card display. So many other coworkers helped with so many other things (Emily, Jake, Kelli, Elizabeth, Jennifer, Heather, I'm sure I'm forgetting others) but Anna was just such an asset to an event planning roster. She's a jewel.

4. Bowling: While it seemed crazy originally, Austin and I signed up for a bowling league (ok, once again, this is through my work, so seriously) that started three weeks before the wedding. I thought, "We won't have time to bowl!" but I'm glad I was wrong. I know it's not exactly exercise, but at least moving around and being competitive felt so good every week, even when I was just a ball of stress. And Austin's been learning how to do the spin bowl move where the ball curves, so he's pretty much obsessed with bowling right now. It was a good choice.

5. Sistie trip to NYC: As I previously mentioned, Casey and I got up to Brooklyn for a weekend visit to see Jenny in March. Sister time is the best time.

Plan C

2010-06-06T22:29:00.004-05:00

So here it was, Tuesday morning, May 11, eleven days before our wedding. In eleven days, 240 people were going to be ready to celebrate and dine and boogie with us, and damned if I knew where we could make that happen.

Then at work, Kelli IMs me and I can tell she's feeling me out. Was I going to cry if anyone else tried to make vaguely encouraging suggestions about the wedding venue situation? Yes. Yes I was. She sends me a link to a blog post on Ashley's Bride Guide, a local wedding site. It's an article about local event venues with availabilities during the next few weeks, for any weddings that had been displaced by the flood. Mostly the places mentioned in this post are barns in Franklin, nothing we'd really be interested in, but then, in one of the comments, a mother-of-the-bride is talking about her daughter's wedding, which was originally scheduled for the Schermerhorn Symphony Hall on May 22 (that poor girl. My heart goes out to you, whoever you are...). The mom says they've looked at three places as possible alternatives: the Parthenon, the Opera building, and Houston Station. She says that Jeff with Houston Station was wonderfully helpful and supportive even though they ended up going with the Parthenon. I quickly googled Houston Station and was flabbergasted. My heart was pounding when I called Jeff to ask how soon we could come take a look. Emily and I went over there right after lunch and I was completely smitten.

Houston Station is a renovated hosiery factory, located near the Fugitive Art studios, between the baseball park and the fairgrounds. I had no idea this place existed until that morning. They only finished their renovations and started hosting events in October. It is HUGE. We would be able to comfortably transport our entire wedding (ceremony, popcorn hour AND reception) into this space just as we'd planned without having to change a single thing. Basically it was everything we'd hoped the Farmers' Market would be, except with nicer bathrooms, a bridal suite and valet parking. Exposed brick, hardwood floors, burlap lining the interior walls, a long wall full of French doors opening out onto a terrace just a few yards from the railroad tracks.

Emily and I sat down with Jeff after walking around and talked through details. It was pretty clear that everything was going to work perfectly, but we still hadn't talked price. He showed me a ballpark quote that was three times what we had been scheduled to pay at the original venues. My heart just about collapsed. I went back to the office and wrote out an email response to the price quote in which I basically begged, pleaded, wallowed and beseeched Jeff to take less than half of his named price. I have never been comfortable with bargaining but with this wedding I apparently had no qualms about offering an insultingly low fee to vendors who I respected and was dying to work with. And it was totally working! After a particularly heartracing bout of phone tag (remember, my phone wasn't ringing this whole time, just voicemail alerts), Jeff, after checking with his business partners, said YES.

Austin and I (okay, plus a smallish entourage of Shan, Casey, Trent, Brandes, Bethany, Anna and Tracy) went back the next day, Wednesday, so Austin could see the place (okay, I wasn't very well going to broker a contract without his approval) and so we could sign on the dotted line. Everyone was so excited and encouraged about this new plan, and so were we. I left the venue with an endless To Do list and boundless energy. I was a woman possessed. Ten days out, and we had a wedding to plan!

Plan B

2010-06-04T20:44:00.003-05:00

To backtrack just a bit, during that week when we were sticking to Plan A, I got one of the sweetest and most generous phone calls of my life. Mike & Mindy Grimes, two of my favorite people on the planet, called me (on a three-way call so that they could both talk) to offer us The Basement as a potential wedding venue. The Basement is a wonderful music venue (underneath Grimey's Record Shop), and it's definitely one of our special places. I thanked them both so much and said I hoped that we wouldn't need to take them up on their offer.

So after I got off the phone with Paul the caterer, fourteen days before the wedding, we sat on the couch in a daze and started to brainstorm Plan B. The Basement was easily at the top of that list. We tried to picture it, the party we'd originally planned, transplanted to this (admittedly small) venue, and it just could almost work. We talked through the possibilities: ceremony on the porch, dinner in the parking lot, dancing on the patio. Casey and Trent drove straight over there to give us an estimate of the size of the parking lot. It seemed like enough room. I called Grimey and he said we could make this happen, that we'd meet on Monday and go through the details.

I called an emergency summit at Shan's house the next day (on her birthday, bless you, Shan...) and all the best ladies gathered around to brainstorm. Everyone left with newly assigned duties and the hope that we were going to pull this plan off. There were some details that were going to be a stretch, for sure. We'd have to hire parking shuttles and try to find a nearby parking lot to borrow for the evening. There would no longer be a traditional processional; most likely we'd just walk down the fire escape from the back door of the record shop. Space was going to be tight for the dessert buffet and the bars. We kept reasoning, people will be understanding, they'll be forgiving if it isn't very convenient or graceful.

Sunday night I went to bed feeling overwhelmed but hopeful. Monday afternoon I met with Mike at the Basement, and it was clear that we had an uphill battle ahead of us. I measured the parking lot and it was just never, ever going to fit 240 guests seated family style. We tossed around ideas for bistro tables or benches. Maybe some tables could go in the (gravel) alley? I started to realize how much of our original vision for the wedding would fall by the wayside if we had the party here. I went back to work after taking some pictures of the parking lot and pretty much fell apart.

I've said that between 4 pm that day and 11 am the next morning was my worst time of the entire wedding-planning process. I was despondent. If someone had poked me gently in the shoulder I would have burst into tears. I was trying so hard to not be a drama queen, to not waste a generously offered last-minute venue when that was what we needed most. That night we went bowling with our Emma league and I tried to shake off my big black cloud, kept telling myself that we'd work it out, that whatever we ended up doing, it would be okay. But in my heart I knew, if someone had told us a year ago that we'd pay $20,000 for a crowded buffet wedding in a parking lot, we'd have walked away.

The Wedding Story

2010-06-03T21:57:00.004-05:00

The truth is, it was all coming together beautifully. The details, the plans, the vision, all there. So much work and time had already gone into the whole process. Many hours of manual crafty labor from so many generous and clever people. There were some days when there was so much to do that I couldn’t even start. And other days where we were in such good shape, I could just waste time.

And then, on Saturday, May 1, it started to rain. Nashville in May is a generally rainy place, but I’d never seen anything like this. None of us had. Ever. It rained all day and all night and on Sunday morning, Digby walked through the living room leaving wet paw prints behind him. This was because our basement was filling with water, groundwater, soaking in through the walls, under the fireplace, around the pipe that leads to the water heater. Water everywhere. We were lucky, it was simply flowing out of the basement through the garage door, so we never got more than a few inches. Some worthless old furniture was soaked; boxes of family keepsakes made it up to the attic without any important losses.

The rest of the city was not so lucky. Thousands of homes were damaged or ruined. The Opryland Hotel sustained destruction at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And both the Bicentennial Mall State Park and the Nashville Farmers' Market were under water. A lot of water.

I just scanned back through my blog history and I guess I never really confirmed this: our wedding ceremony was going to be on stage in the amphitheatre of the Bicentennial Mall, and the reception right next door in the Market House of the Farmers' Market. It was a done deal. We'd paid for the venues, had a solid plan for the setup and the decorations, etc. I'd walked through both locations with the photographer, the video dudes, Tracy (our coordinator and dear friend), Agnes, etc. We'd sent the invitations. There was a vision. It was gonna work.

Until the flood. And I know we got off so lucky here. I heard flood war stories about weddings that were cut short when guests had to be rescued off the roof of the church. Or where the groom had to drive through three feet of water to get to the ceremony, where neither the officiant or the musicians arrived. At least we didn't try to get married on May 1.

So for the week of May 3-8, we didn't know quite what was going to happen. My boss sent me a photo of the Bicentennial Mall Amphitheatre, filled with water like a giant pond. We (just barely) weighed some options for Plan B. We were temporarily distracted from even remotely considering the wedding on the Monday after the rain when I got a call that our street was being evacuated. We rushed home to find the water still steadily rising, all the way up to the stop sign at the end of our street. Our house is on a hill and we were very much out of any immediate danger, but so many in our neighborhood were not safe. People were taking boats down Cooper Lane, helping people out of their houses. It was like another world.

We heard many conflicting reports and opinions about whether or not either of our chosen wedding venues were going to be clean and ready by May 22. I went and walked around Bicentennial one morning, and cleanup crews were spread out throughout the park, and it just didn't look that bad. The grass in the amphitheatre was dying, but they were pumping out the last of the water and it was just not clear when everything would be normal again. The Market House was still chained up tight, waiting for Metro Health officials to prescribe a cleanup regimen. But we were holding out for Plan A. Surely in three weeks everything would be back to normal.

Something I'll always remember about the weeks following the flood: Apparently Sprint lost a tower in the Berry Hill area, because for several days, my phone wouldn't ring if I got a call when I was at work. It would direct straight to voicemail. So while we're rushing around trying to figure everything out, trying to confirm that our home and family are safe, and then planning and re-planning every detail of the wedding, I would just get a benign little chime indicating that I had a new message. Each time I almost had a heart attack.

Another (more pleasant memory): on the Wednesday night of that long uncertain week, we snuck out and saw The Losers at the movie theater. It was terrible. And the perfect distraction. For two explosive, streaking bullet-in-slo-mo hours I didn't think once about the flood or the wedding. Bliss.

So after a week of (stubbornly) optimistically sticking with Plan A, I got the call on Saturday night, May 8th, that changed everything. It was Paul, our dear and wonderful and patient and encouraging caterer, who also runs a restaurant located in the Farmers Market. He said he'd spent the day attempting cleanup in the Market House, and flat out told us to find a new venue, stat. He explained how slowly everything was moving under Metro government and that he saw zero likelihood that the space would be ready in two weeks.

So that's how it came about that, two weeks before our wedding, we had to move the whole damn thing. On to Plan B...

Save the Date

2010-06-02T20:53:00.004-05:00

Except not really, because the date already happened.

Here's what our Save the Dates looked like. Once I figure out how to do that thing where we blur over the line that shows our mailing address, I'll show the nifty sticker that sealed the cards for mailing.

Thus begins my month-long recap of May 22, aka Best. Wedding. Ever!

Before I get around to Starting at the Beginning

2010-06-01T17:16:00.004-05:00

I know, I know. The wedding already happened and I'm still not spilling the lush details. I swear, it's close, I'm going to tackle the daily blogging for the month of June and slowly dole out the whole wedding story, every bit of it. We're still waiting for the majority of the photos to come in and I'll just keep rolling it all out as we go along.

But today, I just want to say goodbye to my old friend Ingrid. She's been gone for a week now and it's very sad. We all knew this was probably her last summer. Summer was never her best time. She was 12 years old, which is very old for a 140 lb. dog with bad hips and bad teeth. In fact, every summer for the last couple of years, there has come a point where Dad has mournfully predicted that she wouldn't make it through to the fall. We certainly didn't think she'd make it through all the way to twelve, which is a conservative assumption of her actual age. The adoption flyer said she was three when I brought her home in December of 2001. And that flyer had been hanging up at Petsmart for a year, so maybe she was already four by the time she joined our family.

Some observations about Ingrid: she was never, ever mad at me. She was always happy to see me (and pretty much everybody else) and she had a great sense of humor. Sometimes she'd run across the yard to me and I would think, "Oh god, she's not going to stop," and my life would flash before my eyes. But she always stopped, and always wanted to give me her big heavy paw. She hated helicopters, sirens and municipal vehicles with flashing lights. And bicycles (sorry, Patrick...). She didn't like strange men or kids walking past our house on Eastside Avenue (that's why she eventually went to live with Dad out in the country).

When she first came to live with me, we tried having her be an inside dog. She even slept in my bed, where she snored heavily and tried to spoon me. That lasted exactly one day. Brandes and Dad built her a pen (this was when I was the sole occupant of the little house out on Ashland City Highway) and it was woefully small. Eventually, after a couple of years of trial and error, we determined that the only fence that would hold Ingrid was one she didn't *want* to breach. If she could lay up against the foundation (or, ideally, the door) of the house where I lived, she would never try to leave. That's when it really worked.

Even though she spent the last few years as the galloping snowbear of Leiper's Fork, where she was doted upon by Dad and Lynn, she remained my big dog. We just went out to visit Dad in April and got to spend some quality time with the Biggest. I'm glad for that. I'm grateful that she was loved and fussed over up until the end. Thanks to Dad and Lynn for that.

RIP Biggy Bigrid, the Biggest Ingrid. Missing you today, my happy happiest.

muted

2010-04-07T17:17:00.007-05:00

Austin has pointed out that I shouldn't talk about the wedding details in case some of my readers aren't invited to the wedding. That seems to assume a lot about my readership (as in, it's more than just my mother, and you know she's totally invited), but he's probably right. Instead I'll overshare when it's all over and just say that the invites have gone out, the rvsps are flooding in (boy is THAT aspect of wedding planning gratifying!) and we bought our wedding rings today. So I guess we really HAVE to get married now.

Just kidding. I'm so excited about getting married. I'm excited about the party, I'm excited about our families and friends coming to visit, I'm excited about the dress and the paper flowers and the place cards and the corn muffins and the playlists and the pizza party the night before. But mostly I'm excited about BEING MARRIED! It seems like the whole time we've been together, I've known this is where we were heading, and it's finally here, and it partially feels like we've been married for years, and it partially feels like the big step that it legitimately is. I'm going to share his name. He's going to be my guardian. It's big. And it's exciting. And it's lovely.

How's that for non-wedding wedding talk? I know, weddingweddingwedding, right? I'm trying not to be that girl. What else is going on? Charlie Murphy is still peeing on things in our home. Like the dog beds, if we leave them on the floor unoccupied. Or a stack of papers in the office that needed to be filed. Or my brown boots (dammit). Austin's done plenty of research into possible causes. The vet suggested that we let him go outside, which is of course never going to happen. Instead we started letting him go into the basement unsupervised, which he'd been vocally begging to do since we bought the house. We've also tried giving him ample doses of catnip, with the hopes that he'd chill out. Oh, he chills out alright, laid out spread eagle on the kitchen counter in a patch of sun, drooling.
And then he pees on the green blanket when it falls off the bed. The apparent conclusion is that we have too many pets and he's being territorial, although damned if I know why this suddenly came on when we've been a 6 pet household for over two years. And we're not about to start getting rid of the others just because Charlie Murphy thinks he needs to assert himself. In the meantime, I have to figure out how to get cat urine out of leather. Which is awesome.

The troubling thing is that he doesn't act like he's having a hard time at all. He gets along fine with the other pets, except for when he pushes Mackenzie's buttons, which can be done pretty much by breathing. He and Mischa wrestle and chase each other, and he's very patient with her. He'll rub his head under Bridgey's chin and it's too sweet. On the weekends or sometimes in the evenings he comes and snuggles us on the couch, and it's the most gratifying feeling in the world. I don't want him to be mad at us, or at war (inside his head) with the rest of the pets or our home. Because that's what it feels like: piss warfare.

In other news, Casey and I went to NYC for a long weekend to visit Jenny. It was gorgeous and delicious and we shopped and ate until our faces fell off (nearly). I loved just walking around with my sisters, that immediate natural flow of conversation and interaction that kicks in whenever it's the three of us. Some things I observed: My sisters still think of me as being a terrible traveler. That is fair, because I truly was, for years. I overpacked, I lost shit, I got lost, I procrastinated, I got flustered. I'd like to thank Austin (and also just traveling a whole, whole lot in my mid 20s) for having made me a better traveler. I still get nervous during takeoff and landing. I also still have to compulsively repack every time I take something out of my suitcase. But I've managed to plan ahead for this quirk and try not let it affect anyone else that I might be traveling with. Still, my sisters wanted to make sure I woke up early enough every day to be ready to leave the house at the same time as they were, and I ended up just waiting on them a lot and feeling smug. I also observed that my sisters' patience and stamina for shopping has gone inversely up in relation to my own decline. They used to refuse to shop with me because I'd take so long, liked to be thorough and look at everything. They were always On A Mission. This trip to New York, I ran out of steam in the first 10 minutes of each new store we visited, and wound up sitting on the floor by the front door of H&M, totally over throwing elbows in the name of cheap clothes. I bought six shirts, only because I didn't have to try them on (I refused to enter that hellhole of a dressing room) and figured that if they didn't fit I'd give them to someone they would. The girls completely racked up, happily for them.

I'm running out of steam and thoughts tonight. Remember when Myspace would play a song when someone visited your page? Mine was Fake Palindromes by Andrew Bird for forever. If my life were a song tonight, it would be this: Young Folks by Peter Bjorn and John. It's the new dancing-in-pajamas song in the Gill-Gray kitchen. Mom, you'll like it! Be ready to dance to it with me and my groom in 6 short weeks and two even shorter days...

Commemorating the End of February

2010-02-28T14:51:00.003-06:00

Things I want to do this afternoon:
1. Take a nap
2. Watch My So-Called Life
3. Read The Help
4. Reread Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Things I need to do this afternoon:
1. Trial of the tapas dishes I'm making for the beer-and-tapas throwdown next weekend.
2. Send an email to all the wedding guests letting them know that we've got the website updated.

Things I have to do this afternoon:
1. Manually cancel about 100 Emma accounts.

Oh, procrastination, my lifelong frenemy. Just when I think I'm really and truly a grownup, I find myself playing Mind the Blox instead of just getting my damn work done. I blame Sunday.

Developments

2010-01-22T14:44:00.003-06:00

Some exciting recent occurrences in the Gill/Gray (soon to be All Gray) household:

1. Wednesday night, in the midst of hosting a very lovely little dinner party, I managed to neatly slice off the end of my left thumbnail. About a half an inch in. Whilst slicing up a chiffonade of basil with my chef's knife. I managed to not freak out, since our dinner guests were watching me prep dinner. Just wrapped it up and quietly dug the piece of thumbnail out of the pile of basil and continued on with supper. But oh man, it hurts like a mofo. I can't put any pressure on that thumb at all, making me a single-finger texter and incapable of putting on my own necklaces.

2. Last night we installed the HDMI cord on our new Toshiba 32" HD 1080p flat-screen television. We'd put the tv in on Tuesday but didn't have the right cable to make the HD channels show up. Got it all set up last night and watched the NBC shows and it's just astonishing. It kind of gives me a headache to watch because the picture is so precise. I'm sure I'm the LAST person on the planet to come to this realization. But it's a fun treat and just in time for March Madness...

3. Honeymoon in Ireland: Booked! We bumped it ahead to a month after the wedding (so June 18-26). Initially I liked the romantic idea of heading straight off on this big adventure trip right after the wedding, but the more I thought about it, I've come to terms with the fact that I'm an OCD asshole right before a vacation. And this is the biggest trip we've ever taken, and I didn't want to transfer any of those nerves/preparations/chaos to the wedding week. This way we can get back to life as we know it, post-wedding, and then be ready to take off a few weeks later. To Ireland! Holy cow! We're doing two nights each in Galway, Kinsale and Dublin. Taking an (expensive) train from Cork to Dublin, and otherwise knocking around in a rental car. Flights in and out of JFK, so we can see Jenny and Patrick for a day before we leave. We'll be there during the World Cup, so we can watch some games in Irish pubs and bash England with the locals.

4. Save-the-Dates: Sent! Later than I had originally planned, but they look gorgeous, of course. Designed by my future husband, the most talented man I know. We've also set up our wedding website, with just a placeholder now and a spot to sign up to be alerted by email as we add more info. We need to get the hotel stuff finalized (I'm kind of horrified by how hard this part has been...) so we can share that info on the website and help our guests get their travel plans in place. It doesn't look like we're competing with any major events or conferences in Nashville the weekend of the wedding, which is a relief. Downtown can be a madhouse sometimes.

5. Last night, we were woken at about 4 am by the sound of an elephant herd in the front of the house. This turned out to be Corvinius, who had caught a MOUSE and was zooming around the house torturing it. Austin got up, chased the situation down the hall and eventually lost the mouse in the office closet. He gave up and came back to bed, figuring it had gotten into the ductwork and there wasn't anything to be done. The cats held their vigil, though, and I was woken up a half-hour later by squeaking, thumping and fluttering on top of me in the bed. Corvinius had found the mouse and brought it to us in bed. I flung the covers off and heard the mouse hit the wall, then leaped over to the other side of Austin and started shouting. Austin understands the basic principle of our relationship, which is that if it *might* be a mouse, he has to deal with it, so he finally managed to get the damaged-and-traumatized-but-still-alive mouse into a box and out the front door. Not the greatest night's sleep for either of us. Luckily the dogs had gone out at about 3 (yeah, that part is awesome too) so they weren't around to further complicate the animal kingdom showdown. Good GRIEF.

----------------------------

Okay, so I missed a month or two here. I missed talking about the absolutely amazing night when I came home from work to find 19 of my favorite ladies in the entire world wearing hideous bridesmaid dresses shouting "Surprise!" We feasted, we opened an obnoxious number of lingerie-related gifts, and we danced in the dining room until we were about to drop. It was pretty much the best thing ever.

I skipped the holidays, too. They were mostly low key; Mom and Kam were gone before Christmas and Jenny and Patrick left the day after. Austin and I laid around a lot and cooked a lot. It's been a particularly productive cooking month for us. I've been inventing a few recipes, which I don't do very often (Peppermint Panna Cotta! Spicy Sticky Asian Baby Back Ribs! Grapefruit-Vanilla Bean Sorbet!). Basically, I get a vision for a taste I want, and then research to see if the recipe already exists, and if it doesn't, I cobble together concepts from related recipes until it makes sense. No disasters yet!

And if it hasn't been clear before this, now is the time for my Wedding Brain to take hold and not let go for the next four months. Last Thursday, I woke up wide awake at 5 am with a specific vision of the text for our invitations. Got up, went to the living room, wrote it all down exactly as I pictured it, and went back to bed. It's sort of like wedding autism. My mind is constantly clicking with To Dos and ideas, I can't turn it off. I never wanted to be one of Those Brides, but I guess if I'm honest with myself, I know I have always been. I've got my big binder and my lists and my calendars and I'm ready to get this show on the road.

dolce vita

2009-12-09T21:21:00.003-06:00

Tonight's Menu:

Potato Soup with Bacon from the Rock Cafe's cookbook (sent to me today with the Splendid Table newsletter, which you should definitely sign up for).

Broccoli Blasted, as previously discussed, the best damn broccoli you ever did try.

Chicken Piccata with Caper Browned Butter Sauce

I was too hungry to take pictures. Everything came out exquisite. I made lots of extras because I need leftovers for lunch tomorrow and Friday. I'm already excited about eating all of this again.

A very successful meal to finish a truly fabulous day. I went fabric shopping with the amazing designer who is making my wedding dress, and we found everything we wanted and got fantastic deals. We celebrated by shoe shopping. Then I ran into Hatch to get some paper cut and ended up visiting there for almost an hour. I miss that place. When I finally got to work Emily had saved me a delicious sandwich from Sub Stop, and I worked on entering checks the rest of the day, which is always soothing and gratifying. And then home with my Boo for a feast and a roaring fire in the fireplace. This is the sweet life, we're fully aware.

Luddites Unite!

2009-12-01T22:04:00.004-06:00

Okay, so I dropped off the daily blogging train right at the homestretch. I forgive myself. The combination of sick and busy does not lend itself to interesting self-reporting.

This mystery illness, which may or may not exist, has manifested itself thusly: tired all the time, but unable to sleep in all weekend or get to bed before midnight on a school night. Baffling lack of appetite, which is a sad reality on Emma Bake Sale Day. Occasional bouts of phlegmishness, coughing, sniffling, sneezing, then periods of total calm. And the inability to concentrate on anything for more than ten minutes. Even wedding talk.

Speaking of, pretty much as soon as everyone left the house on Friday (well, really when I woke up Saturday), I realized, we've got a wedding to plan. Thanksgiving was the last big thing in between. Now it's December and that means Goals to be Accomplished. Clayton sent us the engagement pictures he took when we visited his family in Colorado in October; I put some of the best up here. I'm so completely thrilled with these photos and amazed by Clayton's talent. Austin's going to use these shots for our Save the Date cards, which we'll mail this month. I've been keeping myself busy tracking down addresses and updating the guest list with the wedding tools on Martha Stewart Weddings. I always say, that Martha, she's crazy, but she keeps me organized.

I've got Thanksgiving photos to share too, but the engagement pictures maxed out my Flickr account for this month already and I'm having trouble figuring the damn thing out. I even tried to pay to upgrade to a Pro account and it appears to have timed out or failed somehow. Flickr seems to be the prevalent choice for photo sharing, and I like the ease of linking directly from iPhoto, but I don't understand why it keeps directing me to my (nonexistent) Yahoo inbox. Annoying. I'll figure this out tomorrow and share photos of the feasting from Friday.

my face is failing

2009-11-27T22:18:00.003-06:00

Success = Thanksgiving. Hands down, the best Thanksgiving we've ever hosted. I got so much of the cooking done ahead of time, had a killer game plan in place for today, and never got frazzled or stressed in the kitchen. We had the house sparkling clean by 11 am (that's mostly credit to the Boo, he worked his butt off the last two days) and the cooking schedule was so well organized I even had time to watch an episode of 30 Rock in the middle of the afternoon. Complete master of my menu domain.

Fail = sudden onset of cold/sinus/mystery illness symptoms. As in, spent the entire meal blowing my nose every two minutes and sniffling. Where did this come from? I've been feeling a tad feeble the last four or five days, just some sore throat and tiredness, but this new development came up fast and hard, precisely as our guests started arriving. My face appears to be disassembling to a liquid state.

My point here is that I've got pics and menu details to share of today's big feast, but right now, Sudafed and I are going to bed. Goodnight, sweethearts.

listmaking falls firmly in the first category

2009-11-25T20:23:00.003-06:00

Things I Do Well:

1. Baking/Cooking in general (I follow a recipe well, so that's something)
2. Menu Planning
3. Makeup application
4. Give directions
5. Tetris/pack a suitcase/load a dishwasher/rearrange a refrigerator (all uses the same skill set)
6. Keep score at baseball games and stats for roller derby
7. Spot a cat in any landscape (highly honed kitty radar)
8. Quickbooks
9. Hosting
10. Supervising

Things I Do Poorly:

1. Wait tables.
2. Batting, fielding, catching, throwing, sprinting, shooting, or any other sportsy action.
3. Make rice. This is my major failure area in the kitchen. It shouldn't be this hard.
4. Drink alcohol
5. Fix hair
6. Throw things away/part with things
7. Get over sadness (although I can get over anger admirably fast)
8. Resist Mischa when she wants to sleep on the bed with us
9. Sudoku
10. Coming up with Halloween costumes.

I AM KING PRAWN!!!

2009-11-24T20:58:00.003-06:00

Well, I spent a quiet night at home mentally composing a post for tonight, a list of Things I Do Well vs Things I Am Terrible At. But this is preempted by my unbridled affection for the Muppets:

(yanked from my darling girl Kelley)

Sam the Eagle! Animal! Bunsen Honeydew! You have to hang all the way til 3:58 to see my girl Miss Piggy, but totally worth it. And truly, is there a character, both real or fiction, in all history, with whom I relate more directly than the Swedish Chef? No. There is simply no way.

P.S. When we were in Seattle I made great pains to see the Jim Henson exhibit at Experience Music Project. I rerouted an entire day's plans, and went by myself while everyone else went to a pub. Casey said, "I think you have a different relationship with the Muppets than the rest of us." So be it.

excited about...

2009-11-23T20:04:00.004-06:00

...being married in six months. All the time, I have to prevent myself from calling Austin my husband. We recently renewed our Frist membership, and they mailed the cards addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Austin Gray. I hung the label on the fridge. I'm gonna be a Mrs. Hooray!

...Thanksgiving. It's technically my favorite holiday. Even if we never observe it on the traditional Thursday. For the last three or four years, we've had everyone over on the Friday instead, so everyone can spend the holiday with their family and still come over for vast feasting. I don't break from the norm too much: turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, you know the drill. Some new things I'm trying this year: thyme-roasted apples and onions, cranberry-vanilla bean sorbet, Maple Apple Pandowdy.

...tuna casserole on Wednesday night. Because these things make me happy. That's gotta be the best pre-feasting series of leftovers possible.

...my new Adidas slides. I've had an ancient pair for at least five years that I wear every day. All the nubs have worn off. This is one of the least glamorous truths about me. Off Broadway has that lovely program where every purchase you make, you get 10% of that purchase towards a future visit. I still had a big receipt left from my failure of self-control back in January, plus a tiny one that I found when I was cleaning out the office, so I am the proud owner of a new pair of pink and black Adissages for $5.38. New shoes. Five dollars. New shoes.

...four and a half day weekend. Can't come soon enough.

Partial Self-Portrait Vol. 2

2009-11-22T18:13:00.003-06:00

Tonight, while merrily disassembling broiled crab legs with herb butter at our kitchen counter, Austin sprayed me with a particularly enthusiastic wrenching of his crustacean. Considering the possibility for payback, I said:

"Have we ever had a food fight?"

Austin, without missing a beat, responds, "Nope, but I don't think people really do that anyway. Only in Smirnoff Ice commercials."

The Hero's Journey. of Pizza.

2009-11-21T21:26:00.011-06:00

Forgot to post last night. Damn.

I've spent the last several weeks fixating on a very specific vision. Of pizza. We have great pizza right here in our neighborhood (Castrillo's, who we're having provide the chow for our rehearsal dinner) but we always get takeout. My Pizza Vision does not involve takeout. My Pizza Vision is of sitting in a pizzeria and having a hot pie placed in front of me on a metal pan. When I remove the first slice from the pan, the cheese strings out for at least two feet and I have to pile the gooey cheese strings onto my slice on my plate. Also in this vision: pitchers of Dr. Pepper with pebble ice.

I realize now that this vision is a California memory. This is the food we ate at Godfather's with the Jansens after church or before a movie. Or there was a place Elisa used to take us, somewhere on the way to Hidden Beach, where we made a video of the pizza because it was gooey to the point of being (compellingly) disgusting. I'm not fiending for authentic neapolitan cuisine here. I want the cheesy, floppy, Americanized version of the food I grew up eating.

So I took my quest to the masses, and posted a Facebook query:

I'll tell you, folks really respond when you talk about food on Facebook. Any time I'm feeling neglected (oh, as if I ever feel neglected...) I can just say something about whatever I'm cooking up for dinner that night and be assured of some attention. 35 people had opinions about pizza. Some folks could only mention out-of-town pizza joints, which is completely not helpful. Many people mentioned Mafiaoza's, where I've had enough negative experiences as to not be willing to give another try. There were several shoutouts to House of Pizza, which is definitely *great* pizza but not what I'm looking for here. A few folks offered up City House, including one (self-admitted food snob) who blithely dismissed all the other suggestions as inedible.

This is where Austin decided to get involved. First he requested my permission to simply respond with some profanity towards City House, which I denied. We've only been there once, and it was quite disappointing, but certainly not enough of an experience to pass permanent judgment, and we've had so many folks whose opinions we trust recommend it. After having his initial request refused, Austin turned to poorly veiled sarcasm instead:

I'll let you wipe the tears of mirth from your eyes while we ponder, together, what a great writer that man is. He made that all up! I don't even know where he gathered words like "Puglia" and "salame" and concepts like a stone oven that gets dismantled every day. Seriously.

A few people bit after that (poor James sent Austin a direct message begging for directions to Luca Montolivo's hovel), but I'd already moved on to a strong possibility for my pizza fulfillment: Pie in the Sky, a relatively new spot in Midtown. There are a few locations in the Nashville area and I've heard mixed reports on the other ones, but this one so far had some solid recommendations, plus the added bonus of 2-for-1 draft beers all the time. Friday night rolled around and we were in.

Success! Emily and I split a medium thin-crust pie with mushrooms, pepperoni and extra cheese, and the first piece pulled off that pizza with gorgeous, sticky strings of goo, exactly what I was hoping for. This was delicious food that satisfied a specific craving, and I don't feel bad for a bit that it wasn't authentic Italian cuisine. I didn't get my pitcher of Dr. Pepper (truth is, I can't drink Dr. Pepper anymore, other than very early in a day when I know I have to stay up very late... heartbreaking. Dr. Pepper and I used to be so close.) but it was on the menu, so that definitely counts. This one's going on the short list.

one sneak, then

2009-11-19T22:54:00.004-06:00

Okay, so you like the wedding talk? Thanks for letting me know. I'll let Austin edit me if I start putting too much out there.

For now, here's a sneak into one of the big decisions at which we've recently arrived. Not sure if you know, but the state of Tennessee does not recognize ministers who were ordained online to officiate a marriage. In 1997, they ratified the rules on this matter to state that any minister/priest/preacher must have a congregation (specifically, "care of souls") in order to qualify. Sure, we could use an elected official instead (that's what both my sisters did, and that worked out great), and we even met with our city councilman about performing the ceremony, but it never really sat right with me to be standing up there in front of a near-stranger (I could say "sat right with us" but that would probably not be accurate. It should come as no surprise that I'm the one overthinking this matter).

So we weighed our options. Near stranger = legal marriage, not very comfortable. Get a friend to perform the ceremony = cozy ceremony, not legally married. Yikes. The part about being legally married *does* matter. It does. I'm sure every one of us knows couples who aren't technically married but might as well be (or maybe who don't know any different!) but, if the whole point is for us to be lawfully wed by the end of all this planning and excitement, well, there it is. Luckily, I'm a Jansen, and when presented with an A/B equation like this one, I always pick C. I come up with a workaround. Workaround we have.

So we're going to have someone close to us perform the ceremony, have a great big party surrounded by all our loved ones, spend the next day (Sunday) with all our visiting guests, and then, on Monday morning, before we leave for our honeymoon, we're going to head to the courthouse and get hitched. Just the two of us. Say the words and sign the papers. By the power vested in the county clerk by the State of Tennessee.

Sure, it's nontraditional. As I've mentioned before, that's not really something we're going to worry about. My only worry originally was that maybe it would make our public ceremony, the one in front of all the folks, seem less significant. But that's just not possible. That will be a giant moment, the one we've been leading up to for more than six years by then. I'll be in the dress, he'll be in the suit, our moms will be crying on the front row. And then Monday morning will be just for us. A private, formal ceremony to bring closure and gravity, to solemnize the hoopla surrounding the wedding.

And because I'm sure you're wondering, that person close to us who will perform the family ceremony is my Uncle Bill. He's my mom's oldest brother, a true gentleman and also a bona fide pirate. He has offered to wear an eye patch for the wedding; I told him we'd see...

Thus we have arrived at a solution that feels absolutely right.

how much?

2009-11-18T21:25:00.004-06:00

The thing with writing about the wedding planning is that I wonder how much of these details I should share. Isn't some of it supposed to be a surprise for our guests? Or, like with the dress talk, a surprise for Austin? What about the people who are reading who aren't coming to the wedding? Is it too private? Should I keep our plans to myself, at least until after the wedding? Or is this just what's going on in our lives right now, and it's just going to be what I talk about?

Also, thanks for so many of you for commenting lately. I read so many blogs that get 20-30 comments per post, and I'm green with envy. I'm trying to be better about commenting on other blogs that I read, even when Reader makes me horribly lazy about it (or when tumblr doesn't let you comment at all, Trey...). Surely blog comments are the cheapest currency that still feels gratifyingly indulgent when you get one. Hint, hint.

my case for normalcy

2009-11-17T22:34:00.002-06:00

Normal women my age develop the scientific circumstance known as "baby fever."

I, obviously, have kitten fever instead.

I would like to politely request that each one of those little kiddos comes and sleeps on my pillow tonight. Siiiiigh.

foods I crave

2009-11-16T20:43:00.004-06:00

1. sushi
2. Indian (especially my newly discovered true love, vegetable korma)
3. artichokes
4. avocado
5. crab legs
6. popcorn
7. macaroni and cheese
8. chocolate chip cookies
9. the Gold Rush patty melt
10. poppyseed chicken
11. tuna casserole
12. hush puppies from Bill's Catfish
13. Sicilian pasta
14. pretzels
15. peanut butter

So basically, I crave comfort foods. Is that a redundancy? Are all comfort foods something you crave? It seems so obvious.

just call me Ina (does that make Austin Jeffrey?)

2009-11-15T21:44:00.004-06:00

We invented two more recipes tonight. One was rather eh but we think we know why. The other was delicious. The "eh" entry was a glaze for pork chops; in retrospect, it should be a marinade instead. We used butterflied boneless loin chops and even tenderized them in advance, but the meat was still pretty flavorless on the inside.

Peach Glaze for Pork that Should Be a Marinade

1/4 cup peach preserves
1 Tablespoon chili paste (the asian kind with crushed red pepper flakes in it)
1 Tablespoon apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons soy sauce

We mixed this up and then heated it, and poured it over both sides of the pork. We recommend marinating for at least three hours before pan-searing the chops (we used two butterflied chops, which is the equivalent of four loin chops). Cook in a hot nonstick or cast iron skillet until the glaze starts to caramelize and the chops aren't pink in the center.

Delicious side dish:

Mashed Turnips with Thyme

2 lbs turnips
1/2 stick (4 T.) butter
2 tablespoons fresh thyme, chopped
1/4 cup sour cream

Trim and peel the turnips, then chop them into big chunks (about six pieces per turnip). Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and add the turnips; boil until tender, probably about 15 mins. While the turnips cook, melt the butter in a small skillet over medium heat and then saute the thyme in the melted butter until fragrant and the butter just barely starts to darken. When the turnips are tender, drain and mash by hand with a potato masher (ours is metal and wavy and works great, but it will scratch nonstick). Stir in the thyme butter and the sour cream and season well with salt and pepper.

We served the pork and the mashed turnips with Broccoli Blasted, which is a revelation of this oft-maligned vegetable. I seriously can't recommend it enough; we tried it at the Black Bottle in Seattle and literally inhaled a gigantic platter of it. The Epicurious recipe says it feeds four-to-six but that is very unlikely. We used more like 2 lbs of broccoli crowns and only had a bit left, just the two of us. Yum.

It's bedtime for Bonzo (why do I say that? Mom, what does that mean?). We went to the Titans game today (watched from an Executive Suite, if you can believe it) and did a lot of walking to avoid paying for parking or being stuck in traffic. We walked up to the Frist Center after the game and saw the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit, which was lovely. Sometimes I miss her the way I miss Julia Child. And my grandmothers. That's weird, right? It's unseasonably warm in Nashville; honestly, it's been the most gorgeous fall that you could even imagine. But that means I spent most of this day uncomfortably sweaty, and hoofing it up Broadway in mid-afternoon definitely counts as cardio. The moral of this story: I'm beat, and for once it's for a legitimate reason.

P.S. We think that Cialis commercial with the old people sitting in side-by-side bathtubs in the woods or on top of a cliff is ridiculous. Bathtubs are heavy! Who hauls a bathtub (let alone TWO) out into the woods or up on a cliff just to sit naked in it next to their (presumed) wife of 40 years? And there is no running water up there, so did they haul the water in buckets too? Heat it over a fire? I doubt it. I bet those old folks are just sitting naked in empty bathtubs and feeling smug about what a great photo opportunity it all is.

impressionable

2009-11-14T21:30:00.006-06:00

Austin suggests I write about the first time I ever ate Ben & Jerry's Pistachio Pistachio ice cream. That was tonight. Very historic date in the life history of a girl who loves ice cream so dearly. Loves it so much that I took a picture of the astonishingly well-stocked ice cream accoutrement section at Publix and texted it to Agnes tonight. Strawberry marshmallow creme! Cupcake flavored Magic Shell! At least nine different types of ice cream cones! What is this wonderful world we're living in?

I should blog about the soul-regenerating love fest of Guilty Pleasures last night. Or about my new haircut. Or about Kansas, a post I've been working on for a month now. I could talk about some of the new tricks our pets have picked up (Mischa twirls for food!).

Instead I'm going to go watch more Firefly and turn in early on this Saturday night. I'll leave you with an awfully sweet photo of my future husband and one of the things I love the most about him...It's not exactly the best picture of Digby, who is getting so fat, but how about our littlest kid over there with her big ears? This just warms my heart.

which is thirty-two, for the record

2009-11-13T18:37:00.004-06:00

Ways in which I act younger than my actual age:

1. I ate three Pixy Stix (only orange and purple, thanks) and two mini-boxes of Nerds before I came home from work tonight.

2. I hate to take showers.

3. I stomp my foot when I'm frustrated and I squeal when I'm excited.

Ways in which I act older than my actual age:

1. I heard the new Britney Spears song this morning ("3") and said, out loud, in the car, by myself, "This is DIRTY! This is a dirty song!" like some kind of prim marmish person.

2. I am getting more and more forgetful. Like, solid information slipping from my brain. Today I asked Casey if one of her favorite authors was dead, and she clarified that he not only is indeed dead but I was the one who told her about his passing. Not that long ago. Data retention, it's failing me.

3. I am considering self-medicating with Dr. Pepper to ensure my energy level stays high for the rock show tonight. Because last night we literally climbed in bed at 9:30 pm (and couldn't even finish an episode of Firefly).

What rock show? Oh, just Guilty Pleasures. You know. My favorite 80s cover band in the whole entire world. They might be my favorite band of ANY genre. Talented folks on stage singing songs I've loved since I was a little girl, it simply doesn't get any better. And somehow I've tricked Agnes and Stacey and Kelley into going with me, which is nigh onto a miracle. I'm used to cruising these shows solo; the novelty of braving a crowded bar to see Matthew Wilder's "Break My Stride" performed by local funk god Aaron Winters is apparently lost on my nearest and dearest. But not tonight, I'm rolling out with the best ladies (and having sushi beforehand, because this night needs to be better, don't you think?) and I'd better go apply some fierce eyeliner in preparation.

Things we're not going to do at our Wedding

2009-11-12T16:59:00.004-06:00

(in no particular order)

1. Throw a bouquet

2. Throw a garter

3. Wear a garter, for that matter

4. Have a big cake

5. Cut the cake

6. A first dance all by ourselves (or with our parents)

7. A big entrance into the reception (No "Join me in welcoming, for the first time, Delaney and Austin Gray!")

8. Have a DJ

9. Have a band

10. Stay in separate places the night before

11. A traditional registry (we're only registering for our honeymoon)

12. Leave the reception before everyone else

13. Have a ringbearer or flower girl

14. Wait to see each other before I come down the aisle

15. Have photographs taken of our left hands stacked on top of each other

16. Make anyone wait in line for anything (if we can help it at all)

17. Feel rushed in any way

18. Hire a florist

19. Have a full bar

20. Serve butter that is too cold to spread on cornbread

21. The Chicken Dance, the YMCA, the bunny hop, the German Wedding March (much to my dismay) or any other coordinated group dances

22. Wear uncomfortable shoes

23. Listen to anyone telling us what we "have" to do

You wouldn't believe how many people have opinions about some of these things... I've been to so many lovely weddings with some (or all) of these features, and of course they were beautiful events that resulted in a newly wedded couple, which is the whole point. I'm certainly not issuing judgments. We're just tailoring our wedding to our personal tastes and the general vibe that we're trying to share. We'll have a fairly traditional ceremony (in the sense that we stand up at the front with our wedding party on either side of us, and exchange vows and rings and then kiss) and then we just want to have a big delicious dinner party with all our friends and family, which culminates in dancing and dessert. We're going to take a cab home at the end of the night and sleep in our own bed. And we're going to spend the next day with our visiting families, and then get up Monday morning and fly to Ireland (via Boston).

Or at least that's the plan. The catch to long engagements: too much time to change our minds. I've picked a different song to walk down the aisle to at least six times. Maybe if I'd only had three months to plan I could have made some decisions stick the first time around. As it is, we've still got plenty of time to work out the details and to get over the small stuff and to stick to our guns about the important parts (like cold butter. Unacceptable).

excuses

2009-11-11T19:09:00.004-06:00

If blogging is mental exercise (that's a stretch...) and 30 minutes on the treadmill at the Y is physical exercise, I think I can only suck it up for one or the other tonight. So I'm going to get in the shower. Maybe this is a new trend in me actually having the discipline to accomplish the things I set out to. Craft fabrication last night, workout tonight, what could lie in wait for tomorrow night? Those Black Bean Cakes that we keep postponing, perhaps.

Also, I had a great idea for a blog post earlier today, and it was likely related to food, and damn if I can remember it now. I need to start writing it down.

you're never going to believe this...

2009-11-10T21:37:00.007-06:00

Tonight is Podcast Night in the Gill/Gray household. If you didn't already know, Austin and two friends have created a weekly podcast of NFL smacktalking, and they record on Tuesday nights (even if you don't care about football, check that link because my amazing fiance designed the website and has written all the blog copy so far. He's talented! That's why I picked him!). This means Tuesdays have become my night to eat leftovers and catch up on Gossip Girl (I mean, who watches that trash? Not me. Obvs). But the stars must have aligned, or all this wedding crafty talk is seeping into my brain, because tonight? I hope my dad is paying attention, because tonight, I made something.

I can't even remember if I mentioned this (probably not, since I skipped blogging for all of October) but I came home from visiting Austin's family in Kansas with a small fortune in vintage jewelery courtesy of his great-grandmother (Granny). I'm talking about a gallon ziploc bag crammed full of filigree bracelets, antique coin pendants and enamel brooches. I've been incorporating them into my wardrobe (and was glad for the influx of authenticity for my Joan Holloway costume) but haven't had anywhere to store these beautiful pieces. My childhood jewelery box has run out of space and charm and trying to artfully drape long chain-link necklaces on my (darling) earring holder was turning into a mess. I started researching necklace organizers, and found this on etsy. I sent Austin the link and said, "I could make this, don't you think?"

I don't know why you're acting so surprised. My job in college was in technical theater. I know my way around a power drill and soldering iron. I may love not camping, but I'm not 100% girlie girl. I just let you think that. So that you'll be all that more impressed when I show you my craft composition.

I started with a random piece of plywood we had laying around (we're homeowners! We have scraps of plywood in our living room! I think it was intended for kindling). I couldn't find the staple gun (or maybe we don't have one), so I used craft glue to attach a piece of green and white fabric from my optimistic fabric stash. Then I drilled a series of pilot holes in the front, and screwed in a multitude of tiny cup hooks. I also learned how to use the Macro setting on my camera, score! I finished by attaching a couple of picture frame hooks to the top for wall-hanging purposes.

Tools I used: scissors, a borrowed drill (thanks, P. Block) and various pilot bits, needle-nosed pliers, a phillips-head screwdriver and a claw hammer. Injuries sustained: zero. Property damaged: none, other than a Gourmet magazine that is now riddled with drill holes and covered in dried glue. I even mounted the whole thing on the wall above my dressing table, and filled it up with shiny baubles.

Productivity on a Tuesday night! Unprecedented. The dogs thought I had lost my mind when I was hustling around gathering tools and materials. I also changed the light bulb in the garage, which is terrifying, trust me. And I might have managed to sneak in one episode of Gossip Girl, because I'm three weeks behind at this point, and that is simply unacceptable.

P. S. On a related note, has anyone heard of a crafty alternate use or adjustment for old-fashioned clip-on earrings to make them wearable? I tried to rock a pair on Halloween and my earlobes have yet to forgive me for the torture. But I have so many, and they're all so sparkly...

P. P. S. My abuse of the parenthetical aside is at an all-time high. Sorry (sort of).

small joys

2009-11-09T21:19:00.003-06:00

If I were rich, I'm sure I'd be happy. I've always said I'd make a great rich person; I'm generous to a fault and take great joy in gift-giving and sharing. I would spread my wealth around like Dolly Levi and her manure. I'd probably have nicer clothes, but I also probably wouldn't treat them any better than my current Gap Outlet and TJ Maxx-provided wardrobe. I'd travel more, in short bursts, four days to visit Mom, a long weekend to see Jenny, that trip to Chicago that we keep swearing we'll take.

Otherwise, I don't see how different my life could be. Would I rather live in another house? No. Would I rather have a different car? No. Would I want to stop working? No. Would I spend time with different people? Absolutely not. And I don't think I'd ever voluntarily sign up for the weight that comes along with wealth. Right now I feel like I do what I can for the rest of the world; we've certainly earned our wings in the Stray Animal Adoption heaven, and we send small donations to our favorite charities (particularly Alzheimer's research) when we can. If I were rich, I don't know how I could justify the balance between giving and retaining. It would never be enough.

I'm seriously racking my brain to identify parts of my life I would change if money were no object. Because the only thing that's nagging at me right now is laziness about getting in shape, and that not only doesn't have to do with money but is actually WASTING the $17 a month we spend on a shared Y membership that rarely gets used. I make wishes every time I find an eyelash, and lately I just sit there and stare at the eyelash trying to remember what I need to wish for. And the other morning, I wished I would get into shape before the wedding. Wishes are for magic! Not for things that are perfectly well in my command if I just get off my lazy ass three mornings a week. Honestly. That's embarrassing.

My point here, though, isn't about the way I want to look in our wedding pictures. It's about the joy in my daily life that I never look past. If I won the lottery, would I still be filled with peace after dinner-and-a-movie with my future husband? Maybe. Would I get a rush of pleasure from a day's work done well? Who knows. But am I bursting at the seams with blessings? I am. Coming home to a house that smells like spaghetti in the crock pot, and rushing through my nightly cleansing routine in order to climb into freshly washed sheets... there in my life is joy.

meteorologically wasteful

2009-11-08T18:36:00.003-06:00

Why have I spent almost this entire weekend inside? When it's been simply GLORIOUS in the great outdoors? It's a sad reality. And now it's dark and dinnertime and the Mad Men season finale is a scant two hours away. I know I'm going to regret this wastefulness of warmth and sunshine come January.

The good news: major wedding-planning progress this weekend. Austin and I talked through a bunch of details yesterday and made some serious headway. How would I have known that he thinks that tree branches with paper flower blossoms look "dead?" I'm so glad I asked before we started the next six months of crafting frenzy. We came up with solutions to problems I didn't think were ever going to sit right with me (particularly the issue of who is going to perform our wedding ceremony). Then I took all our good ideas and had a couple helpful ladies over for brunch this morning to come up with a game plan. This was a rousing success and I honestly think maybe these girls are more excited about our wedding than we are. That's impossible, obviously, but we have such a good team of crafty people and bossy people and so many more out there just waiting for assignments!

I keep saying when talking about this wedding, we have more time than we do money, but really what I mean is that we have more *volunteers* than we could even hope for. And I'm not just talking about our friends who live here in town; when the Jansens get off the airplanes they're going to be ready to get to work! I can't WAIT!

And because I'm sure you were wondering, here's the brunch menu:

Blueberry Corn Muffins
Potato and Egg Tortilla
Wheeler Biscuits
Fruit Salad
Mimosas with Lemonade instead of Orange Juice (is this called something else?)

Dinner Success

2009-11-07T20:34:00.004-06:00

Tonight we finally made the meal I'd scheduled for Thursday, which got bumped to consume all the leftovers that were floating around after Book Club. I snagged some good-looking tilapia for like $4 at Publix, and we dredged it in homemade blackening seasoning (the recipe from The Palm, yum) and seared in olive oil just until cooked through.

For a side dish we made Creamy Rice with Lemon, Herbs and Parmesan, which is like cheater's risotto. It made a ton; I'm hoping to make some arancine with the leftovers, maybe tomorrow.

The other side was Paula Deen's Broccoli Casserole. A few weeks ago Austin announced that he wanted "a casserole that combines broccoli and cheese and Ritz crackers." So I turned to my girl Paula, because I trust her with all things casserole-related. This came out *awesome.* It's got a few eggs in it, plus a can of cream of mushroom soup (of course), so it bakes up almost like a quiche. And it's only got two tablespoons of butter, so stop with your assumptions on anything with Paula's name on it. I love her.

We watched the new series "V" while we ate, the pilot episode, and it was pretty entertaining. It's got some comfortingly familiar faces (Inara and Wash from Firefly!) and had the same vibe as Battlestar Galactica, with a lot less outer space. I think we'll stick with this one for the time being and see how it goes.

I'm going to clean the kitchen and then head to the Mercy Lounge, to see the Mary Nails and the 90s cover band My So-Called Band (how great is that?!). I didn't get much done today, none of the housecleaning that needs to be accomplished before my Bridal Brigade shows up here for brunch tomorrow morning. But I know they're going to be here to talk about paper flowers and seersucker flag banners and not to judge the amount of pet hair underneath our bed. I'll keep telling myself that, anyway.

P. S. I tried to find that blackening seasoning recipe so I could link to it online and was stumped, so I'll share it here:

Jeffrey's Blackening Spice

From the Palm Restaurant Cookbook

Makes about 1/4 cup

1/4 cup Spanish or California paprika
1 Tablespoon fine sea salt
2 teaspoons dried oregano
2 teaspoons garlic powder
2 teaspoons onion powder
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon white pepper, preferably fresh ground
1 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon dried thyme

In a medium bowl, combine all the ingredients and mix well. Transfer to a glass jar with a lid, and seal tightly. Store at room temperature for up to 3 months.

Shameless Unsolicited Promotion

2009-11-06T17:51:00.007-06:00

A few things I'm wild about right now:

Maybelline ColorSensational Lipstick in Very Cherry

I have been telling everyone all week that this is a L'oreal product, which is probably because I refuse to believe that I could truly love anything by Maybelline. The vast majority of my makeup collection is that familiar matte black M.A.C. packaging (thanks, Shan) and I think I'm pretty spoiled with my taste in cosmetics. I picked this up at Walgreens for like $5, just because I needed a brighter, less sticky red than Racer Red lipglass to be Joan Holloway for Halloween. I wore it ALL night with only a few reapplications, and it never got bleedy around the edges or clumpy. It feels like elastic on my lips, but only in a very comfortable, non-plastic way. And it smells very vaguely of chocolate. I'm going to try some other shades, too (and I loved the way the store display was organized by color family).

Dove Cream Oil

This is a pretty recent discovery, as I only used it this morning for the first time, straight out of the shower. If it doesn't hold up after a full day or two, I'll report back. But right now I just keep pathologically running my hands up and down the underside of my arm because it is So. Soft. I love the way this felt going on, the fact that I wasn't greasy or sticky after less than a minute, and the smell is divine.

Kettle Chips Lightly Salted

I had a dentist tell me once that potato chips are just as bad for teeth as sugary sweets. Which would explain why I'm morbidly convinced that I have at least three new cavities since my last dentist visit (and that was only four months ago). I'm eating these things almost every day. I portion out a small pile into a ziploc baggie every morning when I'm packing my breakfast and I barely make it to 11 am before I've dug in. They only offer the mega-sized bags of the krinkle cut chips, which I don't like nearly as much as these suckers. Craveworthy!

Parks and Recreation on NBC

This one started with a short season last year, and it was hit or miss. Sometimes Amy Poehler makes me want to crawl under the couch. But this year, it's better than the Office (which is really having a good season) and 30 Rock (which is not) combined. The key here is that they've brought the peripheral characters forward more, and they are hilarious. Ron Swanson is totally my hero, and Austin just laughs every time Andy the loser ex-boyfriend is on the screen. This show is hitting it out of the park this year; set your DVR accordingly.

Twenty-Four Hour Seven (to Ten) Layer Overnight Salad

2009-11-05T20:05:00.004-06:00

This recipe is cobbled together from multiple sources. My Aunt Paula makes this salad for Thanksgiving and other family events. I started trying to track down the perfect version of this recipe and started with what I consider the classic source: my collection of plastic spiral-bound church bazaar and Junior League cookbooks. I tallied up all the different recommended ingredients and amounts from dozens of nice old church ladies who brought this creamy, crunchy wonder to decades of Sunday suppers. Then I basically averaged out the required ingredients, adjusting for personal taste (not so much onion) and came up with the Master Recipe. This is science, folks.

Seven-Layer Salad (but don't try to count the layers or it won't make any sense)

1 bag of chopped romaine lettuce
1 bunch of celery (is that a bunch? What is the word I want here?), chopped
1 large green bell pepper, chopped
3 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
1/2 of a medium red onion, minced
1 10 oz. box of frozen peas, thawed
1 cup of mayonnaise (approx.)
2 teaspoons of sugar
4 oz (1 cup) of shredded cheddar cheese
(1/2 lb. bacon, cooked and crumbled, optional)

In order, layer the first 6 ingredients in a salad bowl (I like to use a glass bowl because it looks pretty from the side). Using a rubber spatula, spread the mayonnaise evenly across the top layer, making sure to completely cover the salad and to seal the mayonnaise to the edges of the bowl. Sprinkle sugar evenly over mayonnaise, and then layer with cheese and bacon (if using). Cover salad with plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator at least overnight. Immediately before serving, toss salad together to evenly coat vegetables with dressing.

It's probably one of those dishes that you don't really want to know how to make. You just want to enjoy it in blissful ignorance. I have no problem with that. Just let me know when I should be there and I'll be at your house with a pretty layered salad for Sunday dinner.

of course...

2009-11-05T16:17:00.007-06:00

...I wasn't going to remember to post after the Total Feast Extravaganza of Book Club. Darn. But I can try to make up for it with some food porn...

Seeing as it's that time of year, we did a Thanksgiving preview for book club. We read (or were supposed to read) The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, but we had a shockingly low retention rate on actually reading the book this time. Oh well. Sometimes that's just not really the point. Because the food, oh friends, the food.

I dry-brined and roasted a turkey breast, which was a little bit out on a limb for me. I'm a champ with the full bird but I wasn't sure how to make the proper adjustments to this smaller fella. I did a full kosher salt and cracked pepper crust and left it in a big bag in the fridge overnight, and in retrospect this was probably too long for all that salt. The skin after I roasted it was very salty, not that I've ever had a problem with "very salty" before. I doubt anyone else noticed because this thing was picked bare by the end of the night, and that's saying a lot for a group of 10 girls, several of whom don't eat meat.

I also made my famous macaroni and cheese, which was voted a necessity. Pretty dang good this time, I must say. Evaporated milk is my secret ingredient; makes everything that much cheesier and gooier.

And I made Overnight Salad (or 24 Hour Salad, or Layered Salad, or any other name that applies to this nationwide potluck staple). I think I'll post the recipe when I get home tonight so I at least have five posts for the month, even after I missed last night. That will probably be my sole accomplishment tonight; Austin and I are both totally exhausted and have that terrible feeling that we're getting sick. We're going to mainline vitamin C and get at least 10 hours of sleep tonight in hopes of warding off the inevitable.

Here's the yums:

Clockwise from top left: Kim's garlic mashed potatoes (in the white casserole), several sticks of soft butter (for the rolls, obv), Trader Joe's stuffing (more on this later), my mac & cheese, Kat's empty wine glass and Stephanie's Corn Pudding. In the middle: Megan's roasted brussels sprouts.

From the top: Sarah's butternut squash risotto in the blue dutch oven, my layered salad, and in the middle there is Kat's Green Bean casserole. Across the bottom, from left to right, Casey brought THREE different kinds of stuffing. Because she's crazy. On the left is from Trader Joes, in the center is Stove Top (these were nearly interchangeable) and on the right is Apple, Sage and Leek stuffing, which was simply awesome.

Here's those rolls, delicious snowflake rolls from Whole Foods, yum. And Kat's cranberry salad, her mom's recipe. And then that turkey breast of mine, nicely framed by Julia, my Sexy Stand Mixer. Not pictured: Lauren's sweet potato and yukon gold gratin, YUM. And I didn't even manage to photograph the desserts: Kat's pumpkin cheesecake with bourbon whipped cream (I'm going to let you think about that one for a minute) and pear pie with gruyere crust, courtesy of our dearest Badness.

We're going to start auctioning off Book Club memberships to deserving foodies worldwide. Starting bid: $10,000. Come on, folks, can you put a price on glory?

shop talk

2009-11-03T20:35:00.003-06:00

Should be: cleaning house and brining turkey breast.

Am: updating wedding budget and guest list.

It is NOVEMBER, friends. That's six months away from May, which is the month in which we're going to be married. When we'll have 200-ish of our nearest and dearest here to celebrate with us. Martha Stewart Weddings provides many helpful hints (okay, they're pretty strident) about what we should have accomplished by now in the planning process, but I'm feeling pretty good about it all.

If you were wondering, I've managed to restrain myself from marching back into B. Hughes and stealing the beloved Vera gown. That's just not meant to be. But I am going to go buy that veil that I love, and that's a start. I'm meeting an amazing dress designer on Thursday to see sketches of the dream dress that I brought to her, and to get a price quote, which is hands-down the most nerve wracking aspect of this entire wedding process so far. I *really* want to work with this girl, and if she's too expensive (why wouldn't she be? She's remarkable!) it's going to break my heart. And put me back to square one in regards to The Dress, which is the only thing that I don't have all planned out and lined up. Caterer? Check. Decorations? I have heaps of ideas that are entirely do-it-ourselves. Honeymoon? Ireland, did I tell you?! Now if I can just figure out what I'm going to wear down the aisle (and how I'm going to afford it), I'll sleep easy until the new year.

Sunday morning I'm having a handful of my Most Helpful ladies over for brunch to start talking about things like paper flowers and mason jars. I feel excited every time I think about this wedding, which is all the time. Truthfully, if I talked about wedding thoughts as often as I think them, I would probably have alienated everyone I love and lost Austin forever. I swear, I'm not losing sight of the whole point here: he'll be my husband, which is a greater honor than I could ever hope for. And the party is going to be a night we'll always remember, nothing more or less.

P.S. I can NOT get into a writing groove yet. Is this the most boring post ever? Where are my words?

tonight I...

2009-11-02T23:41:00.003-06:00

a. made dinner and had the kitchen mostly clean in under an hour (Taco Salad from the 30 Minute Cookbook, god bless it)

b. had my first two At Bats of my entire life. Somewhere my father weeps with pride, despite my lifetime 0.00 batting average.

c. had a fierce argument with an impassioned gay man regarding my anti-animal movie stance.

d. didn't even peek at the inbox to inspect the coming hellstorm that is the day after Billing Run. I know what's coming. I'm ready.

Feast or famine

2009-11-01T21:56:00.004-06:00

Once again, I'm undertaking the self-torture that is NaBloPoMo. That's right. I neglect the bloggings for almost three months and then decide to blog daily for the next thirty. The last time I did this, I complained the whole time about how November is such a busy month and who has time to find interesting things to write about every day? The answer: not me. But here we go, anyway.

And just to prove my point, that's all I've got for tonight. My future husband is unapologetically snoring away next to me, after a long day of football drinking. He didn't even finish the big dinner I pulled together (baked linguine, honey-roasted carrots, asparagus with parmesan butter and garlic bread) or the episode of Gourmet's Adventures with Ruth (Reichl). I blame Jon Burr and his nefarious influences for sending Austin home in such a state.

I'm uploading Halloween pics and videos as we speak. Expect to see some extended video of Ali the Dancing PeeWee shaking what her momma gave her. And John "Tape Monster" Baldwin, in a costume that was probably more conceptually successful than in actuality. I don't envy him the cleanup.

Hot damn, y'all. It's November!

fine, then.

2009-08-23T14:52:00.004-05:00

On Friday, Casey and I went to B. Hughes for the Vera Wang trunk show. I figure I have pretty limited opportunities to try on gowns created by the most famous wedding dress designer on the planet. In a million years, I could never justify spending that kind of money on a single item of clothing that will only be worn once. But after the first handful of taffeta and tulle, I can completely understand the appeal.

I suppose I shouldn't have even put myself in this position, but of course I fell madly in love with a $5000 ballgown with a bubble skirt and pintucked strapless bodice. It was breathtaking. All the ladies in the shop gasped when I came out of the dressing room, and Casey got weepy while I was standing in front of the mirror admiring the bell-sway of the skirt and the beautiful shape of the silhouette. I even tried on a simple flyaway veil that couldn't have been prettier.

I told the book club girls about it yesterday, and it was decided that we should host a topless bake sale to fund my Dream Dress. Or create the long-discussed Book Club Girl Pinup Calendar. Or start borrowing $5 or $10 from every single person I know. Their enthusiasm and conviction made it much too easy to imagine myself draped in Vera on May 22. Oh dear...

Yesterday we hosted Badness and Redbeard's Tennessee Wedding Shindig, which was an outright success, largely because of the astonishingly cool and breezy weather. And all that amazing food... This afternoon we took all three dogs to the dog park again, which was hilarious and went quite well. Tonight I'm making baked spaghetti and onion-cheese bread, courtesy of the green Lady and Sons cookbook. Thursday is the Cheatham County Fair Demolition Derby, about which I am unreasonably excited. As usual.

More wedding-planning details soon. Which will hopefully not involve me deciding to convert our entire catering budget into a Vera Wang hedge fund...

belatedly stolen from Kim

2009-07-15T13:00:00.003-05:00

This pretty much keeps me at a solid level of Ecstatically Happy:

And then I found this tribute, linked from somewhere in the Summer Mix Series. It's kind of a tribute to a tribute, technically, and the video skipped sometimes when I watched it earlier on Vimeo, but maybe it won't with the embed:

phoenix - lisztomania *brooklyn pack mashup* from ian parker on Vimeo.

Yay. That's a song to listen to over and over, anyway.

why do I always do this?

2009-07-06T23:12:00.003-05:00

Gah! I wait so long between posts and then there is too much to say. Let's do the bullet point version of an update:

Wedding date: moved. Forward one week due to scheduling difficulties with the Bicentennial Mall. So now we're looking at May 22, which I'm told is going to guarantee us a long and happy marriage. So there.
Seattle: gorgeous. We couldn't have had better weather or a more beautiful rental house. With a Viking range and subzero fridge, believe it. We bought stunning produce at Pike Place, cooked up a storm, played lots of cards, took over the jukebox at a bar in the tiny town of Manchester, and had an amazing meal of tapas at Black Bottle in Belltown. I got to catch the Jim Henson exhibit AND the Hatch exhibit at EMP; both were fantastic and the Hatch show made me miss my old friend Huey. Oh, and we spent a lot of time on ferry boats. I never thought I'd be on a boat.
Alaska: awesome. I'm not really sure if I could live there, what with all their issues with day and night and the proper scheduling of each, but the scenery couldn't have been more beautiful. We saw a small black bear and were woken up by a 5.4 strength earthquake. The Great Wedding Adventure came off without a hitch and it was an absolute honor to be involved and to finally get to meet Agnes's big crazy family, especially Peter, who I feel like I've known for years.
I will say this: air travel = sucks. I swear. It's never going to be any better. We had the most absurd amount of drama getting on a direct flight from Seattle into Anchorage (and avoid a scheduled 5-hour layover in Juneau). We also took a red-eye home from Anchorage to Chicago and, despite being heavily medicated, it was just terrible. Neither of us slept at all (thanks to some well-timed squalling infants); by the time we got home at 1 pm we collapsed in a four hour nap. I have written red-eye flights off of my list of possible travel solutions for the future. At least when flying coach.
Bowling: rocks. We've been participating in the Emma bowling league, and a few weeks ago I bowled a career-high 156. How about that?! It almost feels like exercise. But in a fun way.
ELO night: insert enthusiastic hyperbole here. How I Became the Bomb and Kindercastle joined up with a seven piece string section to perform Electric Light Orchestra's double album opus Out of the Blue, one night only at the Mercy Lounge. And these are both extremely talented bands in their own right, but if they decided to take this (daunting and time consuming) act on the road, they'd be INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTARS, I tell you. I kept looking around at the crowd and everyone was smiling the *whole* time. Tell me the last time you saw a rock show in Nashville where you could say the same...
Fourth of July: vaguely apocalyptic. Casey and I sucked up an uncharacteristic bout of nerves and ventured back into Ashland City for a visit with our oldest friends that turned out to be simply delightful. Then we rode back into town ready to hit the baseball game and were subverted by absolutely ridiculous weather. Monsoonish rainstorms, thunder and lightning, the whole bit. I seriously can't remember ever being rained out of Fourth of July. We didn't see any fireworks, despite having planned to see both the downtown extravaganza and the Sounds blastoff. Weird and boo. The whole situation resulted in us reminiscing about happier Fourths of July in years past, particularly those spent out at the Paine Family Farm, and then I got really sad about missing Jenny and Patrick.
Bridgey: escape artist. After the Epic Independence Day Fail, we arrived home to discover Bridgette, running around a neighbor's yard, soaked and completely freaked out. We assumed that the fireworks + storm had somehow worked her into such a frenzy that she jumped the fence without realizing what was happening. We dried her off, put her and the others to bed, and were most disappointed when she spent all of Sunday showing off her new fence-climbing skill. That's right. Bridgette, the GOOD one, the shy, well-behaved, slightly backwards brown dog has learned to scale chain-link like a monkey. We've temporarily curbed the efforts by wrapping a tarp over the top of the gate, therefore giving her nothing to claw onto, but our eventual (and hopeful) solution involves rabbit wire and hard labor this weekend. Good GRIEF.
Hot Rod: ridiculous. Austin wakes up every morning and watches part of the Andy Samberg movie Hot Rod, about a quixotic pseudo-stuntman and his loony cast of surrounding characters. He just watches a bit and then stops it and picks it back up again the next morning, laughing like a little kid the whole time. I think it's his new Wet Hot American Summer, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
MJ: just sad. I've had this whole defense of Michael Jackson's character and skewering of the media lined up in my head for a week now, but mostly it's been said and it's kind of past the point of relevancy. But Jenny made me smile when she said that her first instinct when she heard the news of his death was to call our cousin Josh and see how he was coping.

There, how was that for the Greatest Hits recap version? I think we're all caught up to speed now. I have got to spend more time blogging and less time on Facebook. Can that be a mid-New-year resolution?

never been better

2009-06-07T19:32:00.003-05:00

Tonight I'm knocking around the house, solo for a little while. Austin's playing FIFA Soccer with JB. I had planned to spend the alone time working on the filing drawers in the desk in the office I excavated yesterday. Instead I poked around online, played a game, read some educational wedding-related articles. Then I straightened up the house, put away the remnants of our crackers-and-soda snack from this afternoon, and got out the ingredients for tonight's Mexican pineapple salad. And I realized, while I was moving around the house, going through mindless motions, I was smiling the whole time.

I don't talk about religion, on here or anywhere. I'm not a subscriber of any specific doctrine. We don't go to church, and we don't follow any scriptures. I don't have astral convictions, and I don't miss them. But the only word I can find to describe this feeling, this day, this place I'm at in my life, is blessed. I am saturated by blessings. It washes over me, so many times a day, and I wish there was a better way to express my gratitude.

I love our home. We cleaned it yesterday, got the office near to full function, and made some decorating progress. It is safe and warm and comfortable when it's filled with girls, sprawled on the couch with popcorn and ice cream, or when it's just us and our pets, on quiet tv afternoons, or when it's just me and my iTunes. There literally isn't a day that goes by that I don't think how utterly lucky we are that we found *this* house. It felt like an arduous search, and it turned out exactly right.

I love my job. One of the bigger wedding-related dilemmas I've faced (as with every bride in the history of the world, I know) has been the size of the guest list. And this is complicated by the fact that I have 70+ coworkers who are also friends who I can't imagine not celebrating with. It's probably not going to be realistic to invite every Emma staffer plus one, but right now I'm doing my best to find a way to include as many as we can. I think about the very best days at Hatch, when we all felt like a productive family full of friends, and that's how Emma is too. I love it when I make a breakthrough on a collaborative project, I love it when I've finished processing the daily check run, I love it when the power goes out and I wind up laying on the carpet of the second floor lounge doing half-assed pilates with Brooks and Rami and Rachael's puppy. I think I've said this before, but you don't realize how much of your self-esteem is caught up in the work week until you find a job that fulfills you.

I love our pets. We both do, equally, with an unreasonable fervor. We're those crazy pet people and aren't remotely ashamed. Digby is getting closer and closer to being a good dog, and Bridgette is such a sweet girl. We had a brushing session on the back patio last weekend (shedding time is definitely here) and they were both just inhaling the affection and attention. Mackenzie is completely back to her old self, running the house with her larger-than-life attitude and making sure she gets quality time with us before bed every night. Corvinius is, well, an oddball, but a loveable one, and spent a large portion of this afternoon rubbing his face on the corner of my computer screen over. and over. and over again. Oh buddy. And look, we don't like to play favorites with our pets. But every single day, Mischa and Charlie Murphy fill us up with love. Mischa got a new toy today, and she's currently sacked out on her spot at the end of the couch with this new red stuffy wrapped in her arms like a woobie. I just want to hold her so tight. Charlie Murphy loves weekends, particularly couch weekends like today, and the absolute peace and joy he spreads when he's sleeping leaned up against my lap... it's just the best.

I love my friends. Book club friends, work friends, people who don't fall in either category (there aren't many...), I can't get over the support network that surrounds me. I spent a lot of my adolescence thinking of myself as not a "girlfriend" kind of girl, and I'm so happy that I was totally wrong about that. We threw a surprise bachelorette party for Agnes last night, and the house was about to burst from all the girlie love. Lisa and Jenny were missed, but otherwise it couldn't have gone better and I was so glad we could all spend sweet time with Agnes before she takes off for the Great Alaskan Wedding Adventure.

I love my family. The reason I didn't think of myself as a "girlfriend" kind of girl was, obviously, because I have the best built-in girlfriends on the planet, my sisters. We talk every day and nothing feels complete unless it is shared with them. I'm so glad that we live close enough to my dad that we can just have low-key evenings of ceiling fan installation and (really good) chicken wings with him and Lynn. We're so lucky to have them both nearby. I miss my big crazy California family so badly, and one of my absolute favorite things to imagine about our wedding is having them all here together again. And I am just chomping at the bit to get to Seattle (next weekend!) and give my Mom one gigantic hug, followed by a series of smaller ones. It's been almost a year since we've seen her and I can't wait to spend a week on the lake with her and Kam (and Casey and Trent and a deck of cards!).

And of course you knew this was where I was going, but I love Austin. I'm not going to detail all the reasons that he's the man I'm going to marry (I've done that before and certainly will again) but the place where we are in our life together is just especially good right now. I am excited to see him EVERY DAY. How silly is that? I start to feel restless and shifty if it's been more than a couple of hours since I've checked in with him (thanks to IM and texting for completely spoiling me by having my fiance´ available to me at all times). We're on the same page about all these major decisions we've made in the past year and will be making in the next year. We're not exactly wealthy, but it's been a long while since we've had to look at anything and say, from a financial standpoint, "How are we going to make this work?" We carpool almost every day and talk about the stories we hear on NPR. If it sounds idyllic, it is. I can't think of an aspect of my life that isn't made better by just having him with me. We don't have to do everything together (see: FIFA Soccer) but when I'm walking around our house by myself, smiling, it's mostly because of him.

staycation

2009-05-23T15:22:00.003-05:00

The truth is, I would rather be laying on this couch with my Boo, my kitty and my puppy (and all the other pets happily sleeping around the house) than on any beach in the world.

May has turned out to be pretty busy. The road trip to Atlanta was pretty hairy, we ran into some nightmarish weather and traffic and got to the wedding a half-hour late. The party was a blast, lots of fun and dancing and picture-taking. We stayed up late, ordered some delicious pizza, and had a great time partying with my hilarious coworkers. We got up the next morning, had delicious breakfast at West Egg, and braved our first Ikea. We were so overwhelmed we only ended up with a blue and white checked rug for the kitchen, some photo frames and a desk lamp for my (as yet nonexistent) sewing table.

We didn't make it home in time for the market house celebration at the Farmer's Market, but we had lunch there the next day and got snowballs... yum! We're still hopeful to get everything worked out to have our wedding reception there, but no news on that front yet. I kind of have my heart set on it at this point, and it's really going to throw me for a loop if we end up having to look elsewhere. Casey and I have been brainstorming some alternatives but nothing has clicked. Hopefully we can just nail down the details with the farmer's market, put our deposits down and move forward.

The rest of the month has been haze of birthday parties. I swear everyone is born in May. Roller derby was last weekend, that was a blast. Another big blowout for our girls, they're skating so well this year and playing really good defense. Lots of fun to watch.

I'm mostly just blogging to blog. To not go a whole month without writing again. Tonight Tracy and I are meeting at Mercy Lounge for the Long Players, who are performing Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run. Should be a blast. I'm hoping to also make it to the end of the Alcohol Stunt Band show at the Basement as well.

Three day weekends are just a gift. We can be lazy today, productive tomorrow, then lazy again on Monday and it works out perfectly. We're hoping to spend some time (finally) in the garage tomorrow, and then grill out in the evening. Maybe some yard work too, although it's gotten hot here. Not as much fun for working outside.

Now I think it's naptime.

looking back

2009-04-30T19:28:00.003-05:00

So I *almost* did it. I missed a single day blogging in April, but I nearly made up for it with two posts in one day a few weeks later. It was good practice, even if it didn't exactly mean I shared something scintillating every day. I will do my very best to NOT take a month off now. But I'll be glad that I can delete that 10 pm daily alarm that says, "BLOG!"

I will say, it was entirely unlikely that you were going to hear from me today. It's 7:30 pm and I'm still in my nightgown, nursing a colossal hangover. Emma Talent Night was, of course, a total blowout, and I drank too many berry vodka drinks much too quickly. It was super, super, super fun, of course, and I've been told that I didn't *act* that drunk, so that's a relief. I appointment myself one of the official photographers for the evening, and got some pretty great shots that got progressively blurry as the night went on. I'm sure just technical problems with my camera, right? But the fun wore off when I woke up on our bathroom floor at 4:15 am. These are probably details I could have spared my parents. But it's possible that my mom was doing a little drunk texting of her own, as I received this at about 10:30 pm:

G p frkn good no tlk yet posl yr m

Thanks, Mom. She was at a Glen Phillips show. Obviously.

You will most likely NOT hear from me tomorrow, as we'll be out of town for the first time in over a year! We're Hotlanta bound in the a.m., cruising by the Holy Mecca (I mean IKEA) and then checking into our very posh hotel that we got for a song because they just opened yesterday! Woot! Then on to Emily and Neil's wedding of amazingness, and I'm just super excited. We'll be home Saturday afternoon, hopefully in time to catch the last of the Market Celebration at the Farmer's Mkt. That seems like good karma, right? Plus, Snowballs! Then Scott Miller at Mercy Lounge Saturday night, YAY. I'm looking forward to the brief road trip with my Boo, it's not an experience we share very often and I think we're both ready for a minibreak.

Happy Quite Nearly May!

about that frosting...

2009-04-29T16:57:00.004-05:00

So Casey and Trent have the same birthday (wild, right?) and they alternate years getting to request a birthday cake. Casey is all about strawberries and whipped cream. This is Trent's year. He wanted CHOCOLATE. I set about tracking down the most chocolate chocolate cake I could find.

I found this cake on Epicurious (always my go-to when I want something that has already been road-tested). 1277 reviews and 91% of them would make it again? That's a hearty enough recommendation for me! I made the cake layers on Saturday with some hot Drew's Brews coffee from Sip. They came out absolutely gorgeous (I went with three 9" layers instead of the recommended 2 10"), dark and slightly sticky. I wrapped them up and managed to not alert Charlie Murphy the Chocoholic Cat to their hiding place.

Sunday morning I made a quick ganache for the frosting, according to the recipe, but I wasn't wild about the results. The cake itself was already so dark and moist and gooey, I thought a simple drapey ganache would be too homogenous. I stuck it in the fridge to chill and consulted Agnes when we popped by the Walden Market before lunch. We discussed the pros and cons of whipping a ganache or incorporating whipped cream. I thought I'd see how spreadable it was after the chill and play it by ear.

When we got back to the house (a mere two hours before the birthday party was scheduled to start, poor planning on my part...) that ganache was a solid unstirrable mass in the fridge. Oops. The spatula was sticking up at a perfect vertical angle. Hmm. Time to apply all of my dessert-making problem solving skills.

First I whipped the solid ganache with a hand mixer. This didn't go great. The bowl wasn't big enough for much movement, and the chocolate, while lightening significantly, clung to the beaters and was still not really spreadable. So I went WAY outside the realm of reason and popped that bowl in the microwave at half-power for a minute. It came out totally uneven and kind of lumpy, actually quite ugly. UGH.

So I went with my last resort and whipped up probably a cup and a half of whipping cream. I partially folded it in to the lumpy and runny ganache and then put the hand mixer back in there and whipped until everything was evenly mixed and fluffy. Gorgeous!

Now I'm off to Emma Talent Night! It's a shame I didn't manage to pull together a Baking Demonstration. Clearly, the skills!

the lies I tell to my diary

2009-04-28T22:06:00.003-05:00

Sorry friends, you're looking at another half-ass post tonight. I'm in the throes of a battle of wills with my iPod and my poor decrepit iMac (aka The Jukebox). Why won't they talk to each other? Why won't they be friends? GAH.

I need my own personal Reggie for nights like these. Austin doesn't seem too concerned about my technical problems. I have important mix cds to make!

from the swamp

2009-04-27T21:50:00.003-05:00

I had planned on bringing my readers a cautionary tale (with a happy ending) about making a fluffy chocolate frosting out of bittersweet ganache. And also a recipe overview of the Brazilian Black Beans (with beets, quinoa, pineapple and cilantro). But the truth is, my eyes are closing while I type. We had to be up early (again) to take Kenzie to have her stitches taken out, and then it was a busy day at work.

Then tonight I met Casey at the Belcourt to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a film we loved absolutely to pieces as little girls. All the songs were familiar, the choreography (which is really fantastic) recalled crystal clear memories, but the storyline was horrifyingly un-PC. I just typed an incredibly long recap and realized it was just a bad idea. Let's just say this is probably the last movie to endorse kidnapping as a mating ritual, sans irony. Although maybe the whole movie was completely tongue-in-cheek-wink-wink, and it went over my head just as much this time as it did when I was nine.

In-depth foodie talk tomorrow, complete with pics, I promise.

the procrastinator, on Sunday afternoon

2009-04-26T15:47:00.003-05:00

what I should be doing:

- whipping cream
- whipping the ganache in the fridge
- folding the cream into the ganache
- frosting the very, very, very dark chocolate birthday cake
- boiling macaroni noodles
- stirring into the hot macaroni: cheese, butter, sour cream, evaporated milk, eggs
- mixing up the banana bread batter
- baking banana breads
- applying wrapping paper to the case of beer in the garage
- making quinoa
- sauteeing garlic and scallions with vinegar and jerk sauce
- tossing black beans in the garlic jerk sauce

what I am doing:

- finding things to look at online while parked at the desk in our office. because it's cooler in here. and there are no ovens on.

At least the potato salad is finished and ready to put in the car. We're taking that, a very chocolate cake and macaroni and cheese to Casey and Trent's for their birthday dinner. I also roasted some beets with herbs and butter, and those, along with the jerk-seasoned black beans and quinoa, should make up my lunches for the rest of the week, with some pineapple, cheddar, cilantro and sour cream. Yum!

mental note to self

2009-04-25T22:16:00.003-05:00

You know how they say you pay for what you get? And you get what you pay for? This apparently applies to appliances. This morning we were stuck at home with the FOURTH (fruitless) repair visit for our refrigerator. Our huge, nice, posh, glamorous, nearly brand-new refrigerator, the one that we would never have been able to afford if we hadn't bought it at the Sears Scratch and Dent store. A 25-cubic foot Whirlpool fridge for under a grand? Lucky us! Right?

Ugh. Today we had the pleasure of being informed by the repairman that the replacement part that we'd received (and had to wait a week to have installed) was unnecessary and not going to fix our problem. We also got to listen to him get in a bitch-fight with the tech support on his speaker phone. Then he called his supervisor to rat out the other combatant in the verbal squabble. Charming. He (and the tech support, and the supervisor) was stumped by our fridge's inability to maintain a proper temperature, and decided to blame the problem on faulty wiring in our electrical outlet. This is entirely likely, since there has yet to be an example of UNfaulty wiring in this house, other than the new outlets installed by my dad, but are you telling me that it took the FOURTH VISIT before someone checked the outlet? So now we have to bring in an electrician, have the outlet repaired (or have it confirmed that the outlet isn't the problem) and then sit tight for another two weeks until our next service appointment. Awesome.

The good news is, as with all the other visits, the fridge is plenty cold and making ice like a champ since they reset all the operations. It will probably work for another week or so and then start warming up. We threw away two garbage bags' worth of food out of the freezer this morning (last summer's peaches, sad). I dearly, sincerely wish we'd just not bothered with the bargain-hunting and just bought a perfectly fine appliance from Home Depot for the same price and infinitely less trouble. Lesson learned.

Friday Video

2009-04-24T17:53:00.003-05:00

Because I don't know what tonight holds (other than meeting baby girl Stella Jeanette Cecil!) and because this made me bounce up and down in my chair with glee, I'm going the lazy route and posting a video today.

Thanks to Yewknee for the video alert. Happy Friday!

partial self-portrait

2009-04-23T20:17:00.004-05:00

Delaney: Honey, what should I blog about tonight?

Austin: Susan Boyle.

Delaney: Babe. I don't even know enough about her to make it interesting, and I'm not going to be the billionth person to blog about her.

Austin: You should look up who performed AFTER Susan Boyle and write about that.

Delaney: This is not helpful.

Austin: I think that would be hilarious.

outline

2009-04-22T22:39:00.003-05:00

1. Tonight marks day 5 of successful antibiotic dosage for Mackenzie. I don't know if you can truly appreciate the magnitude of this feat. On Friday the vet tech handed me that little green jar filled with pills and my heart just sank. The summer that Kenzie had kidney stones (she was three), the daily administering of (liquid) meds was like the apocalypse in our house. But miraculously, this time around, we just hide the pill in a small bowl of wet food and she has taken every dose without blinking an eye.

2. I had a movie date tonight with some lovely Emma girls. We watched Notting Hill at Hilary's house and ate pizza. Delightful company, delightful film, I can ask for nothing more.

3. When I got home, Austin was about an hour through Scanners. I don't know anything about this movie, except it is apparently not the same thing as A Scanner Darkly. I'm hiding out in the bedroom while he finishes it, and I can report that the soundtrack is very Buck Rogers-esque.

4. When I was five I somehow saw part of an episode of Buck Rogers, where a man gets incinerated by a laser beam or something. He is standing there, and then SHAZAM there is a charred puddle on the floor where he was. This absolutely TERRIFIED me. Clearly, I'm scarred, if I can recall it in detail 27 years later. I think we were at Uncle Dennis's house.

5. Has this seemed like a long week to anyone else? I can't believe tomorrow is only Thursday.

6. This weekend is the Walden Artisan Market in East Nashville, on Eastland across from Rosepepper. Last month it was a blast, lots of neat stuff from local craftspeople. The weather promises to be absolutely glorious (if a little hot, but I'm not complaining) so you can bet there will be a good crowd at the market. Come check it out! Some especially talented folks will be there (oh, you know, my sister Jenny and her husband Patrick. And Badness. And Carolyn. And Caitlin). Don't miss it!

7. I collect vintage slips and lingerie. Did you know that? I would estimate I have at least 100 slips. This weekend I sorted them into two of those big long tupperwares that go under the bed. All the practical ones that can actually be worn underneath dresses or shirts went in one, and the dressup ones went in the other. It inspired me to actually get them out and wear them more often, so the last few nights I've hung around the house in pretty silkies instead of scrubs. Just a little way to feel fancier (and Austin sure doesn't mind that I'm not wallowing in shlubby).

8. Mischa is so damn cute. She just hands out High Fives like they're free. She warms my heart.

9. I read this article today with a great deal of interest. Making your own cream cheese! What?! That seems outrageous to me. But I think homemade granola is in my immediate future, and homemade bagels are on the horizon. God I wish Nashville had some really good bagels. It's a bagel wasteland, I tell you, starting with the demise of Nashville Bagel on West End. Dad used to come home with bags of day-old salt and cinnamon raisin bagels, we'd eat them for weeks.

10. At least once every few hours, I get distracted just looking at the ring on my left hand. It couldn't possibly be any prettier. I look at it and think how lucky I am, and I can't believe anyone loves me this much.

I did it!

2009-04-21T22:25:00.003-05:00

I invented a recipe! This was cobbled together from typing "chipotle chile slaw" into Epicurious. It came back with about thirty recipes; I pulled ideas from about four of them. I was mostly inspired by the chipotle mayonnaise we make with the Baja fish tacos from the Cook's Illustrated 30 Minute Recipe book. It's YUMmy.

Slaw with Chipotle and Cilantro

1/2 of a small head red cabbage
1/2 of a small head green cabbage

Slice the cabbage very thin (I did it by hand but you could certainly use a food processor). Place shredded cabbage in colander in the sink and toss with about two tablespoons of salt. Let the cabbage wilt for about an hour. Rinse cabbage thoroughly and drain (a salad spinner works great).

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together:

1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup sour cream
1/2 bunch of cilantro, washed and chopped
3 T. freshly-squeezed lime juice
3 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, chopped fine
1/2 teaspoon of some of the adobo sauce in the jar with the peppers
2 T. honey
1 T. apple cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoon cumin
salt and pepper

When the sauce is combined, add the well-drained cabbage and toss until evenly coated.

We served this Mexican-inspired slaw with ground beef tacos and a package of Mexican rice. I'd like to also try it with simple blackened salmon. ¡Muy delicioso!

post 120, how bout that?

2009-04-21T17:16:00.003-05:00

Some sweetness from the laziest weekend

lapse

2009-04-20T16:46:00.003-05:00

Today, I'm opting to go home early and take a nap rather than post a lengthy blog. Shame on me.

This made me really happy today.

And if you're looking for some goodies tonight, come on over to the Mercy Lounge. Part 2 in the Send Some Band to Bonnaroo series of 8 off 8th shows... come see all eight acts and vote one of them into a slot at the Manchester Mudfest. Why do I care? Oh, How I Became the Bomb is playing. Don't you want to force J. Burr to slog through the hordes of hippies and rave dancers? I think that would be hilarious. Lots of other great bands on the bill tonight: Autovaughn, Pico and the Island Trees, K.S.Rhoads, four more. Details here.

Now you see why I need a nap? Plus it's free! Whoop!

Oh, and to be fair, of course I would go to Bonnaroo. If it was free. I did once before, and wasn't even motivated by BRUCE Springsteen that time! Gah! The Boss!

I realize I'm not much of a food blogger...

2009-04-19T21:41:00.003-05:00

...because I never post recipes. I cook from other people's (copyrighted) recipes so much, it's not right to share them, right? Hmm. Maybe later this month I'll find something I invented (or tweaked enough to make it my own) and throw it on the ole blog. Tonight I'm too wiped out from the kitchenstravaganza of this afternoon and evening.

First up: Coconut Cream Tart. A quick shortbread crust, a coconut custard filling, toasted coconut layered between and sweetened whipped cream on top. It's chilling now, I'll report back after the first slice.

The tart left me with three egg whites so I also tossed together a batch of chocolate chip meringues. Easy enough. I had all the other ingredients on hand (including mini-semisweet chips, oddly enough). My coworkers can expect the bounty to be shared tomorrow.

Dinner was a new recipe I pulled out of the "Good for You" page of a recent Cooking Pleasures magazine (which is the same place we found the Sicilian Pasta recipe, so I was optimistic): Orange Chicken with Quinoa and Carrots (or something like that). Chicken thighs browned in olive oil, then onion, garlic, quinoa, shredded carrots, raisins, orange zest, paprika, s&p, all stirred in until they start to get soft. Covered with broth and orange juice, brought to a boil, then shoved in the oven for 45 minutes until the quinoa soaks up all the liquid. After it was out of the oven, we stirred in flat-leaf parsley and chopped green olives. Served in big bowls with more of those awesome honey-roasted carrots.

Austin was concerned about the dish not having enough flavor, so he made a sauce of sriracha, sesame oil, rice vinegar and honey. I drizzled a bit on mine (he probably used more) and it was a very wise choice. I'm guessing this was something of a northern-African inspired dish? Definitely our first attempt at quinoa, and I liked it very much. I like the snap and texture. I think the meal would have been much, much better sans chicken. I don't care for thigh meat (and couldn't find boneless thighs meat, so spent a lot of time cleaning and de-boning those suckers) and the chicken didn't absorb much of the seasonings. But all put together, with the sweet and spicy carrots and sauce, it was a pretty satisfying meal. I'll keep trying different things with quinoa (maybe try to recreate the amazing quinoa tacos from Teresa the Taco Lady!).

Other than the cooking efforts (which really only started at like 5:30) it was a lovely and lazy day. We had leftovers for lunch and watched the third Bourne movie, which was fine if rather exhausting. So many chase sequences, so many fight scenes, it runs together. It's super rainy in Nashville today, so the dogs all hung out inside most of the time and we had some good family time.

Oh, and last night's undetermined dinner destination turned out to be Eastland Cafe, and apparently J.Burr's celebrity status is such that we got an entire patio all to ourselves for the whole meal. Delightful. We got an awesome appetizer (goat cheese brulee with local honey, roasted tomatoes and peppers and grilled flatbread) and I had a couple of absolutely swoon-worthy cocktails. The first was called the Three Rs, basically a rhubarb lemonade with rosemary syrup and rum. YUM. It was a tiny bit strong at first but as the ice melted became completely delicious. Then after the meal I ordered a Spicy and Sweet, which was muddled strawberries and a jalapeno slice in cava. So good. I just got a goat cheese salad (what, more goat cheese? who, me?) and mashed potatoes and fried green tomatoes for dinner, and Austin got a really delicious pork tenderloin. Jon had ricotta pasta, which was very good, and Ali also had side dishes: macaroni and cheese, roasted brussels sprouts and an iceberg wedge with blue cheese and Benton's (!) bacon. We couldn't NOT order blueberry beignets for dessert. Really a treat of a meal. Then we came back to the house and played another entirely lopsided game of Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture. Note to self: in the future, we're not playing Boys against Girls when one of the categories is Sports. Boo.

Kenzie has spent all day hanging out on my dressing table, which has to be an improvement over hiding under the bed. She stands up when we come into the room, and purrs when she's petted. All good signs. She's also taken three drama-free doses of antibiotic, and we head back to the vet at 8 am tomorrow to get those tubes removed and get her on the road to recovery. Whew!

Austin has just left the television on Spike TV: Zombie Strippers. I think I'd better recruit him for kitchen cleanup and some coconut tart before bed.

pre-date postings

2009-04-18T19:12:00.003-05:00

Rather than risk skipping another day of the blogs, I'm going to throw this one up here before we leave for dinner (location yet to be determined). I'm wearing a fun new green sundress and feeling rather cute, even if I kind of think this dress makes an exaggerated bulge out of my tummy. Austin swears no. My hair looks good, anyway.

I spent the majority of the morning and afternoon on Myspace, of all places, exporting all my old blog posts to my desktop (using that Print Preview: Save as PDF trick). I had forgotten that I spent most of 2005 only posting dumb internet surveys instead of actual written blogs, which is pretty obnoxious. I indulge occasionally in the list-format surveys on here or on Facebook, but back then it was 15 postings in a row. It is no wonder that my dedicated readership at the time consisted of two: Austin and Agnes, who were both completely obligated to read. Sorry to both of you, four years later. Would it be annoying to make a blogspot page for these old blogs, so that non-Myspace users could peruse them? I haven't decided yet.

Before I forget, Kenzie is doing ok today. She ate an entire can of wet food last night and again this morning, so her appetite is back, which is a huge relief. We even attempted the trick of hiding her antibiotic pill in her food this morning, expecting a total fail, and it worked! Shocking. So far so good. She's still camped out behind the bed, except for two random (mysteriously motivated) wanderings down the hallway into the bathroom (maybe the tile feels cool to her?). This involved a lot of complaining. Nothing new there. I wish I could keep her under closer observation, but I know she feels safer behind the bed, and I'm glad for the separation that keeps her pretty much unbothered by the rest of the menagerie.

As Mom pointed out, I was due for a third crisis this week (1. slashed tire 2. Kenzie vet drama), so I tried to cut the tip of my left middle finger off last night. It turned out to just be a rather painful, fingernail-invading slice, but nothing life-threatening. I was chopping an onion lazily, with a dull knife, so that's what I get. I need to get my chef's knife sharpened, but don't want to be without it for a day. If you're keeping score, that does mean we had Skillet Chicken Pot Pie last night, so delicious. And watched the Bourne Supremacy, which wasn't nearly as good as the first. I usually love Joan Allen (especially in Pleasantville, swoon) but didn't buy her for a minute in this film. And the Russian assassin's apparently psychic ability to find Bourne in any crowded metropolis was not exactly thrilling. He's just a dude who wears black all the time, how much could he possible stand out? Unimpressive. We'll still watch the third one tomorrow, Austin has it stashed on the DVR.

I guess it's dinnertime. We'll see if we end up eating Mexican food on a patio (which is definitely what the Boo wants) or driving to Joelton for catfish (definitely what I want). This will be a matter of filibustering until our co-diners (Jon and Ali) take a stand. Possible compromises: Sky Blue Bistro or Eastland Cafe, both places I like to eat that also offer porch seating. Bon Saturday!

Kenzerelli, that's what they call her.

2009-04-17T18:24:00.005-05:00

**fair warning... slightly gruesome veterinary details to follow**

Kenzie and I had a not-great day. I took her to the vet this afternoon, after she hadn't moved from under our bed or eaten for three or four days. She's not exactly a trooper about being transported anywhere, and especially not anywhere that results in her getting pinned down to a metal table while a strange man pokes and prods her. It turns out she's had an abscess in her rear-end area, possibly for quite some time, and it's rather large now. Poor kiddo. The dr. sedated her, drained the abscess and inserted a drainage tube. They waited until she woke up and handed her back off to me.

I was pretty scared and upset the whole time, but once we got home and she came out of her kitty carrier covered in blood and looking like an effed-up science experiment, I totally fell apart. Her hip is shaved and she has rubber tubing hanging out in two directions. She is NOT pleased about any of the tubing/suture situation. She's been fiendishly bathing herself, and a moment ago I caught her tugging at the tube with her teeth. It's going to be a long weekend.

Really, it could have all been much worse, I know. She's twelve, and her half-brother (my beloved Boogie) dropped dead of a mysterious "sizeable mass" three years ago (and took a big chunk of my heart with him). She's been rather foul-tempered since her feral kittenhood, and it's hard to say if maybe she's been sick for years and we just chalked it up to being calico-ish. I spent the last 24 hours consumed with dread for a disease diagnosis that would involve dozens of expensive treatments that would add up to her as torture. A treatable abscess, a diagnosis of "She's going to be hurtin' for a little while," accompanied with a disconcerting wink, really, it's almost best case scenario. But I'm still feeling pretty volatile, and think I'd better go start dinner and lose myself in the next Bourne movie before I spend the rest of the night having fearful crying jags.

{The picture above is the first shot of Kenzie taken in our new house. She acclimated astonishingly well and was hanging out with me on the new couch within a few hours of the moving crew leaving. I took this picture with the built-in laptop camera, just to show how cool she was being (while my boys, who I would ordinarily think of as being much braver than Kenzie, were still hunkered down in closet corners, freaking out). I wish we had the scanner hooked up so I could post a picture of Mackenzie as a kitten, because she was absolutely the cutest damn thing, with a pansy face and so much trouble.}

coming down off my expectations

2009-04-16T22:57:00.003-05:00

Tonight I declined to watch 30 Rock with Austin and instead settled in bed with the laptop and visions of blog topics dancing in my head. And instead of composing the manifesto I've been manifesting all day, I caught up on my Reader. Google Reader is the biggest timesucking timesaver ever. Sure, it's better than methodically checking every single one of my bookmarks every day, like I used to. Now I know when my favorite sites are updated, and they're all listed in one handy place. But that handiness and availability makes me a little too subscribe-happy. I recently unsubscribed from Weddingbee, from the Twilight lexicon (what?) and from the East Nashville listserv. Among those three sites I would estimate 150 new posts daily. And sure, it's easy enough to scroll through them quickly and scan for pertinent topics. I won't say I didn't occasionally just click "Mark all as read," and not even lose sleep over it. But I don't even miss any of them now, after a few weeks of going without.

Maybe I don't need to know all the details from the White House blog. Cakewrecks is occasionally too prolific to keep up with. Bites has been very post-heavy the last few months, but it's all very topical to my interests and lifestyle. This month's blog challenge has added another 20 or so to my daily check-in, but they're sure entertaining and make me love my coworkers even more. Wedding blogs are really starting to stack up, though. There has to be a cutoff point, I can't keep inundating myself with so many brilliant ideas every day. Our wedding is only going to happen once, and will only be a maximum of 5 hours (plus related activities, but still...). There is no way I'm going to cram every scrap-paper cupcake flag and multicolored macaron into our Big Day. I'm not even going to try.

What's my point? Keeping up with my Reader is rather time-consuming, and probably prevents me from doing more in depth writing of my own. But I love my daily dose of LOLcats and Zooborns and Married to the Sea (who only recently added a RSS feed, thanks Drew and Natalie!). And somehow I managed to make a blog post about reading too many blogs, that's so meta!

Two things I can talk about tomorrow: Emily's surprise shower/chocolate tasting tonight (so much fun) and Mackenzie is sick (filled with worries). And how weird is it that tomorrow is already Friday?

the art of being flexible

2009-04-15T19:21:00.003-05:00

I'm not always the best person at changing The Plan midstream. It's ok, I'm fine with my own borderline OCD-ness. It is the difference between kid Delaney, who used to lose her homework every day, and adult Delaney, who loves filing things. If it takes a near-disorder to help me keep my life straight, that's the way I prefer it.

So I make lists. And schedules. And sometimes I relish in ignoring them (see: yardwork plans for last weekend). But mostly, I have expectations for what the day will bring, the week, the vacation, the renovation, etc. And when Things don't go according to that plan, sometimes it takes me some time to adjust. Sometimes it's as easy as saying, "Ok, no biggie, we'll do lunch next week," and going and picking up a sandwich. Sometimes I have to write everything down and look at the big picture and rearrange some post-its and say, "Alright, so we'll switch the night we're making soup so we can meet Emily and Neil at Trivia Night, but this will only work if you drive and we leave my car at Casey's." Sometimes it's a big change, something I wasn't prepared for, and it can take me months, even years, to get past the regret, that tiny pang that something isn't quite right, and it hurts a bit when I remember what that something is.

But tonight is just a little tipover. I was leaving work a bit late, heading home to start dinner (skillet chicken pot pie). Austin was at a meeting in Cool Springs (horrors!) and I was hoping to try to time everything right so dinner was ready when he got home. But as I was pulling out of the Emma parking lot, my car was making a horrible noise and dragging to the right. I pulled right over and inspected the damage: a very flat tire. I know this is no big deal. But truthfully, I don't know if I've ever had one. Definitely not since I've had this car (almost four years) and probably not since college.

I ran through my options, pleased that my first instinct was not panic. I tried to remember what kinds of roadside assistance we still subscribe to (at one point I think I was covered under three different plans). I considered how long it could be before Austin's undetermined meeting conclusion, and if he could be any help to me. I wondered for a moment where Dad was. And then I came to my senses, backed up, and parked the car in front of Emma. And waved down the next coworker to leave the building, and lucky for me it was Chris Wood. First he waved back at me cheerfully, then realized that I was beckoning and pulled his truck around. We proceeded to unpack the spare tire out of the back of my car (I repeat, this has never been done before) and try to figure out the jack. Some of the fellows from the contractor crew who are working on Emma's third floor stopped to offer advice. Then Chris Nelson, aka Carlos Contusion, came out to help as well.

We got that tire changed (I say "we," ha!) in no time, with no drama. And I just kept thinking, over and over, my coworkers are my family now. If we had ended up living in California instead of Tennessee, I would have been able to call the Pros from Dover any time I had car trouble. As it was, I always called my dad. But now I have this vast group of reliable, brilliant, kind and helpful folks that I'm surrounded by every day, and they've become my support system. In so many different ways. It's not like there aren't bad days at Emma. But there are just good people. As I do at some point every day, I thought, "How lucky am I?"

I figured driving home on a donut tire was unnecessary, so I hightailed it to the other family, my FIRST family, and hung out at Casey and Trent's house while Austin finished up his meeting and headed back from the evilburbs. We can just leave it at Carmax overnight. Now I'm rethinking the plan for tonight and the rest of the week. By the time we get home tonight it will be too late to start dinner. We can make chicken pot pie on Friday. Maybe tonight we can go to PM and have crab wontons and sushi bites. I can be flexible with my food scheduling.

Domestic Goddess, speaking

2009-04-14T23:17:00.003-05:00

Housework I enjoy doing:

Unloading the dishwasher
Folding laundry
Unpacking after a trip
Dusting
Straightening/putting things where they belong
Making the bed

Housework I really just don't mind:

Sweeping
Sorting and starting laundry
Washing dishes/loading dishwasher
Scrubbing the bathroom
Taking out the trash and/or recycling

Housework I simply despise:

Mowing the lawn
Vacuuming
Cleaning the catboxes
(Austin says to put "Showering" here. Which is accurate, if not entirely topical.)

If there was a category between "Don't really mind" and "Despise," I'd put Mopping there. I generally avoid it. I would say there is literally anything I would rather do than mow. I spent my entire adolescence trading my sisters every chore in the book to get out of having to mow. I don't really mind the rest of gardening, once I get out there and get my hands in it, but I generally procrastinate the act of just getting all the tools together and going outside.

Now, sauteing, chopping, trimming, toasting, shredding, folding, mixing, melting? Sure thing. Anytime.

lack of inspiration

2009-04-13T22:05:00.003-05:00

I wish I had something really crackerjack to say tonight. I don't. I'm wondering how I'm even going to make it to bed, or manage to get my face washed before that, or get the dishes cleaned, or even get the remnants of tonight's dinner packed up and put away. Right now, I'm not positive that I'll ever get over the onslaught of Full by which I'm currently buried.

It was a simple meal. Sicilian pasta, one of our very favorite dishes, a puttanesca-type sauce with crushed tomatoes, zucchini cut into thick matchsticks, onion, garlic, basil and chopped Kalamata olives. The recipe calls for fettuccine, but we use penne. Served up with a side salad (just lettuce and dressing) and Texas garlic toast, it's pretty much a perfect meal.

But then we also had to eat some cake. Pineapple upside-down cake, still slightly warm. It is a rare occasion for me to get home before Austin (since we ride together almost every day), rarer still to have a couple of hours to kill while he works late. So I baked a cake. I imagine we'll save some for ourselves, and I'll present the rest to the book club girls tomorrow night, along with the requested deviled eggs and potato salad.

Right now, I guess we'd better get the food put away, before Charlie Murphy does for us (he already made off with one penne noodle). I hope everyone has pineapple-sweet dreams.

the paranoia, it drives me

2009-04-12T22:08:00.004-05:00

We did indeed make it to the Farmer's Market yesterday, where I got to meet the owner of B&C BBQ (aka Bacon and Caviar, the frontrunner for wedding catering). He was super cool, and the preliminary conversation made me feel good about that option for later. Still no word on the legality of having our boozy wedding at the Market, but I am optimistic and think we'll hear something soon. I had bbq pulled pork (with white sauce) and mac & cheese, both delicious. As we were walking out, there was a kettle corn stand where they were pulling hot caramel corn out of the popper. Ding ding! I walked away with a still-warm bag, and then skidded to a halt on the first bite. I've avoided caramel popcorn most of my life, because I'm usually disappointed by it. I realized, with that warm explosion of sweet and salty, that I'm always disappointed because my first impression of caramel popcorn was freshly popped on the wharf in Monterey, and it's never that good. Never. But yesterday, it was almost perfect. Austin said, "You want to have that at the wedding now, don't you?" and I just smiled and nodded, with my mouth full.

I was mostly lazy the rest of the afternoon, sticking around to the house to greet the fellow from the pest control company, coming to spray (botanically, organically) for mosquitos, and powder the crawl spaces upstairs for wasps. The pest technician turned out to be a former high school classmate, so that was a little weird. But I'm glad to get that taken care of before the weather gets warm; our backyard and kitchen were mosquito farms during our painting sessions in September.

Then I headed to the roller derby bout, which was a bloody blur. Bloody for the New Orleans Big Easy. Final score: Nashville Rollergirls, 211; Big Easy 34. Ouch! It was almost hard to watch, but not really. I can't say I wasn't chuckling and hollering along with everyone else while our girls skated their asses off. Loads of fun.

After that I went to the Five Spot for Claire and Sara's birthday party. Showing up there sober was probably a mistake. Most of the attendees had apparently shared a pre-party and were making a lot of nonsensical racket. Luckily there was a vast snack bar, and good conversation to be had with some lovely friends. I also managed to get my boogie on for a few songs. I bailed out after midnight and had to perform my favorite routine of peeling off my smoke-soaked clothes, ditching them straight into the washing machine and climbing directly into the shower. Sigh.

You might be wondering why I was doing all of these activities solo. Where was Austin? Oh, Austin spent about 10 hours on Saturday playing a Battlestar Galactica card game with J.Burr et al. Please, feel free to mock him mercilessly for this foray into outright nerdiness. It's kept me busy all day today. I don't mean to imply that he didn't come to the roller derby; he did, like a dutiful statsgeek, but he went straight back to Jon's house as soon as the bout was over and made it home around one a.m.

Today was quiet but productive. We got Mitchell's for lunch (god how lucky are we that the best deli in Nashville is a half mile from our house?) and Austin mowed the lawn. I got new stuffed dog toys while I was at the grocery store, and Digby and Mischa were so happy and hilarious about them. They always wreck their new toys within the first 24 hours, but the abject joy we get on the big reveal is totally worth the waste of $4 worth of textiles. I know that's not very ecologically sound. I am providing a video to help you judge me less. We got the house straighted up, the laundry done, and made amazing pizza for dinner: asparagus and potato with goat cheese and andouille sausage. So delicious.

We watched The Bourne Identity while we ate our pizza. I'd never seen any of the Bourne movies, and was really enthralled. I'm such a sucker for action thrillers! Particularly with Clive Owen! Swoon! We've had this movie from Netflix since January; if I'd known my boyfriend Clive was in it, I would have probably taken the time to watch it sooner. Now I'm ready to watch the next two, as soon as possible. Very entertaining.

What didn't I do this weekend? Oh, read Watchmen. I'm a book club flunky. We're meeting at Megan's house Tuesday and it sounds like a healthy portion of attendees have actually read the damned thing, but I'm never going to make it. I don't like reading it before bed, it makes my dreams weird. So that just leaves lunches at work for reading, and I didn't do much catching up last week. Oh well. I'm usually pretty good about reading the book club book; this is just going to have to be a fail.

first fail

2009-04-11T10:57:00.003-05:00

Here's what happens when we have a lovely dinner date with the Talleys, and then we all come back here and Austin and Brad watch Mighty Boosh videos and Anna and I gab about wedding ideas: I forgot to blog. Damn. Very disappointed in self.

I did the abs and butt pilates workouts Thursday morning, and have been so sore since then that I'm hobbling around like a cripple. I swear I've forgotten how to walk normally. I thought it would be smart to go to the gym after work yesterday, just to stretch my muscles and warm things up. I walked on the treadmill for a half hour, and am still just as sore. So my solution was to sleep for 12 hours last night, and I must have slept crooked because now I can't raise my left arm above shoulder heighth without a pinching pain that runs from elbow to jaw. This is it. I'm getting old. I'm in my early 30s and my body is betraying me.

Now, really, that's not true. My body is only reacting to the utter sloth and gluttony that I indulge in on a daily basis. I grew up thin. I come from a thin family. I have a fast metabolism, and for the first 25 years of my life, I could eat whatever I wanted, never get any physical exercise, and still never consider my weight or body fat. You guys can throw tomatoes at me; I know this isn't exactly something to complain about. Being thin is considered to be something anyone can comment on. I don't really miss being told, "You're too skinny... you're so thin..." all the time. As if anyone would say something if the opposite was true!

Since Austin and I have been together, and I'm creeping through my late 20s and early 30s, my metabolism is certainly slowing. It was a gradual process, and one that I was in denial about for a very long time. But the truth is, I'm packing on the pounds, adult pounds, ones that are not easy to shed. Fifty of them, to be exact. I think I've gained almost exactly fifty pounds since I met Austin in January of 2004. To look at it that way, like a total amount of body weight, is horrifying. That means I added an additional 30% of myself. In five years. I wouldn't say I was necessarily at my ideal weight five years ago (I was still in single-girl fight-or-flight mode), but I don't recognize myself in photographs now, and I know it's gone too far.

And I know it's obnoxiously obvious to want to lose weight for the wedding. But I have a red and cream flowered strapless dress that I wore for a few special dates in the first year we were together, and I really want to wear it to our rehearsal dinner. So I've got some serious work cut out for me. I'm trying to establish a regular exercise routine, and for an absolute beginner, it's a climb. I'll work out regularly for two weeks and then drop off for two months. If a specific goal of a wedding (and the hundreds of photographs that I want to treasure for eternity) is what it takes, at least I have probably the strongest motivator that I've ever had to lose weight.

The other side of this is obviously diet. And you all know this is not an easy adjustment for me. I think about food all the time. It is a huge factor in my happiness, and also certainly my hobby. I follow my cravings religiously. Denying myself is not my style. I'm not going to go on a crash diet. We tried the master cleanse last summer and it was a no-holds-barred disaster. Not for me. All I can promise to do is eat LESS of the bad things, and more of the good things, and try to maintain a balance. I cleared all the garbage foods out of my snack drawer at work. I'm making a point to cook with fish one night a week. I do crave salads, and I'm trying to put less unhealthy-but-tasty accoutrements on those salads (ok, not every salad needs an ounce of goat cheese). It's a number of small adjustments, but hopefully it will help me keep up the motivation on the exercise front, and all balance out.

Now I'm going to drag my crippled body to the Farmer's Market for lunch, and then rest up for the Roller Derby tonight! Good luck, All-Stars!

Happy Nashville Sounds Opening Day

2009-04-09T23:22:00.003-05:00

This must be the sportiest two weeks of my life:

Wednesday April 1: World Cup qualifier soccer game
Thursday April 2: Bowling with Emma peeps
Tuesday April 7: Predators hockey
Thursday April 9: Nashville Sounds baseball opening day
Saturday April 11: Nashville Rollergirls vs. New Orleans Big Easy

Plus we've played spades almost every night before bed. Not to mention this all comes after surviving the maelstrom of activity that is the NCAA men's college basketball tournament when you share a home with Austin Gray.

Sporty McSporterson. That's me. I hardly recognize myself.

Photo Wednesday

2009-04-08T21:31:00.041-05:00

Sandy Drive: Springtime

Happy Soccer Fans: Go USA!

Our view of the pitch: not too shabby!

Our co-attendees: Quite silly.

Thinking outside the vase: Lawn flowers in a failed butter keep (thanks, J!).

Tonight's Dinner: Foil Packet Tilapia with dill, honey tangerines, lemongrass and shallots with brown rice and honey-roasted carrots. Amazing!

I'm going to the hockey game. Please enjoy this survey in my absence.

2009-04-07T15:52:00.004-05:00

1. Who was your FIRST prom date? First and only: Scotty Hooper, after many months of scheming.

2. Do you still talk to your FIRST love? I guess that depends on who we're talking about. I'm going to say probably not.

4. What was your FIRST job? Writing peoples' names on Christmas stockings with Elmer's Glue and glitter at Hickory Hollow Mall, December 1993.

5. What was your FIRST car? 1988 Nissan Maxima Station Wagon: Imogene, the Cruisin' Machine

6. Who was the FIRST person to text you today? I haven't gotten any texts today.

7. Who is the FIRST person you thought of this morning? Probably Austin? I don't remember thinking about anything when I woke up. Just dismay.

8. Who was your FIRST grade teacher? Mrs. Johnson. She is the teacher who informed my parents that I seemed bored because I was eating my crayons, and recommended I be placed in second grade. And I was.

9. Where did you go on your FIRST ride on an airplane? Nashville, TN. Our parents had already moved out here the month before, my sisters and I stayed with our grandmother while Mom and Dad got us settled. Then we flew out to see our new home.

10. Who was your FIRST best friend & do you still talk? This question prompted me to search for Talora Gross on Facebook, because I haven't thought of her in years, and haven't spoken to her in much, much longer.

11. Where was your FIRST sleepover? I'm going to guess Aunt Dorothea's.

12. Who was the FIRST person you talked to today? The Boo. Assuming that Mischa doesn't count.

13. Whose wedding were you in the FIRST time? Cousin Elisa's.

14. What was the FIRST thing you did this morning? Groaned.

15. What was the FIRST concert you ever went to? Pearl Jam on the Vs. tour, Murphy Center, March 1994.

16. What was the FIRST vinyl record you ever bought? I don't remember ever BUYING a vinyl record, until I got that fancy Radiohead one for Austin. But I think the first one that was bought for me was Michael Jackson's Thriller. Unless you count the little Mattel ones that were storybooks. We had Ewok Adventure and Alice in Wonderland.

17. What was the FIRST cassette you ever bought? Possibly Debbie Gibson's Out of the Blue

18. What was the FIRST CD you ever bought? Garth Brooks, the one that was Black and White. That might be the name of the album, can't remember.

19. What was the FIRST mp3 you ever downloaded? Probably something from the Hitmaker!

20. Who was the FIRST famous person you ever met? Vince Gill, at a Belmont Basketball game.

21. FIRST tattoo? Still zero.

22. FIRST piercing? Ears, when I turned thirteen.

23. FIRST foreign country you went to? Jamaica, mon.

24. FIRST movie you remember seeing? Mary Poppins, on the Disney Sunday Movie.

25. When was your FIRST detention? In seventh grade, on a field trip, some classmates and I crossed the street to eat at Dairy Queen. We all got in school suspension.

26. What was the FIRST state you lived in? California.

27. Who was your FIRST roommate? A girl named Mandy? Jessica? Something like that. She was from Kentucky and went home every weekend.

28. Where did you purchase your FIRST home? Inglewood!

29. Where was your FIRST child born? Nowhere. Never.

30. Who was your FIRST kiss? Again, Scotty Hooper. I hope he doesn't ever google himself.

31. What was the name of your FIRST elementary school? Ashland City Elementary School (ACES!).

minor rant

2009-04-06T22:26:00.003-05:00

I've threatened to address this topic for years. But the magazine industry, in addition to being nearly obsolete, is an enormous racket. Subscription cards are a horrifying waste of paper and trash, for one thing. Even (maybe even especially) magazines that spend a great deal of their pages on eco-wellness and conservation can be tipped upside down to an avalanche of the familiar white rectangular cards. How many subscriptions do those things sell? I would guess less than one for every fifty magazines that are purchased. So what is the logic to putting FIFTEEN of the damn cards per magazine? Wasteful, annoying. If you'd like to hear a gross detail, ask me what I do with them. It's kind of like freecycling, but involves cat litter.

Additionally, the magazine renewal process is the opposite of transparent. The only way to know when your subscription is actually expiring is to figure out the encoded date on your mailing label (and if you already opened your magazine, most of which are encased in plastic now, you already threw away that label). Otherwise, the only gauge you have for the timing of your expiration is the CONSTANT letters you get encouraging you to Act Now! Lock Down This Special Introductory Price! You're Qualified for Professional Industry Pricing! I just received a subscription to a well-living magazine last month as a gift from my Aunt, and TODAY I received a "Renew Now and Save" letter in the mail. The amount of paper this industry wastes in pointless advertising (not to mention the actual printing of the publication, which rarely gets kept or reused) is astonishing.

And even if I was an absolute sucker, and I went ahead and mailed this company a check to renew at the special low price of $10 annual, it is never made clear as to whether that payment would add an additional year to my current (prepaid) subscription, or if I'm just paid up for the upcoming 12 months. I'm going to get those damned renewal notices no matter if I'm paid up for the next decade or not. How would anyone who didn't keep pristine payment records AND maintain a constant conversation with magazine customer service ever know? I'm pretty certain that, over the last fourteen years of subscribing to Martha Stewart Weddings, I have paid for at least eighteen years worth of service. Sure, at $16/year (as long as I can remember), it's not like this is breaking me. I am extremely loyal to this magazine, I have saved every single issue, and I read every single page. $16 is completely reasonable for that amount of value, and I will always pay them as soon as I get an invoice rather than risk missing an issue (and, admittedly, when I *did* miss an issue last fall after we moved, MSW replaced it immediately, no questions asked).

But this leads me to my last topic: I have worked for a magazine, and elsewhere in the journalism industry. I know that the only thing that keeps these publications' doors open is advertising revenue. The operating expenses for any magazine are paid ENTIRELY BY THEIR ADVERTISERS. If you are purchasing a glossy filled with cosmetic, automobile and entertainment ads, you just gave that publisher an extra $3-4 that they didn't earn. They should be paying YOU to read their magazine and support their advertisers! The fact that these publications still attempt to add to their profit margin by assigning (occasionally outlandish) dollar values to the service of placing their magazine on a newsstand or in your mailbox is astonishing.

We have subscribed to a major weekly entertainment rag for most of the years that Austin and I have been dating. One year we got it for free because my subscription to Premiere magazine was transferred to an EW subscription when Premiere met an untimely demise (RIP). After that, we got an obnoxiously high renewal notice and canceled. Then a few months later got a ridiculously low "new subscriber" offer, and signed back up again. This has gone on for years now. Last year, my 2-year subscription was running out, and I got a nondescript card in the mail that told me, in unreadably fine print, that the card I'd used to pay for the original contract was going to be charged $46 unless I contacted them in writing to cancel in the next 14 days. I did so and received confirmation of cancellation. The SAME WEEK, Austin got a "subscribe now and save!" card inviting him to take advantage of the special low price of $19 for two years. A $27 difference in prices for the same plan?! Outrageous.

I love magazines. Especially cooking magazines. I cut most of the garbage mags out of my life (I used to religiously subscribe to Glamour, Cosmopolitan, In Style, Mademoiselle, US, Elle and Allure). I stopped taking Food & Wine when I realized I was only cutting one or two recipes out of every issue. Now I get Entertainment Weekly, MSW, Bon Appetit, Everyday Food (which I'm not planning on renewing) and Real Simple. The only ones that I always read cover to cover are MSW and Bon Appetit. Would I be more likely to read the other magazines if they were free? Probably not. Do I look at all of those magazines' websites regularly? I do. Is it clear that the days of the slick glossy publication are numbered? I think so, although it will make me sad when I'm no longer adding to my neatly ordered shelf of Weddings magazines once a quarter.

Just like in the music business, the magazine industry's total refusal to overhaul their subscription system from the outdated service that made them piles of money several decades ago is, most likely, its death march. Magazines that haven't put all of their content online, in an easily searchable format, will continue disappearing without a trace. I just wonder how many more years I'll find those damned cards under the bed or receive "urgent" notices in the mail before they've all just vanished.

insight in the moment

2009-04-05T23:17:00.003-05:00

Tonight, instead of working on the thoughtful, actual-topic blog I've been pondering all day today, about female friendships, maturity, personality and relationships, I played spades with my fiance for three hours.

Did I make the right decision? From here, the answer is obviously yes.

On a food note, we made one of our favorite dishes from the Cook's Illustrated 30 Minute Recipe book: Italian Sausages with Onions, Peppers and Potatoes. Because this isn't nearly enough of a health-food dish, we traditionally serve this in a bowl with cheddar cheese grits (Alton Brown's recipe). Tonight, inspired by the shrimp and grits at Rumours, I made a balsamic reduction to pour over everything. It was syrupy and sweet (and made it hard to breathe in my kitchen while reducing). Delicious! Served with a little salad with that favorite wasabi-bleu cheese dressing. And chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

So that's fair warning, coworkers: chocolate chip cookies and cucumber sandwiches (aka leftover baby shower food) coming your way in the morning. Happy Monday!

fulfilling my godmotherly duties

2009-04-04T21:07:00.003-05:00

I'm shocked by how productive we ended up being today. So often, Saturday is the day of recovery, Sunday is when we get on the ball, and then on Monday morning I'm pining for *another* day of recovery. It works out better this way, with a flurry of errands and cleaning on this first day of the weekend, and an obligation-free Sunday. Well, tomorrow isn't exactly obligation free (brunch plans + baby shower) but certainly nothing demanding.

Today we lunched at Kien Gang, much to the abject joy of my future husband. That boy, he dearly loves his vermicelli #3. I'm still not 100% sold on Vietnamese food, or at least haven't found anything there I'm crazy about, but managed to do my own bowl of vermicelli justice. Then we stole some produce from the K&S Market (ok, we didn't steal anything. That's just how it feels, because that place is alarmingly cheap). I found a couple of gorgeous Asian pears that smell like perfume, and a handful of honey tangerines, and lemongrass for the tilapia we're cooking on Wednesday. We also stocked up on a vast variety of fruity sodas made with sugar instead of HFC: ginger beer, grapefruit and apple sodas. Then we made it back to the east side and finished our grocery shopping, drama free, at the Eastland Kroger. I'm so tired of leaving the Inglewood Kroger angry every week. It's worth it to me to drive the extra five minutes (or ten or twenty) to not be tempted to storm out of the store midway through my shopping list. It is my dearest hope that the wild rumors of a Wild Oats, Trader Joes or Publix coming to East Nashville will come to fruition soon.

When we got home we cleaned the house, including mopping the floors and shaking out the area rugs. Every week has felt like spring cleaning lately, but it's so, so, so worth it to wake up in a clean house that I don't mind walking around in my bare feet. We watched a favorite episode of Firefly, then threw together a delicious dinner: fried eggs and sage country sausage, a fruit salad (pineapple, cantaloupe and one of those honey tangerines) and fried plantains! This was our first foray into plantain (don't ask me why) and we were both thrilled with the result. Yes, this was a fry-heavy dinner, but somehow didn't feel too terrible for us. I only used a tablespoon of butter, which makes me feel better.

Now we're holed up in Leia and Richie's tv cave, doing the easiest babysitting job of all time (the boys were already asleep when we arrived). They have that fancy Netflix box where we can call up movies at will, so we're about to start Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which I've never seen. Austin swears I'll enjoy it. I do love the soundtrack, so that's a good start, right?

Movie time!

a silent house

2009-04-03T20:44:00.003-05:00

Today was, as expected, another experiment in chaos. Phones were finally restored at the office around nine, and emails didn't end up getting TOO backed up. But even as I'm typing this, I'm remembering two different things I didn't finish today that I completely lost out of my brain. Damn. Sometimes I thrive on crisis detail, and let adrenaline and busybody-ness kick up my productivity. But sometimes it's all just too much, and I literally forget important things that I was in the middle of working on. Luckily, my MacMail saves drafts even when I close the program. And I've got two unfinished emails that are going to go out tonight.

But that's ok. I'm tucked in on the couch with my red blanket across my lap and my puppy across my feet. Tonight we snuck out for sushi and I have big news: Samurai has sake now! A whole menu of nine different kinds. Mercy! In related news, I'm probably going to be asleep before ten. Right now I'm catching up on my Reader (so much additional activity with all the coworkers blogging!) and maybe I'll start on my astonishingly backlogged stack of magazines. I got the new MSW LAST FRIDAY and have only made it through the first few pages. Who am I becoming?! It's like I'm a stranger. To myself.

Honestly, everything else I've thought of to talk about can wait until later. Gotta save other topics for the next 26 days! Plus I just got so distracted by this video that I am just going to give up making any sense tonight. Instead I'll make a grocery list and be ready for a productive weekend that can at least partially be spent hiding out. Is April always this busy?

Any typos or grammatical errors tonight are sponsored by unfiltered sake.

sweatin' to the oldies

2009-04-02T22:48:00.003-05:00

After a chaotic day, I have one major pronoucement: I LOVE DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION. Or DDR, as the game regularly refers to itself. If I had this in my house, I would not be (quite so) out of shape. I'm currently researching my options for owning DDR for my very own. Maybe we can register for it?

Let's see, what else? Oh, right, we had crazy storms in Nashville today. I love storms except for when my dogs are outside by themselves. Then it mostly makes me sad. Austin got home before I did, where he found some very, very muddy animals. They're all high strung even now.

The storms knocked out the power at work today for a little while, and once it returned, we were sans phones and email for the rest of the day. This is quite crippling to productivity. The good news is, instead of laying around on the floor and playing I Spy in the downtime, I threw myself into some problem solving conversations with several of my genius coworkers, and am excited about some of the solutions that were uncovered. It's 11 pm now, and we still aren't getting emails or voicemails, so I'm a little terrified to come in tomorrow to the deluge. I am also feeling the pain of some of my systems coworkers, who will likely be awake all night trying to restore our internal office communications by the time our customers on the east coast are in their offices tomorrow morning.

Oh, and I went bowling, also with my coworkers (maybe they're my only friends) (just kidding). It was super fun. The bowling alley was the site of the DDR throwdown with Emily and coworker/non-sister Casey. All in all, it was a busy but good day.

Tomorrow I am working from home in the afternoon while Sears comes to repair our (very nice! dammit!) refrigerator for the THIRD TIME. It is looking likely that we are going to have to cash our warranty in and get a new one before the year is out. Very frustrating. Monday we took a 60 degree reading out of the fridge. Unacceptable. Also in the afternoon, the Personal Farmer gentleman from Gardens of Babylon is coming to give us a consultation on what and where to plant for our vegetable garden this summer. I'm super excited about this project and will hopefully have more details tomorrow.

Buenos noches!

challenging myself

2009-04-01T22:23:00.004-05:00

Recently I noticed that it had been a few weeks since Molly had updated her blog. I decided to hassle her about it, then realized a more productive approach might be a little friendly competition. I issued a blog challenge, for us to each post every day for the month of April (like NaBloPoMo, but less lonely). We both got so excited about the challenge that we opened it up to the rest of our coworkers. So now we're twenty-three strong, which is pretty awesome, and so far it looks like everyone is getting off to a crackerjack start!

Tonight I don't have anything in depth to contribute. We went to see the US Men's Soccer team compete in a World Cup qualifying match vs. Trinidad & Tobago, and it was super fun (especially with the final score: US triumphs 3-nil!). I ate a horrifyingly delicious pepperoni pizza from Papa Johns, and like a third of e.o'block's funnel cake (they smell better than they taste, I always forget). Now I'm trying to get caught up on my Reader. I'm going to have to unsubscribe from Weddingbee. It's wearing me out. Like a dozen posts a day, and I just can't keep up, and if I scroll too fast my Firefox locks up.

I'm excited about a month of daily writing practice. I'll make the standard advanced apologies that I certainly can't guarantee that I'm going to have anything *interesting* to say. But I need to work on this habit, of putting words to my daily life. My dad tells me, "Your blog's broken," when I haven't updated in six weeks. And by then, I have too much to say. So back at it, here I go, with no specific theme, although I'm likely to talk about wedding thoughts here and there, and mostly food otherwise.

Sweet dreams out there.

oh, and also...

2009-03-23T14:08:00.005-05:00

I should have mentioned this yesterday, but the oft-requested photo updates are available. I've got all the before-during-and-after shots of the house here, and finished up some fun stuff from 2008 here. I've also got a new gallery for 2009 here (including photographic proof of the Red Lobster adventure, and photos of the canister labels). Oh! And I also made an album just of food pictures. Look in there for some glamorous Cobb salad shots, and a not-very-appealing photo of the Much Vaunted Samoa Tart. Holy mother!

recipe for an excellent birthday

2009-03-22T10:37:00.003-05:00

1. Start by having a not-great week leading up to the Birthday. Have some kind of not-completely-sickness funk dragging you down. Take a sick day on Thursday to rest, and then don't feel any better the next morning. One good thing happens Thursday... presents arrive from Future MIL: Sleeping Beauty and Snow White special edition DVDs, plus some delicious snackies. Eat four lemon cake balls then take a nap.

2. Take your assigned birthday personal day on Friday. Sleep in and be lazy, eventually go to the new southern restaurant near your house (Southern Bred) with Jon Burr. Eat so much homemade cornbread and rolls that you can only take like four bites of (delicious) catfish. Run some shopping errands (the joys of antiquing with J.Burr!) and then go home and take another nap. Birthday week = naps galore!

3. When your fiance gets home and takes an envelope out of his pocket, snatch it away and open it. The contents: about a dozen individually designed blue and white labels for your dry goods canisters. Each is perfectly matched to the contents of the canister (Vanilla Sugar is lacy and feminine, All-Purpose Flour has a gingham backdrop and Bodoni Bold Italic typeface). Some labels have witty commentary: Wheat Noodles (What do we even use these for?), Dark Brown Sugar (Now with more molasses!). Try not to cry that you get to MARRY this incredibly talented man who thinks of the perfect thing that you didn't even know you wanted. (He also found you the first-ever issue of Martha Stewart Weddings on ebay, which apparently is missing from your collection).

4. Meet Suz and Bryan (coworker + husband who feel like old friends) at Watanabe for dinner. Sushi! Bibim bab for the boo! Witty conversation and a warm booth on an alarmingly cold and rainy night! Perfect. Climb in bed at 10:30 and only feel 40% guilty for bailing on the Bomb show (that guilty level will raise to 65% when you're told the next day that they had a special birthday dedication lined up for you. Hmm, maybe that's more like 85%).

5. Amble out of bed Saturday morning. Bake a German chocolate cake for Dad (setting aside one cake round for yourself) and a dozen deviled eggs for Patrick. Magically get it all together and still make it to Bombay Palace in time for lunch. Feast on vast amounts of yellow and orange sloppy foods and rices.

6. Head to Casey and Trent's for presents and cake. Unprecedented: you get EVERYTHING YOU ASKED FOR. A sewing machine (used, simple, still with manual, exactly as requested)! The Bride's Instructional Manual! A box of silly goodies from your mom, plus some much-needed cash monies. And the highlight: Grandma Jansen's recipe box. This part makes you cry. Pull it together then eat some cake (and yes, it's the best German chocolate cake you've ever made. A triumph. You'll get an email from your father a few days later with the subject line "HFSGCC," in which he suggests you are receiving a Lifetime Achievement Grammy for this cake, which he has eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner for three days straight).

7. Hustle over to the fairgrounds for the Nashville Rollergirls vs. the Tampa Tantrums. Back story: Tampa humiliated the Nashville girls in Tampa last year. Additionally, the first home bout of this season (a double header against Jacksonville and then Austin) was a total bloodbath (Nashville lost each game by over 100 points). The point: the Nashville girls are gunning for a victory. The conclusion: probably the best bout you've ever witnessed. World-class skating and a relatively close game the entire time. Scream yourself nearly hoarse by the time Rambo Sambo scores 21 points in a single jam. Bounce around the gym for a while, ripping with adrenaline and greeting all your friends who came out. Then head to the Melrose Pub for some delayed sandwiches and crowded, noisy conversation with your nearest and dearest. Bedtime by midnight: perfect.

8. Wake up shockingly full of energy for the first time in a week. Must be residual adrenaline from the bout. Clean up the house a bit and then head to Red Lobster at noon to meet Casey and Trent at the bar to watch Tennessee (lose) at basketball. Everyone else trickles in, and you all finally sit down for a seafood feast around 2. You order a pound and a half of snow crab legs and eat for an hour. Finish it off with chocolate wave cake and ice cream, and smuggle home an entire box of cheesy biscuits to share with Emma the next day.

9. Limp home after four hours at Red Lobster. What else could you do but take a nap?

10. Finalize birthday festivities on Tuesday night at Badness and Redbeard's St. Patrick's Day soiree. Gifts from Badness: ice-cream flavored Jelly Bellys in a cone-shaped dispenser, a hilariously outdated wedding planning paperback, and FOOD TV HOST BARBIE. Complete with her own chef's knife and stand mixer (that really spins!). Disassemble the whole package to poke at all the details (cameras and lights! pot holders on a rack! an oven that ACTUALLY BAKES A PIE!). Spend the rest of the evening snickering to yourself with happiness.

Okay, I'm ditching the second person format to give you the second half of this update: wedding talk. When last we met, we were still riding on the engagement high (okay, that hasn't gone away, at ALL) and had vaguely picked a date: May 15, 2010. And my best intentions were to just cruise for the next several months and then start planning in earnest in the fall. Now, you and I both know, I wasn't going to be able to let this rest. Because truthfully, there are a few important details that, if they are locked down in advance, can help shape and curb all the wild brainstorming and idea-culling of the next year: 1. location 2. tentative guest count 3. color scheme.

The tentative guest count was both surprisingly easy and reassuringly not prohibitively high. I'd be lying to you if I said I hadn't already been thinking about this for a while, so it was pretty simple to cobble together a list of our extended families plus the (edited) guest list for our housewarming party, plus out-of-town important friends. I was bracing myself for a 300+ headcount by the time I'd finishing entering everyone I could possibly think of, but was pleasantly surprised when the excel document totaled up at 223. That includes plus ones for all the single folk, all children over age 12 or so, and my closest coworkers + spouses. Hmm, that sounds almost doable!

Up next: location. I'd had an idea in my head for a long time, one that I knew Austin also approved of (details momentarily). But there were some logistical aspects to this plan that I wasn't positive about, and I wanted to be certain that we'd explored other options before we made any decisions. I started brainstorming with my girlfriends at work, and ended up with a list of a dozen or so places that would probably work, places we could check out and get a feel for. But I knew as this list went on that I was getting further away from what we really wanted. I loved the pictures I found online of War Memorial Auditorium, but I've never actually been there. We don't want to get married somewhere we've never been! There were other spots that had pros (great view of downtown) that didn't quite outweigh the cons (we'd probably have to use their in-house catering), blah blah.

So I did some finagling, and the weekend before my birthday, Austin and I went to the Farmer's Market for lunch. We haven't been there in a few months, since it was still in the midst of a vast renovation, and I was nervous about what we might see. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. The central part of the Market Building (where all the restaurants are located) was still filled with tables and chairs (instead of booths, like it used to be a few years ago). It's open to the skylights above, and has big wood beams across the top of the dining area. I got pulled pork and macaroni & cheese at B&C BBQ, which turns out to also be a catering company (Bacon and Caviar). Austin got his same mediocre Chinese food that he loves. I chatted a bit with one of the maintenance staff, and he confirmed that the Market Building was available for event rental.

Then we walked down the Bicentennial Mall (which runs alongside the farmer's mkt) to the Tennessee Amphitheater. This is a place I've loved since it was built when I was in college. I have a lovely memory of us all going there with my grandma, and finding dozens of four-leaf clovers. It has a gorgeous view of the capitol building, and I've always thought it would be a beautiful place for a wedding ceremony.

So a few days later, I went back with Casey and we walked around some more. She agreed with me about the vision for having a ceremony in the amphitheater, then everyone walking over to the Farmer's Market for a big dinner reception. We got a reasonable quote from the parks director on renting the amphitheater, and as of this Friday, got another amazingly inexpensive quote on the event rental for the Market Building. Barring some kind of contract-signing or deposit/reservation disaster, we've picked a location!

So that just leaves color scheme for the Big Three Advance Decisions, and I'm hung up. Mostly because Austin has (strong) opinions about these matters, and I don't want to push him around or rush him. I want our wedding to be a shared vision, celebrating who we are as a couple and surrounded by the people, foods and things that we love. I am not going to be one of those brides who plans the entire party with no input from her groom, and Austin's not interested in being one of those grooms who just shows up. He has an amazing sense of style, color and design, and I plan on incorporating his ideas and opinions equally with my own. The color scheme is an important jumping-off point for this. Initially he said he wanted to use Manchester City blue, which I fully support (I love baby blue too), but when I expressed my desire (nay, my requirement) to carry pink roses for a bouquet, he balked. He thinks blue and pink together look like a baby's nursery (and, if poorly executed, he's right). So we backed off a little bit, and I thought we could look at some other color schemes as well. He also suggested a palette range of greens, which I think could be really lovely, and conducive to the Farmer's Market, but I'm not giving up on the idea of some really bold and pretty blues. Portuguese blue! Tiffany blue! That aquamarine color from all of Hans Silvester's pictures of cats in Greece! So maybe we can cobble together a set of blues and greens that we both like, and I can still sneak my pink roses in there as a very seldom-used accent color for feminine details. I swear to not put any groomsmen in pink shirts (unless they WANT to wear them)!

So there you go, some birthday and wedding updates. Also, did you notice the new look of the blog? It's still a work in progress but I am at least pleased with the format of the text not only being two inches across. I think now I'm bound for one more birthday nap...

officially...

2009-02-03T22:34:00.006-06:00

I don't remember when I became a wedding fanatic. It was certainly before I turned ten. My favorite game was dressing Barbie in a white gown and veil and inventing a ceremony. When I started doing the grocery shopping for my family, as soon as I turned sixteen, I would buy myself one bridal magazine per market run. Jonda, the nosy cashier at Food Lion, would say, "Who's getting married?!" when she ran the magazine across the scanner, and I'd just bluff it out and say I just liked the pictures. I have every issue of Martha Stewart Weddings since its inception in 1994. In college, I started keeping notes about my (fictional) future wedding in a book called Brides's All New Book of Etiquette. Some of my winner ideas from that time period include "non ruboff lipstick" and "bubble machine for dancing." I watched A Wedding Story obsessively and often planned my career as a wedding planner, which included watching the Jennifer Lopez movie at least once a month.

At some point when I was still very young, I got it in my head that I wanted to be married on May 15, the Ides of May. I apparently thought it was a lucky Irish day, although a quick google search tells me it is no such thing. But I fancied the way it sounded, the Ides of May, and looked far ahead on a perpetual calendar for a time when I was grownup enough to marry and May 15 fell on a Saturday. I decided May 15, 1999, was when I would be wed. I was confident that all minor details, including a groom, would fall into place in plenty of time.

I was 22 when 1999 rolled around, and, it turned out, way too young to get married. May 15 fell on a Saturday again in 2004, only a couple of months after Austin and I started dating, and I don't think I even noticed. Since college I've helped with and coordinated at least a dozen weddings for friends and family, and even one paying customer. Surely one of the happiest times of my life was two summers ago, when both my sisters were married in the same gorgeous, crazy weekend and I had a major hand in overseeing both events. I still collect MSW magazine and I still file away things that I love as being possible features for future wedding events. But realistically, I toned down my own expectations. I'm 31. I don't expect as much romance and passion out of everyday life as I might have when I was fifteen. Of course I had once invented a million fascinating ways in which my betrothed would surprise me with a proposal, but these fantasies, as with many of the other digressions of youth, have faded with maturity.

Five years ago on Friday was Austin's and my first kiss. January 30. It's the day we always celebrate as our anniversary. At lunch on Thursday, a coworker teased me, "Five year anniversary... sounds like proposal time to me..." I efficiently laid out all the reasons why I did not think this was likely. For one thing, Austin and I share finances now, so I would certainly know if he'd bought a ring. For another, he's not much into surprises. Additionally, both of my sisters were engaged on their five year anniversaries, and I didn't think Austin even knew that, but if he did, that was way too much pressure. No, I said, while I do think it's something that will come up soon, I think when it does we'll just talk about it, and maybe go ring shopping. I'm not expecting a grand gesture.

And I wasn't even lying to myself, I swear. These were all reasonable, logical truths, and Austin is a reasonable, logical man. It's certainly one of the things I love most about him. We had planned a sushi date for Friday night at Samurai, and I was just inordinately excited about dynamite and crispy rolls. In the afternoon, Casey asked if we'd want to go out for a drink with them after dinner, and I thought that sounded like a good plan. I picked Austin up after work and we headed to Elliston Place. When we got out of the car I pulled out his anniversary gift (the newest Shepard Fairey book), and he made an embarrassed face like he'd forgotten mine. I didn't think of it again.

We feasted on sushi (Dynamite, Crispy, Sunday Morning, Jane and Sushi Burrito) and Austin opened his gift and really, it was a perfect dinner date. We took a self-portrait while sitting at the sushi bar. The waitress offered to bring our check. Austin turned to me, looked me in the eye, and said, "Will you marry me?" He held out his hand with a ring box, opened to reveal a diamond solitaire on a slender silver band.

I just stared at the ring for a full moment. Wait, what? A diamond? This is happening right now? I looked back at Austin and squealed, "REALLY?!" and burst into tears. I was laughing and crying and kissing him and said, "YES!" The waitress brought our check, looked at me like I was crazy and hustled off. I just kept crying and holding Austin's face. I had this overwhelming feeling like I'd missed something, or that I didn't understand what was happening. The sushi chefs, and then our baffled waitress, congratulated us. Once I calmed down (a bit), Austin explained that he'd told Trent on Thursday, and Trent was scheduled to tell Casey right before we went to dinner, so by then they were both going to be dying to hear from us. I texted Casey and told her we were going to come by, was that ok, and she wrote back, "Yes!"

We drove to South Street and I just kept staring alternately at my hand and then at Austin in a total state of shock and awe. When we got to Casey and Trent's house, they were both overcome with excitement. There was much hugging and tears, and a bottle of champagne. I called Jenny to tell her, and then Mom (more squealing, more tears, etc). The four of us went to Rumours together, and I got to show Shannon the ring (more squealing, some jumping up and down, and free banana cake). I called Dad (Austin had already called him Friday afternoon) and Agnes (again, the squeals) and kept trying to track down Leia. We got sleepy, and were ready to be alone, and headed home to make a list of all the people we needed to tell the next day. Before we went to bed I called Amy and Aunt Paula. I couldn't believe this was finally the time that I could start talking about our own wedding without feeling like I was fooling myself.

But really, I just kept looking at Austin, and thinking, I'm going to marry this man. It's not like any of this (other than the proposal) is a surprise. We bought a home together, we share lives and family, I've never been so sure of anything. Literally. I would marry him tomorrow at the Wildhorse Saloon if that was the requirement to ensure that I get this man, only this one, for the rest of my life.

Already, people started asking if we'd set a date. When I'd begun to think about it, as early as when we bought the house, I'd thought fall of 2010 would be reasonable. That would give us plenty of time to plan and save, and it would be far enough after my sisters' weddings to not be too much of a financial burden, too soon, for my family who traveled here in 2007. Plus we've got an important wedding coming up this summer, which will require all of my creative resources, plus some financial ones as well, so I figured we could cruise on "engaged" until June, and then start making some decisions. But Saturday morning, we talked a bit about when we'd want to have a wedding, and Austin said he didn't want to wait until the fall. He suggested May of next year. I thought, "May? Hmm." And then I said, "I wonder which day of the week the 15th is on next year." And believe it or not, it's a Saturday.

So guess what? We're engaged. And we appear to have set a date.

I wouldn't call it an epic fail...

2009-01-04T19:28:00.004-06:00

...so much as just an inevitability. I did not avoid that shopping binge I mentioned on Thursday. I went straight to TJ Maxx after work on Friday and basically got a new wardrobe. It added up to seven new tops, a dress, gym shorts, workout pants, a sweater, a woobie, a corduroy blazer, a Wonderbra and a picture frame for less than $200. And I didn't stop there. Hauled it to the Mills today and found a new pair of jeans, four pairs of earrings, and three pairs of shoes. The upside: I got all of this for approximately one-third of what I would have spent if I'd been paying full price for anything. Or to put it another way: it's a good time to shop right now. At the Maxx I was gleefully throwing $3 shorts and $6 shirts into my cart, giggling to myself and snickering, "Why not?! It's THREE DOLLARS." I tried on eight pairs of jeans at the Gap and luckily the only pair I liked were also on clearance. $19.99, thanks. I was handed an "additional 20% off" coupon when I walked into Off Broadway, so I made off with two pairs of flats for half-off, and a sharp pair of Puma running shoes for $40. Fair enough, right?

And I didn't go to any movies, so that's like $25 I saved (per movie) by not getting ticket, popcorn, sour patch kids, etc, right? I will accept all assurances of justification from anyone who is offering them.

I've also just been unforgivably lazy. I literally didn't leave the house yesterday, or even take off my pajamas. I slept until ten, putzed around on the computer for most of the afternoon, and watched the Kiera Knightly version of Pride and Prejudice while eating pasta with butter and parm, aka my Single Girl meal of choice. The movie was really great, by the way. It's funny how you get over how ridiculous Kiera's face is after you watch her for like thirty minutes. After that movie was over I flipped over to catch the second half of Beautiful Girls, and then the last three-fourths of That Thing You Do. That put me to bed after 1 am, what a party girl!

Today at least I got dressed, met some of my favorite girls for brunch (at Margot, which was amazing, of course), then managed to get all our groceries for the week for $70 (including detergent, when did detergent get so expensive?!). I suppose that victory led to my error in judgment that was the fateful trip to Shopryland. Having had trouble leaving Kroger for less than $200 lately, maybe I ended up just about breaking even.

But really, the overarching significance to this weekend comes in the form of missing my boyfriend like a lovesick middle schooler. I'd like to think, as a woman with a free and independent will, I could handle a long weekend of just taking care of myself. Turns out, I'm completely addicted to the luxury of always having Austin within earshot (or IMshot). I talk out loud to myself a LOT when I'm alone. I feel like I'm forgetting important things. I start to believe that all of our pets are moping around and blaming me for doing some unspeakable thing that has sent Austin away forever. I assign ridiculous significance to the most benign things, like folding (his) socks or making (our) bed. The way I'm mooning about and wishing I could hear his voice, you'd think I was still in the first blush of new love, instead of creeping up on a five year anniversary (we met five years ago, to the day, tomorrow. Crazy, yeah?).

I suppose the good side is that I'm blogging for the second time in a week. It's reassuring to know that if you give me something to complain about, my college concentration-in-creative-writing tendency towards hyperbole and melodrama reappears with a vengeance. It just goes to prove my frequent assertion that most of the time I'm so happy that there is nothing to write about. And that is okay by me.

At least the house is relatively clean, and I've finished all the laundry, and have meals planned and pantry stocked for the upcoming week. I still can't shake the feeling that I've been rather pointless when given two whole days of no obligations. After those first couple of months of seeing almost constant visual progress on house projects, this last month of laziness seems especially wrong. There are so many small and dumb things I could accomplish if I just sat down to do them, like reorganizing my vanity table or my closet. These things bug me every day but I keep refusing to waste precious sloth time on them. Austin is no help here; he is tolerant of my laziness to the point of being encouraging (Delaney: "I didn't even brush my teeth today." Austin: "Good for you, babe.").

The other thing hanging over my head is the continued shambles in which my work inbox remains, and I'm heading in tomorrow for most likely the busiest day of the month. I stayed late on Friday clearing out pressing Billing issues that had come in that day, but many more have come up this weekend and I still remain permanently behind on my bigger project of tracking cancellations. I intended to put a few hours in tonight but so far, I've just been blogging. I tell myself, there's not point in getting burned out by working from home all the time, but the truth is, I'm horribly inefficient when I'm in the office. I have the dual timesucks of working with a gigantic group of good friends, and an inbox that needs (literally) constant maintenance.

But I'm probably not going to be too hard on myself. I'm going to go enjoy a bowl of Golden Grahams for dinner, in my peaceful six-sleeping-pet living room. I'm going to resist the temptation to play another round of that damn Blox game while trying not to call Austin every ten minutes to tell him I miss him. I'm going to hit the sack early tonight because I can expect the dogs to rouse me sometime between 6:30 and 7 in the morning. I'm going to force myself to get up and get to work early and then kick absolute ass at my job that I love until it's time to go pick up my Boo and go home for penne with vodka sauce.

Clearly, I have nothing to complain about.

2009-01-01T10:45:00.003-06:00

Stole this from Operation Pink Herring. Thanks, OPH!

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before? Bought a house!

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I only had two: get in shape and blog regularly. We did start going to the gym for a few weeks but fell off around holiday time, so I'll give myself a C- on #1. And I was quite spotty in the bloggings, but did manage to do the daily food blogging in July, so B- for #2. Mine for 2009 involve weight loss, debt management and kicking ass at my job.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Yes, Leia did, we welcomed Godson Nummber 2, Ezra, this summer. Cort, too, although I still haven't even met Paige, which is unforgivable.

4. Did anyone close to you die? My maternal grandmother, Mary Frances Jansen.

5. What countries did you visit? None. No visiting.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008? Discipline.

7. What dates from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? March 17: started at Emma. September 23, closed on our house. October 18, moving day.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? (I feel like I'm kind of beating this one into the ground) Buying our home.

9. What was your biggest failure? I can only think of snarky answers to this. This was kind of a winner-type year for me...

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Not at all, blessedly.

11. What was the best thing you bought? House? Again?

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? The majority of the USA, for making the right choice on election day.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? The rest of the USA, for making us worry too much before election day.

14. Where did most of your money go? Ah, that's an easy one: HOUSE. and food.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? House and new job.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008? It's terribly sad that I don't have an answer here. Maybe that Beyonce song about Single Ladies, because it's always stuck in my head.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
(a) Happier or Sadder? Happier
(b) Thinner or Fatter? Fatter
(c) Richer or Poorer? Poorer with debt, richer with equity.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Exercise.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Waste time at work.

20. How did you spend Christmas in 2008? Very low key evening at Dad's.

21. Did you fall in love in 2008? With 2607 Sandy Drive.

22. What was your favorite TV program? 30 Rock

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? Sarah Palin. I just didn't know she existed this time last year.

24. What was the best book you read? The best book, or the one I enjoyed the most? Best: Atonement. Enjoyed: Eclipse.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery? This was not my year for music. My greatest musical feat was my 20 hour Best Damn Songs playlist.

26. What did you want and get? Wall-E and an earring holder. And a house.

27. What did you want and not get? The house on Wayne, thank God. And a home equity line of credit, dammit.

28. What was your favorite film of this year? Wall-E!

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I turned 31 and we had a big ice cream-themed party. With cupcakes in ice cream cones and vast amounts of sweets.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? I got nothing here. I feel quite satisfied.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008? The lack thereof.

32. What kept you sane? The boo.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Clive Owen, sweetie.

34. What political issue stirred you the most? More just a single man: Obama. He stirred me.

35. Who did you miss? Both my grandmothers, very much, especially at Christmas.

36. Who was the best new person you met? Not gonna pick on this one. The entire staff of Emma, for starters.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008: I'm learning to work hard for what I want to deserve.

******************************

Happy new year, everyone! Hope everybody had a safe and fun holiday. We went party-hopping, with a stop at the How I Became the Bomb show at the Basement. Yesterday I heard a few Guilty Pleasures songs and got a little twinge of not wanting to miss them (again), so when the Bomb opened with 'Freedom 90' I couldn't have been happier. Awesomely hilarious. And I got to feed Teresa her birthday cupcake, so the night was a success.

Now today we were supposed to go to a brunch party but it's been canceled and I'm so glad. If I can just hang in there long enough for Castrillos to open, we're gonna have a good day. Tonight we've got a little dinner party planned (third in a week, wow) and I'm excited to see and catch up with Mike Mc, the oldest and dearest of friends. Tomorrow morning Austin leaves for a weekend in Kansas, and I'm going to spend the next four days working frenetically (first of the month at work is a rough time) and trying really hard not to shop. I can feel a shopaholic binge coming on and I'm just going to avoid it by staying home all the time. I swear. I bought Beedle the Bard yesterday, maybe I'll somehow get so sucked into it that I can resist the wild call of TJ Maxx. Although I will most likely venture NEAR a mall to see some movies. Who wants to go with me to see Bolt? Looks so damn cute.

Happy new year, y'all. This one's gonna be a great one, I can feel it.

belated, as usual

2008-12-23T10:08:00.003-06:00

Dad says I should just write a bit, every day, until I'm caught up. Right now it's been so long that it's daunting to try and get in here and cover everything. Today is the last day of work until Monday, and it's pretty quiet. I've still got some Christmas-present-related projects to work on for my personal self, and will probably get some of it done tonight.

We've got a week's worth of good food at home, starting with Italian Sausage Soup with Tortellini tonight. Yum! The recipe has like 170 positive reviews on Epicurious, that's a good enough endorsement for me. And tomorrow night we're doing Austin's favorite rigatoni with (um) Italian sausages and mushrooms. Yes, it's poor menu planning on my part, so many sausage dishes in one week, but really, who cares? I'm also going to make a treat just for us to split on Christmas Eve: jasmine rice pudding. It's a ridiculously elaborate recipe but what else would I do with my time tomorrow? Will report back.

Let's think, what else haven't we covered? Thanksgiving, for one. It was a triumph, as hoped. I think we ended up having 19 people over to eat, and with lots of help we pulled off a major feast. I'm sure I was a high strung maniac in the weeks beforehand, but honestly, it couldn't have turned out better. I was having especial difficulty focusing on a dessert plan, but ended up making Raisin Cream Pie (per Austin's request), Caramelized Apple and Pecan Pie (best of both worlds), and Pumpkin Cheesecake with a Maple Marshmallow Topping. Yum! I'm getting closer and closer to a comfort zone with pies/pie crusts, and the apple/pecan pie came out really amazing. Special shoutout to Austin's mom, who was a HUGE help and also great company the whole weekend.

Then two weeks later we had a massive housewarming party, which also came off pretty danged well. I'd guess we had about 90 people come through the door, including lots of kids and babies! Which is fun. I only ended up making about half of the snacks and treats I wanted to make, but it still went great. VIP to all my kitchen helpers, and to DJB for the BACON WEAVE, which was slightly more popular than even my freaking adorable godsons. What's up with that?

What else is happening? We got the fireplace serviced, and just got firewood delivered on Sunday, but have had two consecutive nights of failed attempts to start a fire. We'll figure it out, it just might take a while. I lost the battle of wills re: a Christmas tree, so we're going without for the first holiday in our new home. But it's fine, honestly. I'm just looking forward to several days with no obligations and a chance to get caught up on some work without distractions. Or, more realistically, play Mind the Blox while halfway watching movies we've seen a million times before. For like 8 hours straight.

Other house updates: kitchen cabinet doors are installed, we got some nice matching towels for the bathroom (thanks, Joan!), and finally found and installed curtains in the living room (thanks, Brian!) so that we can sit in that room in the early morning without going blind. The early stages of the man room are coming together, and we moved the big entertainment center down there and put a much smaller one in the upstairs living room. Brian and Austin hid all the boxes that were cluttered in the office before our party, so that room *looks* finished, even if that is sort of an illusion. Joan also got me an earring holder that is PERFECT in the bedroom and holds literally exactly as many pairs of earrings as I own. I bullied Dad into hanging our new mirror over the mantel right in the middle of the housewarming party. And Kim, god bless her, brought us back a set of matching runner rugs from Ikea for the hallway. So basically little things are coming together, the small details as we settle in. We're hoping to start framing one or two pieces every month, and slowly start getting things hung on the walls, and then maybe we'll be ready to tackle the bigger projects of man room, garage and laundry room once the weather warms up.

I will try to check in again over the next 5 days of sloth. Why wouldn't I? But if I don't, have the best holiday ever, wherever you may be.

Fairy Alphabet

2008-11-07T19:19:00.001-06:00

I remember this so clearly that I wonder what it must have meant to me when I was four.

attempt at a new tradition

2008-10-24T09:42:00.001-05:00

Not that I think I can keep it up, but I'll try starting a new tradition of List Fridays. Cause y'all know I love the Lists.

Things I Still Can't Find in the New House:
- Our plates. All of them. Any of them. I wasted at least an hour looking for them last night.
- My white zippered hooded woobie.
- My deodorant and body spray (I broke down and bought more).
- My favorite little silver dragonfly earrings.
- The kitchen towels

Things I'm Excited About:
- Features CD release show tonight!
- Beautiful weather forecast for the weekend.
- Weekend! Ready to sleep in a bit and spend more time on getting the house settled.
- Apple orchard on Sunday! My favorite event of fall...
- The fact that our dogs have, miraculously, adapted to sleeping on their new beds and not on the new couch!

Things We Need to Do This Weekend:
- Clean out the garage at the old house.
- Take trash, recycling and empty paint cans to the Metro waste center on Trinity.
- Finish painting all interior doors and get them hung.
- Absolutely unpack the rest of the clothes and kitchen.
- Load up the car for a massive Goodwill trip on Monday.

One Important Thing I Already Did This Week:
- Voted! It took 10 minutes at the Howard School yesterday morning. And the big news: my Dad voted too! For the first time in his life. How's that for upholding your civic duty? This morning I was listening to NPR and they said Obama is starting to pull ahead in the swing states, and it make me want to cry with gratitude and hope. And then they started talking about the state of the economy, and that made me want to cry for entirely different reasons. I feel so insulated and lucky working at Emma and owning this great new home that we can still afford. All this terrible news on the radio hardly affects my daily life, other than getting turned down for the HELOC (sigh). But it's scary to start thinking about a future where things aren't so secure. It's an inevitability now.

recovery

2008-10-19T14:46:00.001-05:00

Foolishly, I had the Comcast disconnected Friday instead of, oh, I don’t know, Monday? So at about 7 pm (Friday) tonight we lost television and (horrors!) the internet. So I’m blogging into Word, and will paste and post as soon as my next free moment with wi-fi comes around.

And here it is: Moving Day. Or Moving Eve. It’s 10:30 pm on Friday the 17th and we’re winding down for the night. Tomorrow morning we’ll be packing up a U-haul truck with all of our (voluminous) worldly possessions and heading to 2607 Sandy to start a new chapter in our new home.

I absolutely hate it when people complain about how busy they are or how busy they have been; it’s just one of the least interesting topics of conversation I can think of. But here I go, I’m about to tell you how very, very busy we’ve been. Because almost every night for the last three weeks we’ve finished up our work day and headed straight to the new house to paint, prime, sand, scrub, rip and varnish every inch of the place. The bathroom is coming together amazingly well. Drywall is hung, bathtub is in place, walls are mudded, sanded and primed, and tonight my Dad, the hero, finished placing all of the (one-inch octagonal) tile in the floor. It’s been incredibly exciting to watch the bathroom come together, and I can’t believe he’s done it almost all himself. With lots of help from Austin, plus some from Patrick today. Simply amazing. We picked up a gallon of sky blue (Glidden Falling Rain) paint for the walls, and everything else is white, white, white. At first it seemed like an outrageous undertaking and expense (okay, it’s both) but making the bathroom a room we’re really proud of and love is going to turn out to be so worth it all in the long run.

In the meantime, the rest of the house came together beautifully. Paint is up on all the walls of the main floor. I finished the last coat of yellow in the kitchen this morning, and pulled all the blue tape down to reveal a completely transformed room. The backyard fence was finished Thursday and looks shiny and sturdy. The only major roadblock we’ve come across was revealed on Sunday night when Megan and I, excited to see how everything would look when it was finished, pulled up the carpet in the bedroom to reveal horrible stains on the hardwood floors underneath. I know we shouldn’t have been surprised, and we certainly should have found out for sure one way or the other WELL before a week before moving day, but I was simply heartbroken. Further investigation revealed the office floors were nearly as bad. Two days of discussions later, we decided to undertake a simplified floor refinishing project, and Wednesday night Brandes helped us sand the floors and bleach out the stains. Thursday morning he met me there again and we got woodstain down, then I applied poly that night and this morning and they look REMARKABLY better. Especially the office, where there is only one dark spot left and it’s going to be covered by a bookcase.

So other than the floor drama, which will most likely continue into our occupation of the home because we haven’t even pulled up the carpet in the hallway yet, everything has gone so well. The white trim, while being a major pain the labor ass, makes all the new colors look gorgeous, and this morning while we got things cleaned up it started finally getting exciting, as opposed to overwhelming. There is still so very, very much to be done, particularly to the basement, but the living space is ready for us to move in and start putting our things away.

I spent a lot of time this week picturing where everything would go, and I feel like I have a good game plan for unpacking over the next four days. I took a week off work for the moving, so I’ll have M-T-W there to really get my nesting on. Comcast is coming tomorrow for installation, including our new DVR, whoop! And Sears is delivering our new 25 cubic foot Whirlpool refrigerator in the afternoon, a hulking giant of an appliance, the kind with the French doors on top and the freezer on the bottom. We are hemorrhaging money, to the point where it’s like we don’t even notice anymore, but I know it’s gonna hurt in a month. The HELOC is still stalled in the approval process, mostly because no banks have any money or credit right now, I suppose? But we’re confident it will come through and we can start clearing everything up after that.

Packing up the old house has been laborious and bittersweet. I got a little sad, we’ve been really happy in this house and had many dreams for a future here. We absolutely got a better house out of the bargain and I’m so excited about our new home, but it is always an emotional time, stripping a home down to the walls and turning it into a stranger again. I’ve been lucky enough to have lots of tough-love help in packing (“Are you SURE you want to keep all fourteen of these ramekins? How many ramekins does one person need?!”) with VIP credit going to Jenny, who slogged away about six hours today and left a swath behind her of just-barely-contained possessions in dozens of cardboard boxes. I don’t mean to discredit the contributions of Casey, Megan and Lauren, who managed to box up the contents of the dining room and about sixty percent of the kitchen last night, all while surrounded by as many as five curious and muddy dogs, plus Charlie Murphy, who loves helping and packing and helping with packing.

*Editor's note* As I said, those were my comments from Friday night. It's now Sunday afternoon, and we're indulging in a lazy day before getting started on the absolute wreckage that is our new home. It's a maze of boxes and furniture, all just sort of plopped down willy-nilly, and I'm ready to tackle it with a vengeance. Unpacking is one of my favorite things.

Other than all the boxes, things are settling in just fine. We still need to clean the old house and empty the fridge, and take the remaining contents of the garage to recycling. And my cd/dvd shelves were screwed to the wall and we didn't have the right tools to take them down, so we'll need to rescue those before we close up the old house and give Tony back his keys.

By far the toughest part of yesterday was dealing with the pets. My sisters say we should all be alloted like 10 minutes over a lifetime when we can simply talk to our pets and have them understand. I would have taken three minutes to just explain to Charlie Murphy and Corvinius that we were not trying to kill, maim or abandon them by cramming them into a cat carrier and a picnic basket, respectively (poor Vinius). Jenny and Casey bravely took the lead on this endeavor and drove all three cats, wailing their fool heads off, to the new house. I'm so glad I wasn't in the car because I would have cried the whole time. Mackenzie, shockingly, adjusted quite nicely and was hanging out in the Man Room cool as a cucumber when I went to check on them an hour later (Charlie and Vinius were huddled together behind one of the doors). I suppose Kenzie has moved six or seven times now, while the boys were only brought into the Eastside house when they were still too small to care. Happily, by bedtime they were all three out and about, exploring, finding their food bowls, and eventually snuggled up in the bed with us like brave and forgiving kids. Charlie Murphy, especially, I believe has been extra sweet to me today as an apology for nearly gutting me yesterday in the Dreaded Box Incident. If I wasn't so embarrassed by the state of my belly I'd post a photo of the scratch that runs from my breastbone to my navel. He meant it at the time, but I'm getting lots of blinky eyes and sweetness today to make up for it.

The dogs also adjusted. We brought them over here and left them in the backyard before we went and picked up the moving van, and by the time we got back here with all the helpers and trucks they were pretty frantic. But they've been zooming around the yard and clearly enjoy all the space and shade. Last night proved more difficult; when it was finally time to bring them in for dinner it took much coaching (as expected) to get Bridgette and Mischa up the stairs. But they finally made it and explored the house (as much as they could with boxes everywhere) and spent the night sleeping on their three new dog beds in our bedroom. Then when they woke up at five am and refused to go down the stairs, things got temporarily ugly. We finally coaxed all three of them out at about 7 and went back to bed until ten. We spent some time playing with them outside this morning and I think they are really going to love it here. Hopefully by tonight we'll have made more sense of all the mess and they can get a better feel for the new place (and the new couch on which they are not invited...).

That's my excessively long update. Better get my unpacking groove on. Look for a Special Thank You edition of the Delusions blog, coming up next...

another quick update

2008-10-10T11:04:00.001-05:00

One more week of painting, painting, painting done. The living and dining rooms are done (except for the lighting fixtures) and the kitchen just needs ceiling and wall paint. We've got two coats of red in the bedroom and it looks like it's going to take a third. The bathroom is completely gutted and Dad started replacing the insulation yesterday. We still have to paint the office, rip up the carpet in the bedrooms, paint all the interior doors and put up cabinet hardware, etc.

Sunday night we went to Home Depot and made an exhaustive list of everything we need for the bathroom. Bathtub, toilet, vanity cabinet, sink, faucet, lighting fixtures, towel rods, the works. We took the list to the customer service counter where a helpful little lady named Luz entered all of the things we wanted, issued us a line of credit, and arranged for everything to be delivered Wednesday morning. It was an astonishingly easy process. We just kept looking at each other and laughing. It was pretty much the exact opposite of the process we're experiencing with the Home Equity Line of Credit, which has been drawing out for a week and a half now with no resolution. It must be historically the worst time ever to ask for credit, even secured credit. We've got some (financially irresponsible) contingency plans in place, but it would be nice to have that HELOC to make things more comfortable over the next few weeks.

So we're clicking right along, right on track for moving day a week from tomorrow. We took a break last night and stayed home to make shepherd's pie and watch The Office. It's been extra funny this season so far. I can't wait for the return of 30 Rock in a few weeks! Last Saturday night after painting all day Austin went to Jon's house to watch football and I showered, climbed in my favorite pajamas and watched 5 episodes of 30 Rock after talking to my mom on the phone for an hour. It was not my most glamorous Saturday night ever, but perhaps the most welcome one. Oh, and Monday night we went to the Sears Scratch-and-Dent appliance store in 100 Oaks and it was a goldmine. I think that will definitely be where we get our new fridge. They had great prices on massive, nice fridges with only some cosmetic damage. Very exciting!

Oh, I updated my Picasa with more "during" pictures of the house, and also an album of the best of 2008. Check them out!

fair enough

2008-10-03T23:02:00.001-05:00

You're right, you're right, I should have updated by now. Here's the breakdown:

Actually, after typing several different versions of the breakdown, I guess I should just sum up by saying that closing took longer than we expected, cost more money than we expected, and probably took a few years off my life expectancy in sheer stress and tooth-grinding. But it's over, we closed last Tuesday (the 23rd), it's possible that we got the last mortgage EVER in this crazy crazy economy. So that part is done; our name is on the deed. We celebrated with sushi after the closing, then spent that afternoon at the new house with Dad coming up with a Master Plan.

And then we started Operation Make This House Ours. It began with a long Wednesday night spent ripping up layers of berber carpet, indoor/outdoor carpet, disintegrating carpet foam and beneath all of that a layer of that green and beige marbled tile like from elementary school hallways. It was hard work but extremely gratifying, and now the Man Room has exposed concrete floors that we will leave unfinished for a while until we're sure all the moisture issues have been solved. The only other major projects we had planned for pre move-in were painting the whole main floor (including trim and doors) and a potential laundry room overhaul (and paying a professional to fence in the backyard). Friday night we drove to Greenbriar and picked up (part of) a new sectional couch that I found on Craigslist. Saturday we met Dad again to talk about the Painting Plan, and somehow over the course of that conversation decided to completely renovate the bathroom.

I don't remember if I mentioned it before, but neither Austin nor I are fixer-upper people. We were not looking for a project house. We don't walk around our house and itch to rip things down. We wanted to move into this new home, put away our things, and start having our normal life again, complete with an outrageous amount of free time and plenty of good home-cooked food. Even after we fell in love with this house, which most certainly needed updating, we figured we could spend a couple weekends with paintbrushes and rollers and be ready to go. A bathroom renovation was not in the grand scheme of things. But after looking at the recommendations from the Home Inspector, and realizing how much we truly, truly hated the tile on the walls and the sink cabinet (and the medicine cabinet. And the lighting fixture. And the weird little gray toilet. And the totally unnecessary striped wallpaper) it was determined that IF we were going to do something about this, now was the time, with three weeks of unoccupation and lots of volunteer labor.

So Sunday morning Dad and Patrick started demolition on the bathroom, while 9 other kind and amazing members of my immediate family (including Badness plus Brett plus Bill, who basically count) picked up screwdrivers and painter tape and trim brushes and fanned out throughout the house. We got a REMARKABLE amount done in that first full day, including a first coat of white paint on almost every bit of trim in the main floor. I was so excited and honored by all the help that I managed to (*mostly*) not freak out at the crashing and crunching sounds emitting from the bathroom. Kam suggested that, instead of having a panic attack every time I walked past and saw gaping holes in the walls, we have a photo of what we want the bathroom to look like (sky blue and white, please) screenprinted on a sheet and hang that over the door.

Progress throughout this week has been a bit slower. Monday night Austin and I got the second coat of trim on the office and most of the hallway, and otherwise realized a major glitch: there is almost no lighting in the front half of the house. Obviously this will be remedied when we install new fixtures and move in with our floor lamps, but in the meantime, painting at night is going to be severely limited. Tuesday some of our loveliest lady friends pitched in and helped me blanket the kitchen with a swath of white paint while Dad and Austin continued their ruthless barrage on bathroom demolition. Wednesday night Austin finished up the demo while I attacked a weird patch of fake parquet flooring in the basement that was apparently attached directly to the concrete floor with Gorilla glue. In 1959.

Then the nicest thing happened: we took Thursday night off. It was a rough week at work, too much to do and an apparent total inability to focus, and I was ready for a break. We made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and watched as much as we could stomach of the VP debate. I climbed gratefully into bed at 10:15 and felt completely refreshed the next morning. Tonight we cleaned up the demolition debris. This included vacuuming up an apparent 50 year supply of razor blades - razor blades!- that were stored in the back of the old-fashioned medicine cabinet (this means they just fell through the "safety" slot into the wall), a fascinating and horrifying endeavor. The bathroom is now down to stud walls and once we remove the bathtub (tomorrow) we'll be ready to start building everything back up again.

So tomorrow we're back at it. We'll get as much painting done in the front rooms as we can while there is daylight available, and I think by the end of the day we'll be rolling beautiful colors on the walls. I'm taking tons of pictures and will start assembling them into a before-during-after home improvement diary for those of you following along at home. I didn't expect this to turn into a big life-dominating project for a month. I'd just been thinking, "First we close, then we move." But I think we're doing the right thing, and with every blister this house becomes, more and more, ours.

from Alisha: morning face (past noon really)

2008-09-19T12:30:00.002-05:00

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

My levels of paranoia and superstition are at an all time high. I'm not going to talk about the house until we are the proud owners of keys. With our names on a deed.

Have a good weekend, y'all.

staring down September

2008-09-06T15:01:00.001-05:00

More house updates... the radon test came back great, very encouraging, and a physical inspection by the mold guy seemed to be fine on Tuesday. We went ahead and signed the release form that would tell the selling bank that we were 100% going to buy the house as is, and were just waiting for the official mold test to come back Thursday morning before we sent the form in. Just to be safe. And then that mold test came back pretty bad, reporting 27 times the "undesirable" amount of mold, mostly in the basement, and recommending $3000-6000 worth of remediation and professional cleaning. Yowza.

So we spent most of Thursday in crisis mode, trying to really figure out what this meant and if maybe we should reconsider the whole deal. Casey and Jenny both encouraged us to try to think objectively; that regardless of how much we love THIS house, maybe all the trouble of mold cleaning and painting and fence building and carpet removal isn't worth it, and maybe we were signing up for more than we would have ever originally agreed to. Which is certainly true, we said from the beginning that we weren't fixer-upper people and didn't want a huge project house. But now that we've seen it, and pictured many years of happy life there, and gotten excited about things like red bedroom walls and screened-in porches, it all seems completely worth it.

The whole time we were having this "is it worth it?" discussion, I felt physically ill and just so confused. That awful feeling seemed familiar, and finally I figured it out: I felt exactly the way I did the day they told us Charlie Murphy had feline leukemia. The vet did the test on his first kitten visit, and very vaguely recommended that maybe we should just go ahead and put him to sleep right away, since he had this terrible and expensive disease. And we didn't even consider it, we just scooped him back up and took him home and loved the hell out of him and gave him liquid vitamins in his food and he GOT BETTER. He kicked that disease before he was even full grown, and tested negative on his next visit. Not to mention grew up to be one of the coolest cats ever. And I can't even tell you the millions of times that I have been so grateful that we didn't listen to that vet, whose job it is to give you the bad news and the worst case scenario. And that's what this mold inspector does as well. He has to tell us the most extreme possibilities so that we don't come back to him in a year and say, "You told us this was fine!" And mostly we were just overwhelmed by being told that something really bad was happening that we didn't understand, and then were being recommended the worst case scenario, passing up this house that we love.

Austin talked to Dad about it, and Dad said it was absolutely not a reason to walk away. So we went to dinner and talked it all out, and went to Home Depot and looked at paint chips and got excited again. And Friday morning we told our realtor to go ahead and send over the Inspection Contingency Form, and to tell the selling bank that we do want this house, moldy basement and all. And then yesterday at lunch we met with our lender, signed a ton of papers, gave him all of our tax documents, and had the house appraised for the lending bank. We should have the appraisal back on Monday. Everyone involved is enthusiastic and encouraging, and thinks we should be in good shape to close by Sept. 19. It all feels more real every day! I think I won't let myself get completely excited until we have a key in our hand and our names on a deed, but it just keeps getting better and better.

In the meantime, I'm starting the longest and most exhaustive To Do list ever. And I'm going to roll out on the town with my girls tonight for a little Guilty Pleasures action. And I'm sure we aren't through with crises and home-buying drama, but we're going to keep going with our guts and moving forward, because there isn't really anything else to do.

sunday, sunday, sunday

2008-08-31T10:43:00.001-05:00

Good news! The inspection went well. It was a painstaking process (our inspector was so thorough and meticulous, it was just a marvel watching him work) but the overall diagnosis on the house seemed to be positive. We certainly have our work (and cash outlay) cut out for us, with projects and updates necessary to the electrical, plumbing, insulation, gutters, what could be left after that? But there were no immediate safety issues, and the general foundation/condition of the house is looking pretty good. We are going to have radon and mold tests on Tuesday, and will find out the results of those by Thursday. That's cutting it a little close because we have to turn the contract back into the selling bank by end of day Thursday, but so far, so good.

I think the best part about the inspection was just getting to hang out at the house for a few hours and confirm our belief that it just *feels* good in there. It feels comfortable and like we're surrounded by the place we'll be able to call home. We're coming up with ideas for paint colors, and starting to shape a (very tentative) schedule for painting, carpet rip-up, fence and electrical updates, and then move-in. We're so lucky to have such an amazing support network of friends and family who are willing to help.

I'm still in bed at 11:19 on Sunday morning, and Corvinius is giving me the most outrageous show of affection. I'm thinking that if we needed HIM to help us paint the trim in the new house, he'd totally do it. Because he loves us. And so would Digby, but he'd probably make a mess while he was trying to be helpful. I think we'd give Bridgey a project where she could work quietly by herself but still feel like she'd accomplished something. And maybe let Charlie Murphy just be the team leader for Troublemaking and Enthusiasm. Mischa could help us check all puddles and water receptacles for water content. And I don't think we could ask Mackenzie to do anything. I mean, we don't ask for much now, and we're still catching a lot of attitude.

I know we're pet crazy. But the mere fact that they live here with us really shaped our househunting process. One of the houses we really liked (but was in a very sketchy neighborhood) had the awkward aspect that the door to the backyard was through the master bedroom. The idea that our bed would be the first thing the dogs would encounter when we were letting them in from a muddy backyard was sort of a dealbreaker. Other houses that were otherwise strong possibilities got axed because they didn't have big backyards or weren't fenceable for whatever reason.

And now I love the idea of thinking about where they will all hang out in the new house. I think it's likely that Mackenzie could claim the entire attic as her (lofty) territory, and I doubt she'd get much argument on that matter from the pups. I'm a little worried about the transition of having to have the dogs go down a flight of stairs into the basement before they can go out. Digby, I'm sure, will barrel down headfirst and end up in a pile of limbs at the base of the stairs. He's not afraid of much, nor graceful in his enthusiasm. But I'm pretty sure both Mischa and Bridgette will require some coaching/bribing to get them comfortable with the process of ascending and descending. I'm just hoping that the need for their dinner and their desire to hang out with us will help motivate them to overcome their fears.

Another thought I'm wrestling with is the desire for a dog door into the backyard. That would also probably take some encouragement and time with Mischa and Bridge, but I know they'd get used to it. We just have to find another solution to Austin having to get up in the middle of the night, sometimes multiple times, to let the dogs out. It's more disruptive (to him, not me, I sleep right through it) than having a newborn baby, I swear it. But Austin's concerned that any door the dogs can get out, so can Charlie Murphy, and despite his regular vociferous claims to being perfectly capable of going outside and not getting into trouble, we are just not willing to let him take that risk. David at work suggested trying one of those dog doors that only open to a chip on the dogs collar, but I have a feeling that Charlie Murphy the Wiley would find a way around that.

I've been accused of having homebuying goggles on right now, and I'm sure that is true. I mean, buying our first home is a huge deal, and certainly the biggest thing we've accomplished together, but I can find other things to talk about, right? It's just that most of it sounds so obnoxiously simperingly cheerful that it's rather embarrassing. Work? GREAT. So good, I can't even explain it to you. Life with The Boo? Just super. We're just smile a lot, and are otherwise just having a great time. Yesterday we borderline-crashed a barbecue in Nippers Corner with Jon and Ali, and got to feast on championship worthy brisket and pulled pork until we thought we were going to die. Then a few short hours later (and by a few short hours I mean, literally, two) I met up with some of my favorite ladies for my favorite sushi and may or may not have permanently injured myself by overeating. After that we rolled to the Mercy Lounge for the Bomb show and I spent most of the time holding my stomach and moaning, until the band played and we ran up to the front to dance.

Other than my adventures in overeating, there isn't much to report on the cooking front. I made a pretty killer quiche on Monday, with zucchini, mushrooms and bacon. I forgot to buy Gruyere so I (over)compensated by tossing in every cheese in my fridge. Cream cheese in the filling, layered slices of swiss and mozzarella, and shredded cheddar and parm on top. YUM. We've got lots of vegs from the CSA to roast soon, and sausage links and bulk sausage to find a good use for. I doubt we'll have any problems with that.

In the meantime, I think it's a patty melt and onion ring kind of day. Gold Rush, here we come!

trying to overcome...

2008-08-23T10:10:00.001-05:00

...the crippling superstition of talking about things before they are certain. I don't want to jinx this whole deal.

But the day after that last post, we found three new houses that caught our eye. We went the following morning (Saturday) and looked at them all, and two were nothing special, and one on Sandy Drive was pretty great. Great enough that my heart was racing while we walked through it, and we kept just looking at each other and smiling. And our realtor seemed pleased with everything he could see.

So we went back to Sandy on Sunday, in the morning with Casey and Trent, and in the evening with Dad and Richie. And everyone approved. I think Trent and Casey were withholding enthusiasm a little bit, trying to not get too gushy in case everything fell through like last time. They also seem to think this house is in the middle of nowhere, as well as "too big," as if that exists for a family with six pets. But I think they can see all the things we love about it (I'll detail below, even if I'm nervous to talk about it too much), and when Trent saw the 30 x 15 foot "man room" in the basement, he yelled, "We're moving in!" Dad was leaping about in joy and detailing the treehouses he will build for his grandchildren at this house (uh, Dad? Why not harass my MARRIED sisters about this topic?). Richie also kept stomping his foot like Elijah and declaring that he was jealous. Very wholehearted endorsements from that front.

So we decided to meet with Peter on Monday and assemble an offer. Then he called Monday morning to let us know that he had spoken with the seller's agent (the house is a bank foreclosure, so we're dealing with A Bank and not A Person) who said that the bank was not accepting FHA loans on the house. Uhhh, what? After all the trouble of being told we only qualified for an FHA loan (and therefore weren't eligible to buy our own house that we've rented for three years), we ended up finding a conforming (conventional) loan that would work for us, with only 3% down in a gift form and no requirements about the condition of the house. This was all accomplished during the work day on Monday, so we still got our offer put together and sent to the bank Monday night.

Then we waited and waited. We had requested to hear back on our offer by Wednesday at 6, but the seller's agent didn't seem to think it would happen in that time frame. He did say it was a "pretty good" offer, and hoped the bank would just take it and not draw out the process. Wednesday came and went, and Thursday. Luckily we had the Cheatham County Fair Demolition Derby to distract us from the agony of waiting for an answer. Finally, Friday afternoon after lunch we got a quick email from our realtor: "ACCEPTED!!" Hooray!

So now we have to see the addendums placed on the contract by the foreclosing bank, and approve them. We have to fork over 3% earnest money, which will also be our down payment. We have to line up an inspection and then figure out what our lending bank wants from us. And then we've got to BUY A HOUSE.

A big house. 2025 square feet. With a finished attic, a finished basement, 3 bedrooms, two bath, a huge kitchen with baby blue formica countertops, and a gigantic magnolia tree in the backyard. The living room, dining room and kitchen make up the front half of the house, all flowing into each other with huge doorways. This might be my favorite part of this place. Where we live now, the kitchen is the back of the house, the living room is the front, and there isn't a natural social flow in between. I love the idea of these three rooms feeling like one big area for visiting, dining, cooking, entertaining. The bedrooms are both large, in the back half of the house, with a large bathroom between. We will need to pull up the carpet in these bedrooms before we move in, but there are good quality hardwoods underneath and it shouldn't be a huge project. We also need to paint (as you'll see from the photos) and finish the fence in the backyard so our dogs will be safe and we can just kick them out of the basement door. Other than that, we could happily move straight into the main floor of this house and slowly update/furnish the attic and basement into our own usable space. I think we'll make the second bedroom on the main floor into an office/library, and put the spare bedroom in the attic. And I also think we'll get a grownup couch, and move the Big Brown Couch into the basement, along with the darts and eventually an entertainment center. It needs a good cleaning, it's been empty since May. Otherwise, it's a house where we could live for years, with privacy and big lawns and a covered patio.

I'm just so excited. More fingers crossed for all the contract negotiations to go quickly. With luck we'll be homeowners soon!

Oh, and thanks for all the amazing advice and guidance we've gotten from all of our friends and family. This whole experience has been vastly easier because we know so many smart, experienced people!

Even quicker additional update

2008-08-14T22:31:00.001-05:00

So the sellers accepted another offer. We didn't get a chance to counter. We are back to the drawing board.

We went back and looked at our #2 and #3 houses from the previous weeks' searching, and were pretty uninspired. I don't want to suddenly get overly picky, but I also think that we're supposed to "know" when we walk in the door, right? And I didn't know. I feel like I spent a lot of time picturing myself and our selves and our stuff in the house on Wayne, and now I can't see us anywhere else.

So oh well. No other news from here. We had derby practice tonight, which was fun, and then I conned Austin into letting me pick up spaghetti at Pizza Perfect, which was all that I wanted to eat. Now Stranger than Fiction is on, and it makes me crazy happy, so that helps leave this pretty lame day on a high note.

Good night!

Quick update

2008-08-14T09:33:00.001-05:00

We put in an offer on a house. On Wayne Drive, near Stratford and Porter. It has been our frontrunner favorite the whole time, and signs are looking good. I'm too superstitious to talk about it yet, so that's all I can give you. We should hear back on our offer by Friday morning (tomorrow!) at 10 am.

I don't even know what to tell you, other than that. It's pretty much all I can think about. I will send pictures as soon as I feel it is safe. Oh, and I finally got to talk one-on-one with our landlord and he was, as expected, so nice and sweet and understanding about everything. I am really relieved that it didn't turn into a combative situation. He's coming by this weekend to look at the condition of the house, and we're committed to give him at least 30 days notice when we're going to move out. So that all feels way better. No bad karma.

That's all I've got right now, folks. Hopefully I'll have even better news for you tomorrow.

I'm glad I don't have to think of a number reference to go with "ten"

2008-08-10T09:30:00.001-05:00

Okay, okay, ten days. That's not so bad. It's just rather alarming to think about the shift in The Plan that went down in those ten days. Here's the scoop:

We've lived in this house for almost three and a half years, renting from a very kind if absentee landlord (I'll call him MT). He bought the house for a steal right after the big tornado that damaged much of East Nashville, lived here for a little while and then moved to a farm south of town and rented this house out. He's definitely not a professional landlord, or someone particularly savvy in the real estate world. But he's very kind, and totally hands-off. Most of the time this works in our favor. He doesn't mind about our menagerie at all (he even suggested we get a dog when we moved in, because the backyard is fenced and we're so close to the park). When the tree fell on the house last year, MT let us choose the color of the replacement siding, which was fun, but also let me be the contact person for the contractors and insurance people, which was maybe not really my job.

But we haven't minded, we've acted like we owned this house the whole time, doing most small repairs ourselves, painting, installing ceiling fans, etc. And the plan has been the whole time to buy this house from MT. Two years ago, when the a/c went out in August, the repair company formally recommended that MT replace the whole system, and he said that he couldn't afford it right then but if we decided to buy the house, we could take the cost of a new HVAC system off the selling price. We've just basically been waiting for some sort of motivator to start the scary process of applying for a home loan, gathering a down payment, negotiating, etc. In the last year we've certainly been guilty of not pointing problems with the house out to MT, because we didn't want him to have to fix them, and also didn't want any repairs to increase the value of the house. We'd rather just wait and fix them ourselves as soon as it was ours. This especially applies to the bathroom floor, which is actively rotting out. The a/c system is having major traumas (the previously mentioned pouring of condensation onto the basement floor), and the hardwoods need refinishing sooner rather than later.

So two weeks ago, MT called and wanted me to know that he is considering a move to the east coast, and wants to sell the house before he leaves. He wanted reassurance that we still wanted to buy, and I very firmly told him YES. I told him we'd start the process of talking to banks, and get back to him. He mentioned that he had a friend who is a realtor, and when it came time to put together contracts she was going to help. I said that was fine. We still didn't talk about price, but Austin and I already had an idea in our minds. We had paid for a private appraisal in March so we would have an idea of what to offer, after taking approx $10k off for the HVAC replacement. It seemed like everyone was on the same page, and we were excited to have a reason to move forward with the home buying process, and also pleased that now MT was motivated to sell, which would hopefully make the whole transaction go quickly with minimal negotiation.

So imagine my surprise when a woman called me a week later (last Thursday the 31st) introducing herself as MT's realtor, and letting me know that she had prepared a private listing on the house, just for the purpose of our purchase. She assured me that there would be no listing on MLS, no sign in the lawn, no lock box on the door. The listing was just for our private transaction. What? Why would we need a listing if we were just going to offer MT our reasonable price, and he would just accept and we'd sign some paper? I tried to remain calm and asked her what price was on the listing. She named a number that was $60k more than our intended offer. WHAAAAT?

I told her the amount that the house had appraised for in March, and she sounded distinctly nonplussed. She asked if MT knew about this, and I told her no, we had just arranged for the appraisal privately so we would know any potential pitfalls in the house, and know a range for a reasonable offer. She quickly pointed out that a private appraisal was not the same thing as a bank appraisal, and I told her we were definitely aware of that. She asked what comparables the appraiser had used to determine the price of the house, and I gave her the range that the 17 comparables he had found determined (it was still approx $20k less than her listing price, at the highest end of the range). She said that there had obviously been new sales in the area, and started listing three bedroom sales. I pointed out to her that the house cannot be technically listed as a three bedroom. The room where we sleep doesn't have a closet or central heat and air vents, and you can only enter it through another bedroom (the room we use for a dressing room). Therefore, not technically a bedroom, it can only be listed as an office or a nursery. She says, "Well, that's debatable." NO. It's not so much debatable as real estate law.

Ugh. So I hung up the phone with her, letting her know that we had appointments at banks the NEXT DAY to talk about financing, and that I would contact her as soon as we knew more. Reported all this drama to Austin and my sisters, and we decided to go ahead with the meetings at the banks, and hope that MT would accept our much lower offer and just decide to move on. It seemed to us that his "friend" the realtor had accepted his request for help and then decided to turn the whole transaction into a commission for her, and maybe MT was just being taken advantage of and would be glad for our offer and that would be that.

But that is definitely the moment that the niggling doubt turned into something in the forefront of our minds. I remembered that night we discovered the water pouring out of the a/c system into the basement, and when I was walking back up the stairs looking at the total decay that is our basement, I thought for just a tiny second, "I don't want to deal with this." And the next day, when I was telling a coworker about the situation, he said, "Don't buy that house."

So we went to the banks, and were told, essentially, "Don't buy that house." Bank #1 told us that we basically were only qualified for an FHA loan, based on today's current market and most lenders not wanting to loan to anyone without solid homeowner history. A conventional loan would involve a big down payment as well as matching amounts of assets that we do not have. And in talking about our house, and all the things we wanted to fix about it, Banker #1 started to think that the house wouldn't pass an FHA inspection. He wanted to encourage us to start looking around the market; he said there were tons of great houses in our price range that don't have the problems that our current home does. He was very pleased with our credit scores and histories, and said we qualified for homes way above our price range.

After that meeting I took Austin to work and went looking for Casey. She wasn't at home, but Dad was there, working on her roof. I sat down with him and told him the whole story, and how I was trying to reconcile all this new information inside my head. The idea of NOT buying our house was brand new, and the thought of suddenly househunting was terrifying. Then my dad did the strangest thing: he gave me fatherly advice. In fact, it wasn't just fatherly advice, it was a very firm fatherly lecture. He said that ever since we'd been talking about buying this house, he thought it was a bad idea. He thinks that it will continue to have problems, and we weren't going to want to deal with them. He said that the amount of renovations we would eventually need to do would be disruptive and make life really hard for a while. He pointed out (extremely incisively) that neither Austin nor I are Home Improvement People, we both work full-time jobs, we have neither the skills nor the interest in renovating a house. He said that there are larger issues with a house that has been built out bit-by-bit that would possibly make it NEVER qualify for FHA financing. He said that if we had our hearts set on it, he would be with us every step of the way, but suggested that we get online and start looking at houses in our price range and see how nice they were and how we would feel about them.

So, whoa. All the sudden we were househunting. We met with Bank #2 and it was the same story as Bank #1. Banker #2 heard our story and laughed at the "listing" price on our current house and talked about how much she loves East Nashville and how many great houses were over here right now. She also told us that we qualified for much more expensive houses than we could afford, which I guess is comforting but also terrifying. She walked us through a Good Faith Estimate, including what we could expect to pay in down payments and closing costs, and it was all very educational. And becoming less scary by the minute.

So we went home and got on Realtracs. We went to Leia and Richie's house, where Richie already had MLS listings pulled up for dozens of homes he liked for us. We drove around Rosebank and Inglewood and Eastwood Neighbors and wrote down addresses and got a little lost. The next day we made lists of houses we'd seen online and drove around trying to find them. Monday we hired a realtor and gave him a list of thirteen houses we had seen and really liked. Thursday we got to look at six of them, mostly in the Inglewood neighborhood, and really really liked one of them. Then yesterday we went and looked at the other five on the list (we'd already eliminated two, one that was a duplex and one with a POOL that already had a contract on it, boooo) and found another house we felt great about in a neighborhood we did NOT feel great about. We started to feel like we had a first, second and third choice. Then we went back to the house from Thursday (on Wayne), and met the current owners, who told us point blank that the price was negotiable. The owner is starting a job in Texas on the 25th of this month, and is extremely motivated to sell. We poked around every corner of the house, took a ton of pictures, and even started talking about where our furniture would go.

So now what? Hopefully C & T are coming over today to look at the places we are interested in, especially the house on Wayne, and give us their opinions about neighborhoods, etc. I'm trying to get Dad to crawl out of his hollow and come up to take a look as well, because I don't think we'd buy a house until he got to kick the proverbial tires, inspect crawl spaces, bang on pipes, etc. But after that? Maybe we're going to put in an offer, possibly as early as this week. We got a crazy idea that since these current owners have to be out soon, and we would have to give 30 days notice on vacating our house, we would have a few weeks to make adjustments (paint and rip up carpet, etc) before we needed to occupy the space. It's an exciting thought, and gets more exciting the more we talk about it. I'll post pictures as soon as we think it's a good idea, and I'll keep you posted, in brief, now that I have the full story out.

Wish us luck!

thirty-one

2008-07-31T22:20:00.001-05:00

Here it is, the last day of July. I haven't won any blogging challenges, since I missed two days, but this is indeed my thirty-first post of the month.

So, in retrospect, could I be a food blogger? Sure. Thirty-one posts in which I say the word "food" somehow, that counts towards something. SHOULD I be a food blogger? Nope. I appreciate the mental exercise of daily writing, and the way it documents my life (for my Mom). And I think that I will continue surrounding myself with the topic, because it is the thing about which I most like to think and talk. But on days when I don't have anything to say, about food or otherwise, I'm not crazy about boring you with the things I still think I have to put down on the screen.

Like tonight. There is a lot to talk about, a lot of crazy shit went down between last night and tonight. But I'm not even ready to discuss, and don't want to jinx the parts that could be good or harp on the parts that could be bad until the dust has settled. I'll keep you posted; even as early as tomorrow I should know more. In the meantime, I don't feel bad about closing the computer, washing my face, taking out my contacts, curling up in bed with a Real Simple and making it through three pages before I turn off the light. I get to sleep in a little tomorrow, since Austin and I took a joint day off to take care of things. I do promise to not take a whole month off, like the shock therapy after November NaBloPoMo. I will have more news to share, and I'll keep trying to take food pics as we're learning this new camera.

Sweet dreams out there, blogosphere. Rabbits rabbits rabbits.

The new 20

2008-07-30T22:47:00.003-05:00

This is Casey reporting for Delaney because she's in a brown-out. Yep, that's apparently a term folks use for what happens when your power is out enough to make you unable to blog and worried about your many days worth of leftovers going bad, but not like totally out. Sounds scary.

Anyway, she suggested I tell you that she won't eat pizza without ranch dressing. It took me a few moments to figure out that this comment was intended to satisfy the food related aspect of this evening's post. I actually had pizza with ranch dressing for dinner, so there.

I think this should be good enough to keep Laney on her NaBloPoMo. She'll be back with y'all shortly!

Sophie Germain

2008-07-29T20:20:00.001-05:00

Dark Chocolate and Orange Tart with Toasted Almonds

Well-Loved Recipe

I first tried this recipe in the fall of 2003. I printed it out from Epicurious and made notes after reading the reviews. Among the changes I noted: multiplying the filling recipe by one and a half, taking the crust out of the oven after 9 minutes instead of the recommended 12, and stirring the filling into the ganache before spreading it into the crust.

Chocolate Shortbread Crust with cinnamon and sea salt, already baked

It's not a complicated dessert, really. I would give it an intermediate rating for difficulty. The only real trick is starting early enough. At least two days before you plan on serving it, or you'll be in the kitchen all day. That first time, I decided to make the tart to celebrate Casey's first week of law school, and planned ahead accordingly. I made the dough for the crust two days ahead and let it chill overnight, then rolled it out and baked it the day before.

Filling: chopped toasted almonds, chopped candied orange peel, brown sugar and cinnamon

I also candied the orange peel ahead of time, and let it cool and dry overnight before chopping. The filling is just the candied orange peel, toasted slivered almonds (both all chopped up), plus sugar (the recipe calls for white but I've used brown) and cinnamon. Then I made a ganache, which is so simple that it makes me laugh, and poured a little into the filling so it would hold together on top of the crust. Spread the filling into the crust and pour the rest of the ganache over, then chill overnight. Really, not difficult.

Melting the chopped bittersweet chocolate in the hot cream to make ganache

The night I planned to serve this tart, Trent and I went to a baseball game. The plan was for us to head back to the South Street house after the game, where we'd meet up with Casey, Jenny and Patrick and enjoy the dessert together in celebration. But the ballgame went to extra innings, and we started getting impatient phone calls from C, J & P.

Jenny: "We want to go ahead and eat the tart. We're tired of waiting."
Me: "No, just sit tight. I want us to all eat it together, so it will be special."

Ganache all smoothed out, then a little bit added to the filling to hold it together

Another phone call, ten minutes later...
Jenny: "We're getting really hungry and tired. We want to eat the tart. Stop being selfish."
Me: "Don't be mean! Just be patient!"

Phone rings again...
Jenny: "We aren't waiting anymore. We're going to eat it!"
Me: "FINE. Screw you guys. Whatever." Click.

Filling spread into the tart crust

And then another call, two minutes later...
Jenny (sounds sheepish): "Laney? We love you..."
Me: "Yeah, yeah."
Patrick: "Laney? We love you..."
Me: "Fine, fine."
Casey: "Laney? We love you..."

Finished, with ganache poured over the filling, smooth and shiny. Just chill!

I got home to over a third of the tart (which is supposed to feed 16) gone, and a note next to the pan on the counter:

Front

If you can't read it, it says:
Suggested Names:
1. Holy Fucking Shit Tart
2. Ain't Fuckin' Around Pie
3. Does somebody have to go to law school to get this? Tart
More->

Back

4. Sex Pie All grown up
5. Everybody Loves Delaney (and we're gonna stay up all night thinking about it) Tart
(heart) J, P, C

After all these years, this is still known as the HFS Tart. I brought two to work today, and am feeling pretty good about my status as Most Popular Employee. Who Also Tries the Hardest to Be Most Popular. And Has No Problem Resorting to Shameless Bribery for Affection If Necessary.

far from February

2008-07-28T22:14:00.001-05:00

Dad picked me up from work today and took me home so we could look at our impending dooms of home repair. Turns out the prognosis wasn't terrible: fixable hot water faucet, dying-but-not-dead-yet a/c system. No emergencies, just no running water in the kitchen tonight. He'll be here again tomorrow to repair the faucet, and we can hopefully ignore/encourage the air conditioning to just hang in there until we buy the house, at which point we're planning on replacing the whole damn thing. New ductwork and all, hopefully, to make the house more efficient and less, you know, hot.

I was pointing out to Dad that we could live with the a/c system at this level of terribleness, for the time being, because it's always this stuffy in our house, especially in the back. He agreed with me, but then said something like, "But you're my cooking girl. You need a comfortable kitchen."

This afternoon Suz and I were talking about babies, and siblings, and the story she heard on This American Life about girls who were switched at birth. Apparently when they found out, later in life, they realized that their personalities fit in much better with their birth families than the ones in which they were raised. We like to think that our lives are simply an overlapping of influences, but there is clearly something else there. I never really thought that I was born with a personality. I look at Ezra and Elijah and wonder at which points they will be different men, with different goals and ways of speaking. I'm surprised even now at their physical differences, when I mostly just think all tiny babies look the same. I found my picture of Elijah from the day after he was born, and the one I posted here of Ezra, and it's really remarkable the differences in babies' faces.

I think about my sisters and I, and we came from the same places, the exact same ones, and we turned out still very different in our personal selves. Was Jenny born stubborn? (yes.) Was Casey born permanently convinced of her own correctness? (yes.) Was I born prone to procrastination and easy distraction? (ah, yes.) There is the more extreme example of our California cousins, with whom we were raised in total equality, by our parents who are siblings in the most obvious ways, and I swear, those families couldn't be any more different than us.

And this is a silly point to which I'm leading, but how did I get to be a foodie? I know some people don't like that term, but I don't mind it. I don't want to be mistaken for the snob type of foodie. You all know that I will not just eat junk food but I will wallow in it. But I'm a foodie in the sense that I like to think about, talk about and do things relating to food. I'm sure I spent a quarter of my work day detailing my cooking disasters of the weekend (fried corn! that's all I'm going to say! exploding grease-filled kernel torpedoes!) to coworkers, and getting the goods on their own pulled pork and raspberry duck adventures. The friends that I have bonded with at this job, this is what we talk about. My amazing group of book club girlfriends, what do we do when we're all together? We eat. We exchange a month's worth of menu planning emails, and then we all cram into someone's kitchen and stuff our faces while we talk around food.

A few years ago my friend Craig asked me how I became a baseball lover, and I was able to respond to him (in essay form) with the rather precise timeline of my eventual love of the game. Tonight I was peacefully assembling tarts in my kitchen, moving about the motions of simmering cream, whisking ganache, and trying to think back to the time in my life when this started. As a little girl, I loved reading my mother's cookbooks, and eventually embraced my role as kitchen helper. But I don't remember feeling filled with thoughts of food the way I am now. Thoughts of candy? Is that the same thing? I started tackling baking projects, sometimes with Dad: decorating cakes, the baklava incident, salt water taffy that stained our hands blue. In college I was so poor and didn't have a working kitchen until my junior year. After that I started hosting dinner parties.

But I wonder, what did my parents think? Was this some obvious direction I was always heading, or was a fascination with food/cooking just another personality quirk that was revealed as I matured? The way other kids develop a penchant for mathematics or sports? Food is my hobby, my topic, my solace, my celebration. Tonight I reveled in my silent kitchen, my unrushed ballet of spatulas, measuring spoons, taking the lid off the jar of cinnamon with the dull end of a butter knife. Other times I love sharing the act of cooking. Projects like smoked pork butt or thai noodle soup are things that Austin and I can enjoy tackling together. I'm certain that my finest moments with Agnes have happened when one of us was at the stove and the other standing over the cutting board. I'm sure I don't have to explain that my fondest memories of both of my parents have occurred while we were sharing a kitchen.

I'm not quite sure where I'm leading with this, and my attention is waning as the evening draws to a close. I suppose it's not any good to try to identify the sources of my most basic self, any more than scrutinizing my needs for air and water. Is Lover of Food on the Meyers-Briggs test? (Is chocolate an emotion?) When my dad calls me his Cooking Girl, and my mom says I'm inspiring her with my food talk this month, and my sisters and friends are peppering me throughout each day with recipe discussions and ingredient ideas, I can see the bigger picture. Food is the physical representation of my need to take care of everyone.

The tentacles of these relationships run back and forth from Mom to Julia Child; from Dad to the black microwave cookbook, the pages stuck together with decades of toffee-making; from Jenny to the cold sesame noodles I haven't even made yet; from Casey to secret nights of boxed mac-and-cheese and vanilla ice cream with Hershey's syrup. From Agnes to the sledgehammer we used for crushing ice on the patio; from Megan to snapping green beans without a pause in conversation; from Amy to panicked ingredient substitution calls from the market; from Austin to that first flicker of wanting to lick ganache out of his beard. Distant and constant, primal and minute, the web of food in My Life and Family doesn't have a beginning, doesn't have to have come from anywhere. The only piece of advice my mother ever gave me that turned out to be untrue: Food is just fuel for the body. It is not. It's way more than that, and I'm glad for it.

Tomorrow: photo essay on the HFS Tart. That's right, I took pictures. And fair warning: this one involves some R-rated language. In my sisters' handwriting. Sorry, Mom.

b stroke six

2008-07-27T23:32:00.001-05:00

I don't even think I have time to get into all the mishaps today. And all the joys, of course. This morning we had a girlie breakfast dancing-movie party at Lauren's, and it was, delicious. And featured a special guest appearance by Brand New Ezra, the handsomest. It was pretty much a perfect afternoon, in good company, with great food (my contribution: hash brown casserole).

But things started to go wrong when I got home. I had intended to put together the HFS tart for the Emma staff (actually, two. Two HFS Tarts), and had already made the dough for the crusts and candied the orange peel this morning. I would like to think that I can make this tart in my sleep, but truthfully, I think my horrifically hot and muggy kitchen was working against me. I wrestled with a sticky and drippy dough and got chocolate on every item of clothing I was wearing (fortunately, those were all pajamas. I didn't put on pants today). Then finally I managed to get the dough fitted into the pans by basically pounding on it with my elbows, got the pans in the fridge to chill, and tried to shake my frustration off and concentrate on dinner.

The menu: Skillet Chicken Pot Pie, roasted CSA potatoes and fried corn. With no difficulties, I threw the potatoes in the oven, with onion and garlic and thyme, horseradish and Dijon mustard. I thought I was off to a pretty good start. This was probably at about 7:30? Then there was some kind of time suck between 7:30 and TEN, which was when dinner was actually finished. And apparently this time suck involved a bomb going off in our kitchen. Or at least that's how it looked when we went back in there after eating.

Honestly, I'll tell you about the rest tomorrow. I'm up against the midnight hour here, and I can't even keep my eyes open any longer. This way I'll have something to discuss tomorrow evening when I've only eaten leftovers all day. Ugh. I need an extra weekend.