So I’ll admit, I’ve been having some problems with balance lately.
Luckily for me my work schedule is based on an academic calendar so I get some time here in Dec-Jan to reset the scales again and get things back closer to unity. Look forward to some posts then (including a 2011 wrap-up) In the meantime watch this video of one of Meg’s Calm Jars.
Contrary to popular belief, I had a really annoying cold combined with strep throat, not Tuberculosis recently. (I say “had” even though I still have to clear my throat more times and than I can count in a day and cough more than I’d like, I’m getting over it I swear.) This illness and my incredibly overbooked work and social calendar have caused me to be absent both here and pretty much everywhere else online. Perhaps I’ll recap in a future post, but for now I can show you the last project finished and the next event planned
Gianni Schicchi - Performed by the CSB/SJU Music Department
Packers Tickets for Sunday November 20th
I’ll catch up soon. . . Well actually probably in December. Take care everyone.
Kevin
We received an incredibly generous gift card for Kitchen Window as a wedding present. We purchased an ice cream scoop, some syrup to make soda (with our soda stream,) a shaker (for sesame seeds), ghirardelli chocolate for home made-mochas with the Nespresso, and a pot rack.
The pot rack is designed to go on the wall, which we thought would be better since we’re just renting. The instructions say you’re supposed to attach each mounting point to a stud. However, I don’t know any walls with studs only 7 1/2″ apart. So to reinforce the rack, I purchased a piece of stainless steel. I had to cut/drill/countersink/ and sand(polish) it. Check out the pictures below, I think it turned out pretty well.
If we didn’t take your picture on your last visit it was probably because we ran out of polaroid film and you should come back and visit again. We’re all stocked up again and always ready for more visitors.
A while ago Meg expressed she had a celebrity crush, Mark Bittman. We were watching Spain on the Road Again and she explained that not only was he attractive (and apparently vaguely similar to myself) he was smart and knew how to cook. I didn’t know exactly how to respond. I’m not going to try and bill myself as the perfect husband here, I have my own celebrity crushes (Adele being one of the current ones.) In the beginning I tried to resist and comically argue against Bittman’s allure. As time went on and I have been more exposed to Bittman’s writing and recipes, I have begun to trust him (This started at Cafe Vienna in Barcelona after eating what he described as the perfect sandwich, which while I wouldn’t call it perfect it was incredibly good.) This development caused me to order his book
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food.
After opening the book and seeing some of the recipes, Meg and I decided that we would use the book as our predominent choice for new recipes in the future. So I got some postit flags and on Sunday we picked two recipes for this weeks meals. Yesterday Meg made Fried Rice and tonight I made Vegetable Pancakes
After eating tonight’s dinner, I won’t make fun of this crush anymore.
Meg and I (Taken by Shea)
Meg and I have been trying to catch up on life and work for the past few days after arriving back home from Indiana. It’s been a seemingly slow week. Things will be okay for a while and then something will remind us of the sadness of last week and it’s repercussions. At times like those it’s nice to have some distraction. Last night we hosted some good friends Joseph and Shea for dinner at our home in Maple Grove.
Joseph and Shea
Meg prepared a wonderful sweet potato soup and we made paninis. We swapped proposal stories and talked about fun times and spent a lot of time smiling and laughing. Thanks for coming up to visit you two.
Other Updates: -
Slide Curtain (paused due to multiple project syndrome)
Scanning Photos for upcoming memorial service (We just received the chemicals we need to properly clean the photos before scanning, scanning should start [and hopefully end] on Sunday)
Wedding Thank You Notes (Due to perfectionism [me] and diligence [meg] we are further behind in this project than we should be. We have all of the printed thank you notes in the box they arrived in sitting in our living room. After we return from Indiana later this month, we will earnestly attack that project and you will all receive your well deserved hand written thank you notes, {we couldn’t believe and were honored by the enormous generosity of all our family and friends} hopefully not too late for everyone’s sensibilities.
Wedding and Honeymoon Photos {and posts} Online (after all of above, I get this taken care of.)
Lastly, an additional Thank You, for everyone who has sent us cards or flowers or notes or emails of sympathy. I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to Meg (and her mom) and I to get these tokens of love and support. Thank you.
After 8 full days in Spain (4 in Barcelona, 1 in Bilbao, and 3 in Madrid) and two full days in transit,
Meg captures me taking pictures on top of the Cathedral of Santa Eulalia in Barcelona
Meg and I are back in the US and back to what most people would call our “normal” lives. Meg went back to work yesterday and I returned today. We’ve been trying to catch up with things (unwrap presents, put away decoration supplies, lots of laundry, starting to integrate our heretofore mostly individual lives, and generally being very, very happy spending most of our time together.)
I bet many of you might have been curious, about the future of this blog. (Will it end after the wedding? How long will it stay? . . .) Well the intention when we started this blog was to have a shared space where we keep all the people we care about updated on our lives and other fun things – so we intend to keep it for a long time. (It will occasionally be “renovated” to reflect our current situation – the first one will probably be soon) We both have multiple online outlets to express our continued individuality (we’ll probably post info about those someday if you aren’t informed,) but this space will be our FAMILY space. I’m feeling a posting burst coming on as well, so stay tuned.
Before I go, I have a favor to ask. If you attended the wedding and took any pictures at all, can you please share them with Meg and I (in their full resolution) so we can have a even deeper appreciation of the wonderful day you all shared with us. We’d really appreciate it. Just send Meg or me an email and we’ll let you know how to get them to us. (oh and we’ll have Spain photos up soon too.)
Welcome to our new visitors, (I’m assuming, of course that some of you haven’t visited before and now that you got that golden envelope in your mailbox, you thought you might see what that whole internet thing was about) and to our regulars as well. I’m so far behind on posting I don’t even know where to start. I guess I’ll just cover the high points and hopefully this weekend get back to some longer posts
Before I continue let me backtrack… I was supposed to write a post last weekend after our big Thanksgiving “week-end” but I managed to get sick and completely forget about it. Below are the high points. It’s weird it seems like it was almost a month ago now, but it was just a little over a week ago.
Back to the present now (which I should finish since I need to get back to the cleaning, but I’m procrastinating.)
Reading all that post above makes me wonder why I’m not tired all the time. I think it’s effective time management. I don’t always mention the little things that happen so often between Meg and I that make me smile and make the time go by with 100% less worry or complaints. We sneaked out on a week night to see the current Harry Potter movie, we laughed through podcasts in the car together, we exchanged simple gifts for Sinterklaas, and we try to do little things for each other whenever we can like cleaning the house before she gets home from volunteering at the prison (oops, I gotta go.)
It’s been a while since you got a gratuitously cute couple shot, so here’s one from Thanksgiving. Our dear family friend Christine gets photo credit.
Life is a series of decisions- some big, some small. Mostly small really. What do I want for lunch? Which way do I drive to work? One or two scoops of frozen custard?
Some are more significant than others, and all have multiple half-lives. {I’m claiming the invention of the phrase decision half-life as the amount of time before a decision loses it’s significance in your life.} I mean, how significant is it to my life today that I lived in Pittsburgh for two years? Quite. How significant is it that I lived off campus my sophomore year of college? Not as much.
Married life, it follows, is also a series of decisions, however it adds in several new dimensions. Decisions made together involve an examination of how well you and your spouse cooperate, as well as how well you know your spouse and their priorities in life. Does each individual play fair [exhibiting the proper the use of bargaining]? Does each also show the correct amount of give and take? Add in children and your life as a road of mostly simple decisions becomes a treacherous (hyperbole used for humor) path to tread.
Meg and I went down this “road” last weekend. We made a major purchase together. We’ve made significant decisions together before, we decided to get married, we decided to go to Italy together, etc. But other than the decision to get married, this weekend’s decision has a pretty long “half-life.”
We purchased a sofa.
PB Comfort Grand Slipcovered Sofa
Sink into the grand sofa just once, and you’ll know how it got its name. Designed with even deeper seats than our regular PB Comfort Sofa, the eco-friendly grand sofa offers 10″ of extra width, inviting a whole family to relax together.
(Note: We choose the knife edge cushions with the down blend wrapped cushions in walnut colored washed linen cotton slip covers.)
I’m pretty proud of us. I think I tempered my extremely long “mulling” period and I think Meg increased her purchasing patience by a lot. We’re both still really excited about the purchase and the only thing we wish now is that Pottery Barn could get it to us sooner. The order has been placed, but it will still be almost two months before we get to place our behinds on those down blend cushions. Stay tuned, we’ll let you know how it feels, or better yet, plan to visit us in December and try it yourself.
