I don’t blog much when I’m busy

Apparently it is NaBoloPoMo, yeah, I didn’t know what that meant either until I looked it up. National Blog Posting Month, where folks challenge themselves to blog everyday to get [back] into the habit of it. I’m not sure I can come up with something worth sharing EVERYDAY, but I can go for 2-3x week (at most).

Between my new job, (which I started after returning from Labor Day/Rosh Hashanah week Boulder, during in the middle of the High Holidays), commuting, and general house chores I am exhausted most of the time. Thankfully the major holidays are over and things have settled down to our new normal. We attend Segulah Minyan every other week, and blob out at home and maybe stock up on local produce and other items at the farmers market on the alternate weeks. Ben has been keeping me sane by packing my lunch every morning, otherwise I’d be spending all my hard-earned on lunches (plus I’d be breaking my personal policy of not eating out more than 1x week).

Here are a few photos from our week in Boulder. It was SO nice to spend time with friends (and their baby bellies and babies), as well as have some time with Ben where I didn’t feel like I was keeping him from work or where either of us were competing with a laptop for the others attention. Sometimes we have trouble putting our gadgets down, it’s a work-in-progress.

squash from Robyn and Mark’s garden

BUTTES in Golden, CO

crazy topography in Golden, CO

sunset in Boulder, CO

overheated Dan and sassy Ronya

Miri and King-of-the-rock Danny

Yom Kippur was a Segulah Minyan event, at a rented church social hall in Sheppard Park/Silver Spring. Services were great and I actually felt present for most of them, but it really punctuated how much we miss CBS in Boulder. Speaking of Congregation Bonai Shalom, the synagogue was CRIPPLED by the flooding in Boulder in mid-September (it started 2 days before Yom Kippur, which was thankfully held at nearby Naropa University’s East Campus). Reading the news out of Boulder in mid-September was terrifying and sad. If you have any pennies to share, I’m sure Bonai would appreciate them (instructions on how to donate via email or phone are on their website).

You’ve already seen our photos of the AMAZING sukkah Ben built on the patio, and my friend Jennifer came down from NY for the day for the first day of sukkot (we dwelled with dinner, brunch over the news paper in the AM, and general lazy lounging in the afternoon after a nice walk exploring my neighborhoof) before she had to head back to the city for work the next day. Boo. We don’t see each other enough. I guess I need to take a turn and go to New York again!

What else is going on….

Weight Watchers as a program is great, but my progress has been glacially slow. lately I’ve either hit a plateau or gotten lazier at tracking than I thought. Blergh. Soon it will be cold enough to blame it on heavy winter clothes, but that trick only works once!

Now that we’ve moved past the craziness of ALL the Jewish holidays feeling like they are ALL AT ONCE (it always feels like that when they swallow Shabbat whole, or turn it into a virtual 3-day chag), and I’ve gotten more used to my 8 hour + lunch day, things are settling down.

In more upbeat news:

In late September we helped my friend Andrea, from way-back-when at IAC, move from her temporary furnished apartment into a gorgeous flat in Adams Morgan. She’s pregnant and her husband was traveling for work and Ben and I didn’t want her trying to unpack without help! We also explored her neighborhood a little (all new to all of us) and ate some awesome falafel and fries for lunch and pizza for dinner, YUM! It was the first real fall-weather day we’d had and it was crisp and beautiful. It was a bit of a shame we spent it unpacking, washing bedding, installing a new printer, and buying what felt like ALL THE THINGS at Target, but it showed off how great her apartment is that the windows really let in the light and air and it was still nice and quiet even though she’s 1/2 a block from a major urban shopping/dining area (think Pearl Street in Boulder). I’m kinda jealous.

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ROAD TRIP!

how do I get this apple dumpling into my mouth without making a huge mess?

Ben took me to the first family reunion he’s attended in 10 years (they hold it every 5ish years). It was my first trip to the Berkshires (during the summer) and it was gorgeous there, but I left my camera in the car. Oh well.

On our way there we made a stop to pick up a fruity contribution (tiny, golfball sized plums) for the reunion and split a HUGE apple dumpling for brunch. It was a lovely road trip and we listened to Dame Judi Dench’s  book, And Furthermore on the way there and 1/2 the way home.

The reunion was lovely and I got to meet lots of Ben’s cousins who are our age, though I’m not sure I made any new friends, we were definitely the quiet ones at this gathering! The lake house a true testament to the 70s. The basement is a plush burgundy mancave with an electric organ, pool table, and pingpong table that all coordinate and upstairs has a blue and a yellow bathroom (the kitchen is all wood and carved dowels). Ben’s great uncle made sure to have kosher deli catering so that Ben and his parents could gorge on huge sandwiches (nitrates give me a headache, I stuck to gloppy salads and dessert).

As lovely as the drive up was. the drive home the following day STUNK. We stopped in central New Jersey on the way home, to visit Ben’s grandpa and report to him about the reunion. Grandpa Bob was kind of… droopy until his aunt came and reminded him to eat lunch (then ordered him a new, hot meal with extra meat loaf) and made sure that he ate at least 1/2 of it and drank his coffee. Apparently coffee was the missing element and droopy grandpa finally woke up! Since he had been sick earlier in the week we weren’t expecting much, but I accidentally threw him a softball by wearing the same tshirt as I did in the framed engagement photo he has on the windowsill and then he started babbling about dancing with me at our wedding and everyone was quite pleased about how alert he was. It was a much less emotionally challenging visit than we’d expected.

Hmm, I can’t find a copy of our engagement photos anywhere on my computer. Weird. NOTE: Yes, I know Ben’s name is wrong on our photographer’s blog, he was just B on the paperwork and they guessed wrong.

The drive home from NJ sucked. It was 100% traffic all the way home. Oh well, I hope you enjoyed the farm photos!

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Trying To Look Forward

I’ve made some great DC/MD based friends, but we’re all so much more spread out and I don’t have anyone to call and say “I had a bad day, I need someone to talk to over wine and gourmet french fries” with here (also, I’m trying to lay off the wine and french fries because neither are particularly WW friendly).

first tomato of the 2013 sesason

Anyway, I saw some old friends, and a new one, while in NY for a 24 hour visit last weekend for a baby shower. It was great, I had wine and gourmet french fries! No, the food isn’t the only reason it was great. It was amazing to catch up with friends from Boulder, Interlochen, and DC and I had a great time with all of them (and great food too, I came back having overspent my flex point allowance for the week by 17 points in just 2 days!).

Sometimes I just have trouble adjusting to my new physical location in the world because all the people I have collected along the way aren’t all around me all the time. Sometimes, I’m just homesick for boarding school or even summer camp, when most of my peers that I cared about were in the same physical place I was at the same time and we could stay up talking (until call to quarters) about everything and anything. Is that more nostalgia that homesickness? I guess I just wish my new friends were closer and had fewer obligations/more flexible schedules so that social calls didn’t need to be so planned out.

Whatever.

One of the newest bonuses that I’ve discovered to being a real grownup, one who spends their Sundays doing chores and running errands, is that I get to garden on my patio! It was too dry and hot in Boulder, plus our patio was coopted by Crazy Neighbor Lady. Lately, Ben and I have been chowing down on Thai food every shabbat, to keep up with the growth of the Thai Basil; eating lots of farmers market eggs and goat cheese with fresh chives, eating salads topped with fresh baby greens from the garden (they don’t grow fast enough to make whole salads out of all the time), making lots of Italian-style pestos and salad dressings (green and purple!), rosemary bread, and we’ve ordered some Kosher meats to eat with all the thyme we’re growing too.

Container gardening is fun! We mulched everything well, so there’s very little weeding, and it’s been raining pretty frequently so we hardly have to water. I don’t think it will be cost effective to grow our own foods unless we stay here or re-use the same pots and dirt for a few years (the pots were the real investments at $11-19 each), but it’s nice to get outside and have some plants to tend to and chat through the fence with neighbors (yes, one smokes, but she’s not crazy!).

Time to pull myself out of my melancholy, call my adult play date buddy (she’s on maternity leave, bonus baby snuggles!), surf the job boards, and then head downtown for our lunch and museum date. Maybe I should spend a few minutes weeding (more like trying pluck off all the basil flowers) in the sunshine to perk myself up. WEEE, SUNSHINE (dutifully ignoring the 90 F temp and potential for afternoon storms).

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Memorial Day holiday weekend

We went out to visit my Gramma, in Solomon’s Island. The weather was BEAUTIFUL Sunday and Monday (low 70s and slightly breezy), so instead of spending the day in the car, we stopped at some wineries (nothing worth noting), and at the Cyprus Swamp visitor center and went on a nature walk – I adore nature walks with boardwalks. Then we went for dinner at CD Cafe, walked the boardwalk, and then went home to Gramma’s and tried to see the planets grouping. There were too many trees and her dock access pointed the wrong way, so we only saw what we think was Jupiter. Oh well, at least there were no mosquitos out yet!

Today we had a lazy brunch of cheese omelets (Ben is a GREAT cook!), toast, and apple slices. Then we raided Gramma’s bookshelves (she claims she’s trying to pare down her collection, but I saw the bag of new books by the front door), and set out for the Calvert Marine Museum and Lighthouse. It is SO much bigger than I remember as a kid. We didn’t get there until about 12:30 and then we met for lunch at 2 at Kim’s Key Lime Pies for another tasty meal in town before hurrying back to the museum for the 3 PM boarding of the Wm. B. Tennison cruise around the island! It was so nice to get out on the open water, and we almost had the boat to ourselves. I guess everyone had started heading home already at that point.

We’ll have to go back; there are entire buildings more of the museum to see, and we never did make it to visit my Gramma at Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, where she volunteers, more wineries to visit, and there’s a Railway Museum that I didn’t know existed!

Maybe we’ll become weekend [subsidized] people ;-)

 

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work, travel (and being left behind), and vacations

English: Drum Point Light, Solomons, Maryland, December 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ben was in Triste, Italy last week. He learned lots of stuff, met some new-to-him atomic physics folks, and got to show off his 3 month-old knowledge of his current lab’s research and publications at the International Centere for Theoretical Physics. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either. He took some really lovely photos that he might let me upload later.

I, on the other hand, have been temping at a lovely firm on K Street. It was a two week gig to cover the interim between hiring a new person an when she started and was subsequently extended to three weeks to cover someone else out vacation. I wish I could stay here…. Oh well. I did have an interview for a job I don’t want, so I left that to the staffing agency to communicate for me. If I’m going to leave the path to being a paralegal I’m going to do so in the non-profit world, not in employee benefits (albeit serving law offices, which is why they were hiring someone with a legal background).

This weekend is Memorial Day and we are going out to Solomons, MD on Saturday evening to spend some time with my gramma and see some museums. I’m excited to share the Calvert Marine Museum with him (even though it’s not yet fiddler crab season), but apparently the Calvert Nuclear Facility stopped offering tours or having a visitor center after 9-11. Doh. We were also hoping to go up to Annapolis and visit the Naval Academy Museum or we might just walk around, find somewhere to eat rockfish for lunch, and have some unscheduled time.

Bonus: I found this wonderfully written blog post while looking for a recipe. This woman writes how I would like to: http://youmadam.com/2009/02/21/what-to-do-with-those-daikon-you-bought-at-whole-foods-that-have-been-hanging-out-a-bit-too-long-in-the-fridge/

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I have felt like this writer

I know what this engagement felt like (I got Ben an awesome watch that is solar charged!) and what it feels like to be a FREEZING, yet happy, wriggly blue caterpillar (though my sleeping bag is purple and Ben’s is red). Though we decided to make our (January, in Colorado) engagement official over pillowy gnocchi followed by metal karaoke and took the frosty camping trip a few years later.

 

http://apracticalwedding.com/2013/04/mutual-engagement/

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WBF becomes WBFM

WBF was my roommate my first year at boarding school. We both started living with weird/crazy roommates and worked with 12 other girls to coordinate an unprecedented 9 room, 12 girl switch-a-roo. We were the only ones where neither roommate ended up in the room they started out in. We bonded over Pink, Garbage, No Doubt, and other late-90s girl rock.

We got along like sisters, arguing about stupid stuff and doing little things to taunt each other sometimes. It was kinda awesome. We chose different roommates for our second year at school and then went off to different places for college (me to CCPA and her to USC). I visited LA for one spring break, and later Austin when WBF was in law school at UT and I was finishing up school in Boulder. She planned my bachelorette party (pole dance lessons, followed by pizza and cocktails, and tickets to a cabaret show), it was awesome but poor WBF was really sick and I think she actually skipped the cabaret show. Oh well.

We were all hale and hearty for her wedding this weekend!

tall boys wearing toddler ties

working out the wedding rehearsal staging

me and Ben at the TX capitol

on the trolly bus, en-route to the wedding!

the almost-weds, making eyes at each other during the wedding

And then my camera ran out of batteries and the photographer seemed disinclined to take any photos that didn’t have both halves of the couple in them. I’m vain and hopefully I’ll get to see how my outfit came out in photos! I think the dress I wore was out of the closet for it’s last time, it was almost too big/baggy but I ate enough tacos in 2 days to remedy that…. Back on track now that I’m not longer in tequila and taco land, just in time for the A-RTS festival in my neighborhood and Cinco de Mayo this coming weekend!

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what do I do during the week

When I was in Boulder, and between jobs, I would bake a lot, volunteer with our CSA, volunteer at our synagogue (before I worked there), and blob-out (like I’m doing now).

Now that we live so close to my parents, I can tag along with my dad on business trips! Woohoo! In February I went to NY with him for 36 hours. This time we went to Philadelphia for 24 hours. It was too short of a trip to meet up with anyone, but I did get to visit some smaller museums and go for a lovely walk in the sunshine, The NEW Barnes Foundation Museum and the Academy of Natural Sciences, while my dad was attending a lunch meeting at the Museum of Art (yes, with the Rocky stairs).

Deinonychus

Neither museum permitted photography, but I did take a few snapshots while wandering around outside. If you’re ever in Philly, the new Barnes museum is GORGEOUS!

I could get used to this not being lobster-red after spending an hour outside at mid-day thing. No wonder visitors to Colorado always end up sunburnt, the sun is so much friendlier here!

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It’s finally spring in DC!

This has been a BUSY month. During Passover I went through a few rounds of interviews for a new job, which I was only at for about two and a half weeks. It wasn’t a good fit. Tax law was too passive for me, I really like getting to do legal research and helping support aggressive arguments, and tax law was more about actuarial calculations and data entry; not enough law for me in the long term. Oh well. At least I hadn’t gotten too settled yet. It was never meant to be, I was just too optimistic to realize that at the time. The entire time I was there, I felt a bit like this:

 

That is NOT how one should feel at work when the job and the employee are a good fit.

In cheerier news, we went downtown as the cherry blossoms were starting to bud (but before most had blossomed) 2 weeks ago.

Now, I’m back to where I was a month ago, looking for a NEW new job, but at least I have a slightly better idea of what to look for and what I should have seen as warning flags earlier in the interview process.

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I haven’t abandoned this blog

I just got REALLY busy. First, we moved into an apartment (WOOHOO!) in Rockville, MD, with a big patio. It’s a 2ish bedroom/1 bath, 900 sf with a HUGE patio. There are two little caveats though: the only grills allowed are electric (WFT?), and we’re in the corner of the courtyard and get almost no direct sunlight. Oh well, the plants from my dad are still doing well and we’ll be super glad of the lack of direct light in the summer, when it’s super hot outside.

Two days after we moved in I went on a 2 day business trip to New York with my dad. We saw Jersey Boys, I met up with a friend at an awesome bakery, I took a tour of the New York Public Library, ate an amazing salmon burger at Oceana, and took my first Amtrak Acela trip (it wasn’t much different from the regular train, just an hour faster and with more power outlets).

After I clean for Shabbat I’ll try and remember to take photos of the apartment. We’ve been there for 2 weeks now and there are only 5-6 boxes left to unpack!

Here are some photos from the Library:

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