Quite the blog hiatus, that. A "let's do life full-force for a while without even really stopping to breathe" sort of hiatus.

We're coming up on our fourth wedding anniversary in a few weeks (and just before that, my 40th birthday sneaks in there).  Four years of living and loving and leaning and learning. Four very, very good years.

We did that thing, that thing where you sell your underwater condo in the city, buy a starter home (that will quite likely also be the finishing-up home) in the cheapest neighborhood of a ritzy suburb, start to fix up said home, get pregnant, finish up your $15 million fundraising campaign, have a baby, and buy a minivan. We did that thing, and it is glorious. I've never felt so normal.

Having this guy in our lives is awfully glorious:



Having a new job that involves WAY less travel and WAY more nine-to-five-y-ness than I have ever experienced in my adult life is a gigantic privilege... and maybe just a little bit boring, if I'm honest. I almost miss always-new rush of prepping madly for a trip, the public-speaking endorphins, the completely chaotic schedule. But I revel in coming home to my lovelies almost every single night, having dinner with my husband (which these days mostly involves scrounging from the fridge and eating standing up over the sink, but simultaneously at least), tucking this butterball into bed, and making plans of my very own every weekend.



It's amazing to watch Simon learn. You can almost see the brain cells soaking up the knowledge of how things work and what to call them and how to exercise just the right amount of control. He's got that unbridled joy of a toddler discovering the universe, and a contagious happy-dance, but he's not afraid to sit down with a good board book or six and contemplate hippos and Elmo and the ABC's for a while.

Aaaaaah, this life is good.

Mission: Honeymoon (Part two: Rome)

After a few days in London, we took the red-eye to Rome. So much to see!

Is he adorable or what? He's totally adorable. I find it hilarious that the sign behind Scott says "CAPPUCINO.  ALSO BIG BEER."

At Piazza San Pietro.  We didn't try for a papal audience... but seriously, if Pope Francis had already been elected at that point, I'd have been all over it.  Heck, if Pope Francis had been elected earlier, I might still be Catholic! But most likely not. :-)

A statue of... somebody, in the Basilica. Simon of Cyrene? He appears to have a giant cross. (Actually, at first glance, he appeared to have a giant... something less religious. And now I can't unsee it, so-- ha! Neither can you.) 

We made sure to take some time for self-reflection.

Just a lovely moment at the Palazza Massimo alle Terme -- Museo Nazionale Romano.

In looking for souvenirs for our niece and two nephews, we declined to buy them at the Colosseum gift shop. "Hey kids, look at the nice gentlemen beating each other to death! Fun for the whole family! Hey, remember how you learned in Sunday school about the Christians being eaten by lions? No? Well, here are some illustrated pictures!"

Hey look! A piazza! Instead of street corners, Rome has statues and fountains.

The resemblance is hard to miss. We determined that in a former life, Scott had been a one-armed old Roman guy with prodigious facial hair.   

Obligatory honeymoon selfie, Roman version.

The layers of history are incredibly visible in Rome. And there are so.many.ruins.  These are at Ostia Antica-- miles and miles of well-preserved ruins just outside the city. By the last day, we'd seen enough ruins to last us a good long while.  Fascinating stuff, though.

And of course, you know the old adage: When in Rome on your honeymoon, eats lots of gelato!

So, we come to today: a year later.  A year after the honeymoon, I can say a few things for sure:

1. Being married to Scott is a state highly superior to the state of NOT being married to Scott. 
2. I am feeling way more "settled down" at this point in my life than I had previously thought possible. We have since bought a home and these days I'm perfectly content to talk about things that might happen in this house MULTIPLE DECADES from now.  Serious paradigm shift has occurred. :-)
3. Marriage is fun. Like, it's ridiculously awesome. We both feel like we won the lottery. Though neither of us would pass up an actual winning lottery ticket... 

Mission: Honeymoon (Part one: London)

So... in celebration of the first anniversary of our honeymoon, I thought I'd share some photos. :-)

The first half of our honeymoon brought us to London-- and marked Scott's first international adventure! He's pretty happy about that.   

So hey, did you know that the Tower of London is not just a tower? I, um, totally did.  Yeah. The Tower of London is an entire fortress city, complete with live-in guards, the Crown Jewels and a whole population of ravens. (Yes, I said "nevermore" way too many times. Probably wasn't even funny the first time.) 

Obligatory honeymoon selfie! This one's on the Tube. Dutiful public transit users, we minded the hell out of that gap.

We explored the inner workings of the HMS Belfast.

 "Hey sweetie, show them how you feel about the rain." London fog at the London bridge. 

This one's pretty much in here for the aesthetics. 

A bunch of stuff happened!

This happened:

I married my honey. If you have a honey, I highly recommend becoming married to him/her.

This also happened:

I acquired a top-rate set of in-laws, completed with adorable nephew and funky sister-in-law.

Then I became a Dog Person. It mostly feels the same as Not Being A Dog Person, except that I walk around the block a lot more now, and collect poop in a little blue bag, and have a new appreciation for chasing squirrels. It's a little bit like having a baby-- every time I come home, he's happy to see me. And if we want an evening on the town, we have to come home first, so Poochface can eat and pee.

And we needed balance in the family, so then we got a cat. Then I was on familiar territory. I know how to be a Cat Person. He was pretty little when we brought him home from the shelter, but he had no problem finding his appetite. Luckily, our two kiddos get along pretty well.


So that's our little family. The single-to-married transition went ridiculously smoothly (with a few dog-shaped bumps in the road), and either we're still in the honeymoon phase, or maybe being married is just easy sometimes. :-) And speaking of honeymoon... that's the next post!

Oh right! I have a blog!

This year, more than many others, deserves a recap. Here goes: the story of my life, 2011 version.

January through March are kind of a blur. I assume that some good stuff happened, with probably a smattering of less-than-desirable episodes thrown in for good measure. I assume there are a few blogs posts that deal with that time period. Go read them.

After April, things are easier to remember. I met a boy, see. Well, a man, actually, but it's just too awkward to say "manfriend." (He's totally of age, guys, I promise, though he is five years younger than I am.) Anyway, we've gotten along really well from the beginning, and the long-term possibilities are starting to look pretty solid. So there's that.

Work is good. I've traveled quite a bit this year, doing my malaria thang. Then the boss completed her contract and I become the new boss. That happened officially a couple weeks ago, but the workload ramped up a lot earlier than that. So I'm juggling a ramped-up workload and a few special projects that I accidentally showed competence for. It's kind of energizing for the moment, in a frenetic sort of way, but if we don't replace me soon, frenetic is just going to turn to frantic. And that wouldn't be pretty. So here's hoping that the hiring of the assistant goes smoothly (and quickly!).

In terms of family, there were a few health-related bumps in the road this year. My brother-in-law had an acoustic neuroma which required brain surgery and a lot of physical therapy. He's still working to get full function back. That same week, my mom was in the hospital with pneumonia, and three days later, my stepfather had a massive stroke (from which he somewhat miraculously made a full recovery). Everyone's doing OK now, but it was tough going there for a while. My dad's doing well, and even moved in with his new sweetie (who's pretty great).

Every once in a while people ask me what I do for fun. I'm not sure I answer that very well. Work takes up a goodly portion of my life; and boyfriend, church, household and condo-hold chores take up much of the remaining portion. I did take that awesome trip to Ecuador, where I got what presumably was cholera but managed to also have a lovely time, so that continued my streak of interesting international vacations. I read a lot, and I watched a few TV series this year, too, though none are coming to mind at the moment. Scott (that's the boy) loves to play board games, so I've learned a lot of great new games this year. There! (she says triumphantly) That's totally a hobby, right?

Yeah... that's 2011 in a nutshell. It's looking like 2012 might be rather a banner year. Yay for that.

adventure book

I had the pleasure of visiting some pretty adorable kids last weekend. Baby Girl, who's not a baby anymore, and Little Sister, who is. Baby Girl, who is just shy of her third birthday, was so excited to pull out her "Adventure Book" and show off its contents. Clearly she'd gotten the idea from watching Up, and her adventure book was much the same. It showcased tiny moments of her days, the ones that bind together to make the stuff of life, and passed them off as adventures. And, suddenly, they were.

My internal clock is telling me it's time for adventures. (Which is a nice change from the clock tick-tocking about babies and whatnot.)

So I'm looking life in the eye, buying tickets for remote and unknown locations, saying yes to life in all the ways I can, delighting in the little things. Finding the adventures that are already embedded in my life. Creating new ones.

One of these upcoming adventures will happen in Ecuador, with hiking and jungling and touristing. But most of them will be the mundane ones, the tiny moments, the little connections.

Which makes this my adventure book.

smile!

So I just got stood up for a coffee date. It's not the end of the world, but it's not exactly fun, either.

Since I had walked the mile-plus to the coffeeshop, I wanted to do something constructive with my walk home: I decided to smile at everyone I passed. So I smiled at the guys milling around outside of McDonald's, the dads pushing baby strollers, the sweet old couple celebrating perhaps their 40th or 50th Mother's Day, the mother pushing her child in a wheelchair. I smiled at the drunk guys pounding bongos and the teenagers weaving through traffic on bicycles. I smiled at pugs and poodles and the lone Canada goose wandering down the middle of my street (?). I was answered in four different languages, one of which I couldn't place. One guy wished me a happy Mother's Day.

It was fun! I feel like I interacted with my neighborhood more in that half-hour than I have since I moved in.

I thumb my nose at thee, Ron from Chicago, IL.

food mood

I'm loving my CSA share already, and it's only been a few weeks. So far my freezer is filled with arugula pesto and homemade quasi-palak (an Indian-inspired spicy spinach concoction) and my belly is filled with salad, stir fry and delicious roasted turnips.

I'm lucky to have the option to join a CSA-- I know that. I pay extra for the privilege of consuming food that's grown locally and without chemicals and delivered to my door by the farmer himself. (Chad, that's his name.) Working in world hunger, I'm all too aware that most people in the world don't have this option. They can't afford luxury food. They live in deserts or food deserts, or they don't own property that allows for farming, or they live in contexts with untenable soil or very short growing seasons or corrupt governments or thieving neighbors or really big bugs.

I'm lucky, I'm privileged... and it's a lot easier just to forget that and go out to eat and cook fancy food and believe I deserve it.

not a bad problem to have

I think I'm suffering from a case of delayed-onset Honeymoonitis.

Here's the thing: I am really liking my job lately! I didn't get to have a honeymoon period the first time around, because we went straight from "protracted hiring process" into "frustrating and scary transition, including massive layoffs and a bout of extreme job insecurity." But the dust is starting to settle, and I'm seeing at least the vague outlines of the Really Good Thing that I've gotten myself into.

My colleagues, it turns out, are well-endowed with personal and professional gifts that make working with them a pretty joyful experience. Relationships are healthy, despite our turbulent recent past, and meetings are productive. We have a great mission, and I think each one of us puts that mission first.

I'm starting to get the hang of my responsibilities, one sphere at a time. I now know approximately what's expected of me when I travel and when I'm in the office, and I can meet those expectations. Soon I'll have the fine privilege of performing annual tasks for the second time, thus allowing myself the possibility of feeling actually competent. This is... fun!

Whee!

harmony

Easter had a lot of little highlights this year. The vigil, where Anna was baptized with cold water and joined a big family. The whole Triduum, in fact, that brought me from there to here with solemnity and exuberance. The joyful white-and-gold-and-lily celebration. The decommissioning of our old organ with a joyful Vierne Symphony. Delicious Easter lunch with a black bean salad that was to die for and perfectly executed roast lamb. A cleansing new fire at the Point, with attendant marshmallows.

But the best part was the singing. The six of us, musical and non-musical alike, somehow produced delicious guitar stylings and four-part harmony that wove itself in and out of the lyrics, supporting the words and lifting them up above the page, bringing Easter to life in triumph and alleluias.

It made me think about harmony, how much more beautiful it is if everyone is singing something just a little different; departing from one another and joining back up again, never getting too far away but also not relinquishing individual identity. Unison is beautiful, but never as rich or as deep as harmony.

There's a lesson here, a lesson about who my friends are and how I view difference. About how I can learn from others as they depart from me and join back up again and weave their lives in and through and around mine. And about Easter, how it's more joyful when you celebrate it not just through your voice, but in four-part harmony.

C8-H10-N4-O2

I read somewhere once that coffee affords this country millions of hours of workplace efficiency.

Today, I believe it. A few minutes ago, I was nodding in my chair, bench-pressing my eyelids, and straining to hear approaching colleagues so I could arrange my face into some semblance of consciousness and not totally humiliate my somnolent self.

Xanthine alkaloid to the rescue! A quarter-mug of bitter fluid later, I am bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to take the workaday world by storm.

Excuse me. I'm feeling a surge of productivity coming on.

my green thumb (such as it is)

The veggies are on their way! As much as this morning's inch of snow may beg to differ, spring is in the air, and my CSA* season has begun. I sit on my couch and eagerly await the delivery of a box of spinach, lettuce, arugula and sweet turnips that you can eat like apples. CSA: that's step one of my very own "taking root" curriculum.

Step two: There's a little brown bag of compost sitting on the counter in the kitchen. I got it for free at the "Family Farmed Expo" a few weeks ago, and it's been waiting patiently for me to determine that it's Basil Season. Every year, my lone foray into the agricultural sphere consists of a pot or two of basil on the windowsill. This year, that compost is going to nurture one heck of a pesto pasta dinner. That's the goal, anyway.

Step three has been brewing for a while. I really want to try my hand at vermiculture: cultivating pet worms who will eat my food scraps. Practical and low-maintenance: nearly everything a pet should be! (Actually I prefer soft and cuddly to furless and wriggly, but you can't have it all.)

So that's my plan: veggies, herbs and worms. Gettin' my farm on.

*Community Supported Agriculture. For the uninitiated, that's when you purchase a share in a local farm and receive weekly packages of the land's bounty. For us urbanites, it's a delicious, convenient way to access organic vegetables and support local agriculture!