Pie and compromise (sort of like tea and sympathy? This title’s a bit of a stretch.)

I’ve decided to participate in the BlogMeFebruary challenge cooked up by Katrina of Sota is Sexy and Lindsey of LindseyTalerico.com, because it’s low pressure (one post a week, or more if you want) and also, these ladies are very, very funny.

This week’s challenge is FOOD (really, they wrote it in all caps so that’s what I’m sticking with), and today’s prompt is dessert–though I’m apparently allowed to pick from any of this week’s prompts (I think?) or make up something of my own that’s on topic– still I’m going to riff on dessert for a bit.

J hates cake. I haven’t really been able to pin him down on what exactly it is about cake that is so offensive, though. Sometimes he’ll say it’s too dry, but my mom and I have a (not very) secret recipe for some seriously moist cake (that sounds vaguely dirty. It’s not. Just replace the oil with applesauce and use a box mix. You’re welcome.) but he’s still not into it. So it’s just one of those things that, maddeningly, I LOVE but my partner is just not that into (see also: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter books, making the bed.)

Anyways, we got married not that long ago. As most wedding movies (and that one episode of Gilmore Girls) will remind you, selecting a cake is a VERY IMPORTANT part of a wedding. Franck Eggelhoffer (“Every party has a pooper, that why we invited you! Party pooper! Party pooper! Every party has a pooper, that’s why we invited you, George Baaanks!”) from Father or the Bride says so.

So we had cake at the reception (I think my mom would have boycotted if we didn’t provide her with cake after everything she did to help plan that shindig.) There was the requisite cake cutting and feeding each other/getting frosting on his face. People went “awwww” like they were supposed to.

Photo by Christopher Morris Photography

BUT! we also had pie at J’s request. Lots and lots of pie. So much pie that our friends from college reported that each had at least one piece of all three flavors.

 That’s a lot of pie.

So much pie we took home extra. It was the best part of our wedding, depending on who you talk to. And we got to eat pie in bed for breakfast during our honeymoon. And in bed after dinner while watching Parks and Recreation, a show we both love.

So my husband may not like cake, but I guess it’s not all bad.

Who wouldn’t love that face?

The Water Returned!

True to form, I am only 3 weeks in to this new blog and already 1 week behind. (I never said I was perfect.)

But! Our water came back last Wednesday after the city/some rando crew hired by the city or my landlord (we’re not quite sure on that one) ascertained that the pipe had not, in fact, frozen as they initially believed.

No, my internet friends, somehow the city crew that drives around planting trees in below freezing weather in January had managed to CRUSH our water main while they were planting our tree. So this past Wednesday morning, another crew, this one definitely hired by our landlord, arrived to replace the busted main. They were out on our sidewalk with a jackhammer at 7:30, which was handy as that’s when I need to get up for work. When I returned nearly 12 hours later, this is what greeted me:

If only it had been summer and I was one of those kids from Hey Arnold!

The crew who put in the new pipe had the bright idea to use the hydrant to clean up the debris from the street. In opening up the valve, they broke it, and so for nearly four hours water gushed out of the hydrant across the street from our building, spraying so hard it hit our front door. Eventually the fire department showed up and fixed it, but it was a fun coda to the end of our water saga. First we had no water, then waaaaaaaaay too much. High-larious, let me tell you.

Since then, I’ve been struggling with some sort of cold/flu thing that I keep saying I will get over, but it’s been slow going so far. January was kind of a rough month for me. I wasn’t really looking forward to this new year, anyways (it’s not triskaidekaphobia), and then January hit me like a ton of bricks, so now I’ve come out the other side a limping, unshowered, hacking, fevered mess. (I have no idea where the limp came from.) But I made it through. February, you’d better treat me right, you hear?

In other news, one of my best friends just bought a house (!!!!) and I will be visiting her there this weekend, to help peel some truly ugly wallpaper off of the walls she now jointly owns with her fiance. Fun times. I’ve never removed wallpaper before, but I do love me some home improvement projects.

 

Water and trees. (Not the story you might think)

I mentioned before that I live in Brooklyn. Like much of the country, we’ve had a pretty cold week.

The city decided to plant a tree in front of our building this week. In doing so, they exposed our water pipes to  (forecasted) below-freezing temperatures for several days, and now we have no water because the pipes froze.

That’s the story our landlord relayed to us, anyways. It was strange how it started: Wednesday night, J noticed that the water pressure from our bathroom faucet was low. Thursday morning, he ran into our landlord (who lives in the unit below ours) on the train, and discovered that the problem was going on in their place, too. Thursday night, our landlord informed us he’d checked throughout the house and hadn’t found a leak, and that the water coming in from the main line was very low. Friday night we had even less water pressure. This morning we had no water. This afternoon our landlord informed us that the pipes are likely frozen and it could take several days for them to thaw (where I come from, frozen pipes don’t so much thaw as they burst, so I’m thinking no water for a week.) So J and I went and bought gallons of water at the grocery store and made arrangements to shower at a friend’s apartment. And we fought about how much water to buy, because we’re both pretty pissed about the situation.

But we do have a skinny tree out front now that might provide shade to our building in like, 20 years.

In other news, we have a mountain of laundry to do (at the laundromat), our cat has not peed anywhere inappropriate in three whole weeks (either she had an infection that we cured with antibiotics or we haven’t done anything to piss her off lately) and this morning, before I realized we had no water, I finished painting the storage boxes my mom got me for my birthday and now our DVD collection looks like this:

Organized pop-of-color-y goodness

As opposed to what we previously had going on, which was this:

What our DVD collection used to look like

I was pretty proud of myself. Then I realized I couldn’t wash off the paint.

But still proud.

About Me

A few things about me (the short version):

I like books, daffodils, chai lattes and blogs. I recently married my college sweetheart and got a pixie cut. Next up: world domination.

Feelin’ sassy with the new haircut

A few things about me (the long version):

I am currently in therapy. I don’t know how much I’ll talk about it on here other than to say this. As of now, it’s still pretty early in the process, and I don’t know how much I want to share with family, friends, and/or a faceless void possibly comprised of tens of anonymous readers. That said, the basics are: I was really depressed for a long time. I realized I was depressed, took a long time to figure out I might need therapy, sought therapy, am now in therapy and feeling less depressed. I am very hard on myself a lot of the time. I’m the kind of perfectionist who does not do things rather than do them and fail/have them not be perfect. My therapist is Gestalt-trained, which is a weird (to me, anyways) sort of therapy that (to the best of my understanding) works by examining tension in your body and connecting it to the emotions you’re repressing when you feel these tensions, and the root causes. I think it’s helping.

All my cousins on my dad’s side of the family call our grandmother Nonie. That’s because she is Italian and wanted to be called Nana, but I, the firstborn grandkid, couldn’t pronounce it and my version stuck. (I’m actually pretty proud of that.)

I have a yellow cat named Saffron that we adopted when she was a year old. Her paperwork says she shares my birthday, but that is of course the vet’s best guess. My husband J thought it was a sign anyways. Her name is inspired both by her coloring and by a character on Joss Whedon’s short-lived, much-beloved show Firefly. This should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about what kind of cat she is (a cat who will pee in inappropriate spots at inopportune moments, like on my umbrella before I leave for work on a rainy day), and quite a lot about what kind of nerds J and I are (Browncoats!).

My gorgeous cat, who may or may not be plotting murder or escape at any given moment.

J’s a freelance scenic designer. Sometimes he goes off and does theater somewhere else, sometimes for a month. Since we live in a 400 square-foot apartment, that’s not always a bad thing.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a writer, then a marine biologist, then an oncologist, then a writer again, then an actor, then manager of a theater company. Now that I’ve grown up I have no clue.

I work for an advertising agency because a)paycheck and b) health insurance. But if you’re a prospective employer who stumbled upon this blog, I was taking time to explore another possible career path. Having confirmed that it is not the career path for me, I am eager to return to the world of nonprofit administration.

I grew up in Northern NY, about 10 minutes away from the Canadian border, in a small-ish town that is big for the county it’s in (or it used to be—it’s kind of dying now as the industries that supported it are moving away.) My husband J grew up in Central NY in a tiny town about an hour away from the mall where I used to go back-to-school shopping each year (which is 3 hours away from my hometown.) We met my first month of freshman year in a theater program at a SUNY in the Hudson Valley. Now we live in Brooklyn, after a brief detour to Southern Indiana. We got married at a vineyard in the Finger Lakes in September of 2012. We really like living in NY state.

Us in our Halloween costumes, which cost us $8 total. (He was a cowboy, I was Rosie the Riveter.)

(I over-use parentheticals.)

If you’ve read this far, I am very pleasantly surprised! And I would also like to know as much or as little about you as you’d like to share, so please leave a comment if you have the time.

Expectations and Birds

Hello Internets.

I know you very well. A Google search (I’m not a monetized blogger so I don’t use/push Bing) would imply that you, Internets, know me pretty well too, judging by my LinkedIn, Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter, and Pinterest pages.

It’s true that these profiles and collections reveal quite a bit about me. But I’ve been holding back an awful lot. I even had a blog before (and a LiveJournal before that–two, in fact), but I still held a lot back. I’ve been watching communities for the better part of a decade now at fan fiction sites, on blogs, in the comments on websites. Like I’ve been waiting to be the real me before getting involved. I’ve wanted to be involved, I’ve made some really half-hearted attempts in the past, but ultimately I have held myself back. Because I wasn’t enough yet. Good enough, fun enough, smart enough, big enough, thin enough, handy enough, creative enough, funny enough, sexy enough, kind enough, conscious enough, well enough, ENOUGH enough. (Enough is a really strange-looking word, isn’t it?) Not being enough kept me paralyzed, forever watching but not participating, not allowing myself to really go after the things I want.

SO. All of that feeling like not enough of course led me to therapy. Eventually. I think that’s another post or several. I just didn’t have a particularly good way to transition to this: I need to stop with the not being enough. Enough, already! This is where I am right now, this is what and who I am right now. Full disclosure: I still don’t really think it’s enough, but I think one of the ways to get over that is to just do things anyway.

Now, this is part of a cycle for me. After I’ve been down on myself for a while, I start to perk back up and say “Ok! I am good at things! I can do stuff!” (Usually it’s a bit more specific than that.) And I make very ambitious lists and audacious goals and after two weeks the weight of all the THINGS and STUFF I need to do crashes right back down on me and I go back to thinking I’m a failure for not being able to accomplish anything at all.

Case in point: below are all the things on my list right now.

-My husband J and I are making big plans for redoing the bathroom (actually, we tackled that this past weekend. ACCOMPLISHMENT) and re-arranging the bedroom and maybe also painting the kitchen and oh yeah buying new rugs for the bedroom.

-Separately, I’m following along with Apartment Therapy’s January Cure, though I’ve already fallen way behind.

-I want a new job and in my head I need to have it by March. Why? Not sure. But it ideally involves my passion. Only trouble is, I’ve been mixed-up for some time now over just what is my “passion.”

-I’m blogging again. At least in draft form. I want to have a blog that lets me interact with a lot of the smart, funny people I’ve come across online (and maybe a few in real life, too). I don’t know how often I’ll post to start, but I wanted to start.

-I want to build myself a website. Stretch my creaky HTML & CSS muscles.

-The aforementioned Mighty List. The goals I’m tackling first? “Become a morning person” and “Read all 100 books on the Guardian’s Top 100 Novels list”. No way I could possibly fall short of those, right? (/sarcasm)

So usually I would look at all of these things on my list and get scared and down on myself, but I think the therapy is actually working. I look at my goals and remember what Anne Lamott shared in a few of her books: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Bird #1 is in the bag.