missELENAeous

Last Saturday we drove from Wilmington to Durham. We picked up a...

Sun, 19 May 2013 21:43:00 -0400

Last Saturday we drove from Wilmington to Durham. We picked up a rental minivan from RDU and my brothers and then headed to Charlotte for Ryan’s girlfriend Erin. Somewhere along the way the plan to drive overnight was hatched and before I knew it we were in Atlanta at 2am. By 7 we had arrived at the Friendship Tree in Gulfport, Mississippi and by 9 we were in New Orleans. 1,015 miles.

After a week of partying and wedding prep and the wedding we headed home. We left New Orleans and drove north through Birmingham. We stopped for a long lunch at The Bottle Tree and then headed first to Charlotte and then to Durham. We slept for a few hours at Reid’s then, this morning, dropped the minivan off and headed home. We were back in our house by noon. 1,035 miles.

Last night we threw Lauren a bachelorette in the Marigny. Never...

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:46:30 -0400

Last night we threw Lauren a bachelorette in the Marigny. Never has a woman in a boa looked so happy.

Tomorrow we leave for New Orleans for 8 days. Which means...

Fri, 10 May 2013 18:00:00 -0400

Tomorrow we leave for New Orleans for 8 days. Which means we’re leaving Kaylee for 8 days. This is the first time we’re leaving her for more than a few hours, so as you might imagine I’m feeling all of the guilt. All of the anxiety. And all of the feelings.

Our super incredible neighbor is going to watch her so that she can stay in her house, in her comfort zone. Since this whole experience is a first we don’t know what to expect. She LOVES our neighbor but she’s used to being home all day everyday with Dan and spending most of her evenings with both of us. It’ll be an adjustment and I expect she’ll freak a little bit every time we leave her for a while. That or she’ll forget about us and switch her loyalty to our neighbor.

To make up for our impending abandonment we’ve been spending some extra time with her this week. Last night we headed to her (our) favorite place, Carolina Beach State Park, to swim and run and play in the sand. We picked up dinner from our favorite Latin American restaurant and let Kaylee really get out some energy. She swam in the river, ran laps, played fetch, and rolled in the sand. Any day that ends with me washing sand out of her harness is a good day.

With just one week to go before her 9 month birthday (when dogs...

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:55:00 -0400

With just one week to go before her 9 month birthday (when dogs reach full physical maturity) I’ve started taking Kaylee out for runs with me. Last night we did our longest run yet- 2.5 miles! She is doing so well on these runs, keeping pace, not pulling too much, and only throwing her entire bodyweight against me to stop and smell something occasionally. There was one moment where we were coming down a wooden ramp on the wharf and she started to tear off to smell another dog that I thought I was going to fall and break my neck, but I didn’t, so we’re good.

I’ve been running with her in the regular harness because she HATED the Gentle Leader so intensely, but it’s sort of a pain because she knows how to pull in it and just leans her (very strong) muscle weight against it. Our friends recommended a harness with a front leash attachment so I think we’ll be checking that out once we return from New Orleans.

(pictured: her wiped out on the floor after our run last night)

This weekend was the first in a long time we had absolutely...

Mon, 06 May 2013 23:18:10 -0400

This weekend was the first in a long time we had absolutely nothing scheduled. And since it was exactly a week before we’re leaving for Lauren’s wedding in New Orleans I figured I’d use all the downtime to crank out the remaining projects on the wedding docket. I did not. Instead I hung out with Dan and the dog, cooked and photographed like crazy, went for an amazing 8 mile run through Greenfield Lake, did some yoga, and relaxed.

It was wonderful. And I have all these weeknights to get to the wedding projects, right?

After a week of mostly rain (note to self-check the weather...

Sun, 05 May 2013 14:25:26 -0400

After a week of mostly rain (note to self-check the weather before you bike to work), I spent some time in the garden yesterday weeding and loving on my plants. I’m very much still in the “these are my babies” stage with my front yard garden, so they’re getting a lot of love. Let’s hope I can keep it up all summer long.

I was delighted to find that two of our four tomato plants have tomatoes on the vine! Even better- all four are flowering! The beans are also long enough to reach the trellis, the arugula is getting bigger and bigger each moment, and the rosemary has gone from mostly brown to mostly green. May, you may be full of storm clouds lately but I forgive you.

After over five years together I can tell when Dan needs a...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:45:58 -0400

After over five years together I can tell when Dan needs a little space. Yesterday was full and crazy and busy, so today I headed out with the dog for a few hours so that Dan could have some alone time to play video games or read or just enjoy a little breathing room.

Kaylee and I headed first to Poplar Grove for a run, Kaylee’s longest with me. She’s finally old enough to start running on the leash, and today we made it 2.2 miles! Afterwards we drove up to Topsail Island for a walk on the beach and some running through the waves. That pup loves the water, that’s for sure.

The full moon has powers, y’all. Strong powers. And after...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:07:00 -0400

The full moon has powers, y’all. Strong powers. And after this full, partially eclipsed, moon week a margarita is the perfect answer.

This weekend we headed up to DC for our friend Brit’s...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:05:07 -0400

This weekend we headed up to DC for our friend Brit’s surprise birthday party. The party was Saturday and because Brit couldn’t know we we’re in town we stayed with Rachael and Alex (and Wednesday) on Capitol Hill.

After staying up way too late catching up we headed to Union Market first thing Saturday morning for brunch. After perusing the market and scoping out our options we settled on Buffalo and Bergen. Rachael and I both had traditional knishes and French toast bagels (holy yum) and I finished off with my brunch standard Bloody Mary. It was all so delicious, plus the atmosphere (and company!) left nothing to desire. The next time we’re there we’ll have to head back for dinner. I really want to visit the cheese shop where they went the night Alex proposes!

This weekend my cousin Mary and her husband Sean came into town...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:51:59 -0400

This weekend my cousin Mary and her husband Sean came into town for the Azalea Festival. We started the weekend off one the right foot with the Avett Brother’s concert, which was amazing, on Friday night. On Saturday we romped around Poplar Grove with the dogs (Kaylee found herself a giant mud puddle to roll in) then hit Kure Beach for fossil hunting, laying in the sand, and donuts. We finished the night with wings, fireworks, yuker, and gin cocktails. It was wonderful and I barely even felt judged for going to bed at 10.30. Sunday we walked through the festival, had brunch at Dixie Grill, and hunted down some Civil War sites. Later in the day as Dan and Sean played cards Mary and I chatted with my sister, Lauren, about her upcoming wedding. In one month! Gah!

Mary and Sean you’re welcome any time. Britts Donuts, I wish you weren’t outside the scope of the wedding diet.

Starting last week we initiated project free-range Kaylee,...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:49:59 -0400

Starting last week we initiated project free-range Kaylee, otherwise known as the-puppy-graduates-from-her-crate. It’s something I’ve been pushing for since we started leaving her out when we left the house, and her good behavior while she was alone 12 hours when we were gone for Nita’s funeral earned her Dan’s trust for a trial run.

One night last week we left her crate door open when we went to bed. She was confused about what was happening but settled in nicely and had a great night. The next morning I ordered her a big new bed from Molly Mutt (mollymutt.com) and we decided we’d ditch the crate when it arrived. That night, however, she started barking at 4am. Thinking it was her being noisy about neighbors (Thirsty Thursday at the frat house across the street), we put her in her crate and shut the door. When I got up at 5.30 to go to yoga I was hit with a horrible smell and a pathetic scene. The pup had been sick, the barking must have been because she needed to go out, and the crate was a mess. I tossed the bed that was in the crate (she’d been de-stuffing it all week anyway so it wasn’t a big loss) and put the crate out in the rain. A quick trip to Target got her a new bed and she very abruptly became a free range pup.

Since the whole incident she’s been doing fabulously. Her new bed came last night so now she has a nice bed in the living room where her crate was and a nice bed in the kitchen next to my desk. She whined when we went upstairs at night the first night or two but has been on terrific behavior. No chewing things that aren’t meant to be chewed, no accidents, no trouble. Little Miss Almost Full Grown is turning into a pretty great dog. Now all we need is a doggy door so we don’t have any guilt about when we wake up.

I thought we could all use a little humor today. Thanks, Los...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:33:47 -0400

I thought we could all use a little humor today. Thanks, Los Primos.

What happened in Boston is heartbreaking. What happens every day, all over the world, is heartbreaking.

Bombs are not the answer. Violence is not the answer. And distorting a tragedy as a vehicle to make a political and racial point? You have no idea how destructive you are. Let’s be outraged. But let’s be outraged about every bomb that goes off across the world every day that wipes out innocent civilian lives. We are all humans.

I found out yesterday that I (B&S) got nominated for the...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 07:56:00 -0400

I found out yesterday that I (B&S) got nominated for the Saveur Best Food Blog Award in the Best Regional Cuisine category. And I’m all holy shit. Because holy shit.

You can vote for me, that would be amazing. I’m so overwhelmed with excitement and confusion and ZOMYGODS that I can barely contain myself. But yeah. This is huge. I can’t believe it.

So today I read this article in Slate about getting married...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:35:00 -0400

So today I read this article in Slate about getting married young and why it’s awesome. And then I read the rebuttal, also in Slate, about how the idea that getting married young is just a conservative societal confine oppressing women. And to both I kind of want to say STFU.

I got married when I was 23. Dan was 25. We’d known each other since my sophomore year of college, but hadn’t started dating until the last semester of my senior year. To be totally honest, not a month before we started dating I told my dad I would probably never get married. And I honestly believed that. I thought it was a bullshit social contract that didn’t matter. How, you may ask yourself, did I go from thinking marriage was pointless to being married within 2 years? Well, easily, it turns out.

Not to get mushy but within weeks of our first kiss I knew this was it. He was the one that I wanted to make bespectacled babies with (I actually said that in my vows, though in a more lady-like way) and the one I wanted to whittle away (literally if I get my way) my years next to. I’d had plenty of serious relationships where marriage had come up and in the back of my head I always thought “I’ll go along with this but it’s not real. This guy is good for now, but this isn’t forever.” With Dan I never had that thought. Instead I had the yeah, this is it, thought. Nothing felt more natural than the idea of marrying him. The catch, of course, was that when we started dating I had just joined the Peace Corps and was scheduled to leave in the fall (this was mid winter). So we talked about it, a lot, going back and forth about how our fledgling relationship could survive two years of me teaching AIDS education in the Dominican Republic and him eating Hot Pockets and developing the web in Pennsylvania. And then one day, he said, well, what if I come with you? And it was like well fucking duh.

In order to join the Peace Corps and get placed together you have to be married, so that was the day we decided to get married. He was a few hours away at the time so I celebrated my pseudo-engagement by going for hot wings with Brit and Charlotte. The plan was set. Dan would apply to join me, we’d get engaged officially sometime that summer, we would get married, and we’d honeymoon for two years doing the service I’d dreamed of.

A glitch in the plan came when my medical screening didn’t go through because of a chronic eye condition I contracted in college. Turns out the Peace Corps doesn’t send people to developing countries who can go blind fairly easily if a relapse were to occur in their stupid condition that they got because they had stupid shingles when they were 19. Too risky. So our plan was trashed but we’d already decided to get married, started planning a wedding. And you don’t really go back on something like that, so ahead we forged. Not to mention that by this point the idea of being married felt like the natural step, a no brainer.

If you want to read about our actual wedding you can over on B&S (and that grape salsa is fucking awesome), but I wanted to share some thoughts on our experience, marriage in general, and the decision to marry young.

- We proposed to each other. We both had engagement rings (that I bought because he had paid rent that month), and we made a mutual decision to enter into the social and legal contract of marriage as a team. I also opted not to have a diamond, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because even if I liked gems I would have felt insane spending that kind of money on a ring when we could barely afford our queso habit.

- We got a joint checking account and moved in together when we formally got engaged (July 3, 2008). This was a big step for our relationship and ultimately one that I think made it all… real. When you’re 22 living with your fiance fresh out of college (art school no less) the whole experience can feel like playing house. Having very serious conversations about financial planning and our goals made it feel like the lifetime commitment it is.

- We talked (and talk) about our expectations of marriage honestly. I think the stereotype of people who get married young is that they think it’s going to be a fairytale because they’re unrealistic immature dummies. I might have been an unrealistic immature dummy (I let my mom pencil in my eyebrows that day after all) but I do think that I had a clear head when it came to the reality of marriage. I’m the child of a really nasty divorce. My parents still don’t talk, and their relationship has been a big old red flag in every relationship I’ve had since 1997. I get it. Marriages fail. They go down in big, firey, explosive flames. Divorce rates are sky high, relationships end, often despite the best efforts of everyone involved. I am not arrogant enough to believe that my marriage is immune. I’m not actively bracing myself for divorce because I think that would sink my marriage in and of itself, but I do approach the whole experience with caution. I know that it won’t be easy every day. Fuck, almost four years in I can say with conviction that it HASN’T been easy every day. There are days I want to murder Dan and I’m SURE he has days where he would rather shut his office door and not speak to me at all than deal with my crazy. But the thing is, we made a commitment to try every day. And so we do. When we argue we take some time to cool off and then talk about it until it’s resolved. Sometimes that means sitting coldly on other sides of the room slinging glares but sometimes it means amazing conversations where we learn things about ourselves and each other that we never would have known otherwise. What I’m saying is, it’s a process. All we can do is commit to both putting in everything we’ve got.

- We make decisions together. Financial decisions, what to eat for dinner, what to name our dog, when to start trying for kids, what yoga class to go to, what color to paint the bathroom, what to plant in the garden, how long to visit for Thanksgiving, everything. We’re a team, period. We also share all the responsibilities. Bill paying, house work, driving on road trips, cleaning out the fridge, everything. Frankly the only steadfast rule in our relationship is that I’m the one who grocery shops because grocery stores make Dan anxious. On the flip side Dan is the one who walks to pick up pizza because if we’re ordering pizza it usually means I’m a glass of wine deep into the couch and I’m not walking anywhere.

Ultimately, what bothered me about both articles was how black and white they were. I got married young not for religious reasons or because I felt pressured to or because I read too many Mormon mommy blogs and thought marriage would be an amazing dream cloud of rainbows but because I was with someone that I knew would make me happy for the long haul. I am definitely not the same person today that I was September 26, 2009. Neither is Dan. But we’ve grown and changed together and I think we’re happier than ever. Neither of us are perfect but I can’t imagine going through life with anyone else by my side.

I didn’t get married because I wanted to be married, or because I didn’t want to face the world alone, or because I was with someone and it felt like the logical next step in our relationship. I got married because I found the partner I knew I needed and you can’t control how and when you meet that person. Dan is absolutely right for me and it just so happens that we met at 19 and 21 instead of 26 and 28. And now that we ARE 26 and 28 I just have to say that I’m so fucking glad I’m not planning a wedding right now. I mean, have you guys SEEN pinterest?

So, basically, this isn’t an argument for getting married young or for waiting. It’s why I got married at 23 and why I think that every person should get married if and when they want to, having considered what it really means to be MARRIED to someone for EVER and everyone else should mind their own damn business. (This applies to having children, as well. The state of my uterus is not your concern, nosy outsiders).

Being both a hypochondriac and someone with severe aversions...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:11:34 -0400

Being both a hypochondriac and someone with severe aversions towards the doctors can make being a pet owner difficult. On one hand the idea of going to the vet makes me want to die (not because of the vet, we LOVE our vet), but on the other hand I’m constantly concerned Kaylee is dying. It’s a tough balance to strike the whole making-sure-she’s-healthy-and-I’m-not-overreacting-but-also-not-ignoring-real-problems-because-I-assume-the-medical-industry-is-a-profit-centric-racket thing.

On Saturday I noticed a patch on Kaylee’s cheek where the hair was falling out. I did some Googling (the worst idea ever when you’re a hypochondriac/assume the worst) and convinced myself it was mange. IT WAS THE ONLY EXPLANATION.

I talked myself down and decided it was probably nothing, and then came to the central stance that I would watch it. So, I watched it. And yesterday it seemed to have gotten bigger so this morning I got up early and took her to the vet.

One skin scraping and a lot of treats later there was no evidence to believe that it’s mange. The vet says she probably scraped it somehow (like at the park on Friday) and gave us some ointment to put on it to help clear it up. She also said to watch for signs of mange just in case, which gave me just enough room to hang myself.

(p.s. as of today this little beast is 32 pounds)

This weekend we drove to a small church outside of Pine Hurst...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:10 -0400

This weekend we drove to a small church outside of Pine Hurst for the funeral of my great aunt Nita.

Nita was my grandmother, Barbara’s, older sister. They were two peas in a pod, those two. Never have two sisters loved each other more. In fact, so many of my memories of my grandmother also include Nita- they were always together. For the past few years every time I’ve seen Nita she’s shared how much she missed Bobbie, and I’d like to think that now they’re finally back together. Sitting on that big old beach in the sky making up stories about strangers walking by.

(photo above of Nita (far left), Barbara (far right), and their parents, Stanley & Flossie)

A few trips to the farm store and Home Depot later and our front...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:56:55 -0400

A few trips to the farm store and Home Depot later and our front yard has a garden bed! I think I’m going to do a whole post about building it over on B&S, but in the mean time I can sum it up with two statements- Kaylee loves to bark and dig AND my fingernails are black.

Also, the farm store has the best sign ever in the history of road signs.

When I look at this photo of my grandparents (my dad’s...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:23:23 -0400

When I look at this photo of my grandparents (my dad’s parents- Barbara & Ken) I see myself. I make that face, the one Bobbie is making, constantly.

Tonight we headed to Carolina Beach State Park to enjoy the...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 23:27:22 -0400

Tonight we headed to Carolina Beach State Park to enjoy the sunset, let the dog run and swim, and relax a bit before what is going to be a long and exhausting Saturday. It was glorious. It continues to amaze me that we live a short 20 minute drive from THIS.

This past weekend, for Easter, my mom and her pup Lucky took the...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 11:30:34 -0400

This past weekend, for Easter, my mom and her pup Lucky took the trip down I-40 to visit us. It was easily one of the nicest weekends we’ve spent together, full of walks on the beach, collecting shells and watching dolphins, treats (donuts, frappes, French toast waffles, root beer floats, foccacia bread, wine), yoga, and relaxing. My mom was sweet enough to bring us a beautiful orchid as a house warming gift, something I’m not terrified that I’m going to kill. And while we had a lot of adventures we also spent a good part of the weekend obsessively watching Season 3 of Covert Affairs which was awesome because a) I was dying to finish watching it and b) I just wanted to veg on the couch during the last few days of my spring break. Thank goodness my mom got hooked after half an episode and was as eager to marathon watch it as I was!