Month: December 2011

Happy Birthday, Mr. Thor!

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Today is Mr. Thor’s birthday. We will be in the same age decade for at least another 5 years.

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you already know that Mr. Thor has been an overwhelmingly positive force in my life.

He continues to blow me away with the amount of love and support that he offers, continually and unconditionally. Before Mr. Thor, I didn’t really understand what a healthy friendship should look like, I don’t think I knew the true meaning of love, and I definitely had some gaps in my self worth.

To say that he has  been a healing force in my life would not be an exaggeration. He is at times a coach, a therapist, or a cheerleader. He gives me a reality check when I’m going off the deep end and a nudge when I doubt that I have what it takes.

He is hilarious, and I love our inside jokes. We do impressions to make each other laugh. We watch old SNL skits over and over again and laugh hard every time.

He is caring, brilliant, fun, and he has a heart of pure gold.

I wish that every person on the planet could feel the way I get to feel because I know this man.

Happy birthday to the best husband, ever.

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The things we do for love (the things we do for love)

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Mr. Thor's monster sandwich.

I make my husband a sandwich just like this most weeknights.

Not pictured:

The salad I make most nights

The apple I cut up most nights

Also not pictured:

The dishes Mr. Thor does most days

The coffee Mr. Thor gets ready most evenings (with a timer!)

The garbage that Mr. Thor takes out most weeks

…OK, now it looks like my contributions are puny! I do laundry, too.

Which brings me to what is also not pictured:

how much I love being married.

 

I love Christmas.

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I do. I love the trappings of Christmas, too. The green and red. The sparkly snowflakes and stripey wrapping paper. I love ornaments for my tree, and up until last year I didn’t really have a home where I could put my tree up. I had no idea what I had for ornaments.

I have balls. Lots and lots of balls. The plain kind from when I was a kid (and they are truly from when I was a kid – I think the boxes had Bradlees and Ames price stickers on them) that are glass and one solid color – red, green, silver, blue, or gold.

This year is my first married Christmas. Mr. Thor and I thought that it would be a good time to start building up our Christmas collection, so that we don’t have to hang these depressing, chipped balls year after year. Well, that’s my reasoning, anyway. I think Mr. Thor just kind of goes along with my whims when it comes to stuff like this.

On Black Friday, I took advantage of the sales at the Corning Museum of Glass and picked up a couple of ornaments that looked just like ornaments I grew up with, only safer:

the one i grew up with involved pins and beads.
the one i grew up with was perched on a VERY pinchy clip.

Then, Mr. Thor’s mom showed up at our house a couple of weeks ago with these two additions:

for the person who has everything.
for the person who is obsessed with cigars.

We were so inspired, and decided that we loved the personality that was starting to take shape on our tree! We decided to buy one more each, that we went to a store and picked out ourselves.

Mr. Thor's pick. I had to wedge him unceremoniously in the tree so that you could see his body.
My pick. He reminds me of a parade float!

The one thing that strikes me as I look through all of these is: BALLS. they are all over the place. I tried to take the pictures around them, but they are everywhere. I think I will keep one box for nostalgia, but the rest have to get permanently phased out.

Did I  mention that I love Christmas and the trappings of Christmas?

Fireworks vs. Cannonballs – Part 2

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During my wonderful chat with my friend Stephanie, I started explaining what I perceive to be the primary problem with my focus, and subsequently, my achievement (or lack thereof). I am interested in too many things, all at once. I want to sew, knit, crochet, bake, cook, learn French, Spanish, & Italian, write books, go back to grad school for an MLS, no wait, an MFA.

And I am not really moving toward any of it. But I am interested in all of it. And I would love to achieve even some of it.

My energy is so divided that it’s like fireworks – a bang and then everything just shoots off in different directions. And, maybe, something pretty for a few seconds – but ultimately it just fizzles out without making a lasting impact.

What I need to do is FOCUS – all caps – so that my energy is more like a cannonball.  A boom, and enough oomph to leave a mark. It might not be pretty, but it will do something.

So, that brings me to my word for 2012: FOCUS. I have been doing a decent job of focusing on the blog, and I hope to keep that going. My first area of focus for 2012 will be… sewing! I took a 2-hour class once and I absolutely loved it. I am signed up for a 10-hour class that starts next month (which is also next year!!)  and covers the basics over a 4-week period.

Ask me how it’s going, if you don’t hear about it.

Fireworks vs. Cannonballs – Part 1

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Back in October, I was having what seems to be an annual late-night chat with my dear friend Stephanie from The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me, during what seems to be her annual visit to Not the City, New York. During that chat I opened up about how my dreams just seem so out of reach and how I don’t even know if I am still dreaming the dream anymore.

In the morning, I woke up to this on my fridge:

An encouraging poem that is still on my fridge.

I read the poem and had a good cry. And I sort of resolved to do something, because one of my friends managed to write me a meaningful message using Magnetic Poetry for couples (which, by the way, contained the word DIVORCE! I threw it away immediately.). And if she could do that, I could at least muster some effort to resemble the person I long to be.

One of the first things I did was decide to get back into writing. Coincidentally, NaBloPoMo was coming up. I decided that I would update my blog every single day in November. I did write a few good posts, but mostly I am thankful for the writing practice and the “practice” practice – the mindset shift of digging into something every single day.

I wasn’t intending to make this a multi-part post, but, well – here we go again.

Let it snow.

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I knew this no-snow winter* couldn’t last. 1-2 inches in the forecast, which I know is positively paltry compared to forecasts in other places.

Commence piano music and tea and curling up in a ball on the couch.

Note that I did not say “curling up in the fetal position,” which is what I will be doing emotionally.

See you in the spring, happiness!

*Yes, I know it’s not technically even winter yet. Mr. Thor loves to remind me, and I love to tell him to stop it, please.

The things that bother my brain…

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So, there is this THING going around facebook, and no I will not link to it here – it’s stupid! In an honest attempt to not steal stupid content, I will tell you is that it’s on http://www.buzzfeed.com and the title is: “12 Extremely Disappointing Facts About Popular Music”and it lists out random facts like, “Led Zeppelin, REM, and Depeche Mode have never had a number one single, Rihanna has 10” and “Ke$ha’s “Tik-Tok” sold more copies than ANY Beatles single.”

And the list is full of little factoids like that.

Think!

When music was hard copy only, how many singles did you buy? I bought exactly two, in my entire life, and I’m not too proud to admit it. The first one was a record of Miami Sound Machine’s “Conga.” The second was Chely Wright’s “Shut up and Drive.”

Now. Now that music is digital, how many single songs have I purchased?

I can’t even count. When a song is a dollar, and an album is at least ten times that, I am way more likely to just choose the songs I like the best and buy them.

When I was younger, the cost of an album was enough that I had no problem sitting in my room for hours listening to the radio to tape good songs as they came on. I rarely ever bought albums – I bought every New Kids on the Block, Madonna, and Debbie Gibson album, a Beatles greatest hits album, a handful of Indigo Girls albums, and a few more – and they were all ON TAPE. Not to mention, in high school, I mostly bought musicals on tape. Yeah, yeah, I know. Les Miserables, Jekyll and Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, even A Chorus Line.

Do you think that even the dorky kids in school have such a weird music collection? No.

Technology is so pervasive that the great majority of kids expect to own iPods. Do you understand that I had to save up my allowance for a knock-off walkman… that played cassettes? I never owned a discman until after high school. I got my very first CD player when I was 18.

So. Music used to be WAY less accessible. WAY.

And there were also fewer people on the planet.

And there was no internet for most of the earlier artists that they are referencing.

It’s not even like comparing apples to oranges. It’s like comparing apples to… broccoli.

But, really, reading things like that gets my brain whirring, wondering if anyone out there is trying to make a reasonable comparison, and how I can get my hands on that information.

I just roasted a chicken.

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Almost every day, I eat the same thing for lunch: deli turkey and provolone on whole wheat bread.

I was going to buy a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store with the intention of eating it for the week – sandwiches and salads and even burritos.

But the only rotisserie chickens I found were labeled “barbeque” (shudder).

At that point, I thought I would just buy a package of boneless/skinless chicken breast and roast it in the oven.

When we got there, though, I thought – hey! whole chickens! I just roasted a turkey recently and it went pretty well. Maybe a chicken would also go pretty well!

And then I thought, no, chicken breasts are easier.

And then I looked at the price. The whole chicken was $0.88 per pound. The chicken breasts were over $3 per pound.

So I grabbed a six-pounder and threw it into the cart.

I came home and rinsed and dried it. I chopped up a few large slices of onion, mixed with sage, rosemary, and a bit of garlic and lemon juice and stuffed it loosely. I put it in a baking dish and left it in for just over 2 hours.

It was AMAZING. I tasted the breast and I let Mr. Thor taste some, too. We are both in agreement that this beats lunch meat any day.

It was much like roasting a turkey, only smaller, easier to handle, and easier to carve. Maybe if I keep roasting the chickens, by next Thanksgiving my turkey game will be greatly improved.