december, where'd you go?

Holy cats & dogs this month FLEW by! In a month that's already congested (in the best way) with holiday shiznit, I threw in trips to 6 different cities juuuuuust to make sure the Christmas season didn't slide by calmly.

1 & 2 - New Jersey and Phoenix: work trip, see previous post

3 - Ft. Worth: I tacked this onto the end of 1 & 2 to save on my flights. I got to see Mom and John's new casa, which is ten times cooler than any of the houses we ever lived in when I was there. Why do parents go and do that?! But truth be told, I'll take a hot tub and pool at any stage of life.

4 - Idaho Springs, CO: A last-minute Cyber Monday sale offered $100 round trip tickets from Chicago to Denver. ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS. We didn't think skiing was going to pan out this season, but low and behold, you can scrape up cash pretty quickly with a carrot like that dangling in front of your face. Post to come...

5 - Ft. Walton, FL: Christmastime with Brian's family! I hadn't seen them in two freaking years which is totally unexcusable so we took a full week to fly down and get some good quality time in. They are such wonderful people, I love them! It's hilarious to see his parents interact too, because our relationship and theirs share some similarities, so it's sooooort of like watching a preview of 40 years from now.

Brian's brother with Maggie 

Brian's dad and his new hat from Santa - we're all wondering how well-utilized this will be in Florida?

A Florida Christmas indeed

Brian's mom and I are now each other's defense attorneys against all those boys

6 - New Orleans: Since Ft. Walton is only a 4-hour drive to Nola, we popped over for a night to see Katie and Brian! Such a blast! The Brians had never gotten to spend that much time together, and it was awesome to see they clicked just like the girls do. It's one thing for your friends to end up with someone tolerable, but it's another thing to have them enhance the fun, you know?

yummy brunch at Tartine

classic water meters

tour at NOLA Brewery

the Mardi Gras store

We ended 2012 with a small shindig at our place a few hours after we got back from Florida. No rest for the weary, right? I know 2013 will be just as jam-packed with more travels, time with loved ones, and bigger and better things! Bye 2012!

like that tomahawk laying on the record player?

estoy aqui sola

I think I’ll be able to look back over the past few years and quickly tell when my craziest periods at work were based on my blogging frequency. I MISS blogging! Like my dear friend Jackie, I’ve gotten out of the habit, although I don’t have a baby to account for my absence like she does…just screaming, whiney, poorly behaved clients...

Anyway, I’m on a plane now and thought maybe I could play a little catch-up.

This week I got a little break from the office to do focus groups for a client, first in New Jersey and then in Phoenix. For NJ, it was a one-day whirlwind with a colleague in tow – no time to explore and barely enough time to sleep. But for Phoenix, I came on my own, which was the first time I’ve traveled for work by myself. And I have to say, it’s pretty awesome.

First, all your expenses are covered. And I could get used to a daily Starbucks and extra coverage on my rental car, you know what I mean? Yeah? Yeah? (God I’m such an adult, gross).

More importantly, you get to skip the idle conversation. Some coworkers are more fun than others, obviously, but my experience in general is that it’s pretty brutal—people are so quirky when they travel and I’m not into indulging their freak flags.

Phoenix was a perfect trip for me to be alone on, because I arrived around 1:30 p.m. and didn’t have to be at focus groups until lunch the next day. I managed to squeeze in 2 hikes – huzzah! Actually that’s not fair, I should say 1 death-hike and 1 slightly-confusing walk around some buttes.

 

buttes = baby mountains

Death Hike

I did some pre-searching on Trip Advisor & Yelp and decided to try out Camelback Mountain, which was one of 3 main local hiking spots and sounded pretty challenging in the reviews. Note that I actually sort of ignored the reviews though. I scanned them for the lay of the land and got the “vibe” that it would be a good workout with good views, but I totally omitted key phrases such as “you will need to be hands free for the rock scrambles” “trails are very poorly marked” “I got lost” and “extremely steep” – eh, who needs direct quotes anyway?

The trail started off clearly marked with nice wooden stairs staked into the trail – steep, but nothing to write home about. Then slowly but surely, the path degraded until it was just a pile of giant rocks. The incline was so sharp in some spots that they installed metal railings for you to hoist yourself up with—naturally that’s where I dropped my bottle of Gatorade, about 1/3 of the way through the ascent, which fell so far and so hard that it busted open and gave the people down below a lemon-lime splattering—“Greetings from Chicago, everyone!”

 if you look hard enough, you can see hope at the top (in the form of people)

Some girl told me that it was pretty easy after that, which was a bold-faced lie. To be honest, it wasn’t the steepness that threw me as much as the utter and total disregard for trail markers. You generally knew to keep going up obviously, but as for any left or right guidance, well, that was at your discretion. And for someone who wasn’t blessed with a mental compass, I would categorize my trek to the top as “willy nilly.” A few times I panicked that I had taken some crazy divergent path, so I stopped until I could see or hear someone nearby. At another point, I dropped my ID without realizing it (which incidentally I did the second day too WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME) and a few minutes later someone would start shouting “Laura! Laura!” And, as you know, I had run out of my hydration source at the beginning so let’s just so I wasn’t the most well-equipped hiker in the whole place, okay?

a desert Christmas

But the net net is, I made it to the top and managed to get all the way back down without breaking my neck, spraining my ankles (although I rolled them about 10 times), or falling into a cactus. Which yes, I almost did twice. Whatevs. Later when I was looking up some place to go the next morning, I noticed the parks & rec dept gave them all ratings like ski slopes and that Camelback was a black diamond. Whoops. I guess what you don’t know won’t hurt you though, because I’m sure I wouldn’t have gone if I’d seen that before, but overall it was totally do-able and was the perfect mixture of challenging, scary, relaxing, and beautiful.

 

see monkey arms come in handy when you're alone!

Also, as a sidenote, Arizona seems to be pretty amazing in terms of outdoor goodness. I absolutely loved the Grand Canyon, Sedona, and now Phoenix too seems to have a lot to offer. Not to mention that it was 80 degrees during the day and 50 at night—that’s winter weather I can get behind!

it's snow time

This winter's gonna be a weird one, because we're coming off of a super-strangely-warm winter last year, so no one really knows what to expect. Even though we're looking at a warm-ish turkey day, we did get a little taste of this last week! Very apropos after a frenzied few weeks in Obama's hometown!

December will be telling for what the next 5 months have in store weather-wise...until then, we'll be holding our breath (while still riding bikes)...

live from San Fran

We're finishing up an awesome weekend in San Francisco - we came out to celebrate one of Brian's friends getting married and managed to get some time in the city and also up in San Rafael, which is north across the Golden Gate Bridge. Incredible weather (80 degrees in November!), lots of exploration outside, and delicious local food on top. Since this is our third time here and my fourth, I didn't have very high expectations in terms of seeing something new, but the city really surprised me! Golden Gate Park is incredible, the ethnic & seafood options are everywhere, the terrain is so fun to drive (this wasn't new to me but still), the scenery is just beautiful, and there are so many hiking and biking paths every time you turn around...only wish we'd had time to rent bikes for a day! If I didn't already have a full list of cities that I fantasize about living in, this one would definitely be on the list now. #californiadreaming

boondoggle

At my job, you basically fall into one of three categories: planning, account, or creative. I'm a planner. If you're an account person or a creative, you typically get to attend video/photo shoots, cool client events, etc. Planners don't get to do anything super fun like that because we fall in this weird no-man's-land where we don't really need exposure to the client and we can't really lend any assistance on set (I know, I'm really selling what I do). SO, you can imagine my surprise when I found out that all the important creatives/account leads couldn't attend the ESPYs, and that I would get to go instead! BOONDOGGLE!

I didn't even know what the ESPYs were before my current job, so no worries if you're not up on the sports lingo :) (They're an awards show in L.A. for sports peeps, sponsored by ESPN). Because my client was also a sponsor, they gave our agency two tickets to attend, and the invite trickled down to me! (Cue disappointment on the client's face, ha!). I'd never been to L.A. before, and it seemed like going for an awards show on my company's tab was pretty much the perfect way to do it.

The trip was a whirlwind (24 hrs there and back), but filled with a bunch of highlights, surprisingly, none of which were from the actual show! The show itself was so long, relatively boring during the commercial breaks, and they didn't serve alcohol. WHAT KIND OF PLACE IS THIS.

Shaun White & Olivia Munn say "pretty great seats, huh?" 

(despite that dude's head on the left)

I will say, it was cool seeing all the celebrities present awards (Zooey Deschanel, Jessica Biel, Tim Tebow, Peyton Manning), and they aired a ton of feel-good stories during the show that made me have a couple of sports cries. I also got a lot of good QT with our clients, which is unusual for planners as I mentioned. But okay, to the really good stuff...

First class, baby

If you can believe it, I accidentally ended up in first class when my ticket was booked. Since I'd never ridden up there with the high rollers and was on a four-hour flight, I was nothing short of CRAZY EXCITED! I got real food. And free drinks. And a pillow. And a ton of leg room I didn't need. It was amazing!

this is the real deal

The Grand Canyon

I haven't set eyes on the G.C. since we stopped there on our honeymoon, and I definitely didn't think I'd ever see a view like this! Is this not the most unbelievable vantage point?!

I almost couldn't breathe! I thought it was incredible.

The best part though, was when I realized we were flying over the exact location where we'd taken our 9-mile hike almost exactly two years earlier. 

we hiked from the top of the rim all the way to the point overlooking the water 

(actually I stopped short but B did the whole thing)

Red Carpet

So the funny thing about having a ticket to the red carpet is that you actually get a ticket to the non-celebrity red carpet that runs riiiiiiiight next to the celebrity red carpet. God forbid we share the same pathway, right? My primary celeb sighting during our carpet foray was Eli Manning, not bad! Everyone else looked like Somebody I Should Know But Couldn't Quite Place / Maybe Never Knew to Begin With. 

 sunny day in L.A.! loved it!

Lauryn Hill

I had pretty high hopes for the after party, which we also had tickets for and thus I assumed would be amaze-balls. It didn't disappoint in terms of fanfare (pretty much like a gigantic wedding on crack) but I got zero opportunities to de-flower Tim Tebow, so overall it was a fail. HOWEVER, there was one redeeming moment of the night, which is when Lauryn Hill unexpectedly performed. The Fugees narrated my precarious 6th/7th grade years when I migrated from being an awkward loser to an awkward loser with friends so I was super excited to re-live that! But no really, apparently she has been sort of crazy in her recent years and doesn't show up for concerts and stuff so I felt lucky to see her perform, especially in such an intimate setting. 

She was awesome! She sang a lot of crowd favs with a twist and was pretty much a freestyling badass. Aside from her being all crazy and whatnot, I wanted to be her.

Overall, the whirlwind trip was a perfect taste of L.A. for me--getting our hair done, first class treatment, sweet hotel, and an exciting night! Not a bad way to do L.A. in a day!

it's that time again...

...it's slow cooker season!

I had the most Sunday of all Sundays this weekend, because it was filled with all the required activities:
1. Church
2. Gym
3. Laundry (sorry, no Tan, jersey shore fans)
4. Football
5. SLOW COOKER!

I fell in love with our slow cooker last year and have been waiting anxiously to bust it out again, but it hadn't been appropriately chilly until now! One vat of amazing chili later, we officially stepped into fall. Which means summer is over, boo, but fall has found a soft spot in me that likes orange trees and boots and pumpkin spice lattes and crisp air and epic Sundays like this one juuuuuuust enough to look past the all lack of warmth, lack of light, etc.

So yay for chili, I will have a thousand more bowls of you before this is all done!

tales from the train II

Recently, I was standing in the aisle holding on to the back of someone's seat (common fare for rush hour). We were both facing the same direction, so I was essentially standing over his shoulder. When you're jammed all up in someone's business though, after a while there's really nowhere to look except at the person's hair, lap, book, phone, whatever. They can't see you so it doesn't really matter, and sometimes it makes your ride a lot more interesting.

Just to set the stage for you: this guy was probably 26, had a bowl cut, wore round glasses with slightly tinted frames, a plaid short-sleeved shirt, khaki shorts, socks/tennis shoes, and looks like he played one too many games of Halo when maybe he should've been at the gym.

It's 8:30 a.m. He pulls out his phone, scrolls through his texts, puts it back in his pocket. The second time this happens, I decide something must be important so I should probably watch to be sure.

Through a series of backstrokes and re-writes that go on for at least five minutes, he commits to send "Claire":

So I realized that maybe you'd never received a flirty pic before. I just got a new lamp and thought I'd show you.

Then, in the creepiest of all creepy things, he scrolls back through his phone (to where I see that he has sent the last three texts to Claire from the night before with no response), puts it back in his pocket, folds his arms, closes his eyes, and smiles the most lascivious tight-lipped smirk I've ever seen.

He has no idea that Claire's never gonna text him again.