the plus side

Even though winter kicked off a little late around here, it's been in a steady freeze for months now - we JUST got our first big snow of the season this week! 9 inches made for working from home, which is the best, and also meant that I could actually close up shop when it was still light outside and hit the park with Brian.

Only once we'd played some football (and I had successfully jammed my finger) did I realize that this was perfect snowman snow! Actually that's a lie, Brian knew that (as if I know about snow varietals...), but it made me realize we HAD to build one because it would be my first! Score!

My key takeaway from this was "holy intensity." Not quite like the giggling-silly-game I thought it'd be. Do you know how hard it is to pack that much snow together? Welcome, full body soreness and drenched clothes! Maybe it could've had something to do with my Snow-Nazi Instructor...God bless him, but wouldn't three tiers have been sufficient?

I guess he did turn out to be pretty magnificent.

I'm so glad we squeezed out a semblance of a winter because it is so beautiful every time it snows. And since I've switched to working out in the morning, sometimes I choose to walk (v. drive) to get to see the fresh snow and at that hour, it's dark and quiet...so peaceful. This winter gets a high five from me!

morning on the way to the gym...snow is just begging to be walked on

not a bad "commute" to get your day started

unfortunately sometimes this happens too...

the road to africa...

...is paved with vaccinations.

 

yellow fever, polio, typhoid, tetanus, hep a, hep b, and flu (for good measure)

That's right, we're going to Africa! And it'll only take 10 needles, 2 prescriptions, ignoring 4 state department warnings, and 2 eight-hour flights to get there :)

Jokes aside, we leave in a few short days to spend two weeks in Kenya, and I couldn't be more excited/nervous! Up until a couple of months ago, I'd been frothing at the mouth for a trip to New Zealand and had all but booked it when I realized Brian wasn't too stoked. Which I guess seems strange - you do know that NZ is supposed to be THE most beautiful place in the world right?! - but he had spent some time in Australia, so the thought about jumping over to the next nearest neighbor wasn't too out-of-the-box in his mind.

After a little brainstorming and an awful lot of discussion, we decided to pursue one of my other bucket list adventures - a volunteer trip to east Africa. I don't know how or why that ever got seeded in my brain, but I have always been super intrigued by east African cultures (as a lot of people are), and just sort of felt like maybe there was something for me over there. So now we'll find out!

The organization that helps coordinate everything is called IVHQ (International Volunteer Headquarters). We chose them because 1) I know someone who did a different program with them and loved it, and 2) I like the way they're infrastructure is set up, which makes it super affordable - and most volunteer programs are stupidly & prohibitively expensive. They have programs all over the world, with all sorts of placements, from construction to teaching to wildlife conservation to sports recreation. SO hard to choose from! You should check out their site if you're at all interested in this kind of thing; it's amazing what you can get yourself into with a couple of clicks on the computer :)

Anyway so here's what we're looking at, itinerary-wise:

• Fly into Nairobi, Kenya - one day of orientation
• 3-4 day safari through the Maasai Mara 
• Back to Nairobi (or just outside) for 2 weeks of living with a host family and going to our daily placements - Brian will be at an orphanage, and I will be doing a women's education program (could range from teaching about reproductive systems to working with them to improve their trade, like selling beads, etc.)
• 36-hour stopover in Amsterdam
• Home
• Sleep + sadness

So far I've only picked up about 15 words in Swahili, along with "I speak English" and "Can you take our picture?" I think if I can master "Where is the bathroom, I feel like a monster is clawing its way out of my lower intestine" then I should be good to go!

supper club

So I guess we're old enough to be doing supper clubs now.

Not to be confused with the potluck I'm going to shortly, where I'm bringing beer and a bag of pistachios. This is supper club, pinkies up!

This weekend, a co-worker hosted his first bi-monthly "blind" supper club, meaning a certain group was invited but without knowing the rest of the guest list. Everyone was assigned a course, told to pick a partner, make their dish for 22 people (bite-size), and coordinate with the theme "winter."

mmm peanut/carrot/ginger soup

Having mostly hosted/attended dinners where melted Velveeta cheese was a perfectly acceptable dish, I knew that wasn't going to fly with this group. This is a pickling, microbrewing, homemade-pasta-making crowd. I mean, they literally handmade the benches that we sat on. THAT kind of group. All good things, just far above my skill set, which only yesterday expanded to include the use of a food processor.

food processor proof. I'm thinking we could use more counter space

They mixed up the seating so you were near your partner, but not next to them - probably for setups, as I think we were the only married couple there (=we're old). Each pair served up their course with a short description of who they were, what inspired their dish, why it made them think of winter, etc. Since my dish was mostly inspired by desperation, I didn't have much of a storyline. The host had asked for the title of our dishes earlier in the week and I told him "Fire & Ice" because that seemed just vague enough to leave me options. Of course, by the time he'd printed the menus and I'd started actually considering my dish, I realized anything super hot or super cold is pretty much the worst thing to transport across town to a dinner for 22 people.

I gave up on that little ditty and settled for an apricot-walnut-brandy rugelach, with a small brandy sour drink on the side. I gotta say, even though these suckers took me all day to make, I was so super proud of putting something edible in front of a room of mostly strangers and not poisoning one single person. I wish I'd take a picture but I was more focused on serving :( It did look sort of like this picture though: 

that dough had to be mixed, frozen, filled, rolled, re-frozen, and baked. sheesh.

Other dishes were things like lamb with truffle mac & cheese, homemade pasta served two ways, spaghetti squash with an avocado/mango salsa....

If they let us back to the next edition, we'd definitely go again! Maybe I can even learn how to conquer the ole dough blade...

not fighting is way harder than fighting

Since I met Brian, I got introduced to skiing and absolutely fell in love with it. Which is lucky, since Brian is super passionate about skiing - grew up in Colorado, on ski team in high school, etc. During our time together we've been to Steamboat, Tahoe, Breckenridge, and a smaller "mountain" in Wisconsin...all great trips...on which I cried every single time.

Because despite our mutual love for skiing, we cannot seem to pull it together when it comes to skiing together. A typical day goes like this: I take a lesson in the morning, join back up with the group in the afternoon, show Brian one of my new skillz, he gives me a pat on the back, then tries to teach me more new things, and I burst into tears and go skiing with someone else. We've always had enough other people around us that I could always ski with instead, so honestly I didn't worry about it too much. Until we got in on a Chicago-Denver flight sale for $104 (round trip!) and then realized we couldn't get anyone to come with us. OOPS!

So here's the funny thing about marriage that's a little different from dating. When you're dating (assuming it's not super serious), sometimes it's just easier to fight than it is to get to the root of the friction and fix it for good. You're not entirely sure this person's gonna be around forever so letting your crazy flag fly is a lot more natural than sitting down for a communication-a-thon. But then you go and get married and lo and behold, your disagreements are bound to be similar and recurring for the rest of your life, so it's better in the long-term to just take the painful route of truly figuring out what's going on so you can better handle the situation the next time it comes up. And for our ski trip, we needed to stop acting like we were dating and go on and get married dammit.

So we did the responsible thing...we drank. Oh, and stood in the kitchen for two hours trying to figure out how to not fight on the ski slope. It was painstaking. It was overanalytical. It was embarrassing (mostly the part where I realized I wanted him to give me more praise on my skiing progress, what am I, 6 years old?). It was even boring. But you know what? We walked out of there with a plan. A how-to-ski-together communication plan. Because we are mother-f-ing ADULTS.

And it worked! It totally worked. We made pacts (I will give 100%. He will let me choose when to receive a "lesson" from him. See, told you it was painful...) and we kept them and had a blast. It is such a ridiculous thing to call a success, but it was really important for us to figure out this whole thing, because skiing is going to be a big part of our lives and it makes no sense for it not to be a big happy part.

Now I need to take a nap from all this adult-ness.

lessons on the lift = acceptable

Winter Park village (and fresh snow!)

so freaking cute

one of the fun things about being alone on a trip is that your husband can't escape when you want to, say, watch carolers?

no tears here!

or here!

who can argue when you're looking at this?

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)...