How the cookie crumbles

Years ago, I was going through a really rough time. The exact how, what, and why aren't really important anymore but I definitely wasn't in a good place. At first, the boy I was dating thought he could fix me. When he couldn't, our relationship was over. Not long after, my closest friend at the time followed him in the same way. I will never ever forget her telling me that she just couldn't stick around and watch me be sad. It took me years to find any peace with what happened, with the idea that people I trusted, people who loved me, could walk away like that. Months later I sat down and talked to a priest about everything that had happened, about my confusion, my anger, my hurt. His response was nothing I ever would have anticipated.

Maybe they did you a favor.

It didn't feel like a favor at all. It felt very much like the opposite of a favor. The priest didn't stop there though. He went on to suggest that people who walk out of your life when things get rough aren't friends at all. That I was better off without those kind of people. I didn't even think priests could say that kind of thing.

Luckily for me, I found better friends. Friends who loved me exactly where I was. Friends who were sad that I was sad but knew that sometimes you just need time and space to be sad. Because that's okay.

Recently a friend going through a rough time, mentioned that they felt they had to be a certain way- the way they were before. Our situations are so different but all I could think in that moment was that I needed my friend to know that it's okay to be different, to be sad, for as long as it takes. Because everyone who loves her will be sad with her and when, down the road, a day comes that feels a little warmer and a little sunnier and a little better, we'll all be there for that too.

Two Years

Yesterday, my husband and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary and I think that all we know for sure about this marriage business is that two years feels a lot like one.

We hadn't been living together for a month yet when our first wedding anniversary rolled around. We celebrated in a big way (Red Bull Air Races! Hockey game!) but we missed out on many of the things you might expect from a couple that has been married for a year. Among those things, the year old wedding cake tradition. In all of our moves, our cake ended up with neither of us until well after our first anniversary. So yesterday we dutifully pulled it out of the freezer and dug in (after letting it warm up a little) to our now two year old wedding cake, which was surprisingly delicious!

Of course, I'm wondering if we'll always feel a year behind or maybe we'll just always feel like we've been married for half of the actual length of our marriage? Probably time will catch up with us at some point but for now it's kind of cool to feel like we've had two first wedding anniversaries.

Backyard Science Part II

Composting is SO COOL!

That's not even sarcasm. It is really the neatest, dorkiest thing ever. Maybe it wouldn't be as cool if I wasn't so into science, it's hard to say. It's been four months since we started composting and the shear weight and volume of material that has been diverted to our backyard compost bin is pretty incredible. I haven't been keeping a tally of exactly what's gone into the bin but I do know that we have filled it to bursting at least a dozen times. (Total volume of the compost tumbler, 37 gallons.) I'll be pushing material in and thinking to myself "okay, this is it, we're going to close it up soon and let the last material in decompose." Then I check it a week later and half the volume has disappeared into thin air. So, some adventures from the last four months.

Adventure the First.
I've become that person. The person I said I wouldn't become. The one who brings a spare plastic container to work so that I can bring home my orange peels or apple cores and compost them. After four months of composting, throwing things like that out just doesn't sit well with me anymore. My husband rolls his eyes but is reasonably good-natured about it.

Adventure the Second.
Having guests over. Sometime, back when this all started, my husband and I had a conversation that went something like this:
Husband: You're not going to compost at parties are you?
Me: Of course not! That would be a ridiculous pain!
Well. That went the same way as "of course I won't bring compostables home from work." I spent the first party we threw after the compost tumbler was set up cringing at food waste going into the trash. Now I set out three bins at parties: compost, trash, and recycling. And our friends have been fantastic about it.

Adventure the Third.
But won't it smell? I often ask guests to the house if they would like to come out to the compost with me. Often this is because guests mean extra food, which means that I need an extra set of hands to carry everything. This invitation is often met with a concern over the smell. No one wants to hang out with smelly stuff. I sure don't. That's okay though because the compost doesn't smell. It's pretty incredible but a well balanced compost is pretty unscented. We had one incident early on when the compost was getting a little too dry. I added moisture and then we entered rainy season. I'll admit that it smelled for a while then. I had to start scrounging for carbon sources to add, which leads me to...

Adventure the Fourth.
Importing other people's compostables. Leaves are a great source of carbon for compost. That's awesome and easy if you live in someplace where leave drop easily and often. If you live in southern Texas though, there just aren't enough leaves to keep up with our food trash. Especially in the rainy part of the summer when everything is hot and wet all the time and nothing dries out ever because the humidity is ridiculous. Paper is another great carbon source but it composts quicker if it's shredded. We don't own a shredder so I now import shredded paper from other people. We keep a whole cabinet of it on hand to add when we add another batch of kitchen waste.

Adventure the Fifth.
Mushrooms. Oh my goodness the mushrooms. I thought at one point that the compost was molding. That does happen sometimes and is a good indicator that we are not adding enough carbon or that it needs more oxygen, or both. Some vigorous tumbling and a little poking around though (with a long stick) proved that my compost wasn't molding. It was growing the largest mushrooms I have ever seen. Coincidentally, the mushrooms of doom started appearing about three weeks after a batch of mushroom scraps made their way into the tumbler. Go figure. A composting friend says that these are called "volunteers." She recently had some volunteer cantaloupes come out of her compost. I did not cultivate my mushrooms. No problem though, they are organic (very, very organic in this case) and simply decomposed once the temperature of the pile heated back up.

I really wasn't sure how the backyard science experiment in composting would go. We still haven't harvested any dirt, though we could if we needed to. So far though, it's just really cool. Sometimes I take food out and just spend a little while poking in the compost with a stick to check out how quickly different things decompose. Yes, that does make me pretty weird. That's okay. My parents assure me that the Oscar the Grouch "I love trash" was my favorite as a kid. I'm sure they especially loved me singing it in public, which I was apparently pretty fond of. So maybe this whole composting thing was pretty predictable after all.

Heads or Tails

As in, things I cannot make heads or tails of.

After struggling to keep up with yard care over the summer, we finally bit the bullet and decided to look into hiring someone. My husband was meeting with one potential business owner when he had a conversation that neither of us knew what to make heads or tails of. The lawn care provider asked some questions about us, which was pretty normal. Somehow our different last names came up. Suddenly the conversation took an abrupt left turn.

"Around here, I can see why she wouldn't take your last name. That would make getting hired really hard."

Wait. What?

My husband then tried to explain that it was a personal choice. That it was partly because of my doctorate and partly because of a family legacy that is dear to me. The guy wouldn't hear anything of it though. He was sure it was because I was afraid of reprisal, of racism.

The guy had no idea that way back in college, I nearly broke up with a guy who said he wouldn't marry someone who wouldn't take his name. (Ironically, he later did just that but that's the sort of thing love does to a person.) He didn't know anything about us at all but he was sure he did.

The whole thing was surreal and weird and discomforting. Most of all though, it had me worrying that maybe other people felt the same way that that guy did, that they made the same assumptions. And regardless of anything else, making sure that that possible assumption doesn't stand was worth a blog.

Something about 30

I had planned a great 30th birthday blog- 30 things about being 30. I knew it wouldn't be universal but I thought it would be fun. I had spent days in the car driving to or from work, thinking up things to include in the list. Then I sat down to write it and everything flew right out of my head. And not by way of my fingers and the keyboard. Oh well.

The truth is that being 30 feels just like being 29. Twenty nine felt a lot like 28. And so on. That's not to say that 30 feels anything like 13 but the differences are small, fluid, and ever changing. I remember being baffled as a kid when I was asked how it felt to be a new age. I never felt any different. It would almost definitely be more accurate to ask how I felt after a life event. For instance, my grandmother died between my tenth and eleventh birthdays. Any growing or changing that I did that year was far more altered by that than anything to do with my age.

Speaking of my Grandmother, I think the single biggest change I can point to between twenty and thirty involves her. I remember my 20th birthday. It was preceded by a rough year and a lot of uncertainty. At the time, I had a healthy sense of "well, what now?" I had no idea, no particular sense of direction, and was still working out who I was as a person. I can't say that any of that is untrue now but I also have a sense of working towards becoming something that I did not have a decade ago. I'll always be me but if I could grow to be some of my Grandmother too, I'd consider that a huge success.

Lazy Posting

That love your spouse challenge is going around facebook right now. I'm enjoying all the cute pictures that I get to see of my friends and at some point I was nominated by a friend. I'll pass on nominating other people but decided to dedicate a blog post to the challenge instead. Looking through pictures was fun and I set myself the additional challenge of trying to find as many photos of myself and my husband as I could that show us but not necessarily our faces. Somehow, to me, those can convey all the emotion in the world, often more honestly than when someone asks us to smile for the camera. There were a great deal more that I could have chosen from but these seven span our first summer of dating all the way to last fall. We're in all of the them, I promise!

Eleven months

Eleven months makes a huge difference. Give or take eleven months ago, I was camping on my own up in Copper Harbor, MI. The weather was fantastic- all except for that last day when it poured and I discovered that 20 year old tents cannot necessarily be successfully re-waterproofed anymore. Aside from when I was mountain biking, it never felt particularly hot and there was Lake Superior just a stones throw away to cool off in afterward.

Fast forward eleven months to my husband and I camping with two of our close friends outside of Austin, TX. Just take a minute to mull that concept over. Camping. In July. In Texas.

I'll start off by saying that the weekend was fantastic! I returned happier and calmer for having been outdoors so much (and not the kind of being outdoors that involves weeding, mowing, tree trimming, or any other form of house maintenance). But wow was it hot. It was the kind of hot where you purposefully take a cold shower and feel better for all of two minutes afterwards. I was entirely unprepared for this type of camping. My trusty sleeping bag, which has weathered November nights in the Blue Ridge Mountains without a sleeping pad was 100% useless in the Texas heat. My little tent, which is great for staying warm, suddenly felt like a sauna. Our friends were a lot more prepared.

I was, admittedly, baffled when it was suggested that we drive two cars. I looked at our pile of gear, taking up barely half of my car trunk, and wondered what on earth I was forgetting. My first ever camping trip (way back when I was maybe 8) was a backpacking trip and, while lots of my trips since then have been car-camping, I still tend to pack like I'm backpacking. Because why not? Texas summer is why not.

Our well prepared friends pulled out extension cords (the campsite had power), portable air conditioning units, and fans. I was torn between laughing hysterically and being incredibly jealous. Their much larger tent could fit an entire queen size air mattress and, when you're sleeping in 95 deg F heat, that has to be more comfortable than sleeping bags. This kind of camping was something I had trouble wrapping my head around and I bemoaned the fact that my husband will never ever want to go camping "my way" again. That said, that cup of freshly ground coffee before our early morning hike tasted delicious and we did not turn down the offer to borrow a fan for our tent. It's safe to say that I got a little spoiled too as I traded my usual camping food (oatmeal, GORP, PB&J, apples) for the containers of fresh cut fruit and vegetables that our friends were thoughtful enough to bring along and share.

Eleven months makes a big difference. I'm already looking forward to our next camping trip with our friends though and we brought back books of the Texas state parks to start our planning with. Maybe the next time it will even be cool, or, as cool as it seems to get in Texas.