• Food - Marriage

    Adulting

    May 28, 2020 - By 

    I love grocery shopping. It’s my happy place. I like planning the meals and making the list and then just wandering down the aisles putting things in my cart. I like listening to the music and muttering to myself over which avocado is the ripest. I even liked grocery shopping with the kids, for a while. Until we reached one of those Milestones Nobody Talks About: when they were old enough that nobody wanted to ride in the cart anymore and they spent the entire time running around like feral animals and touching all the things. Or, this. So let…

  • Family - Marriage - Parenting

    An Incomplete List and a Complete Mess

    April 23, 2020 - By 

    Things I have done during the Stay-Home order: Lost a full gallon of milk and found it in the linen closet, two days later Worn my pants on inside out all day before I realized it Cried for no reason Cried for very good reasons Laughed hysterically with my boys Spent too much time on Facebook Made bread Made cookies Been mad at the scale Ordered groceries online As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized how much I love grocery shopping. I’m also very picky about my groceries and like lots of obscure foodstuffs and bring all my reusable bags so…

  • Marriage - Throwback

    Not Cool Enough

    March 7, 2019 - By 

    Chris and I celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary this month. In honor of that illustrious event, I give you a little Throwback Thursday to the early days in our dating history. Here goes. I attended college in northern California, and during my senior year, I had a ritual. About once a month I would wander downtown to the local record store. I’d sample some of the featured CDs and, if I liked the sound, I’d buy one or two. Which is how I came to own All Lights Off, by a band called Rearview Mirror. Although the sound was a…

  • Marriage - RemoteDance

    Attempting to make our house grown-up

    August 30, 2012 - By 

    It’s been almost 2 1/2 years since we bought this house. One of the things about bouncing all over the west coast for our jobs is that we don’t spend enough time at our house to get all those finishing touches done. Things like putting up photographs or buying houseplants or even, um, finishing hanging the shutters because your husband threw out all the little hinges and they haven’t sold hinges like that at Home Depot since 20 years ago when your house was built and now you’re going to have to order them online but that seems like a…

  • Marriage - RemoteDance

    An Iowa Wedding

    July 10, 2012 - By 

    The Bachelorette Party The bachelorette party was a day-long adventure that started out with cake and cocktails at the Barefoot Bar, then progressed to a day of meandering down the lakes in a pontoon boat stuffed full of twenty-something ladies, bottles of booze, and various “gifts” that will not be shown in pictures on this blog due to their – ahem – phallic nature. But these were responsible ladies, and they had the foresight to pay the boat rental place to supply them with a driver for the boat. Meet Tyler. Tyler is 19 years old. He is also the…

  • Marriage - RemoteDance

    3 Years

    March 14, 2012 - By 

    The husband and I were at the grocery store yesterday, picking out our dinner for the night. Chris suggested that we also get dinner for the following night. “Unless you would rather go eat at a nice restaurant tomorrow?” I looked at him. We didn’t usually eat out on weekdays. “Why would we do that?” He looked back at me. “Because it’s our anniversary.” Oh, um, oops. It’s not that I forgot about our anniversary. I just had been so focused on the fact that our cruise vacation was the big birthday/anniversary celebration, it slipped my mind that the actual…

  • Marriage - RemoteDance

    The Marriage Test

    December 14, 2009 - By 

    There is this commercial on TV now… I think it’s for a discount department store?  It features a group of people drinking wine, eating hors d’oeuvres, laughing and chatting in their cocktail-party clothes, while candles on the table gently illuminate the fancy place settings.   And every time I see it, I think, “I WANT TO BE AT THAT PARTY!  It looks like fun and it doesn’t even involve objects that must be thrown, driven really fast, or smashed into each other.” Don’t get me wrong: redneck stuff is fun.  Well, the redneck stuff that I’ve done anyway.  Which is actually…

  • Food - Marriage - RemoteDance

    The Sniff Test

    December 7, 2009 - By 

    Chris and I have differing opinions on when food in the refrigerator is still edible. For the most part, as long as the food item still passes the “sniff test,” I figure it is still edible. The only foods which don’t get the sniff test: bread, and meat. Bread does not get the sniff test because you can usually tell if it’s bad long before you need to smell it. It’s either hard as a rock, moldy, or (if it’s been long enough) hard and moldy. Meat does not get the sniff test because the thought of eating rotten meat…

  • Marriage - RemoteDance

    I’m not buying him a hearing aid…

    November 2, 2009 - By 

    …he did it to himself. When Chris first bought the surround sound, he tested it out.  I was one floor up on the opposite side of the house, in the closet, and I could still tell what movie he was watching. (I was putting away laundry, in case anyone was wondering why I was hanging out in the closet). Well, he now has decided he needs to show our roommates the awesome power of the surround sound.  Here I sit, minding my own business trolling the internet, when suddenly… I am transported to a front row seat at the world’s largest movie theater. …

  • Marriage - RemoteDance

    A Simple Solution

    June 8, 2009 - By 

    The other evening, Chris and I were watching one of the few television shows that we both really enjoy. Chris got up during a commercial break and left the room, and just as he got up, the TV screen turned black. No sound, no picture, nothing. The television was on, but the cable wasn’t. I pulled the remote out of the couch cushion where Chris had been sitting, and mess with it for a while trying to get the TV to work. No luck. “Chris,” I say mournfully when he returns, “the cable’s not working.” He checks to make sure…