Category: Drew

Categories
Awesome Drew Love Sleep talking

A Very Special Sleep Talking 17

So I’m fast asleep last night when all of a sudden Drew stands up.

At first I figure he’s just going to the bathroom, but he turns around and starts messing with the blankets, specifically the quilt on top. He appears to be trying to rotate it.

“What are you doing?” I ask him.

“How do I get these two? To stick together?” he says. He still looks like he wants to rotate the top one, so I find him a corner and hand it to him, and then he starts pulling it off the bed.

“Hey hey! What are you doing?” I say.

Then he pauses for a minute, says, “What am I doing?” and laughs and lies back down. At this point I figure he’s awake and knows how silly he was being.

Then he says, “I think I have too many suits of armor.”

“…What?”

“Too many…suits of armor…you know.”

“Where?”

“…Never mind.”

Categories
Awesome Being a girl Dreams Drew Family Love Memoir Self improvement Sentiment

Seven Years

There’s an old wives’ tale that every seven years all the cells in your body have regenerated and replaced themselves, so every seven years you’re like a brand new person.

There’s another saying that relationships suffer from the “seven year itch,” and that you need to be careful at that point because that’s when many people re-evaluate their relationships, and break-ups or divorces happen.

(There’s also research to suggest that the “seven year itch” has become the “three year itch,” and that’s the year you really need to watch out for. Yikes. Three years? Apprently attention spans are shrinking…)

Internet rumors and Yahoo answers aside…this is on my mind because today is Drew’s and my seven year anniversary. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been seven years. I feel like it’s been forever. I couldn’t even buy alcohol when we first got together, and since then we’ve been through college graduations (a certain classmate graduating with each of us, in two different years!), two cross-country moves, pets, no pets, jobs, no jobs, tough times and easier times.

There were times for each of us that we weren’t sure it was going to work out. But that was early days, when we were both still figuring out the intricacies of relationships. By now we’ve learned how to weather storms and that most arguments are momentary and inconsequential. We’ve hit our stride. I could do this forever.

I’m probably not supposed to say this, but I’ve changed a lot in seven years, and it’s due to this relationship. Am I a whole new person? Possibly. Am I better person? Definitely. I’m more patient, quicker to be grateful, and less moody. And if I’m a little cattier…well, it’s all in good spirits. I like me now. I hope other people like me now too.

Happy Anniversary Drew! Here’s to seventy-seven more years! (Hope he reads this post. Otherwise this is kind of awkward.)

Bakers Square, Davis, Jan 2005
Categories
Awesome Children Drew Friends Nonfiction Sentiment Technology

A New Dominion

I’m a little competitive. In life, and in board games, and other types of games. Sometimes I get carried away.

I stopped playing Risk because of one terrible experience in the college dorms, when I formed an alliance with my friend Josh, and then in a few turns I broke it and invaded him. He gave me some kind of disappointed, “I can’t believe you did that,” look, and then he and the other two people we were playing went to dinner at the dining hall. But I was too upset about my treachery to eat, and I stayed in the dorms feeling bad about myself.

Later, I realized that was stupid, and it’s just a game. I had a late dinner. But I never forgot how swept up I got in that game of Risk.

Drew’s friends recently introduced him to the card game Dominion. One of his friends has this insane expansion pack, with like a million different types of cards. I’m not even going to try to explain the rules.

Drew taught it to me and Erin over the weekend, so we could play while we watched the 49ers game. (Could our lack of attention be what caused…? No, surely not.) The three of us played three rounds and each of us won once, which is nice and PC.

Last night, Drew and I played again and he won, but it was close. I think I like this game! I like the dimensions I’ve been introduced to so far, and I like the way there is some interaction between players but it’s not overly based on that. (Like Ticket to Ride, the other addictive board game brought to you by Drew’s friends.)

I guess what I want to say is…in this world of Words with Friends and Hanging with Friends and Scramble with Friends (Boggle! omg! so fun) and Tiny Wings and Qrank and Fruit Ninja and Temple Run and Harbor Master and Flight Control…it’s really nice to sit down in a single room with RL friends and play an actual board game.

Even if Drew mostly wins.

Categories
Drew Nonfiction Sleep talking

Sweet Sleep Talking 16

Last night I woke from a dead sleep, parched with thirst. I fumbled for the water bottle next to the bed and enjoyed that middle-of-the-night drink of water that is always so so much better than a daytime drink of water. Why is that?

I must have made some kind of noise, because Drew said, “Is that…is that water?”

I handed it over. He drank all but a mouthful (terrible habit) and then handed it back, and said, “Now hurry, hurry, go back to sleep. Don’t waste it.”

This morning when the alarm went off, I said, “It’s 6:00. Are you getting up?”

He said, “Yes, turn the alarm off.”

I said, “No, I’m setting it to snooze.”

To which he replied (sounding totally hurt), “Aw, come on! Don’t be like that.”

Then I think we both slept for another 9 minutes.

For all I know, he was actually awake for both of these. I mean they’re not THAT farfetched.

Categories
Awesome Beginnings Being a girl Drew Endings Home improvements Memoir Nonfiction Sentiment Work

The Devolution of an Apartment

Because I missed the boat on having a comprehensive wedding blog (one of my top 5 regrets ever), I have become slightly obsessive about documenting everything just in case it’s important. Most lately, the devolution of our apartment.

Here it is near the beginning of the breakdown. The hutch is (mostly) emptied out but everything is basically still there:

As the hutch and dining room set move out, everything else starts moving around:

The bedroom and my awesome red shelves, now emptied of books. Well, almost:

The living room only seemed to grow more crowded as we packed, despite my giving away 6 bags of clothes/shoes/etc, and 2 boxes of kitchen stuff, and us throwing away tons of trash:

Possibly making some progress? The desk is gone from the bedroom:

The couches, now freed from their restraining covers, move their waterprint patterns out the balcony and over the side (no room to get them out the front door).

Drew blinds me with the dresser mirror. Maybe he’s tired of me taking pictures while he and his dad move the heavy stuff.

So much room!

Yet still so much stuff!

While Drew and his dad drove the couches to the storage, I made it my job to clean off the bed.

I liked to put blinders on and pretend that this was all that was left. Ignorance is bliss.

The truck filled with boxes:

Our stored stuff, filling up the space:

My plan was to open every cupboard and drawer in the kitchen that still had stuff in it, and close them as I emptied them out.

I got some boxes from work with some strange codes on them…

Progress!

Then a break to take pictures. The masks were mostly because I was using Easy Off in the oven, and that stuff is toxic. But then it was fun to just keep them on.

I am really loving this afternoon spent with my head in an oven. So fun.

Actually, this is preferable.

The final day. Seriously, what is all this stuff.

FINALLY! What a giant bedroom.

What a sparkling bathroom.

What an empty living room!

And of course, to say goodbye, San Bruno had to dress up in its finest.

So long, first apartment in our married life! You were a good little apartment! I will think of you fondly!

Categories
Beginnings Being a girl cars Dreams Drew Exercise Food Home improvements Memoir Self improvement

Setting a routine

We’ve been in our new place for a week now. I can now say comfortably that I do not think we made the worst mistake ever moving out of our apartment. (That was a very real fear a couple times there.)

We’ve now had time to settle in, figure out what stuff goes where, and get used to sleeping in a new bed. We’ve each decided which shower we prefer. We’ve cooked meals in the kitchen. This morning I hosted our book club here and we made lunch for our four-person book club. (It was awesome.) (We should entertain more.)

We lived in the other place for over 2 years. I had a routine down. I knew exactly what I did every morning, and while it was a lot of back and forth from the living room to the bedroom to the bathroom to the bedroom, I knew what each step was and there was a very precise reason I did everything in that order.

But I have to kind of start over here. None of my stuff is in the order it used to be in, for one thing. For another, the bathroom where I shower is not the bathroom where I keep the hair dryer and everything. So there’s a lot more back and forth, because after 4 work days I still haven’t quite figured out what my exact routine is. There’s still a lot of, “What am I missing here?” It takes me a little longer to get out the door in the morning. Which is fine, since my commute is about cut in half.

Drew’s commute is about doubled, which makes our commutes about the same length of time now. Which is nice.

The good thing about getting a chance to recreate your routine, is that it allows you to build in some good stuff. I am trying to build the following things into my routine:

  • Healthier eating, specifically snacking – we’ve purchased a lot of fruit in the last week, and I’m also depending a lot on those frozen vegetables that you steam right in the microwave
  • Cooking dinner – in the last few weeks at the old place, we basically gave up cooking anything besides chicken nuggets on a baking sheet
  • Going to the gym on the way home from work – theoretically I can avoid the worst of rush hour if I wait it out in a spin class
  • More walks – it’s so pretty here, and there are lots of places to explore before hitting the library on the way home.

I also want to try to be more of an adult in 2012: meaning, I want to fold my clothes as soon as they’re clean* and make the bed every day and wash dishes as soon as they’re dirty. Honestly, I have less hope for these resolutions than for the others.

It’s fun to remake yourself every January 1st. And I feel like this year we get an extra boost to help facilitate that!

*I’m rolling my eyes as I write this, since I know that every single clothing item I own is freshly laundered but stuffed into a laundry bag on the floor somewhere. I guess I know what I’m doing tonight.

Categories
Being a girl Drew Endings Memoir Sentiment Writing

2011 My Year In Status

Facebook does this thing I enjoy, where you can sort through all your status updates from the year and then it puts them into a pretty jpeg for you. The writing is a little small (that’s the first time I’ve ever said that!) but I still like the concept of seeing my entire year like this.

There are things I entirely forgot about – and lots of things that I totally thought happened over a year ago. This year was definitely not boring – but also not too eventful.

Unfortunately I couldn’t fit all of the statuses I wanted to. So here are a couple that I had to leave off, that I still enjoyed rereading and reminiscing:

  • First attempt at homemade lattes: aborted!
  • Just found out this play is called Seagull. Not The Seagull. Good to know. First preview tonight!
  • You know she’s your BFF when she texts you how much she loves you…in drunk Spanglish.
  • To the old woman sorting through the trash dumpster at 8am: I know you were most likely just looking for recyclables, or even treasures that some wasteful entitled person threw away…but you are the reason I’ve gotten all OCD about shredding all my personal documents.
  • Today is No Apologies Monday! Did you make a faux pas today? Don’t say you’re sorry! I was 10 minutes late to work…but I’m not sorry!
  • Things trending on Yahoo right now: HIV, M Night Shyamalan, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. #NoApologiesMonday
  • A word problem: If Safeway has a “Buy one, get two free” promotion…can two adults eat 3 lbs of strawberries before they go bad?
  • If USPS is going to “deliver” things by tossing them onto the balcony 3 days earlier than the expected delivery date, it’d be nice to get a heads up so I don’t leave the package out there in the rain all weekend.
  • I definitely thought the royal wedding was tomorrow. Who gets married on a Friday?? Was Westminster Abbey booked for another royal wedding tomorrow or something?
  • Jonathan Amores: a fervent enthusiast of good theater plays
  • Drew: Are we an item? Me: Yeah. Right? Drew: Eh, I don’t really believe in labels.
  • I ate so many jelly beans today. : (
  • From Tina Fey’s “Bossypants” – “In the “Great American Melting Pot,”…New York is that chunk of garlic that you bite into thinking it’s potato and you can’t get the taste out of your mouth all day. It all blends once you mix it, but sometimes you really have to grind it against the side.” I miss you, NYC!
  • I would really like to go up in a hot air balloon.
  • Finally used a Starbucks treat receipt! First time ever!
  • Drew: “We have a very important decision to make and I think we should both say what we think at the exact same time. Should we get a Christmas tree this year? We both say what we think on three. Ready…one…two…three–” Drew and me: “YES.” Drew: “–because it’s Christmas. Okay, good. So we’ll do that.”
  • I drove for 3 minutes in the carpool lane, before 9am when it’s open to all. Rebel!

I promise that’s the last of the 2011 retrospectives!

Categories
Awesome Beginnings Being a girl Dreams Drew Endings Family Memoir Nonfiction Self improvement Sentiment Writing

2011 New Year’s Resolutions: Finis

Now is the time to look back on 2011 and see which of my New Year’s resolutions I accomplished. I’m happy to report that this year went pretty well!

1. Get off of unemployment

In June of 2010 I finished up a contract job at Marin Theatre Company, and I spent the remainder of the year patching together work from MTC, the San Francisco Opera, and reading for Samuel French, as well as supplementing with unemployment. While it wasn’t the tightest things have ever been around here, it was frustrating to be constantly thinking about trying to get enough hours among all the jobs. My number one priority as the year turned from 2010 to 2011 was to get off of unemployment. Which I did, basically right away, when I started subbing in January.

2. Get a career type job

Subbing was very interesting and I learned something, I’m sure. But it was obviously not for me. And like I said before, I was tired of cobbling together a living. My number two priority was to get a freaking real job, with stability and health benefits. Which I did in February! So far, 2011 resolutions are going great!

3. Lose 30 pounds

Oops.

4. Pay off at least one credit card

Oops again. Well, that was a tall order and I might have guessed that it wouldn’t happen.

5. Help Megan to have the best wedding ever

Done and done. I might add, I also helped Liz have the best wedding ever. A good year for weddings!

6. Change everything to my new(ish) last name.

The things I hadn’t yet changed over to my new last name (from my 2009 wedding) were my Mastercard, my gym membership, and three store credit cards. As of this morning I had changed my Mastercard and my gym membership. I planned on just moving this resolution to my “2012 resolutions” list, but then I had this big burst of inspiration, and so I spent some time on the phone this morning calling around and changing the rest of it. 2011 ftw!

I want to mention that every customer service representative I talked to said, “Congratulations on your recent wedding!” when I told them why I needed to change my name. I was too embarrassed to say, “Thanks, it was over 2 years ago.” How time flies.

7. Remember birthday cards for important family members this year

Well, unfortunately I had a couple lapses this year, and for that I am sincerely sorry. I have changed my system because having them in my planner is not working out as well as it used to – I’m just not in the planner often enough. I put the birthdays that keep slipping past me into my gmail calendar so that I’ll get a reminder 2 weeks out, so I can actually get something in the mail in time. 2012 will my card-sending, offending-no-one year.

8. Get a passport!

Thanks to Drew and the scavenger hunt he arranged for my birthday, I am now the proud owner of a passport. And I used it to fly to New York in October, so I know it works.

9. Write!

This was broken down into 5 categories to make it more quantifiable:

  • Script Frenzy in April
  • Submit to Samuel French Off-off-Bway Festival in July
  • Nanowrimo in November (I made the conscious decision to stay sane this November)
  • Blog 100 times over 2011 (the actual number is 168 public posts, counting this one)
  • Look into a Record-Bee column (I actually submitted about four of these)

I’m feeling pretty good about this year! So it’s time to start making me some 2012 resolutions. While I ponder over those and try to make them as specific and achievable as possible…let me know what your biggest resolution is!

Categories
Awesome Beauty Drew Family Fashion Friends Home improvements Love Religion

It’s Christmas in South City!

There’s this neighborhood in South San Francisco, where they must have some kind of agreement or something that you have to sign when you move in, because everyone goes crazy during the holidays. I love it. I aspire to one day live in a place where I’m forced to put up hundreds of dollars of decorations every year so people can come park in front of my driveway and take pictures in my front yard.

Oh, that came out as sarcasm, but I’m totally serious.

Drew, Erin, and I went the other night, but we just drove through and so all my pictures are a little blurry, as Drew was reluctant to stop in the middle of everything and wait for me to get the perfect shot. I had to just magically get it while he was stopped momentarily in the line of cars.

Here are an assortment of – but not all of – those pictures:

The blue house...
...next to the white house
Candy cane fence
One of many Santas riding motorcycles
The best house!

That last house is the best house – it’s one of the first ones you see on your way in and the last one on your way out. It’s the prettiest and the cleanest-looking. There aren’t any weird creepy anamatronics in the windows, and what you can see of the inside of their house is also nice and Christmassy. It’s just the best house of the bunch.

I could have taken my blurry shots and been done with it – and supplemented this blog post with a handmade holiday poem or something – but then last night some of us went out for dinner and on the way back, the one person in the car who you’d expect to be the least excited about Christmas, said, “Ooh! Ooh! Have you seen the neighborhood with the decorated houses? Can we go look at it?”

I mean, that’s just adorable, you have to say yes.

Plus, we had Starbucks, so we were all feeling the holiday spirit.

So we parked and walked around, which means I got slightly less blurry pictures. Although I think that, without a real camera and a tripod, I was never going to get magazine-spread-ready photos. But I mean…cameraphone diaries.

Here are some details I didn’t get during our drive-by visit:

A closeup of the best house, and their tree.
On any other street in any other neighborhood, this house would be amazing. But here, it's like...Okay. What else you got?
I just like the reflection of the house across the street.
A couple years ago, Drew and Erin and I did this, and I had a picture of myself in front of this wreath. Oh yeah, a lot of houses reuse their decorations.
This house goes for quality, not quantity. A real snow globe! These kids were losing their minds!
I just love Nativities.
This is the bear house. They have two of the creepiest trees ever - made all out of bears, held hostage with Christmas lights.
A closeup of the upstairs bear tree...
God knows I tried to take a good picture of us. But I look awkward in all of them. This is the least awkward-looking.
An assortment of characters!
I like the reflections here too
I'm hoping that these people are on vacation or something, and they don't hate their lives.
Mesmerizing
I remember this from last year too. I don't think they're all children. In my head this is a daycare center or something.
Drew likes this tree. He thinks it should be in Downtown Disney or something.
Geese on the roof!

It sure feels like Christmas here – and I can’t wait to see my family tonight and Drew’s family tomorrow! Merry Christmas, all!!

Categories
"Other people" Children Drew Not awesome Theatre

Bring It On: The Musical

Last night Drew and I went to see Bring It On – the musical with the same title of, but not based on, the movie. It’s at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, which has an awesome ceiling.

I have been equating Bring It On with Legally Blonde – both fluffy musicals about blonde girls with more depth than it first appears. I mean, that’s what I assumed.

Here’s what I have to say about the show:

I liked it. The music and lyrics were co-written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who did In the Heights, which is one of my top 5 all time favorite shows. The direction and choreography (some of which was truly amazing) is by Andy Blankenbuehler, who also did the choreography for In the Heights. I was fascinated by some of the cheerleading stunts. I laughed at jokes. I enjoyed the songs. I understand that I’m not supposed to take any existential meaning from it. I would fully recommend the show to…anyone. I want the cast recording (which apparently doesn’t exist as of yet).

But.

Last night was the press opening (which we didn’t know) and they had papered the house with high school students. In the mezzanine there was a large group of students chanting and cheering before the show started. Right after 8:00 (the show started about 10 minutes late) a group of like 8 14-year-olds girls (and one androgynous 14-year-old) came in and sat down in the seats next to us. Here’s what I have to say about them:

I don’t think there was one moment that they all had their phones closed. They were constantly checking their phones, needing to fish things out of plastic bags wrapped in other plastic bags, bouncing in their seats and looking down into the mezz, and – the worst of all – straight up talking to each other.

After the first five minutes or so of this, Drew and I staringly got their attention and it might be true that I slashed my finger across my throat and said “KNOCK IT OFF” in a loud whisper. I spent the next five minutes worried that it was too harsh, but I needn’t have worried. They didn’t care. They continued to talk through the entire 2 and a half hour show.

At intermission and after the show, Drew and I were ranting about them, and as we calmed down he wondered whether we were just annoyed too easily. After all, all kinds of things are annoying: the car in front of us in line bouncing on their brake lights, the ushers’ lackadaisical, “Hey, no pictures…we just have a couple rules” as he walks away.

But I think no. I think that there are little everyday annoyances that you go, “This is so frustrating!” and then get over. And then there are the rude, unchaperoned, socially-unaware teenagers who literally don’t care that you’re sitting next to them staring at them because they are having a conversation during a show. A show that we a lot of people around them paid a lot of money to see.

On the way home, Drew and I vowed that our children will never behave that way. Because we will kill them if they do.

So okay. So Bring It On was great. But teenagers are not. But if you’re in SF and contemplating it – go see it! Super fun.