Category: Family

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Family Friends Religion

Christmas 2010

This year we did Christmas Eve with my parents, and then Christmas dinner with Drew’s family.  On Christmas Eve we went to my family’s church for the candlelight service, and I met their new pastor.  She seems cool and new.  I think she’ll be really good for their congregation.  Being at church made me really want to go to church regularly again.  So I think I’ll add that to my New Year’s resolutions.

Christmas night, after dinner and everything, we went to see 127 Hours.  Every year Drew and I have gone to the movies on Christmas day, and I’m really glad we were able to keep that tradition alive.

2005 – The Producers (we didn’t yet know the tradition would be “movies that come out on Christmas day)
2006 – Dreamgirls
2007 – Sweeney Todd
2008 – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2009 – Sherlock Holmes
2010 – 127 Hours (nothing came out on Christmas this year!)

127 Hours is not the most Christmassy of movies.  But it was good.  I see how it’s a good movie.  There was a part where I felt sort of sick, and I covered my eyes for a minute, but then I thought, This is practically the point of the movie, I don’t want to miss this.  Then a little later I cried a little bit.  Because it was either that or throw up.  It was good though.  I kept thinking about it the rest of the night.

This afternoon while driving to Fort Funston to walk with Erin, Drew said something about today being Monday.  Then I got to tell him today is only Sunday.  He was so happy!

That cat so does not care about me.

We are one week into Christmas Break and this is what I’ve accomplished of my Christmas Break Resolutions.

-Hit the gym 6 times.  I’m up to 4 so far.

-Do some deep cleaning of the apartment.  We even fixed our toilet by ourselves!  The tank’s had a slow leak forever, and we’ve just been cleaning up after it.  But then we finally teamed up and fixed it.  What a rush, right?

-Organize my iTunes and sync up my iPod.  Done!  I got lots of new stuff.  Including podcasts.

-Manage to make a dinner that makes Drew go, “Mmm!  This is DELICIOUS!!”  Does reheating the leftovers from his mom’s Christmas dinner count?  I did make my own mashed potatoes.

Categories
Awesome Beginnings cars Drew Family Memoir Sentiment

One year: California

 

I can hardly believe it, but a year ago today Drew and I arrived in California with a van packed full of our stuff (see above) and a camera full of pictures from our warp speed drive from NYC.  We arrived one day ahead of schedule (earning us back a day’s refund on our rental car – totally worth it).

I am so happy that we decided to drive back.  Driving across the country was kind of inspiring.  I just flipped through the Facebook album I made when we got back, and there are some really great pictures in there.  A lot of the landscape and the way it changed over 3000 miles.

Iowa, one of the best states.
I think this is Nebraska...I have like 15 pictures of this labeled "Void 1," "Void 2," etc.
Colorado, or Wyoming, something like that.

One year later, I still think it was the right thing for us to do, to come back.  I don’t think that we “gave up” or that New York “got the best of us,” especially considering we had a pretty sweet setup out there.  It was a good life for three years but I guess we both knew it wasn’t going to be our life forever, and it was time to get that party started.

Right now, Liz and Bill are packing up their lives: putting a ton of boxes in storage, giving away a bunch more, and packing up a few suitcases and their cat, and in a week they’ll be flying out to New York City.  They will go from the airport to their sublet in Brooklyn (sound familiar, anyone?) and try to orient themselves to a lifestyle completely unlike what they’ve been living.  While a little part of me is jealous over this blank slate, most of me is just plain excited for them…while also being relieved that I don’t have any packing/unpacking in my near future.

I am ready for an NYC vacation, so hopefully we can get it together soon.

In the meantime, I can see the Pacific Ocean from where I’m sitting, and even though I just saw my parents less than a week ago, I’ll see them again next weekend.  It’s 68 degrees here and I’m wearing socks to keep warm (sorry, New York friends).  I miss New York, but not the way I missed California.  Plus, think of the stories to tell my kids about my reckless youth.

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Books cars Family Theatre

“Well, it was no Les Mis Junior…”

This afternoon, Drew and I headed up to my alma mater theatre company in Mill Valley to check out the teen summer conservatory production of Jason Robert Brown’s 13.  I saw it in New York and loved it, so of course I dragged Drew who had never gotten a chance to see it out there.

Man, if I thought the audiences liked Woody Guthrie…this audience was literally screaming in happiness after certain songs.  At the curtain call, the father (?) of the lead actor jumped up and did major fist pumps when his kid came out.  It must be amazing to see a person that you created, now a teenager and up on stage doing something they love.

But if we spent 2 hours in the theatre watching the show, we spent something like 3 hours in the car just getting there and back.  It took us a little over an hour to get up to Mill Valley, thanks to horrendous Saturday traffic.  When the show ended at 4:00 we booked it out of there to get Drew to work by 4:45 in the city…and hit major Saturday traffic coming back over the bridge (closed down to 2 lanes! wtf?).  He was only a half hour late but it was still super frustrating, making us both sit tensely and mutter obscenities at other cars, when we should have been gabbing about the teenagers.

When I left him, it took me a half hour just to get to the freeway.  I spent a lot of this time sitting at traffic lights through several cycles, leaning my head on the window and sighing deeply to show other people how annoyed I was, and occasionally yelling, some of which were swears.  Mostly the yelling happened when a dozen cars zoomed past me in the BUSES AND TAXES ONLY ALL THE TIME lane and then tried to cut in to our lane, in time to make the light I’d been creeping up towards for the last 5 minutes.  It might be true that when I turned onto the onramp to the freeway, a car from a non-turn lane turned next to me, then started to drive in the middle of the onramp, which is two lanes.  It might also be true that I honked at them and then sped around them.

After that I thought, maybe I’m too stressed about this, but the fact was I had been in the car for an hour and 45 minutes basically trying to get the 25 miles home.  I breathed deeply and later went to the gym to punch it out.  (Day 5: $6.40.)

I’m Zen-ed out now but I thought it might still be helpful to make a list of things I love.  Plus I’ve been collecting all these cameraphone pictures.

1. I love that on Tuesday my parents came down and the four of us went to see Wicked, which I’ve been dying to show them.  I love that they loved the show.  I love that my mom and I have been emailing each other just little updates about our day.  (She told me she found some blue nailpolish for her pedicure; I told her I was at work and was hungry but forgot a spoon for my lunch.) 

Here are my parents on BART (they are SUPER excited about going to see Wicked, you can tell):

I have no problems showing my excitement.  Shut up, I love this show.

2. I love our world map shower curtain.  I told my dad I had just bought a new shower curtain, and it was awesome, and he said, “What, is it like a world map or something?”  OMG, Dad!  You were kidding but now that you’ve seen it you realize how awesome it is.

It faces in so you can study while you shampoo.

3. I love the San Francisco Public Library.  I’ve been a member of the Peninsula Library system for awhile now, and finding it very helpful now that I’m working only part-time and really shouldn’t (I deliberately didn’t say “don’t”) spend money on books.  But I walk past the main branch of the SF Library on Grove and Larkin, and I gotta tell you, it’s very promising on the outside.  So on Friday I went in, even though they were closing in 15 minutes, and picked up a library card and admired the inside.  I can’t wait for next week so I can go browse.

The outside reminds me of Shields Library at UC Davis…

…while the inside is what Heaven might look like.

None of these pictures are of books.  But there are totally books there too.  And I walked out with my very own library card and keychain library card!  The library is a really great system, you know?  Free books!  Paid for by the government…or someone.

4. I don’t love leaving Lake County, but I LOVE the way the landscape looks, especially in the summer.  Driving from Lakeport to Davis and vice versa is my little deep down mushy Achilles’ heel.  I can’t help but think of being in college.  And in high school.  This one time, we (CSF, or Academic Decathlon?) were driving back from a field trip to Ashland, and there are no streetlights or anything out there, but I just remember that it was so bright because the moon was full.  I have definitely made Drew pull over on the side of the road and look at the stars from there.  You can see so many.

Speaking of stars, when I went home last week I remembered that I always forget how many you can see out there.  It’s not just, stars in the sky, it’s like the sky is made of stars.  And the Milky Way and everything.  I wish I could see that every day.

But in the daylight, I love this combination of blue, yellow, and dark green.

So now I miss my parents and Lakeport, I am sad because I can’t get any new library books until Monday and because Wicked is closing, and I want to take another shower so I can study Africa.

Categories
"Other people" Being a girl Drew Family Not awesome

The Wedding Photographer from the Black Lagoon

So, I got married last November.  It was a wonderful affair, with wine and family and dancing and cake and guests coming from New York and Spain to help us celebrate.  It was really much better than I expected and lots better than I even wished for.  The caterers were thorough and invisible when they were supposed to be, the DJ played all the right music and none of the wrong music, and the cake was 5 layers, not 4 like we were expecting, because the baker wanted to give it some extra drama.  I love me a 5-tiered cake.  The photographer and his assistant were everywhere at all times, stayed from 11 in the morning until 11 at night, and didn’t mind when our set-up shot plan changed 3 times.  They left the reception when we did, and promised us our pictures in “4-6 weeks! by Christmas!”

Here is a timeline of how the next 4 months have gone.

Dec 15, haven’t heard anything from him, so I email him just to find out if he’ll post them soon. We’d love to sit down with our sets of parents and go through the pictures.  Photographer doesn’t respond.
Dec 22, Facebook informs me he’s going to Mexico for Christmas.
Dec 22, I email him again because I haven’t heard back.
Dec 23, Photographer informs me via email that he’s “out of the country” for the holidays and will return after the New Year.
Jan 6, I email him again asking because I haven’t heard anything.
Jan 6, He writes back saying he’s almost done!
Jan 11, They’re posted! We’re so happy. I email him back asking for a couple others shots – one, a group shot with the girls I used to babysit, which I definitely remember being taken. Two, anything, from any point in the night, of me and my mom together. He tells me he’s out of town until Jan 17 so he’ll get back to me.
Jan 26, I call him. No answer.  No callback.
Feb 12, I email him. No answer.
Mar 2, I call him. No answer.  No callback.
Mar 6, I call him around 9:30 in the morning..  He answers!  Holy cow!  He tells me he’s “just looking at the pictures” and he can’t find the one of me with my babysitting girls.  Also, he says, “this has never happened before” but he can’t find anything of me and my mom.  He’s “never had to set that up before, it always happens naturally.”  I basically give up and say sweetly through my teeth, “Okay, well, everything else is great, so can you mail us the DVD?”  He says he’ll do that right away.
Mar 11, Silly me, I assumed “right away” meant he’d mail the DVD on Saturday, or Monday at the latest.  No DVD has shown up yet and shipping from San Francisco to San Bruno shouldn’t take long.  I email him asking if he’d sent it because I wanted to take it to my parents’ house over the weekend (not true).  He writes back saying he’s at a “wedding photography convention” in Las Vegas to get some new slick DVD cases that he likes.  He’ll overnight one to my parents’ address, if I’ll give it to him.  I give it to him (anything to get a copy of that DVD!).
Mar 12, In the morning he leaves me a voicemail saying he’s been to the post office, UPS, and FedEx and no one can get it there by Saturday.  I text him saying to just send it to me here.

Today we got home and there was a (granted, pretty slick) DVD case leaning against the door.  Which means he just brought it by and left it at some point today?  There are 2 DVDs inside, one saying in Sharpie, “Copy 1” and the other, “Copy 2.”  For needing to be placed in such a slick case, the DVDs are pretty unimpressive, but if I pop them into the computer and my wedding pictures exist thereon, everything will be forgiven (if not immediately forgotten).

So here it is, over 4 months later, and we have our pictures.  The next step is to upload all 600 onto some photo sharing-and-purchasing website, send the link to everyone, and then order the prints.  Now the only thing to kind of bother me is the fact that everyone else has that one great the-happy-couple-kissing-in-a-very-posed-manner-in-front-of-a-tree picture, and we, for some reason, have none of those.  I mean, we have lots of good candids and that’s what I wanted anyway, so it’s all good.  I just kind of miss not having that gazing-at-each-other-lovingly-in-front-of-a-pond picture.

Oh yeah, and I need to write that photographer a scathing review on Yelp.  My only question is, is this the kind of thing where I should warn him beforehand?  Or should I just cut into him via the faceless internet?  Major dilemma.

Categories
Family Fashion Memoir

The danger of scarves

The room we rehearse in is always freezing (except when all the actors leave the room and Liz the SM and I turn the heat up and sit under the vents).  I’ve been wearing more and more layers every day; I’m two steps away from bringing a blanket or buying a Snuggie.  The last couple days I’ve even resorted to wearing scarves, which I thought I would never need in California.  Today I had wrapped my scarf around my neck twice when I recognized a familiar sense of anxiety…

…which I then placed as coming from the fear that, when I wrapped my scarf fully around my neck, someone could come up behind me, pull on the end, and break my neck, or strangle me, or otherwise cause me harm.  Where did this fear come from?  I thought of Isadora Duncan and her untimely scarf demise, but this feels like a deeper fear, something that would have had to be instilled in me at a very young age.

Of course, it must have been my mother.

Here are some other things I’ve recently realized I still (sort of) believe in, leftover from my childhood, even though my brain tells me it’s stupid:

-Premade chocolate milk: made from the milk that comes out bloody from the cows
-Don’t sit directly in front of the TV: the radiation comes out and then down (I guess I know where my brother and I used to sit)
-Reading in the dark ruins your eyes

What did you get told that you still believe?