to my husbear:
you are so handsome.
you don't eat meat but i still
do and you don't care.
to baby miles:
baby why don't you
go to sleep? it is nice for
me and for you. please.
to starbucks:
i spend lots on your
drinks each day. now i'm poor but
very energized.
to steve mcqueen, my dog:
i know it's your name
but stop trying to escape
your cage you're not him.
OR
i love how you sleep
with your legs in the air and
bits exposed. no shame.
to my lovehandles:
you are not sexy.
shut up and go away please.
i hate you both lots.
to baby miles again:
your drooling is nuts!
your giggles make me laugh hard.
your face is perfect.
to summertime:
I AM SO GLAD YOU'RE HERE.
WHAT TOOK YOU SO FREAKING LONG?
please stick around now.
this weekend i went to harrisburg, and part of me never came back.
you see, my soulmate lives there.
not the romantic kind of soulmate- i married that one.
but the kind of soulmate you have, no matter what.
the kind that has a bond which distance and life circumstance can't weaken or diminish.
the kind that's born from a situation in which you never thought you would find such pure, unadulterated love.
the kind that gives you haven when the person you think is your romantic soulmate turns out to not be that at all. (no fears, i am happily married. but other people are still looking, and that's okay, too.)
we call it safelove.
best friends don't break up.
so, i went to visit her.
here is how things went.
we had a picnic.
i helped decorate.
i made signs for the dips.
i made new friends.
i talked a lot. of course.
but i also listened a little.
we had a dance party.
we made crafts.
and i relaxed with my soulmate.
safelove. samehearts.
it was a wonderful weekend.
Does anyone have any ideas for a 25th birthday party in new york in august?
i'm trying to plan something wonderful.
my handsome husbear has his very own blog.
http://bjornvonerck.blogspot.com/
i'm so proud of him.
i am deathly ill.
now, i have a tendency to exaggerate.
but this time, i'm serious.
if i don't beat this flu, i am going to lay down and let it beat me.
on saturday, we went up to our friends' place for a going away party, as our good friend scott is leaving on thursday for a 5 week stint doing volunteer work in south africa! he's going to love it. and i hope we take good care of his fiancee, terra, while he's gone.
the party was beautifully executed, complete with a tiki/safari type theme.
i loved everyone there.
the weather was perfect.
the food was amazing.
but i could not snap out of my funk.
i got some dayquil from terra but it didn't even dent my haze.
and then i had to leave to babysit miles.
thankfully, he went to bed about a half hour after i got there, and then i curled up under blankets to watch crappy nickelodeon tv and hoped to doze off and wake up having shaken the feeling of "blah".
but no, instead i got chills and body aches. i found a thermometer and took my temp every half hour.
i started at 100.2 and ended up at 102.9 by the time his parents came home.
they promptly put me in a car home, where i slammed a hot mug of theraflu made for me by husbear, and slept for 10 hours.
i woke up drenched in sweat, my skin nice and cool.
whew.
apparently my fever spiked and broke numerous times throughout the night, according to husbear who was keeping tabs on me every time he woke up.
on sunday, i moved to the couch.
and there i stayed, in my pjs, until it was time for bed.
husbear was such a dream.
he made my theraflu, he ordered me chinese food (upon my insistence that i could eat a whole meal. i couldn't. oh well). he ran down to the ice cream truck for a giant popsicle to soothe my throat. he rubbed my back. he let me watch all the movies i wanted. he even caught up on episodes of "i'm a celebrity, get me out of here!" with me.
he was the best, and he wins an award.
i was out for the night by 9:30, and at 10:30 he woke me up to move me to bed.
i then slept fitfully, unfortunately.
steve mcqueen kept stealing my covers, i kept waking up sweaty, and i had the WEIRDEST dreams of my life...one of them being that i couldnt remember where iw orked or who i worked for and i had to go door to door and look at different houses to see if they were where i was supposed to be. it was very unsettling, even if it sounds stupid.
and today i am at work, existing on purell for my hands and daytime theraflu for my body.
i hate hate hate not being able to kiss miles.
i think we'll spend the afternoon in the sunshine and see if some vitamin d will help me. worth a shot, right?
soon enough, i'll be able to wrap up in this
beauty, made just for me by my beautiful cousin madison.
a little piece of home always helps when you're sick, don't you think?
today i went to arrojo studio in tribeca and got my hair cut by nicole.
i was sitting next to mr. arrojo, by the way.
though nicole is a big enough deal on her own.
and she was really, really wonderful.
sweet and silly, and very very talented.
wanna see?
here you go:
i also got some new clothes because urban was having a "yard sale". yay!
pics of those to come later, along with all of my flea market finds!
but right now i need to straighten up the house because people are coming over to watch the RED WINGS WIN THE STANLEY CUP TONIGHT!!!
oh, it's going to be glorious.
today is just the poops.
i woke up sleepy and cranky.
apparently so did the sun.
so IT went back to bed.
THE LAZY MOTHER@#$%ER.
i cannot handle anymore of this weather.
it is JUNE, for crying out LOUD.
ACT LIKE IT.
so, i am sitting here while Miles naps (it only took him 4 #$%&ing hours to fall asleep) trying to remind myself of the positive things about today.
1. it is my friday, and also my payday. i have tomorrow off.
2. i am spending that day off getting my hair cut by nicole at arrojo studio. for you reality tv junkies, she was a runner-up on the last season of Shear Genius. yeah, her. she's cutting my hair. i'm stoked. and...it's gonna be short. short short. you'll see.
3. i had a chocolate chip pop tart for breakfast and i only feel a little bit guilty.
4. husbear uploaded pictures from tuesday night. and here they are:
this is adam, laurel, and jeff on the patio that adam built.
this is my dog, steve mcqueen, king of poop.
this is karl, husbear, and joe. they are also known as white pines. dave is also in the band, but he is behind joe.
these are some of our friends, enjoying the show.
this is the "stage".
this is joe. when he sings, laserbeam musical notes shoot out of his mouth. it's pretty amazing.
this is Husbear, doin' what he does. i love him.
this is molly dog, with jeff, anna, and erin.
this is my best friend kate. her necklace has my name spelled out, but all of the letters are clustered so you can't see them. oh well.
this is kate in my lap. we love each other.
and this is anna, matt, and davey jones of frontier ruckus.
there. now i feel a little bit better.
last night husbear had a show.
but this was no rodinary show.
this was a brooklyn backyard show.
which, if you will scroll back a few entries, you will find are the kinds of shows i enjoy the most.
this one was 2 blocks from our apartment.
in fact, this one was in the backyard of the house husbear and i first lived in when we moved to new york (after a brief stint in park slope).
but it's different now than it was when we lived there.
the fellows who keep it now have done really beautiful things to it.
including creating a backyard venue where previously there was only shrubbery and weeds taller than me.
and as i am five feet ten inches tall, that is no minor thing.
so they cleared that all out, along with some questionable material found among the debris (as this house is located directly next to an abandoned building that has been infiltrated by the neighborhood crackheads. yikes.)and they built a patio. and a garden. and strung up christmas lights and lit tiki torches.
and it's just beautiful.
(i will have oh so many pictures tonight when husbear uploads them to my laptop!)
and then my husbear kept a pretty beat for those handsome gents of White Pines.
and then just Joe and Dave played a few songs from That's Him! That's the Guy! and i was yet again rendered breathless at their harmonies. until you hear it, you will never know quite how powerful they are, but seriously...you can't move. oh, i hope you hear them one day.
and then frontier ruckus played.
and it was astounding.
this is such a talented, wonderful group of artists.
and then it rained, and we all ran as fast as we could into the living room and crammed our bodies in tightly to hear them play a few more songs.
and then the rain stopped, and we ran back out into the yard for a few more.
and so many of their songs are about michigan, and i got a little homesick.
and then i looked around and realized how many of us michigan folk were gathered in the yard, in a brooklyn backyard, to hear beautiful music about our home, and it felt like home, too.
because it is.
home is where we are.
i have the best friends in the whole wide world.
we caused an urban ruckus last night. it was a really good night.
that's right.
i came home and ate my words for dinner, because my darling husbear made the bed.
well, he at least pulled the sheet and comforter up to the top.
we'll work on pillow placement later.
so yesterday, while perusing organic produce at forager's market in dumbo, a short handsome gentleman stepped back and lightly bumped miles' stroller.
the young man turned around to quickly apologize and excuse himself ever so politely, and my heart stopped.
like actually and truly stopped.
and when it started again, it did so in a double time that would make billy blanks proud.
because i was excusing jason motherfreaking schwartzman.
if you dont know who that is, 1. shame on you. and 2. he was not only the drummer for my longest running favorite band Phantom Planet, but he was also in every other amazing movie ever. ever. including but not limited to Rushmore, the Darjeeling Limited, I Heart Huckabees, and Slackers.
i then found myself in line behind him as he paid for his groceries and was darling and polite to the cashier. he nodded goodbye, and i was an instant puddle on the floor. think alex mack.
so i text miles' mom immediately to inform her that this god of an actor is just walking willy-nilly around her neighborhood, expecting her to FREAK OUT and race home and scou the streets for another glimpse of him, and she just responds with "oh yeah, he lives across the street." like it's NO BIG DEAL.
...i love this job.
and jason, if you're reading this, don't be alarmed if i'm waiting outside of your building every morning with doughnuts and a smoothie from forager's. you don't even have to pay me back.
IN OTHER NEWS.
last night we were awakened at 3:09am to an ear splitting crack that made me very nearly wet the bed.
now, we do not exactly live on the right side of the tracks.
as a matter of fact, we live in bed stuy, brooklyn, just south of the marcy projects.
we're pretty much on the worst side of the tracks imagineable.
gunshots are a weekly occurance, to be quite honest.
so when i heard this crack, i hit the roof, thinking a stray bullet had come in our window.
but when i opened my eyes, our bedroom was filled with pulsating light and the curtains were billowing and swirling like a freaking ufo is landing on hart street.
my sleepy brain finally pieced together all of this information- we were in the throes of a horrible, horrible thunderstorm.
again, lighting struck and thunder cracked, simultaneously, and every car alarm on the street started to go off. this cacophony was far too much for my sleepy head and tiny heart, and i was completely paralyzed with fear.
when i was very young, the slightest rustle of wind in the leaves had me running full tilt for my house, screaming bloody murder that a tornado was coming to sweep me away. it was my absolute greatest fear, perhaps only rivaled by E.T. seriously, i couldn't play in my own backyard without visions of tunnel clouds plaguing me, leaving my grasping at grass with my little fingers just to keep from being sucked away. i had a very active imagination.
i like storms now, but this one was just too close to home, literally speaking.
thankfully, my big strong handsome husbear leaped to my rescue and quickly started closing windows and unplugging appliances.
he then crawled back into bed, retrieved me from the pile of covers under which i had retreated, and soothed and shh'd and cuddled me back to sleep, which took far less timenthan i had expected, considering the alarms that were still going off outside.
and steve mcqueen the dog slept through it all.
but i'm kind of glad i didn't, simply because of the way i was lured back into slumber.
I have so many pictures to take to supplement this entry, but at least I will make an attempt to write it so that i feel motivated to post the pictures.
this blog is proof that i'm really trying to finish anything i start. ANYTHING. sigh. but i'm still powering through. so please at least be a tiny bit proud of me. after this, i go to my recipe blog and post some things since i haven't touched it since
march. i suck at regularity.
so.
this weekend.
can i tell you about it? because it was beautiful.
not only because the sun was shining for the first time in weeks. though that part was spectacular.
on friday, i had the day off.
we spent the morning laying around, watching movies, eating cereal, being generally lazy.
then i made the mistake of asking husbear to help me straighten up a bit. especially since it was mostly my stuff laying around, because while i clean often and fervently, i am a horrible horrible slob during the in-between times.
and it turns out, this has been bothering husbear. who, i might mention, is the second messiest person of all time. needless to say, a brawl ensued, just short of "taking this outside". some people might see this as a bad thing. it's important for you to know, dear reader, that husbear and i fight often. and loudly. and fiercely. but not unkindly or brutally. we are just both very convicted, passionate people with a lot to say. and, lucky for me (and him, APPARENTLY), i clean when i'm angry. so what started as just a quick pick-up-the-living-room twirl, our apartment was quickly sparkling clean. the whole things. every room. i even swept under the sofas, people. yeah. that clean.
and then we kissed and made up. because that's how we do.
and then we left to babysit sweet baby miles for the evening.
once he slept, we ordered pizza and watched movies, and it felt like all the nights i spent in high school babysitting for the kids in the neighborhood, except i get paid adult salary for the best job of my life. which i feel very very blessed for having.
saturday morning, husbear left to play a show at an outdoor music festival in the pennsylvania woods (he drums for a really beautiful
folk set with haunting harmonies. i'm so proud of his contribution to such a group of talented fellows!) and wouldn't be back until sunday, so we packed them up into the van with all of their camping gear, and kate and i set off for
BROOKLYN FLEA!now.
this place is heaven.
it is the most amazing flea market of my life, because there is no crap to sort through. no hidden treasures. EVERYTHING is a treasure. the miracle is having enough money to spend here.
i kept myself in check, however, as my last trip to brooklyn flea left my bank account curled up in the corner, bursting into tears every time i glanced in its direction. yeah.
but i did come away with a killer pair of vintage peep-toe heels in a beautiful dark teal color, a fabulous pair of jeans (which i tried on right there in the market, hiking them up under my sundress. they were straight of "sisterhood of the traveling pants", they were such a perfect fit.), a cute little ring, and a giant flower to clip into my hair, because flowers in my hair are sort of my "thing."
kate got a new bike (i had walked mine to the market, the full mile and a half, which was nothing compared to the riding we did later.) and we were off to ride 3 miles to the
RENEGADE CRAFT FAIR! on the way, my cell phone took a flying leap from my pocket and performed an olympic-wprthy floor routine down lorimer street. oops. i have managed to finagle some pieces back together to create a fully functioning electronic, but it is going to need to be replaced in the near future. sigh.
now, if i said the brooklyn flea was heaven, this place was the place you go if you died in heaven and went someplace better. if that makes sense. this place is like milk and cookies in heaven heaven. well, would be, if everything was free. which it is not. actually, everything is insanely expensive, because it's all handmade.
but man, it was just incredible.
i scored an adorable felted wallet, and kate and i went in search of the perfect friendship necklaces to remind us of one another when she moves to Akron in two weeks. (SOB!! I'M GOING TO FALL APART. but that's another entry all together, and for now, we are pretending it's not happening.)
we did indeed find the perfect necklaces. we were able to make our own at a cute little booth that sold every kind of charm imagineable.
so mine has a little bird, a tiny charm that says "laugh", and her initials- kb.
she then showed me up by spelling out my entire first name and my last initials, so hers says "kathryn vE". and none of her letters match, and it is darling.
sunburnt and broke, we departed for the 2 mile bike ride home (she lives on the floor below me. for now...).
once home we performed a quick transformation into cute outfits to bike to DUMBO (3.5 miles) to see a performance art piece at St. Anne's Warehouse (
The Success of Failure (or the Failure of Success) with Cynthia Hopkins.)
It was unbelievable. Seriously. It was nothing I would have expected to see or love, but it was phenomenal, start to finish.
and it was free, because our dear friend Claire works in the box office and comped our seats. awesome.
and then, we biked 3.5 miles home.
we were sore, exhausted, burned, poor, and the happiest we've been in a long time.
i'm really going to miss her.
sunday came and brought with it my husbear, and we napped on the roof and ate homemade rice krispie treats and curled up on the couch for hours to watch episodes of True Blood and Breaking Bad. And that day was as successful, to me, as Saturday.
And I kept the house clean.
All weekend.
so let's see if the bed is made when i get home, as i requested. ;)
