Have I seriously not written anything here since July? Wow. It has been about that long since I had 10 minutes to sit and think much. The problem with people being expected to work 40+ hours a week is that there is no time left to live, only to eat and to sleep. I think it should be optional at review/raise time that you either get more money or fewer hours.


Clearly, life has been on the crazy side lately. In good and bad ways. We just started a new Sunday School class a couple months ago and we have been out of town every single weekend since the first class. This is a massive change from our former life of sitting at home and doing nothing all weekend. We do like having the freedom to be gone on Sundays since Sam doesn't play for our new church, but at the same time it is kind of stinky to be torn between going to an awesome class or going to California...


I was planning on writing more than that, but my brain is going in too many directions to form intelligent sentences. I guess that is why Twitter is so popular; you don't really have to say anything intelligent. It's moment-by-moment without thinking ahead or behind. Interesting. Or maybe not...I don't know, I'd have to think about it.

letdown to lovin' it! in 3.9 seconds

All morning I've thought today was Friday. Raise your hand if you understand what a bummer that is. To turn things around I thought I'd Google "plaid" again, since it was so much fun the other night when I made my Twitter background. Check out the treasures I found:

Is that me? Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is a photo of me in a parallel universe where I don't live on the surface of the sun, wearing my 65 layers of plaid and orange and brocade and wool. And I never would have thought it, but The Sartorialist posted this photo so apparently it is a total style-savvy look. Sweet. Although, really she could use a little more plaid. Something like this...

I have always been a closet Ralph Lauren fan. (Not sure why I've always felt the need to hide that fact... ) He makes the best huge, bold prints and he just blasts them in your face on skinny suits and floor length taffeta gowns and wow I wonder why more people don't wear them. And I wonder why he keeps refusing to design a wrap for my car. Oh well, look how awesome he is (bottom right photo), strutting his own runway in buffalo plaid.

Speaking of floor length plaid gowns, why didn't I think of this! Google didn't have any info about the origin of this dress, but the photo says it is a wedding gown. I cringe to think that I wore white lace when I could have worn plaid.

Thank you Apartment Therapy for sharing the joy of this room. I would like to guide your focus to the back wall and the white lamp. That is the only part of the photo that I see. I've been longing for flannel gray walls for a while but now I have to refine that longing to flannel gray plaid walls. Ay caramba! And check out the scale of that floor lamp. It looks like a gigantic table lamp and would make any other furniture look miniature. I am going to be thinking about the magic of that lamp for the rest of the day. That should make my ThurFriday go faster!

I was trying to figure out if I could talk my husband into wearing plaid every day of the week and lookie what I found. Zack Efron does it, so how can you go wrong? (Fashionably speaking, of course.) I'm sure that argument will go far when I try to talk Sam into buying stock in plaid. Hahaha, right.

I made a smaller version of this bow (from https://www.redvelvetart.com/) and it is so cute I want to wear it every day. I don't know what kind of salons they have down there in Springfield but all of the RVA girls have the best hair ever. I am still floored that my first DIY haircut looks as good as it does, but I'm always up for a new one... If I could have hair like those dolls where you cut it and then just tug and some more comes out, I would be ecstatic.

Since I lost my officemate last week I have been rocking out to whatever music strikes me every day. It's pretty awesome. I've had country day, alternative day, bluegrass day, and then today was "every artist Amanda mentions via Twitter or Doom for Darlings" day. She kept me pretty busy. The best part was that one of the Pandora stations I made ended up playing a Hanson song. HANSON! At this juncture I will pretend to post a VHS file of the Mmmbop music video my friends and I made 10 years ago...pretend with me now. See? Now you understand why that absolutely made my day.

More musical treasures in store tomorrow, as I attempt to 'inculturate' myself with decent music. I blindly followed MXPX for so long that I never bothered to find out if I liked any other music and now the world is new to me. Some favorites so far: Vampire Weekend, Neko Case, Lady Antebellum, Chopin, Feist and some rather oldies like Cake, Kelly Clarkson, Jason Mraz, Something Corporate. With a little techno/dance on the side. It's a work in progress.

three lost posts don't make a right

Alas, I have been posting my little heart out and nothing has actually appeared here for weeks. My words are lost in Cyberville. I believe a Double Stuf Chocolate Creme Oreo should solve the problem. Laptop Louie does not agree, but he is just concerned about crumbs in the keys. Too bad, Louie, too bad.

Hole.ly.granola. Harry Potter comes out in 15 days. Pardon me while I run out of sight and do a quick hoo-rah dance. 6 was probably my favorite book. The last one with some semblance of normal life for Hogwarts. Although it is Deathly Hallows (#7) that plays over and over in my head when I'm not otherwise engaged.

In other exciting news (alllmost as exciting as 7.15.09): Sam and I now work for the same company. It is pretty awesome. I work pretty freakish hours, but now he works the very same freakish hours and we can commute together. Plus we never see each at the office, so it's almost like we don't work together but still get all the perks. We're diggin' it. He's thrilled to have a job that doesn't work 16-hour days, pay commission or put his life in the hands of a meth addict daily. I mean, what's not to love about his last three jobs, huh? But yeah, this is far superior in so many ways. It is such a gift. Hahaha, we're still waiting to actually settle down, after 26 years each and 3 years of marriage we're still like little ping pong balls popping all over, trying to grab onto a wall somewhere and just hold tight. Maybe I'm a ridiculous optimist or just don't care much for reality, but I've never felt like anything was unsure even when everything was unsure. Another gift- to see the rock under the sand.

Home sweet...what the, where is that?!

Home has always been a tricky word for me, probably for my family too. Over Memorial Day I was hiking to our cabin with my brother and mentioned being homesick in Phoenix. He asked precisely the question I was wondering myself: "Homesick for where?" Yeah, I'm not sure. In fact I think when you've moved around like we have you truly understand the saying 'home is where your heart is' better than anyone. The particular brand of homesickness I meant was a longing for things old and weathered, greenness, community. But I want those things in Phoenix. I want to make them happen here, I don't want to have to leave to find them. So we're working on those goals.
Surprisingly, I am getting my wish for greenness right this moment. My company does these landscape classes on our properties and I have to set up all the A/V stuff for them. So Sam and I are at one of my favorite properties just outside of the city, sitting in their park by the lake, watching the sprinklers and waiting for the class to end. There are a couple solid acres of grass and lake right here, so if I take off my glasses I can pretend there is no desert beyond that. It is ironic that this kind of property is such a luxury. If you want to live in a dense, tree-covered grassy place, just live in ANY other part of the country and you won't have to pay a bazillion dollars for it! But alas, I would be unemployed if people did not want grass and trees in the desert, so I'm not complaining.

I refuse to move from this chair

Blech, I'm whooped. This was a surprisingly long weekend, which is always fun but it left me completely drained. I guess it's back to munching spinach leaves, for me! Mmmm, iron.

Here is our weekend in photos:

Friday nights' movie-in-the-park adventure. I fell asleep on Sam long before those three year olds tired out!

Saturday morning we went to see Angels and Demons. It.was.wow. Ewan McGregor is so convincingly guileless as the Camerlengo. I know that The DaVinci Code had Christians all up in arms and I haven't heard the response to this movie, yet, but I don't see any basis for offense in Angels and Demons. The plot is as follows: Humans are flawed, even the leaders of the Catholic church. Religion and science need to find some common ground and quit trying to get rid of the other. You never know who to trust. See, what's wrong with that? Whereas DaVinci code had Prof. Langdon solving the mystery of Jesus' earthly family and basically shaking the basis of Christian faith, Angels and Demons just shows the catastrophic effect of religious radicals taking their beliefs too far. It does not assume that all Christians are radicals, in fact it has some very complex, humble characters who make a strong case for the rest of us. But through some crafty filmmaking you are constantly second-guessing who is honest and who is faking everything.

Saturday afternoon I found this awesome home store that I think I wrote about yesterday... it was super inspirational. Everything in it was hand-picked by the owner, from Indonesia, Thailand, Peru, China, etc. American antiques are cool and all, but there's just something spectacular about a 300 year old apothecary cabinet from India.

Of course, after spending a while in there my brain wouldn't stop imagining what I'll do with our first house. I woke up unnaturally early on Sunday morning with my head full of color schemes! Phoenix is eternally blue skies and sunny with lots of deserty brown everywhere so I want to counteract those influences with mostly overcast gray walls (everywhere normal people would use white!) and accents walls in apple green, BMW Mystique Blue and anything that can look watery. So I spent most of Sunday afternoon cutting out ideas from my vast collection of ripped up decorating magazines and gluing them with paint samples in a notebook. That's my idea of a good afternoon!!

We also found a new church, Sunday. Living Streams, in Phoenix. It was pretty wonderful and we're excited for the potential it holds for us to get involved and finally make some friends.

I have a plan

And a lot of bug bites at the moment. But most importantly, a plan. We have come to refer to our screaming, stuff-smashing neighbors as "the crazies" or "the psychos". So compassionate, I know... Living above them is like having two very angry babies who scream around the clock and smoke four packs a day. Sick. Our apartment is saturated with their secondhand smoke and we've had about enough. Tonight I was moving one of our dining chairs and noticed it makes a wicked screeching sound on the tile floor. So Sam and I decided that next time they start the screaming we are going to perform Chair Screeching Sonata in A Sharp until they get the point. We can't go down there and talk to them, so we'll just drag the dining chairs around until they realize that it is on purpose. Or maybe they'll never realize and they'll think we are the crazy ones for moving furniture at midnight... and 3am and 4:30am and 2pm and 6pm and 10:15pm.

Last night Sam and I decided we needed to get out for once, so we found this park in Tempe that was playing Ratatouille outside and we went and hung out with a billion little kids and their parents. It was pretty hysterical. A very little girl from the blanket next to us thought we were more fun than her family and spent most of the movie regaling us with nonsense stories and dances, showing off her sunglasses and trying to kiss Sam. Of course he's used to most girls being that way with him, but it is always cuter when they are under 15.

We are checking out a new church tomorrow and I'm really looking forward to it. It is beyond time to find a community here. I can't stand being surrounded by so many people and still being so isolated. Heck, I was in a new decorating shop by our apartment today and I made more of a connection with the owner there in 20 minutes than I have with any human being outside of my job in the nine months we've been in Phoenix. Maybe we need to work harder at this...