Boo

I go back to work Thursday. This makes me quite glum. I actually had a half-dream-half-awake monologue this morning in which I wrote a blog about feeling glum and how the thing about the word "glum" is that if you want to add emphasis to it you can't capitalize it because GLUM is actually less glum, not more glum. Same problem with italics - glum is less glum than just plain glum. So when you write glum, that is actually the glummest way to write it.

Guess who had a great honeymoon

Getting married, part two

Eric, Emerson and I are boarding a plane to Chicago today and hence the festivities will begin! Our Big Party to celebrate our wedding last October is on Saturday night with a wonderful group of friends and family. This will be followed by what we have dubbed our "white trash honeymoon": a week-long family RV adventure through Michigan.

As before any major life event, yesterday we did a brewery tour: this time it was Anchor Steam Brewery. The brewery is just a few blocks from our house and we can often smell them brewing up that delicious beer! We learned that Steam beer is beer that is cooled in big open vats on the brewery rooftop when refrigeration is not available. We also learned that, for a lot of good reasons, they no longer do it that way.

Our tour guide Kevin also told us a random story, as part of the tour, about a Polish guy who works there in the keg room. He was a professional boxer in Poland and was sitting in his living room one day when the doorknob started to turn - someone was going to break in! Our hero just sat in his chair and warned the potential intruder: "Easy to get in, very difficult to get out."

Jump

I took the opportunity this past weekend at Arroyo Seco to jump off a cliff.

I scream and wave my arms and legs the whole way down.

Here's your bee-lover

To celebrate my birthday, Eric and I and Emerson and some friends went out camping for a few days this past weekend. We went to a spot called Arroyo Seco about 150 miles south of San Francisco on 101 South, which means it is about 5 hours away due to traffic except between 1 and 4am.

We were dismayed upon arrival to see a note posted advising us that the drinking water had failed a quality test and was no long considered safely drinkable. They had found "coliform," a fecal bacteria that we imagined to be shaped like tiny cauliflower, in the water.

Always the heroes, Eric and our friend Adam went to get drinking water on Saturday night at the closest general store. It is important that you know that Eric was wearing his "I (heart) Bees" t-shirt on this outing to appreciate the exchange they had with the guy dressed like a cowboy who was hanging out commentating the evening at the store.

"Here's your bee-lover," he started as Eric reached the check-out.

"Why are you buying water?" he wanted to know. Eric explained that there was fecal bacteria in the water at the campsite.

"There's shit in the water!?" he exclaimed, "there's shit in ALL water - welcome to Earth!"

A parental moment

Eric and I went for brunch with friends recently. Pancakes, eggs, yum! Emerson, clever boy that he is, managed to get his hand into the little syrup pitcher and then pour the whole thing on himself and me. Eric and I did the obvious parental instinct thing: we tried to get his syrup-covered hands into our mouths before he could get them into his.

It was a lot of syrup! I was going to try to at least get a little pancake in my mouth to soak it up but then thought better of it.

Torture

For 22 of the last 30 days I have gone to an exercise class that is generally known as The Bar Method but which I like to refer to as Torture because I like to call things what they are.

Inspired by ballet*, this exercise class occurs in a carpeted studio with a mirrored wall and a bar. Exercises include standing on the balls of your feet with your heels lifted all the way up and then "sitting down" into it and then lifting up an inch and down an inch. Try it. If you're doing it right your legs will start to shake uncontrollably after about 12 seconds.

I don't see this becoming a lifestyle for me but I think it has served its purpose. At our Big Party, which is right around the corner, I will know that I made my best effort to look awesome.

*Which I believe is French for "beautiful torture"

Emerson's card

Last night our friends Jamaica, Nelson, Sarah and Rob came over to supervise my turning 32. The celebration in my honor included pizza, wine and a rousing round of a board game called Apples to Apples.

In this game each person is dealt a hand of seven "noun cards" - these can be literally anything from socks to Oprah Winfrey to the 1812 Overture - to play through the course of the game. Each round starts with the round leader drawing a green "adjective" card from the pile (hopeless, joyous, spooky, ridiculous, shallow, etc) and then each person picks the card from their hand that best represents that adjective and plays it anonymously. The leader picks the card that they like best and that person gets the green card.

To win, the key is to play the card that you think the person choosing the card will choose as the best - which may not necessarily be the most literal interpretation. The person who gets six green cards first wins the game.

We added in a special twist to the way that we played on Thursday: in each round, Eric picked a random noun card from the pile and played it with the others. This was "Emerson's card." We were curious to see how Emerson (a random card) was going to do in this game against our hand-selected plays.

He almost won.

Sometimes it was because his answers were irresistably ironic (Socks for Pathetic); other times they were eerily spot-on (John Philip Sousa for Patriotic). Of the twenty or so rounds we played, he got four cards before I got to six and won. (It was my birthday, after all.)

The other weird thing that happened was the adjective card "Shiny" kept surfacing as the card to play next. Each time, the person who drew it would stick it back in the deck and then suddenly the next person would draw "Shiny" again. Cree-py!

And now I am 32 years old.

Happy birthday to me

Today is my 32nd birthday. What a year! Last year on my birthday I was feeling nauseated and crying on and off all day so this year's birthday is almost guaranteed to be better.

I woke up today wondering if I will ever want to have plastic surgery. I don't ever want to want to have it but I am starting to kind of understand how one could find it seductive. I think it is great fun to get older but I think it is hard, especially for women, to look older. The fact that plastic surgery generally ends up making you look scary and sad in anything but the most gentle and flattering lighting will probably be enough to dissuade me should my intention to age gracefully waver.

In other news: tonight I will eat a chocolate cupcake. Yum.

My brother Andrew

Andrew is leaving Chicago this week to go to grad school in Pittsburgh. He's very excited to be starting school. He's been glad to have help from my dad and Mykael getting some furnishings for his new place.

None of this explains why he is sitting at a desk in the middle of a yard in a recent photo sent from my father.