playing house

wow, a week with no blogging. it's been quite a full week. thanksgiving in south carolina, in which all teeth stayed in my head. i did have a nasty head cold, which went away surprisingly quickly after a few days. hooray for immune systems.

on sunday gabe and i celebrated our one month wedding anniversary. mostly by saying, 'wow it's been a month'. and then we saw a house. we were not planning on buying anything soon, especially since we have no money. (details, details.) but it was a fixer upper with tons of space and land for really cheap and i just had to check it out. turns out it was custom built only a few years ago, but then they ran out of money. so it's more unfinished house than a fixer upper. there's about 17 things that have to fall neatly in to place in order to get this. and we got an estimate on the amount of work that needs to be done and it's very substantial. so i'm not counting on anything. all i gotta say is wouldn't this be a nice front door to walk into each day?

and a nice kitchen to cook in every day?



and beautiful french doors to a beautiful deck overlooking acres?



and wouldn't this be a good place to unwind at the end of the day?



or maybe in the giant shower with THREE shower heads plus jets?

well, a girl can dream.

honeymoon pictures, part two

here are some photos of my handsome husband-



it's really hard to get a picture of him without him trying to pose or be goofy. i like this picture because this is how he actually looks with a little smile.



this boy was so super happy to eat cold coconuts by the side of the road. like, really really really happy.



sunset.



one night we had a sizable lizard friend on our ceiling. he wouldn't leave so this was the engineer's sophisticated method to urge him outdoors. neither of us are too squeamish about critters but this guy had something really repulsive about him. it had big sticky fingers, ran really fast, had creepy eyes, and he hung out on the ceiling like that scary scene of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. Here's a close-up.

honeymoon pictures, part one

i thought i'd post some pictures of sunnier times. here are some cozumel street scenes.

another stupid grey day and a stupid head cold and everything is stupid

that sums up the sentiment at our little household. gabe is a big old cranky pants. that is surprising, given that i'm the one that always wears the (cranky) pants around here. he pouted all during his lunch break and then scavenged for chocolate before going back to work. i am usually the chocolate fiend here too. it's cause for alarm, because usually he grounds me when my crankiness/moodiness/self-deprecation starts getting out of hand. i'm trying my best to tread water so that we both don't spiral down into a situation where we are both whining on the couch, not eating and forgetting to go outside all day.

ok, i'm being a tad overdramatic, but this week has seen a complete absence of our happy-go-lucky selves who are all contented smiles. i thought i had allergies yesterday because of a sudden onslaught of symptoms, but it's only progressed and i'm pretty sure it's a head cold. i'm living in a fog. for example: i left the house to go officially change my name. i've been letting it go day to day and i said no more, today is the day. so i left and in five minutes called gabe because i had forgotten to write down the address. about a mile from the social security office i realized i probably would need the marriage certificate. grrr!! i've also had insomnia all week and am at the point where i dread trying to go to sleep at night because i know it's not going to happen.

anyway. we need a good dose of sunshine, as gabe pointed out today, lying on the floor face down and whining 'i need the sun!', totally oblivious to the irony (he's a solar engineer). he pointed out to me that everyone is always happy in san diego all the time. apparently i'm not the only one who also passionately invokes skewed logic when wicked cranky.

but tomorrow is another day, and that day is thanksgiving. we're leaving for south carolina at 7 a.m. when i'll have had about an hour of sleep - what could go wrong? the plan is we will eat so much that we'll be preoccupied with gastrointestinal consequences and won't notice our jumbled, stressed-out minds.

creative playground

Gabe and I had plans with a friend to go to the open art studios in Durham, but we got sidetracked when she mentioned there was an open house at TechShop. Gabe has been lusting after this place since he first heard about it, but the membership is expensive. We thought we'd at least check it out and see what we're missing.

This place is Gabe's Heaven on Earth. It's a huge place with workspaces, 3-d printers, wood shop, metal shop, silkscreening, sewing/serger/computer embroidery, laser and plasma cutters, welding, blacksmithing, electronics something or other, etc. Even glassblowing soon! We got a one hour tour and my brain was swimming with potential art and craft ideas. I actually had a headache.

On first glance this isn't a place with my name written all over it. (i.e. there are a lot of geeky men in there making robots.) The machine shop and saws and electronic anything I cannot imagine ever being friends with. But the place has a lot of classes, a collaborative atmosphere and I'm really excited to try about everything (except making robots). I have some ideas for photography things, mirrors, masks, frames, books, fabric creations.... Gabe's plan is to built a boat and heat pump.

We each signed up for 2 classes and a one-month membership at a crazy good price. Our main worry is that we're going to get hooked. But a lot of people use the center as a business base...so maybe I'll get some good ideas and make a little store. Or not, we'll see.

So if anyone is looking to get either of us any gifts in the future, a gift certificate to here is number one on the list! Also, if you have any requests for anything we could make let us know! So excited!

mid-week update

scene from a few doors down:

gabe and i went out in the middle of the night to see the leonid meteor shower. we didn't see so many, but it was fun to be out in the middle of nowhere at 1 a.m. there were actually a lot of people out, watching from bridges and fishing. the camaraderie was amazing, and humbling - lots of little people looking up at the vast universe...

i made crab and andouille sausage gumbo tonight. i even made my own crab stock:



these are cheddar corn muffins with jalapeno butter. i made it with white cornmeal and buttermilk so it came out sort of like a biscuit.



the end.

blissful sunday

Gabe and I camped out by our fireplace Saturday night, and I woke up Sunday morning to the smell of bacon. That's right, I got a homemade-by-husband breakfast and latte. How could this day go wrong? I also started a third book which is great so far, and just finished two wonderful books. (Yay books!)

After lazing around we realized it was 75 degrees and sunny and went for a bike ride. Gabe is a cyclist who built his own super fancy bike, and I have notoriously bad cardio ability. I warned him I'm not up for his usual 30 mile hilly expeditions. So we depart through our hilly apartment complex and I'm already exhausted, whining and carrying my bike up a hill. We turn left towards the countryside, and it is so ridiculously gorgeous - barns, horses, streaming sunlight, ponds, baby blue sky made more brilliant by the autumn leaves. (Yes, there are autumn leaves left in November.) However, this countryside has wicked hills. Gabe reminds me of the time he came back from a bike ride and he was sweaty and sore and said his route kicked his butt. This was the route. GRRR!!! It was beautiful, but man oh man. I had to tell my thighs if they could withstand the burn I would have pie later. (I made a great apple-cranberry-pecan pie with oatmeal cookie crust.)

One of the best parts of our 10 mile bike ride was a bunch of balloons that told us it was the Orange County Open Studio Tour. I wish I knew about it earlier in the weekend, but at least we saw one studio. This lady painted acrylics, watercolor, and made this bold enamel on steel/copper art. I immediately wanted to buy a kiln and try it out, but I tend to get overenthusiastic about these things. She had a lovely house set back in the woods and Gabe and I agreed it's exactly like the house we want to buy someday (next year?).

Once we were home and showered, we made use of the gift certificate his co-workers gave us to a fancy steakhouse, where we ate a lot, and brought even more home. Ribeye, filet mignon, crabcakes, martini, manhattan, potatoes, salad, seafood gumbo, onion rings, and three desserts (in our defense, the assertively bubbly waitress gave us the chocolate cake on her own). Which reminds me I promised Gabe I'd figure out how to make the seafood gumbo.

This week I'm going to learn how to make candy, figure out how to start a business, and write 2 hours a day. And make a kickass seafood gumbo.