Missing cords

Guys! I have so much to share with you - a post about Budapest and more house picts - but I can't find my camera cord! For shame! Instead, I leave you this Thursday with this sweet picture of my parents at Padua, who are probably in their mid 20's at the time this photo was taken.  They've been married now for 36 years and counting.  I love how leggy my mom was and how sweet they look together? Have you found any old photos of your parents lately?

Happy Thursday!

3 years - looking back, in black and white

 

yes, oh yes!

Info on our rehearsal dinner and farm wedding can be found here , here , or here.  You can read about our sustainable wedding on Walking Barefoot. 

....Or check out our professional photos taken by the amazing Denny Henry - click here and here ....

or if you are into snapshots - we've got those too,

March 6th!

This is Allie and she is amazing. It is also her birthday.

(its actually Allie on her wedding day - 2/16/2008 - and yes, she's still this gorgeous)

Allie is my oldest friend. Our parents met in lamaze class when we were just wee babies in our momma's bellies. We've technically known each other for 28 years + a few months. That is pretty neat.

(us as toddlers! '86/'87?)

I don't have a sister, so I made Allie my unofficial sister and have always asked her for advice (even though she is only 8 days older than me). She has taught me all the important things everyone needs a sister to teach them...like how to apply nail polish and make up, etc.

the one picture of Italian travels '04

A's engagement '07

But lets get back to how Allie is amazing. Not only is Allie is editor extraordinaire of the Crozet Gazette, but she runs her own design company, AMP Designs. As you may have guessed from the picture above, she's married a totally awesome man who is in Med School and has made an appearance in the Parking Lot Movie (haven't seen it yet? For shame. Go rent it now).

This marriage has resulted in the two most beautiful and adorably sweet kiddos I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Allie also puts crafters to shame---hello Weekend Away Bags,Sleeping sack-- !!! And did I mention she has an MA from NYU, has studied in Greece and Italy and can speak/read/translate in Latin, Italian, French and German? (--she is pretty much the smartest girl I know).

(MOH duty at our wedding)

Allie! Happiest of birthdays. You are the best. The best mom, the best wife, the best artist and the best friend. I am so grateful to have you in my life! To a lifetime of friendship!

M&J's wedding '09

A & A's wedding '08

love,

M

lightscape

At work and in school I talk lots about and look at landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes- but I have never seen such a beautiful lightscape!

I flail when it comes to DIY projects + grad school, especially because whenever I have a free moment I feel obligated to thesisize or edit. Anyways, when I have the time to decorate and make our home more homey (so what if we've been moved in two years and still haven't unpacked our wedding gifts?), I would like to make this lightscape - and I know just the place for it.

{via}

Sunset

What is it about late fall/early winter sunsets? I find them so beautiful!

Please enjoy these photos which do not by any stretch of the imagination capture a beautiful november sunset we experienced a few weeks ago.

because its my blog and I feel like it

I'm posting a super lovely, super mushy poem, because I found it and I don't know where else to share it :)
hugs and kisses
m


The Archipelago of Kisses
We live in a modern society.
Husbands and wives don’t grow on trees, like in the old days.
So where does one find love?
When you’re sixteen it’s easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses.
There’s the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck. The sympathy kiss.
The backseat smooch. The we shouldn’t be doing this kiss.
The but your lips taste so good kiss.
The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology,
but you make me really mad sometimes kiss.
The I know your tongue like the back of my hand kiss.
As you get older, kisses become scarce.
You’ll be driving home and see a damaged kiss
on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out.
If you were younger, you’d pull over,
slide open the mouth’s red door just to see how it fits.
Oh where does one find love?
If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear.
It’ll get suspicious and stare at your toes.
Don’t water the kiss with whiskey.
It’ll turn bright pink and explode
into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it’ll be ashamed
and sneak out of your body without saying good-bye,
and you’ll remember that kiss forever
by all the little cuts it left on the inside of your mouth.
You must nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights.
Notice how it illuminates the room.
Hold it to your chest and wonder
if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a special beach.
Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia:
beneath a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others.
The intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

--Jeffrey McDaniel

There's a reason the heart is an organ measured in rhythms

I've been reading the Modern Love column featured in the New York Times. They are so sweet and bring me to tears, each one of them!

"A Joint Account That Underwrites Our Marriage" by David Sarasohn is a wonderful, insightful look at his own marriage to his wife, and how they have survived after so many couples around them broke up. Its really an amazing piece and brings up a lot of the debate, ideas, and conversations that surround marriage today: My favorite passage is below:

"The appeal of the alternative is everywhere. In popular culture, predictability seems like a bear market compared with possibility, and falling into a pattern is the opposite of falling in love. But if you stay married long enough to make people speculate about your religious beliefs, you come to see that patterns are the point; there’s a reason the heart is an organ measured in rhythms.

Being single is all about the future, about the person you’re going to meet at Starbucks or after answering the next scientific compatibility questionnaire. Being married, after a certain point, is about the past, about a steadily growing history of moments that provide a confidence of comfort, an asset that compounds over time. What you share is what you’ve shared, and measuring your communal property in decades puts you in a freakishly high bracket."




Six months on Friday!

you are all so lovely!

Thank you! Thank you my sweet interweb and interperson friends for your kind words about my February blues! Each comment makes me so happy and brightens my day! I love you all!

March has begun, but I don't think I can start hoping for spring until after this weekend for three reasons

1) Ginormous test on Friday
2) Draft of proposal for thesis due Friday
3) Skiing weekend in West Virginia on Friday, and I feel like it is rather unfair to wish for daffodils, april showers, and green grass when snow is required to enjoy skiing.

But March is exciting because not only will the weather warm up, our little richmond book club starts up again AND it is my birthday month! Yikes! I am turning the ripe old age of twenty-seven and I feel rather neutral about it. I once read in a horoscope of personalities book that twenty-eight would be my big year, so I guess i've always looked forward to that age. I am happy to be leaving twenty-six behind. It was the year of highest highs (marriage/all things associated with weddings) and lowest lows (grad school/all things associated with weddings)!

I hope everyone had a beautiful March 1st!

A Life Without Left Turns

In reference to my suggestion that I give up my car for lent, I found this wonderfully sweet story about driving, walking, family and love....check it out :)

(Found Here)


A life without left turns

By Michael Gartner


"My father never drove a car.
Well, that's not quite right.

I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:

"Oh, bull——!" she said. "He hit a horse."

"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none. My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

Our 1950 Chevy

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one."

It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

The ritual walk to church

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church.

He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. (In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.") If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.

As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?" "I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

"No left turns," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."

"What?" I said again. "No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."

"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support. "No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works."

But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. "Loses count?" I asked. "Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again."

I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.

"No," he said. "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week."

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.) He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

A happy life

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer." "You're probably right," I said. "Why would you say that?" he countered, somewhat irritated. "Because you're 102 years old," I said. "Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day. That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet." An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

"I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have."

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life.

Or because he quit taking left turns.

this girl.....

is my sister in law (I got two of them when I married the hubs and both are seriously awesome gals).

Just when I thought that I had to put my enthusiasm for weddings on hold until one of my bff's got engaged, my sweet little sister in law went and got herself proposed to!!!!! Congrats Zil!!!!!! :) Let the wedding planning begin!

how friggin cute and in love are these two?

Zil as a bridesmaid taken by Denny Henry.

Zil and fiance taken by Charles Anderson

almost done!

Well at least with this semester. Which has been by far the hardest semester of graduate school ever. A friend told me that graduate school is the sea of uncertainty. A professors' praise can make you feel like you are soaring sky high, while criticisms make you feel as if your world is crashing down upon you.

Luckily December 11th it is all over and I am going here, with this wonderful guy who knows that wearing my pink bike helmet is the perfect way to make me smile. Also he supports my blueberry tea habit.

homesick

working 30 hours a week and full time grad school is taking its toil on me emotionally. I've been feeling for lack of a better word, homesick. Though I'm really not sure for where or what.... I think its a combination of spending too much time in the library, missing things like snuggle nights spent on the couch with my husband, feeling like I'm not experiencing fall the way I'd like too, and not seeing my mom since the wedding....Do you ever feel homesick for no reason?

These two pictures are silly and make my smile...

JM catching me a rainbow a few summers ago....

My mom and I and the imac :)

pictures

just a few of my favorite snapshots from the weekend. will post more later...

married

feels pretty great. relaxing on my mini-moon with my new husband. post more later

Girls just want to have fun!

I have the greatest friends. Seriously. This past weekend they (some coming from and planning (MTW thank you!) from as far as Atlanta, Boston and Connecticut) threw me a bachelorette party!
Friday was wine tasting and dinner at Allie's where we had a special guest (baby Lou), yummy cookies and delicious lasagna cooked by Allie's husband. We also had a lingerie shower and the girls gifted me lots of lovely (and sometimes crazy) undergarments!






Saturday was tubing down the James river complete with Bodos and Saturday night was dinner at Su's house where she and her sweet Mother treated us to yummy proseco from trader joes (seriously, most delicious proseco ever) and chicken salad and caprese, fruit salad, lemon bars and much more!
Finally we put on some pretty princess "sweet tats" (tattoos) and hit the town for some dancing and fun!

BellevueMartin

I love these earrings found on etsy.






And not just because the artist behind them happens to be one of my most favorite people of all time whose earrings I recently wore to a party :). And FYI they are lightweight and absolutely freaking-fabulous

spaghetti pie!

JM's Aunt Janice gave me the recipe for Spaghetti Pie or "poor man's lasagna" at the bridal shower. I modified the recipe some (I made my own sauce) but it was still delicious and fed us lunch for a week!

Spaghetti Pie (I used a large brownie pan)
1 pkg 8oz of spaghetti, broken into pieces
2 tablespoons of butter
1/3 cup of Parmesan cheese
1/2 tsp of salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 egg well beaten
1 cup of cottage cheese
4 oz of Mozzarella cheese
Meat Sauce*

* I made my own sauce, using my mom's homemade tomato sauce, spinach, onions and garlic :)
Cook the spaghetti in boiling, salted water and drain. In separate bowl mix in butter, Parmesan cheese, salt, pepper and egg. Place pasta in pan and stir in the Parmesan mixture.
Spread cottage cheese of spaghetti layer, top with sauce. Bake in oven at 350 for 30 minutes. Sprinkle Mozzarella cheese over the top and bake an additional 5 minutes or till cheese is melted. Stand 15 minutes before cutting.

the best thing

about the bridal shower the other weekend was all the great recipes friends and family gave me! Maybe it is just because I'm a quarter Italian but I think food is a big part of family and love. JM and I often cook together and I am looking forward to working together in the kitchen as husband and wife!

After our super fun 4th, I decided to make the recipe given to me by my MOH Allie, Spicy Parmesan Green Beans + Kale. Now I never grew up eating Kale, but this was the best! We couldn't stop eating it!
To make:
3tblspns of olive oil
1 onion sliced
1/4 cremini mushrooms (i just used buttons)
1 and 1/2 lbs green beans trimmed and sliced into 1 inch pieces
1-2 tspns salt
1/2 tsp ground pepper
1/4 cup of white wine (Allie uses dry vermouth, I had neither so I added a little extra water- it was missing the kick that vermouth or wine would have given it but was still delicious)
1/2 tspn red pepper flakes (or to taste)
1 bunch of Kale (rinsed stemmed, roughly chopped)
2 tbls lemon juice
3 tbls finely grated Parmesan (or more if you'd like)

* Warm olive oil in large heavy saute pan over medium-high heat. Add the onions and cook till translucent (4 minutes). Add the green beans ( and mushrooms if desired) salt and pepper and cook for 2 minutes. Add the wine and continue cooking till beans are almost tender.
Add the red pepper flakes and then Kale and continue cooking till the kale has wilted (4-5 minutes)
Add the lemon juice and Parmesan and toss to coat. Serve immediately!

Thank you Allie (for the pretty bowl I served it in too!) I have so many recipes to choose from, I think next I'll chose JM's aunts spaghetti pie!

My DIY Bridesmaids gifts

While I lived in DC I was able to take free jewelry classes through the place where I worked. I by no means have great talent, but I learned enough to feel confident making my bridesmaids jewelry for the wedding. I'm using freshwater pearls and some Swarovski crystal beads that I found at a wholesale bead store.




* Sorry for the picture quality, hopefully you get the idea :)

calming down

Because Ashley from Izzy and the Bean is so sweet and understanding. We decided to reorder half of the invites that are going to family and family friends etc and keep the rest to send out to our friends. Ashley was super sweet about it and informed me that she made a similar mistake during her wedding. It made me feel so much better.

Thank you friends and blog friends for your sweet, sweet comments

If you'd like to see our invites click here. I am totally in love with the design:)

Also we got ties for a super affordable price for our boys (ie groomsmen) Because my camera is broken and Jon's is lost in the mess that is our apartment you will have to get the idea from my fuzzy mac book pictures :)