Things I Did On My Three Day Weekend to Austin

Last weekend I once again I found myself on a plane heading west. This time I was off for a girls weekend to Austin, Texas, land of my youth, vigor and skinny body. While I was there I:

1. Ate too much.

Eggs Benny care of the Counter Cafe.

2. Drank too much.

Double fistin' it.

3. Underpacked.

Hey friend!

4. Overplanned.

5. Enjoyed being in the presence of the most beautiful, healthy people in the world. (Seriously, I think Austin has the most gorgeous people per capita. Proof? Whole Foods Market North Lamar. It's as if beauty was concentrated and then squeezed into the grocery store through the skylight with a wheat grass strainer.)

I almost stole this puppy. True story.

6. Heard two entirely different bars full of people encouraged to sing Tom Jone' "Sweet Caroline" in unison, a capella. Ba ba ba! Good times never looked so good. (See Number 2.)

Pete's Dueling Piano Bar, 6th Steet

7. Cuddled with the new baby of some old friends.

Baby Avienne!

8. Had a really well made americano in my old neighborhood.

Surreptitious photo of the hot cyclist at Caffe Medici, West Lynn. (He is making a face here.)

9. Saw, in no particular order: Inordinate amounts of people riding bicycles shirtless without helmets, a bike bar, a truck jacked up so high that one must have needed a full sized ladder to get up into it, dueling pianos, a chick passed out on the sidewalk and escorted to safety by the paramedics, segway tours, food trucks on every block, 4 a.m., a Texas institution of fabulous BBQ with an hour and a half wait, tattoos, beautiful people (have I mentioned how pretty the people are in Austin?), a turtle race, cheap beer, a boatload of drunk PTA moms, pedicabs, Whole Foods Market (twice) and the cutest jack russel terrier names Rico Suave you've ever seen.

10. Got delayed flying both to and from Philadelphia. Thanks Delta! You make flying 'special'.

The only thing missing was Husband. It was a girl's trip but man alive I want to show him all the reasons why I love that town. I am not at all kidding when I say that I would like to chip in with friends to buy a condo there to share so we always have a place to visit. You know, when I win the lottery.

Because really? Who can live without this:

*Photos by Brandy and Sarah.

Some Sunday

Though the coq au vin was greatly anticipated it was a big fat flop. My family graciously ate the very dry, slightly purpled chicken (after waiting an extra half hour for the alcohol to burn off the sauce) and even thanked me for it, but I couldn't choke it down. I guess I'll have to try another recipe.

Actually, once the sauce stopped tasting like bourbon it was pretty edible and it went well on the noodles I had overcooked. I have the bacon to thank for that, though. Bacon makes everything better.

Oh, at least the dessert was good. I have my sister to thank for that.

Sunday was spent putting things in order. We paused momentarily to lose at softball and returned to the house in time to wander over to another neighborhood open house.

It was nice, this house. The stairs creaked too much and the second bathroom was atrocious but it had two lovely patios (for some reason) and a very spacious kitchen. Oh and it was over a half a million dollars. Minor detail.

We don't go to these things for the food though, Husband and I. We're in that part of a marriage where you fantasize about what it's going to be like to no longer be living in apartment that has crammed the kitchen/dining room/living room and office into one space and you don't have to plug your coffee maker in next to the t.v.. We dream.

I want a kitchen. A real kitchen with lots of counter space and brand new appliances. I want room for a blender and a Kitchen-aid mixer. I want cupboards that I am certain will never fall off the wall and I want to be able to separate my food items from my dishes. I want a sink that doesn't back up from someone else's plumbing.

When I have that kitchen I swear I will want to cook again. I will want to bake and try out recipes from the French cookbook my mother-in-law gave me. I will be inspired by it's smooth recycled glass counter-tops and colorful mosaic backsplash. It will have excellent lighting and a corner for my record player because naturally I will listen to my records while making Sunday dinner.

Maybe we'll grill out, though, and I won't do anything in the beautiful kitchen except crush ice for cocktails. My sister's children will play with the puppy in the yard while the men drink beers under a canopy of trees. Someone will claim the hammock and whoever does will drag the puppy up with them, swinging softly in the cool summer breeze. Boo Radley will stalk grasshoppers in the bushes near the fence.

After everyone goes home, Husband and I will take the dog for a walk through the neighborhood. We'll be so full we don't even talk, we just hold hands and look at gardens we like and peer in other peoples windows as they clean up from their own meals. The puppy will eat our neighbor's flowers.

Before bed, if it's cool enough, we'll have a cup of tea on the porch swing. We'll talk about dinner and how much we love our grill and think that maybe we should get a firepit after we're done with the new deck and we'll laugh about that time I made coq au vin and it was horrible and how our furniture in that apartment was shoved together like a jigsaw puzzle.

It will all be a funny story someday.

Though, that coq au vin thing - it's already pretty hilarious, isn't it?

All's Well

The incident was smoothed over lickity-split like. At least on my end. I will try to mend fences the best I can because I don't believe this kind of drama belongs in the workplace and that is the best I can do.

The best I can do is the best I can do. That is all I ask of myself.

Today's weather was decidedly Parisian, I remarked as left Whole Foods, armed with sacks full of ingredients for my next Creust-ed. It was drizzling and not at all warm. Summer was nowhere to be found, despite it being mid July. I imagined myself wandering near the Galeries Layfette or Hotel de Ville, the air fresh from the rain.

Coq au vin. If I had gone to the other fancy grocery store in the area I may have found actual rooster to cook (which I have heard is the best) but it didn't even cross my mind. What makes rooster different from hen meat? Does anyone know?

This thing with Colorado has me sad. I heard the news on the way to work and even though I know these kinds of terrible things happen every day (Iran, Syria, Afghanistan) I was still shocked. Again? There? Why, oh why? Thirteen miles from where the Columbine Shootings happened, too.

I remember that day. I was a senior in High School. I don't remember what period we were in - fifth? Sixth? They turned on the closed circuit television to the news and let us watch as the children at the school in Littleton ran as fast as they could from the massacre that had just occurred. They played the same clip over and over (much like they would do years later when the Towers fell in New York City). Eventually they let school out early and I went to my boyfriend's house to watch the same news clip repeat again and again. I cried. How could this happen? Why would anyone want to do this?

A few weeks later, my boyfriend and I found out that the Marilyn Manson concert we'd been planning to attend in Denver was cancelled. The shooters had been a fan. It was his fault; naturally. Whose fault is it this time? Christopher Nolan? The shooter's parents? The family that brought their three month old child to a midnight showing of a movie? Who do we blame?

It doesn't matter. The blame will not change anything. I am not sure anything will change. Days like this make me think we are a doomed species.

And then, like the rest of the world, I go home and forget about it. I make a coq au vin and I make room for my beautiful new wine glasses that my husband brought home from work and I listen to Cuban music. Far removed.

My thoughts are all over the map. Literally.

After such a long, hard week I am heavy. I am lonely but not at all alone.

Funny thing is, I am fine. Tomorrow will be even better, or so they say. I tend to believe it. Today was really fine. Such an improvement on the day before. The statistical trend is improvement, and we all believe statistics, right?

Tomorrow Sister L and her family will be over and they will bring dessert and we will have champagne and it will be lovely.

And some people have real problems and real sorrows. Please believe that I am not complaining about my life.

The Eleventh Commandment

The Eleventh Commandment:

Don’t be a doormat.

A couple posts ago I mentioned my Twelve Commandments, but I didn’t really explain what they were. It’s another part of The Happy Project – a part that I felt very much inclined to reproduce. I love the idea of having personal rules to live by. It holds me accountable to myself. It keeps me trying to be the best person I can be. My Twelve Commandments are as follows:

1. Live life to the fullest.
2. Love with all your heart.
3. There are always two ways out.
4. Trust your instincts.
5. Save yourself first.
6. Let it go.
7. Don’t stop dreaming.
8. Break the pattern.
9. Failure is inevitable.
10. Burn all evidence of failure and start from scratch.
11. Don’t be a doormat.
12. SPARKLE.

Since I’ve made this list I have, for the most part, focused mainly on the first two. And number eight when it comes to my marriage. I have a lot of old patterns that need breaking there.

Some days though – oh some days test every single commandment on the list.

Today one of the Whispering Girls showed me all her many colors of discontent. She hates me, I get it. I can speculate as to why but what it boils down to is that she hates me. She lets me know by whispering about me behind my back and sometimes – like today – by spitting it in my face. She brings our superiors into it. She plays dirty.

The last time something like this happened I followed her to our boss’s office and tried to defend myself. I tried to put the blame back on her. She cried, I felt bad, nothing was accomplished. I bought her fancy cupcakes the next day to apologize. Nothing changed.

This time, when I asked her to lower her swiftly elevating voice and she spun off in a huff to tell on me, I did not move. I didn’t move a muscle. Lie: Every muscle in my body moved, shaking with anger. Was this really happening? Was my nearly forty year old coworker really tattling on me? Yes. She was.

I stared at my Twelve Commandments (which I’ve pinned in front of me at my desk). 11. Don’t be a doormat. And there was also number six Let it go and number five Save yourself first. Yes, all of these. I needed all of these.

I sat there shaking trying to continue my work. I got up and walked around. I went back to my desk and tried to work some more. I turned up my music. Let it go, I told myself, let it go. I wanted to cry or spit or break something. My body vibrated.

I was calm when I went to have my turn with the boss whom she snitched to. I tried to be productive and ask him for help with the situation. I put my most professional, calm foot forward. Then the second blow came.

It was expressed to me that numerous conversations about me and “whether I was qualified to do this job” had happened. Without me knowing. Without anyone ever saying they were dissatisfied.

The worst is the double standard of it. It’s the hypocrisy and the drama that I have been trying so hard to avoid. I have been doing my absolute best (even when it’s very hard for me) to rise above and be the bigger person. Any yet. Yet, somehow I still got sucked in. I was dragged in when I had let down my guard. I am incredulous.

I don’t understand it. For all the drama I have been trying to wash out of my life I receive it, tenfold, neatly packaged and left on my doorstep, waiting to explode.

But this will turn out okay. I don’t know how but I know it will. I will do my best to make sure of that because The Eleventh Commandment: Don’t be a doormat.

Where My Mind Goes

Some days I miss Paris so much I can taste it.

Everybody knows by now how much I hated working at Pharmaceutical Inc. It was torture in many ways. Looking back though – separating the bitch from the rest of the bullshit – I think I could have liked that job. The one rare week she was on vacation was lovely and calm. The whole office felt it.

She doesn’t work there anymore. According to LinkedIn she has a new job torturing people at Dior which I find much more appropriate for some reason. She wasn’t a bad person, not really. Just a terrible boss.

The receptionist at our office was Moroccan. She was sweet and lovely and she made the most delicious thé à la menthe. She didn’t do it every day so when she did it was special. She brought in her own sugar, tea pot and good black tea that everybody understood was meant just for her tea. On the days she chose to make it she would bring in a huge bunch of fresh mint wrapped in a paper towel and hide it in the refrigerator. She was incredibly picky about her mint.

It took her a good twenty or thirty minutes to make the tea. Sometimes she would make it for a client and there would be little left over for those of us lucky enough to be in her proximity at the time. Other days she made some just because she wanted it and shared generously. If you were lucky, that day you would get two little plastic cups of the sweet nectar.

The whole office smelled like tea on those days. It was the only food smell our neurotic boss would allow to waft around. He had a very sensitive nose, so he said.

Today while making my afternoon green tea I wished that I knew how to make her thé à la menthe. I wanted the pause, the moment, the smell. I wanted to look out our window onto a fancy street just two minutes walk from the Arc de Triomphe. I wanted Parisian summer sunlight.

Instead I took my tea (I very nice green tea that my Chinese coworker gave to me when she became pregnant) and dumped entirely too much sugar in it trying to recreate my mint tea moment.

It did not work.

On Turning Thirty and Why My Husband Is Amazing

I had no qualms about turning thirty. I was ready, am ready, to enter into a decade of love and adventure and family and security so much I cannot even begin to describe it. I won't try. All you need to know is that I left my twenties behind without nary a tear shed.

For my birthday this year I did not plan any special celebrations aside from the general Fourth of July merriment. It occurred to me, I guess, but I was busy. Also, I had a pretty good idea that Husband was planning something on his own.My suspicion was based on that he told me 'I am planning something' and that I had to take a day off of work the week of my birthday. There was a surprise afoot and I didn't want to ruin it.

(Once, when I was leaving PA, my group of friends at the time were planning some kind of going away for me. Naturally I did not know about it [as it was a surprise]. Nearing the day of my departure, I announced to one of my friends that I was thinking about throwing a going away party. Furious, she replied "Well we were planning a going away party for you but it was supposed to be a suprise! God Juliet, why do you have to ruin everything? Since then I have been very careful not to interfere with anything that might resemble, possibly, a surprise.)

The day of my birthday I worked off my hangover from the day before and spent a low key evening grilling at my friend B's house down the street. We had a couple of beers and grilled vegetables and steak and watched B's friend's baby giggle and play in a bowl of water to keep cool, all of us deeply envious that we could not strip down to a diaper. It was a lovely evening and we were in bed by nine thirty.

The following day I woke early despite being able to sleep in. We had to do laundry but it was surprise day. What would it be? Pack a bag? Where are we going? I was like an eager child bothering their parents to have their dessert right up until three o'clock when Husband said we could get in the car to go.

I rode silently, waiting for a hint while he tried to remember the route without putting up the GPS. (Husband goes almost nowhere without his GPS.)

"Shit, I don't know where to go," he said, dismayed. "How to I get to the airport from here?"

"EEEeeee!" I squealed, "We're going to the airport?"

"Yes, just tell me how to get there!"

I directed him and off we went - to the airport.

After parking and the shuttle, Husband took over. He knew it would be quite a task trying not to spoil the surprise. He wanted to keep it a secret right up until the baggage carousel at our destination. Me, I personally would have told me right then. I couldn't possibly fathom how he was going to keep me from knowing where we were going with all of the screens and announcements, but Husband had a plan. It looked like this:

Blindfold plus headphones plus hands over my ears going 'lalalala' equals  difficult in a busy airport.

There was also some business of covering my ears and singing to myself and yes it may have been a bit of a spectacle but you know, I really wanted to be surprised! So I played along.

Would you believe that the whole thing was totally successful right up until landing? I just couldn't block the pilot out when he said "We're beginning our descent into Denver."

Denver. I may have thought we were going to Texas or to Las Vegas maybe but when the pilot said Denver I fell in love with the man next to me all over again. (Thankfully Husband was seated beside me.)

I haven't been back to Colorado in ten years.

This is not totally, entirely true. I was in Denver once for work in 2007 but it didn't feel like a visit. Even visiting the Denver Zoo hadn't made that trip feel like anything but work. It didn't feel like 'going home'.

This time, though, I was with someone I loved and I knew before he told me that I would be seeing my two best childhood friends (at very least). This time I was really going home.

In the airport he tried valiantly to throw me off the trail, saying that my friends were both busy and that he and I would be on our own for the weekend. I almost believed him when he told me he thought we were going to take a cab from the airport but I knew he'd been planning amongst my friends since for some time.

Regardless, when J showed up with her two children in tow I was elated to see her.

"Hey pretty lady, can I take you home?" she asked.

J and her babies

Her children were half grown. An almost ten year old girl - the spitting image of her mother when we were that age - stood next to her adorable not at all a baby brother. I hadn't seen her daughter since a few days after she'd been born - wrinkly and pink without distinct physical characteristics or real personality. And now she was ten.

It struct me as wildly bizarre to see my childhood friend as a mother. We'd quite literally grown up together - our mothers had met when we were in diapers. And though I had seen her since she had her second child it wasn't with them in tow and somehow I didn't really connect them to her. It was so real now. Unavoidable, I guess. We had become adults.

J kindly took us to get something to eat and then deposited us at our hotel for a good nights sleep. In the morning I woke to see the mountains.

See the mountains? (And the dirt in my camera?)

Where I grew up there were desert and mountain terrains, so some of me feels like I am a desert girl and some like a mountain one, but neither of those sides of me have been properly fed in quite sometime. Waking up to see the mountains, no matter how far from my viewfinder, was delightful.

After a breakfast and some chatting with the friendly locals (read: anyone we spoke to), we decided that with our very limited time we would drive to the mountains. We stopped by S's house and were on our way.

All the pretty horses...

S, too, had changed so much since the last time I saw her. It had only been a year, actually, but it suddenly she was very much in love and surprisingly settled down. She lives with her boyfriend and his two children, playing happily at the role of stepmom. I never in a million years pictured I would see her enjoy such a thing and was no less than shocked to see a wedding magazine on the floor of her apartment.

"We're talking about it," she said, blushing.

God, when did we become adults? I thought. And I felt least like an adult out of the three of us though I am sure if you asked any of us fifteen years ago who would be married with children first it would have been me.

The Stanley Hotel. Not so scary after all.

Much to the boredom of Husband (poor dear) we spent nearly every hour reminiscing about things we'd done and people we'd known as children.

"Do you remember that time we were going to Vegas," said J, "And we had to borrow you're mom's car because you wrecked yours? I cannot believe she let two seventeen year old girls do that. Your mom, of all people!! How did we convinced her to loan us her car???"

"And then we lost the hubcaps!!" I laughed. "I chased them down the middle of the highway! There is a picture of that somewhere."

"Oh my God, remember the gold pants?" cried S. "I hated those pants."

"No! I loved those pants!!" I replied, hysterical.

"And you would only ever where it with that huge oversized shirt?" S laughed.

Aren't we cute? MOUNTAINS!!

"Hey! That was because it was that was the only shirt my mom would ever let me wear with them! She didn't want me to go without underwear and that one covered my butt."

And on and on.

We drove to Estes Park. If we'd had more time we would have drive all the way to Grand Junction - I haven't seen my home town in ten years - but we were limited by the hours in the day. A trip to the mountains was the next best thing.

And more mountains!! It was so good for my soul.

We toured the Stanley hotel and I took pictures in the hopes I would capture a ghost in one, but there was nothing caught but three good friends who had a million years of stories between them. It was far and away the most special gift my husband could have ever given me.

Who's that creepy guy? I don't know.

Roses in a beautiful garden.

and more roses in a beautiful garden...

Isn't this bathroom creepy? Let's see if we can photograph a ghost! (Nope.)

After hours and hours of trips down memory lane (and a tour of S's photos from high school) Husband and I didn't have enough energy to go out that night with the girls. I felt infinitely older than I am. I wanted to blame the altitude, but really I didn't want to be hungover on our flight home. It was such a mature decision. We promised that we'd be back for a longer visit so that Husband could see more of Denver and I could show him Grand Junction.

Beautiful storm rolling over the plains.

It will not be ten years before the next trip.