time, time, time...

It constantly amazes me, how quickly time flies by. For instance - it was just New Year's Eve. We were just celebrating our last night in Bali (the last big vacation before we tried to start our family) in May. It was just that afternoon in June, when we confirmed that just-like-that, our family is starting!! And it was just August, when I committed to myself that I would update this space more regularly, to keep my friends and family current on our lives. And now it's October.

O C T O B E R.

Mid-October, at that. Time to start salivating over Thanksgiving side dishes, as I prepare the menu for my almost infamous 5 course Thanksgiving meal. Time to carve pumpkins. Time to order Halloween candy (I just can't give out the waxy chocolate stuff anymore - I've moved on to "healthy junk food" and somehow that feels better). Time to start setting up the nursery... oh right, because I am now in my fifth month of pregnancy. 5 months. Just over the halfway mark. How the heck did that happen? No clue. You wake up, you go to sleep, repeat about 147 times, and voila! Here you are, here I am.

5 months. I'm finally showing, and have just started to gain weight. Baby is doing great - well, baby is doing average, which at this point is a very good thing. Funny point - G and I finally decided to find out what the sex of our baby is on the way to the ultrasound appointment. I was mixed about finding out - there is something fantastic in the mystery of it, such a huge surprise (after all, it is what it is at this point, no changing that!!) but I can also see how knowing would be helpful too... so we were ready to find out. And low and behold, baby kept it's legs crossed the whole time.

Now that is certainly my child in there! No question about it. The doc even asked me to get up and walk around, use the toilet, we waited 20 min... and still the legs were crossed. I love the immense sense of humor of the universe.

Okay - since I still don't have a photo of myself that I am willing to put on the internet, I will leave you with these house photos.

G has finished putting in the floor in the hallway, the back bedroom (known as Julia's room or Mardi's room, depending on who is visiting...) and the office.

Check out the before and after on the front entrance area:You may notice that there is this odd "slate" on the floor, and the wall on the right (G's left, your right) is kind of a blue-gray color. The previous? original? owners thought it a grand idea to stain the wood with a blue wash and it darkened the whole entry area. We decided to replace the slate with the tigerwood and when G was mid-task, he decided to paint the wood the same color as the walls...

It came out so nicely!! He is such an amazing DIY'er. Huge kudos to my husband. He also wants to paint the door, which I am in agreement on. Here is the main hallway: And this is the back bedroom I mentioned before:

He is almost done putting in all the trim. Once that is complete, we move on to figure out if we can afford to finish the dining room/living room and kitchen. It will be complicated, and it will mean life without a functioning kitchen for a week or two... but I know this guy can install and refinish the floors in no time. He's in trouble now since I've seen how fast he did this last bit!!

Hope you are all doing well. Also, I plan on coming to Sacramento for Christmas - 7 months pregnant and all. Let's make a date for a visit if you are in the area!

time to play catch up

Wow. I knew August would be hectic, but I didn't realize how hectic. After my grandmother's visit, we entertained G's father, sister, and her fiance!! Big congratulations to Sylvia. We are so happy for her! And another G joins our family - that's right, we had three G's in the house for a week.

During that time we also took a trip out to Spokane for a couple days, to visit with G's aunt/senior G's sister, M. G's dad designed her house, it is absolutely beautiful. It was also ridiculously hot - climbing into the 100s. This is why I left California!! Sheesh! No wonder I don't live in Eastern Washington.

After the family left, I quickly packed my bags and left for a girls weekend in the Bay Area. I love San Francisco - always will! - and I love hanging out with my girlfriends there. These girls are the best. We headed down to Aptos (between Santa Cruz and Monterey) to spend a few days at a condo on the beach. Good food, good games, good company, amazing views. Fantastic weekend.

The only downside is that I came home to an empty house. My sweet G has gone back to East Coast for a couple (three and a half!) weeks to take care of his dad. His dad is not doing so well - G has gone to provide some physical and emotional support to the family out East.

So that is where we're at. Oh yeah, and one more thing....We are expecting our first child! Our little family of two will be a family of three in late February/early March of 2009. We are incredibly happy - it is such an amazing experience to go from "really? are you sure?" to amazing joy and huge, huge smiles. I am headed into month four of this incredible journey through pregnancy - and of course, I am the luckiest girl in the world, so far this has been a very simple pregnancy for me.

Will certainly try to keep up on the postings, and hopefully get some belly photos up here once I really start showing.

hurray for sweat equity!

G. has almost finished the master bedroom floor. He finished applying the wax the first night of my grandmother's visit, and the three of us picked out some trim and now that is painted and installed. The only piece left is, well, the new painted trim is whiter than the old trim that is still in place around the doorframes. Oops. So we're going to paint the doorframe trim so it all matches and then we can call Phase 1 of the flooring project complete. Check it out!


We had our Second Sunday brunch on the first Sunday this month... a good showing of folks, lots of new faces, and way too much food. So amazing - I love my Seattle family! And the visit from my grandma was great - she has so many stories to tell, I just soaked them all in. Thanks for the visit grandma!! I think you left too soon. (Oh, and I got her to make her potatoes for Brunch - if only I had known all the years the secret is bacon grease... a classic moment at brunch, as I asked her to make one pan with bacon product and another without... when I presented the two options to my friends, their response was, "I guess I'll have the veggie version, but man! the bacon version sure looks better!"... indeed, they were. I'm slowly coming out of my vegetarian shell.... )

Hope you're all having a lovely August. We're just starting to hit 90 degrees here... blue skies even! How I love the Seattle summers...

end of july treats

I made my first cherry pie ever... it was delicious. Pitting the cherries - not so much fun. But eating amazing pie made from scratch? Completely worth it. Here's a photo from when it popped out of the oven... (oh no, photo is on G.'s computer, will have to update later!)

Then, we had D. and K. over for dinner. I couldn't help myself and made these little tarts for dessert - sort of a faux cheesecake with raspberries on top, over which D. had to drizzle chocolate sauce. Absolute tasty goodness:

The other thing I made lately (with B.'s help, guidance, patience and skill)... I took this:

and turned it into these:

How happy are my wrists going to be in the fall? Very very happy. And quite warm to boot.


And no entry would be complete without an update on the flooring project, as G. has been madly working on the floors (my grandma is coming for a visit this weekend, and the house is upsidedown right now, we're sleeping the living room, there is flooring covering the dining room table, etc, etc...) and trying to get them finished before the family visits begin:

timing is everything

This week marks the third wedding anniversary for me and G. We met at the 2004 Burning Man Festival – not unheard of around these parts, but the story has a unique twist.

G. had just moved into a new house in Seattle, and one of his housemates had an extra ticket to Burning Man. He had been focused that summer on finding his mate, as he was tired of the seemingly endless dating scene in Seattle. He stayed with a massage camp where he offered massages to folks. On Friday evening, he ventured out into the fray and found himself at the Hookadome, a large geodesic dome equipped with a swamp cooler, plates of fruit, belly dancers and shisha pipes. And there he relaxed, for many hours.

I had traveled to Burning Man with my sister, J. She suggested that some time in the desert would be just the thing I needed, to re-energize and re-focus. I had just left a fiancé in New York City and was pretty down, and J. was right. It was exactly what I needed. On the drive into the festival, I turned to her mid-sentence and said, “I’m ready to meet my soul mate” and it didn’t phase her – she nodded and answered “Are there any qualifications I need to know about?” and my response was “taller than me and close to my age”. And with that proclamation, we returned to the previous conversation.

We camped by ourselves, true tourists. (We couldn’t find any of the camps we were going to hook up with.) On Friday night, she said, “If we are going to find this soul mate of yours, we’ll have to get out there” and I knew she was right. So off we went, riding our bikes into the wilds of the Black Rock Desert. We met all sorts of crazy characters that night – at one point, we were searching for the Center of the Universe (and were quite unsuccessful) when someone mentioned we should go to the Hookadome instead.

So off we went, we arrived on the Esplanade and parked our bikes together, and joined the line that formed out front, waiting somewhat patiently to get in. Forty five minutes later, we were still in line. Since we were at Burning Man, the last thing we wanted to do was wait in line, so we walked back over to our bikes, prepared to head off into the night in search of more adventures.

Or we tried to.

Julia’s bike was exactly where we’d left it, while mine was nowhere to be seen. After some searching, my bike was found, twenty five feet away from where it was originally and there was another bike lying on top of it. I picked up the other bike, and as I was turning to toss it aside this guy walked up and asked a bit defensively, “What’re you doing with my bike?”

I started to reply, “Your bike?! Your bike was on my bike!” (imagine the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercial line: “Your chocolate is on my peanut butter! Oh yeah, well your peanut butter is on my chocolate!” I sounded something like that.) but as I was forming the words, I registered a few things about this stranger…

One, he was tall. Two, he had the most amazing blue eyes. Three, the rest of the world seemed to be disappearing around him. So I quickly dropped the affronted attitude, and asked, “What’re you doing right now?”

His demeanor changed instantly. He looked a little confused, slightly disarmed, and replied, “Well, I got disconnected from my friends”.

“Then you should come with us!”

I couldn’t believe the words came out of my mouth. I couldn’t believe I was hitting on this guy, a total stranger, someone whose bike happened to be lying on top of mine. I certainly didn’t know what to expect, and was delightfully surprised when he said, “Okay!”

We rode off into the night, weaving in and out of the carnival-like festivities going on all around us, sharing little snippets of our lives, finding that we had quite a bit in common. We had both traveled in India, both enjoyed the outdoors (specifically scuba diving) and both lived authentic lives – politically, socially, and ecologically minded.

It wasn’t until the next day that I heard the story of the bicycles from G., but it turns out that he left his bike about fifty feet in the opposite direction of my bike three hours prior to my arrival at the Hookadome. He had been inside, enjoying the cool air, mellow music and belly dancing and came out to find that his bike was not where he had left it.

It had, in fact, traveled mysteriously about thirty feet north and ended up piled on top of my bike. When he approached me in that moment, in those three seconds that I was holding his bike, he had approached defensively as if I might be stealing it (from his perspective, I was!).

In those three seconds that I held his bike, our lives changed.

So that’s the story of the two bicycles. We parted ways at the end of the festival, and neither of us thought we would see each other again. After all, G. lived in Seattle, and I lived in San Francisco. After several emails and phone calls, G. bought a plane ticket for that coming weekend to San Francisco, just to investigate what seemed to be ignited at Burning Man.
After three days in San Francisco, we were so inspired by what we saw in each other that we decided to get married. Not so much decided as realized what had already come to pass – the universe arranged our marriage, the timing was divinely perfect in ways a web page just can’t communicate. After ten days of knowing each other we were betrothed.
Ten months later we were married in a grand ceremony in Seattle, all because two bicycles entangled themselves with each other at an arts festival in the middle of the Nevada desert, a thousand miles away from home.

Happy anniversary baby! It’s been three years of marriage, almost four since meeting you, and I still love you tremendously. I am the luckiest girl in the world.

and the laziness continues

We didn't get any pictures from brunch - a shame really, since it was a great turn out. I've been hosting brunches on the Second Sunday of every month for just over a year now. We do them "stone soup" style - although we were calling it "stone omelette" style for a while there. Folks would bring ingredients and we'd whip up omelettes or egg scrambles... or have filling for pancakes... we've done all sorts of things. Once we did a sugar blow-out, you had to bring your favorite sugary treat (I think it was in honor of my birthday last year) and we followed it with a fruit detox the following month.

Last Sunday I made blueberry muffins from scratch and those amazing chocolate croissants from Trader Joe's (croissants in honor of Bastille Day on Monday). Oh, and breakfast potatoes. Folks brought banana bread, and southwestern eggs, and fruit salad, and turkey sausage, and an attempt was made to make crepes (again, the French) but they didn't turn out so well. They were abandoned. But it's okay, we had lots of friends (old and new) and it was a good time for all, I do believe.

And B. came over to help me with my knitting. She is a miracle worker. I can't find a camera to snap photos - as soon as G. tells me where he is hiding the cameras I will post photos, I am awfully proud of my creations!

I had to go to LA last Thursday and Friday for work, and that was ridiculous. And this week I had to work some late hours to do some network testing (couldn't interrupt production) so I was on the phone from 11pm til 4am Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Suffice to say, I spend most of my extra time sleeping!

Alrighty then. Hope you are all doing well out there.

lazy days of summer

Wish I could say more, but not much to say. Until we can come up with a lot more cash, the flooring project is on hold. The 4th of July was quiet around here - we stopped at a BBQ hosted by some friends, but didn't hold out for the fireworks. Something about glorifying war really bothered me this year ("the bombs bursting in air...") - I'm just not feeling so patriotic lately.

So G and I keep working, coming home to enjoy the sunset from the deck and our grill, still amazed that it stays light out until 9:40pm. We are finally having real summer weather with blue skies and temperatures in the low (low) eighties. This is why I love Seattle. I have to travel to Los Angeles, just in time for the heat wave - 100+!, for the last couple days of this week. Brunch is on Sunday, so we may have pictures to share from that.