So disappointed...

For at least 10-15 seconds during yoga tonight, I somehow managed to convince myself that it was Saturday. The realization that it was, in fact, Sunday night came as a rude awakening. In any case, we had a great (if too short) weekend. Friday night involved a lot of this:

Curled up on the couch with Community, a warm and comforting bowl of soup, my amazing husband and two fuzzy friends - a great, relaxing start to the weekend!

The soup is Heidi Swanson's "A Good Soup for the Sick" from 101 cookbooks - I added kale and collards for some greenery

dawww.....

DAWWWW....

Since we adopted Sidney, we've gotten into the habit of getting up early on Saturday so we can take him for a good long walk. There are three necessary components for a successful Saturday morning walk - coffee, a puppy, and a beautiful lake path. Check, check, annnnd check!

8oz Black Miel from Bull Run - my favorite drink from my favorite local coffee shop!

Lake Calhoun

And puppy :)

Sid behaved himself quite well, and only barked at a couple of other dogs. His interactions with his peers are quite odd - when he meets another dog, he's fine until they've been sniffing at each other for a few seconds. Then, he flips out and starts barking like crazy...but when we remove him from the offending dog's presence he starts whining like "hey guysss why are we leaving our new friend?!?" So we've come to the conclusion that he doesn't actually hate other dogs, he just has terrible social skills. Barking = friend making...right? No, Sid. False. We'll get there.

We went to two parties on Saturday night - I really wanted to spend time with both groups of people and would have preferred to stay for all of both parties...but I didn't want to miss either so we had to split our time. We started out at my friend Ellie's place for a potluck with a few friends of mine from grad school. The food was fantastic, but the highlight was definitely Ellie's dramatic reading of... well... I don't want to get into too many details, but let's just say it was hilarious.

"...the accused then plugged his nose and proceeded to jump in to the water, yelling 'I'm not scared of you!"

From there, we headed north of downtown to my friend Emily's place for board games and wine! It was a great time. I know board games sounds totally dorky...and it is...I'll own my dorkishness any day. Only great things can come from an awesome group of people, a few bottles of wine, and charades. True story.

Emily, Tyler, Amanda, Ben, Justin, Biz...good friends, good times.

Portrait of a Tyler. The bow tie confuses me.

This morning after choir, I had a great afternoon at my parents' house while Ben was running errands. I haven't been up to their place in six weeks - since I cat-sat Maggie - and I love being there in the fall. They live on a lake in the woods, and the leaves are just beautiful. I went for a walk with my parents, and then had a long chat with my sister Julianna, who was there working on her CV for grad school applications. My little sis is an adult...how did this happen??!?

In a related story, Mini has recently discovered her long-suppressed love for empty paper bags. Leave a paper bag anywhere and within approximately one nanosecond she is all over it, driven wild with excitement by the endless possibilities of a portable cavernous space with handles. Earlier this morning she managed to get her head stuck in the handle of a Whole Foods bag - unperturbed, she proceeded to wriggle her entire body through the handle.

Inspired by this earlier success, while I was gone at yoga she decided to try the same trick with a Patina bag containing my new, very glittery Christmas wreath. The result was that the wreath went for a joy ride through the living room, glitter was all up in everyone's business and I'm still picking sparkles off of the cat. Wreath is fine. Cat is bejazzled. Living room has been vacuumed... just a normal day.

The traumatized wreath

Now, Ben and I are having a Bollywood extravaganza! Homemade hyderbad-style Mango Chicken (thanks Ben!), Kurkure and a Shah Ruk Kahn film... perfection.

Yes.

Happy weekend everyone! And if you actually managed to stick it out and read this entire post about my somewhat lame and boring life...I now reward you with this photo:

The cuteness may kill you. Seriously.

Only the perfect remains

Welllllllllll it's been a couple of days since my last post. Not really sure how to transition out of that one, since it's a bit difficult to go from "hey everyone my friend died" to just talking about daily life. So I think I'll talk about it a little more if that's OK.

The truth is, that while Sam and I were pretty close in college, we had definitely lost touch over the last couple of years. It was just one of those things where people are living in different countires, we have Facebook for constant life updates and at a certain point we stop feeling like we need to actually reach out to the other person in order to keep up with them. I think the last time we communicated was right after his wedding a few months ago - I wrote him a message to say congrats.

I've lost two friends suddenly in the last few years - and in both cases, we used to be very close to but had recently drifted out of touch. Twice, a million times over, I wished I'd told them how amazing they were before it was too late.

I've written previously about one of my favorite Sanskrit idioms:

"This is perfect, that is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect.
When you take the perfect from the perfect, only the perfect remains."

The idea behind this is that everything, including us, is just as it should be - everything in the world is perfect if we truly understand its purpose. This, I think, is somewhat different from the idea that everything happens for a reason - I interpret it more as, whether something is good or bad is a matter of perspective. Can you take something that appears to be bad, flip it and se how it is good?

The word uttanita is about shifting your perspective - turning something around to see it in a different light. I totally get this concept when it comes to myself or the individual. I find beauty and inspiration in the concept that the dark, ugly murky parts of ourselves are just as lovely as the more visibly positive ones. Every lotus flower grows out of mud, darkness and decomposition. I've found that my dark places can teach me a lot, if I let them - they can make me stronger, better.

But I have more difficulty applying that concept at a macro level. In this case, I can't help remembering hearing Desiree Rumbaugh speak about losing her son, and how she was able to transform her pain into something positive. It might sound harsh and heartless that she worked so hard to see how her son's death could be a good thing but really, when you think about it, we often have no control over the horrible things that happen in the world. What we do have control over is how we let them affect us. Being stuck in a state of grief doesn't help you, or the person you are grieving for. If you can transform that grief into a positive force, you can turn the darkness around. Uttanita.

I want to believe that there is a reason for everything - that the dark things that happen in the world are part of what make it perfect and beautiful. And I know that perfect doesn't mean flawless...it just means that everything is aligned. That it's how it is supposed to be.

Right now though, I'm mad at the world. I can't believe that goodness is the absoloute nature of the universe when such a wonderful, loving person can die in such a senseless way. Sam was such a good soul, with so much to give - how can anyone say this is how the world was supposed to be.

Sorry for being such a downer - just needed to get that out. I also found this blog post written by a colleague of Sam's, that just further illustrates what a truly wonderful person he was.

In other news:
- Work has been crazy and I lost one of the memory cards for my camera... sometimes I think I am the world's most disorganized human. Somehow I am able to manage large projects with lots of moving parts, but when it comes to keeping track of my own shit I'm utterly hopeless.
- After work I'm going to the bank to depoist my last-ever tax return. Thanks for the money, government. It's been real.
- I scheduled an appointment on December 1 for Mini's routine lady-parts surgery. My baby is going under the knife - I am NOT excited about this but I also giggle a little at the thought of her being completely loopy from the anesthesia. Is that wrong?
- Ikea furniture = assembled. I successfuly wielded a power drill and everyone in my home is alive to tell the tale.

That is all. Regularly scheduled programming/pictures etc to return soon.

One of these mornings, you're gonna rise up singing

In my first semester at St. Olaf College, I decided to take Honors Calculus II. No idea why I made this decision. I guess masochism got the better of me... either that or it never occurred to my overachieving, type-A brain that instead of taking the exact math class I tested into, I could take Algebra, or the super challenging "Gateways to Mathematics."

Either way, I'm glad I opted for Honors Calc II, because it was in this class that I met my friend Sam Lee. Sam and I bonded over the fact that our professor was terrible and evidently did not know how to teach calculus. Class basically consisted of the prof, whose name I still can't remember, using the entire time to work through some random math problem that had nothing to do with Calc but was "SO COOL GUYS!!", effectively ignoring everyone's questions about last night's problem set. Half the time we never ended up even finishing his problem. So Sam and I would meet up in the dorm after class to teach ourselves calculus at the ripe age of 18. We even invented a new word: logicify. As in "we don't even need class, we can totally just logicify our way through this." Other hobbies included: mocking people who thought they were too awesome, and looking for double-entendres in the lyrics during Christmas Fest rehearsals (sorry Dr. A...sorry...)

Sam was a music major too, so we spent a lot of time together during our four years at Olaf. We worked on multiple class projects together, including one of my personal faves: an attempt at African rhythmic breathing (sadly I can't find a youtube video example...just trust me that it is crazy awesome). For my senior recital, we collaborated on a jazz that included Ellington and Gershwin, and finished with Summertime from Porgy and Bess. It was the most fun I had performing during my entire undergrad singing "career."

I'm writing this because I just learned that Sam was murdered in Indonesia at the end of October, while riding a pedi-cab from the airport to his hotel. He was traveling for work.

I have no idea what else to write, other than that I know he will be loved and missed. Sam was such a bright spot in the world - everything seems a little darker without him.

Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend

This weekend has been a little more subdued than normal - first quarter ended this week at Ben's school and he's been pretty overwhelmed with work. Mini generously offered to help him grade English essays so that we would have time to do other things this weekend, such as drink scotch and go to Ikea.

I think that sentence needs a comma, don't you?

I am smart and helpful

Unfortunately her walnut-sized brain is easly distracted - it is also difficult to take her opinions on grammar seriously when 98% of the time she appears to have been posessed by demons.


Exhibit A


Exhibit B


Sid is not impressed by Demon Cat

On Saturday we went to Ben's dad's scottish-themed birthday party. This basically involved lots of stilton cheese and single malt scotch. Clearly, the bash of the year. AND Ben's dad bought my favorite scotch - the Laphroig ten year. I love this family.

I can totally get behind this party theme

We brought Sidney along for the ride and were a little nervous about how he would handle being around so many strange new people, but he was very well-behaved. He really seemed to enjoy hanging out with the family and can totally hold his own in any conversation regarding the state of education and the economy.


Yes, I quite agree with you

We also made a big trip to IKEA for new bookshelves. This is the excitement that is my life - although if you love books as much as we do, you'd be excited about new shelves, too. Our collection is literally overflowing onto random surfaces that are not meant to hold books - shelves, end tables, the floor, etc - and the bookshelves we have now are literally from my childhood bedroom. So, we came home with a lovely Hemnes shelf set that holds a lot of books and looks like, you know, it belongs in an adult's home...

What is this thing and why is it lying in my frolicking path

I will destroy it

So vicious...

Sid remains unimpressed

Well... my parents are here as we speak, helping Ben and I assemble our shelves. Ben has a power drill in his hand...I'm not sure how I feel about that. Sid is passed out on the couch with my dad watching football. Everything is as it should be.

Does anyone else still use furniture they've had since they were seven? Or is it just me...?

Looking for the good first

Sometimes, my multitasking pays off. Like when I am perusing articles on my phone through a morning of speakers at a conference and find an article which inspires me enough that I'm still thinking about it more than two weeks later.

The article in question is Olga Rasmussen's entry on Bias for the Good in relationships in the District Kula blog. I am constantly inspired by how the teachings of Anusara yoga can be applied to all aspects of our lives. One of my is the idea of looking for the good - instead of immediately nitpicking and finding fault, take a step back and look for the universal, the highest in everything and everyone.

"At some point, during the first day (of the intensive), John (Friend)
encouraged us to “always give the benefit of a doubt in a relationship. That’s
First Principle. You must be biased for the good.”" ~ Olga Rasmussen

What a beautiful idea... and how sad that we have to be remided to look for the good in the people we care about. If you love someone, it just makes sense to always believe that person is coming from a place of love. Trust that they have good intentions and would never deliberately try to hurt or upset you.

We've all been in the other place - that relationship where the benefit of the doubt does not exist. I know I have. When I'm with someone, I tend to assume anything hurtful was done by accident. With the person in question, I would bring up my hurt feelings in an effort to be open and honest. In return, I was accused of being scolding, belittling and insulting, and usually I ended up being the one who apologized.

In an instance when I hurt his feelings completely by accident, instead of telling me how he felt he lashed out, insulted my intelligence and refused to answer my phone calls for an entire day. He basically assumed that if I hurt his feelings I had done it knowingly, which was never the case. I never like to drag up dirty laundry on the internet, but I think this is worth mentioning because it seems like these days, a general sense of mistrust and passive-aggressive manipulation are a far too common in relationships that are supposed to be loving.

It's been a long time, and I haven't thought about that person for quite a while -but reading Olga's blog I couldn't help comparing that relationship compared to my marriage. Looking for the negative and assuming someone is working against you is out to get you is toxic, not to mention exhausting. I found myself constantly on my toes, defensive, wondering if something was real or if I was being "tested" to see how I would react - I hardly knew how to be myself anymore. I cried a lot, and the littlest things would set me off. I just felt...very small.

With my husband on the other hand, I have complete trust. I can honestly say I have never for one second doubted him or thought that he was being anything less than straightforward and honest with me. I can't imagine him ever doing anything to hurt me deliberatley and vice versa - which is why, if either of us ever raises an issue or accientally hurts the other's feelings it is immediately met with profuse apologies and never turns into a fight. Trust is scary, but it is beautiful. It makes you believe you can climb mountains.

The first principle of Anusara, "Open to Grace", encourages us to look at the whole before focusing in on the details. Remember the highest reason why you are there - in a pose, in a job, in a relationship. Anger and suspicion tends to breed more of the same, and this surely builds up over time. I'm not saying you shouldn't tell your boyfriend/girlfriend/sister/roommate you're upset that they forgot to call, didn't remember to buy milk or whatever - tell them for sure. But remember that they love you and in turn, make sure your words and actions come from a place of love.

Either way - there is a lot to unpack from the first principle, and this is just a tiny nugget of what surfaced in my mind after reading Ms Rasmussen's blog entry. The layers just keep coming. This has been a cheesy yoga relfection by yours truly. Peace out. Happy Tuesday.

The Last Cookie

If you know anything about Minnesota (or really anyplace in the midwest), you're probably familiar with the unspoken rule that it is never, EVER for any reason OK to take the last cookie. If you do this, you are automatically the most selfish person ever to walk the planet and deserve to be shunned forever. Even if the cookie in question has been sitting there for hours, lonely and neglected. Even if nobody else in the room even likes cookies. DO NOT TAKE THE LAST COOKIE EVER YOU ASSHOLE.

This rule also applies to: the last slice of pizza, the last truffle in the box, the last few drops in a bottle of wine, the last beer in the case...you get the idea.

Today I brought cookies to work, left over from our Monday night baking. When I first put them out, they were disappearing so fast I was barely able to snag two for a co-worker... but for the last two hours at LEAST, the situation has been thus:

I'm really curious to see how long this continues. Anyone want to take bets? I'm guessing it will disappear between 3 and 4 pm when people get the afternoon munchies and hunger/low blood sugar prevails over midwestern niceities.

More Halloween!!

After college, my friend Tessa and I lived for 3 years in a condo in St. Paul. It was a pretty damn good party condo, a quality we took advantage of frequently. One of our favorite, and most consistent, yearly events was a decked-out, costumes-are-not-optional halloween party. We started throwing the party in 2006, and even though I moved out in 2009 for a place that was closer to school and the bus line, the party lives on. Presently my duties involve less hosting and more showing up and drinking, which is awesome in its own right except that now I have to drive home :(

Here's a blast from the past for you! You'll notice that Ben is in none of these - which is because he was in India from 2006-2007 and Bowling Green from 2009-2010...and we failed to get a picture together in 2008 because we were each trying realllly hard to pretend we did not have a crush on the other. Ah love.

2006: Me as a pirate and Tess as a vampire

2007: Tess as a belly dancer, me as an Eski-ho (with clubbed baby seal - I had a club but it is not pictured here), and Julianna as Helen Keller. I think we were going for "grossly offensive" that year...?

2008: Tess as a devil, me as a...gangster? The best part of that costume was my Pimp Cane - a black 8-ball-topped can that was for some inexplicable reason on sale at a medical supply store.

Here is a picture of the cane in my right hand, even though you can barely see it. It was bad ass....trust me.

2009: Me as a pirate again...and my friend Chris as Rorshach. His costume was creepy and amazing.

In 2010 I unfortunately missed the party because I was at a conference in Michigan so no pictures from that year. This year was a great time as always - good friends, good food, and somehow we even busted out King's Cup. We're 28 years old...I don't know, I can't even explain it. And yes, we had the ridiculous Little Green Man rule. Ah the olden days...

Brendan, Tessa's boyfriend, carving the pumpkin with their dog Merlin

Our college buddy Paul

Catie, me, Becky and Tessa

The Dread Pirate Roberts had to defend me from Rodents of Unusual Size through most of the party...my hero ;)

...and we watched this happen! The end of one of the best World Series to my memory (except for '91 obviously...)

Villain Tyler and Paul

hoo boy.

yep

I give the sideye to Ben's camera skills

On Saturday we went to my friend Jess's party - I met Jess through the Anusara yoga immersion, and it's unfortunate that I didn't get more pictures at her party because the decorations were amazing! Jess and her husband Brad's friends are fantastic and we had a great time.

Me with Jess/Miss Piggy

Last night we just took it easy at home - we only got about 10 trick-or-treaters, but Julianna came over to eat cookies and watch Community.

And...exciting announcement... my little sister is moving to Australia in the spring! Not permanently, thankfully - just for a few months to do some psych research. So excited for her! I know she won't leave until February but I'm already planning to throw her an awesome party.

Well... I am pooped from my hot yoga class tonight, so I'm gonna read on the couch and possibly fall asleep....and apparently watch the cat fall off the table while attempting to collate Ben's students' papers. I wish I was kidding but this literally just happened as I was writing.

Happy Tuesday!