Autumnal Things

I've been admonished by several individuals for not blogging lately.  It is apparently how people "stalk" me "from afar" so I truly and deeply apologize for letting all the creepy stalkers down.

I feel like lately every entry is me apologizing for not blogging...it's a vicious cycle.  I apologize for sucking, promise to write more often, then inevetably I do not write more often and have to apologize all over again.  Bleh. 

After thinking long and hard about this while brushing my teeth at work today, I have identified the following reasons why I am not writing as often:

1. Stress.  I know this is such a lame answer but there has been a LOT going on lately.  I hope to write more about the stress at some point, because there are pertinent points to be made about life and yoga and whatnot, but it might be a couple/few weeks before that happens.
2. I hate computers.  Now that I spend the vast majority of my day staring at a computer screen, the last thing I want to do after work is stare at a computer screen even more.  It was all fine in grad school, when I was staring at my professor while also having side convos with my classmates, but now...by the end of the day I am computer-screened out.
3. I'm a little unsure as to the direction of this blog.  Not that I really feel like it needs a direction, but I started this as mainly a food/recipe blog and have since become too lazy to write down and post my recipes.  I'll still try to post when the inspiration strikes, but honestly I think the real recipe creation is better left to the experts.  As a result, this will probably never happen again.  You're welcome.
4. ...life.  I work 45+ hours a week, and when you add in yoga (5ish hours) running (2-3 hours), cooking, cleaning, spending quality time with friends and husband, there is just much time left for writing.

All of that being said, I really, really love writing.  My job basically requires me to communicate in bullet points, and having a blog motivates me to occasionally throw down a few complete sentences.  THROW IT DOWN.

OK I am clearly delirious.

I've learned some things lately, about life:

Thing 1 that I have learned:  Sometimes when you accidentally stick your neck out where it doesn't belong, good things happen.  I'm not really a self-promoter.  At all.  My single, recurring piece of 'constructive' feedback on my last performance review was that I need to be more assertive. Duh - this is not news to me. In the rare case when I do overstep my boundaries it is usually by accident.  This happened recently, and good things came out of it.  So I'm thinking I need to accidentally show up where I don't belong more often.

Thing 2 that I have learned: I need to get a damn handle on my existential crises.  The speed with which I go from "I don't understand this data" to "WHY IS LIFE??!??" is sort of alarming.  The thought process goes like so:

• Can't understand the data in this damn spreadsheet after 10 seconds
• Obviously this means that I fail at everything
• My contributions are meaningless
• How does this spreadsheet matter, in the grand scheme of all the things?
• This spreadsheet is meaningless
• What am I doing
• WHAT IS LIFE WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF ANYTHING EVER WHYYYYY

This all takes place in the span of about 2.5 seconds, and then poor Ben has to deal with it when I come home from work and start rambling about my purpose in the universe while simultaneously trying to cut up a butternut squash. I  imagine that my holding a huge, sharp knife is not too comforting in this situation.  Anyways, this is meant to be funny, not to make you feel bad for me.  Spreadsheets ---> existential crisis.  This is the way of the world.

WOW.  We have gone down a path here.  This is not what I intended to write about at all.

Whatever.

Here are some pretty photos of autumn in St Paul.  A couple of weekends ago we had one of those perfect, mistly fall weekends so obviously I took pictures.  Oh, also I finally bought a new battery charger for the DSLR (the old one vanished on one of my many travels this spring/summer) so expect photo quality to improve drastically in the near future.

Also this browser is the worst and will not let me change the size of my photos.  I'll fix them later but for now, all of these pictures are going to appear annoyingly huge.  Deal with it.


This is when they tore the street up and we couldn't park in front of our house for several days.  It was lovely



Either ghosts or Sherlock Holmes should probably appear at this point



Pretty Colors

 Also, this little gem just opened up down the block from us.  Macaroons are basically impossible for me to resist and now that they are 2 seconds from my home, I'm not really sure what will happen.






...and here is a random shot of my family having dinner at Everest on Grand - probably my favorite neighborhood dinner spot.




I am also proud to announce that I have gotten my parents hopelessly addicted to BBC Sherlock.  It's kind of adorable yet also somewhat terrifying.  The most terrifying thing is probably that Series 3 won't air for another year, so I have to endure 12 months of listening to my dad 'predicting' how the cliffhanger will resolve.  Awesome.

That is all for now.  See you again soon I promise!!

Tuesday > Monday

Well folks, it looks like Monday caught me looking again this week. Seriously - I have a greater-than-normal inability to function on that day of days, the most feared and hated 24 hours of the week. Everything was great - went for a nice walk to Butter bakery for some delicious coffee - until about 7:30 when I proceeded to spazz out because I couldn't find my checkbook and was overcome by the irrational fear that I would be unable to pay our August rent before we left for Thailand on Friday. Oh and also there is, suddenly and inexplicably, a giant s-shaped curve in my car's windshield. Awesome.

Obviously, as always happens, everything turned out just fine... but I think I know what the problem was: too much pitta!! I had hot coffee, and then hot oatmeal - and even though the temperatures have cooled down I think there's enough residual hot-weather-blues that the combination was just too much. But who can resist oatmeal? Especially chocolate otameal?? I can't believe I had never though of mixing cocoa powder into my oats before, but there it is... delicious oats (in an almost-finished jar of almond butter) with cocoa and brown sugar...mmmm.

Tuesday, on the other hand, was a WINNER. I got a last-minute appointment for a much needed haircut, had a productive day at work, and got a very sweet e-mail from one of my Immersion teachers who I hadn't seen or talked to since the last immersion... and in a crazy coincidence, I'd already planned on going to her class tonight! Karma I tell you.

So Ben and I went to class, had a great time, and came home prepared to put in a good 2 hours slogging away on Thank You notes...but then I checked my e-mail... and immediately turned to Ben and said "Hold it, pour the wine we are SO NOT writing thank-you notes tonight!!"

"Why?" He said
"Because... our WEDDING PHOTOS are online!!!"

like our lovely decorative gift-pile?

So we have been staring at our photos for the last two hours, smiling and laughing at all the sweet memories, and the beautiful moments our photographer captured between friends and family members.

I know it is such a tease to tell you we have wedding photos and then not post any of them...but it's already past my bedtime and I have early meetings tomorrow, so you'll just have to wait :) Possibly until after the honeymoon, when I'll actually have the chance to sit down and write some wedding recap posts.

Cheers to Tuesday, and looking forward to Wednesday!