the break i didn't know i needed.

i hadn't been working very hard once i made the decision. i guess i figured laziness was the same as a vacation, but surprisingly enough, surfing the 'net at work does not a vacation make. it's been so fantastic to be sleeping and waking when i want rather than being subject to an alarm clock. granted, gemma's not a late sleeper, but even since we've been at my parents' house she's slept until at least 8:45 every morning, which has been positively delightful. since my last day of school last friday, so much has gone on. i am feeling too hungry and sleepy to make nice paragraphs, so a list-of-sorts will have to do.

• this year was the best drive over to st. louis we've ever had. i'd even go so far as to say the weather was quite tolerable, and for this time of year, just absolutely fantastic.
  
  
• my parents' basement turned out better than anything i had in my wildest dreams. the furniture is soft and comfortable, the shower has an awesome showerhead that is going to make it impossible for me to get to work on time, the TV is amazing, the bedroom is cozy and private, the pool table and dartboard are such a great way to pass time, the chairs by the fireplace are going to be the perfect reading spot, and the workout room holds my hopes of dropping those ten pounds i gained since the wedding. i am feeling much better about being here for the short haul. it's like my own fancy little apartment.
  
  
• hank and my mom are feeling sick, and shockingly enough, i'm still not. this has been a truly miraculous year for my immune system. keep up the good work, body.
  
  
• speaking of body, it is going to be really hard to drop those ten pounds if i don't stop eating all the crap i have been. today--three hundred pieces of imo's pizza, diet coke, leftover mexican, a butterhorn, an almond cookie and coffee. sadly enough, this was probably the healthiest stuff i've had since we left champaign. it really is going to be a miracle if i don't get sick, what with the wonderful fuel i'm running on.
  
  
• we missed christmas eve at grandma and grandpa's, but from what i heard, maybe it was a good thing. grandpa's not in such good shape, and it would just take up too much time here to rehash the snippets my sisters relayed (plus, in the future, i'd rather not have a bunch of sad stuff to go back and read about grandpa; i need to get on the family tree thing so i can start putting the fun stuff down in writing), but suffice it to say that i am starting to feel sad that grandpa is slowly slipping away.
  
  
• yesterday we went to lunch with krissy harper and her boyfriend ben and her cutie baby elliot. getting there was a total disaster, thanks to dad's directions. i really need to get my own st. louis map. living out here in st. peters feels like being in another world entirely. schlafly's was good though, and afterwards we went over to the city museum. soooooo fun. maybe, just maybe, there isn't anything better in the world than watching little kids have fun. i can't imagine how wonderful it is when the kid is your very own. happily, krissy was more than happy to share her baby for a bit. i could just kick myself for not taking any pictures, especially since i was dumb enough to drag my purse around just so i could have my camera handy. oooh, good thinking.
  
  
• lauren and kelly left this afternoon. boo.
  
  
• gemma is whimper-barking in her sleep (for the second time tonight). it's so cute.
  
  
• i'm getting tired myself. i'm trying to stay up so i can watch AB make sushi, but i'm not sure i can make it 13 more minutes.
  
  

the songs we love by.

by amy ruppel for the kim family auction. i would love love love to have this. it's like the birds are floating on some weird bubble boulders. i'm going to bid on it, and since i think there'll be so many people doing the same for such a heartwarming cause, i think that i'll have to start crossing my fingers now that i even have a chance at snagging it.

the last day.

all week i've been mentally trying to put together a list of things i'll miss now that i'm done with grad school. i couldn't really come up with much. i think that's a good sign that i made the right choice to leave. it's sad though, right? i mean, it's sad that i don't have more to be sad about.

i am sad that this is my last night here at home. real home. home with my husband and my dog and my mess. i thought i'd have a bunch of stuff to say today. stuff like the "fuck yous" that i wish i could deliver to so many people. stuff like the "thank yous" that for the most part i already did. but i don't. this whole thing doesn't even seem real, and i'm sure that by the time it does, i won't care anymore anyway. bye bye, grad school. welcome, life.

tuesday snoozeday.

what a sleepy day. i mean, not that i've been sleeping all day. i've just been sleepy.

today i took the bus downtown to meet hank for (our last champaign) lunch at the esquire, which was a nice little old-timer joint. we were probably the only people in there under thirty-five. i wish i'd known at the outset that we could eat peanuts and throw the shells all over the ground. we'll just have to make a next time, hopefully. too bad i didn't know about this place until i was on the way out the door.

afterward, i walked around downtown, hitting up all the little vintage shops i love and hank hates. there was a really nice little set of six white bowls and six matching plates from the former west germany at the furniture lounge for $15, but being that we don't actually need dishes, i had to pass. i hope someone good gets them though. (i'm secretly still thinking about going back for them. shhh.)

today gemma decided that pizza is her favorite food. she has been constantly sneaking off into the kitchen, trying to get the pizza box (only the one with ham pizza; apparently she's not into mushrooms) off the kitchen table. she succeeded once, but luckily the entire box slid, right side up, off and onto the floor. no pizza for gemma, despite her valiant efforts. so far she's really into butter, christmas cookies, alcoholic beverages, and pizza. such a palette.

we watched lost in translation tonight and it was good--sad and sweet and happy all at once. it's going to drive me nuts trying to think up all the things bill murray could've whispered in her ear at the end. i'm pretty sure that was the point. well, probably the point of that part was more complex than that, involving the whole comforting anonymity and safety of being in a crowd. what a really wonderful scene.

ikea saved the day!

okay, so i'll finish up about the field museum later (oooh, mendel exhibit!), but for now i'm skipping ahead on our chicago daytrip to the ikea part. so, after we left the field museum, we were going to try to find somewhere to eat downtown. i was really hoping to go the downtown bella bacino's. when kelly, mom, aunt karen, melanie, cindy and myself were in chicago in october, we wound up at this place after a wild search for the olive garden. what a lucky accident that we couldn't find the olive garden, cuz this bella bacino's place was just incredible. best italian food i've had outside of italy. anyway, i remember one of the owners telling us that they had another location on michigan avenue, so i figured it shouldn't be a problem to get over there from the field museum. well, that wasn't true. michigan avenue was wild--just crazy with traffic. we couldn't find a place to park except valet for $20 an hour. um, no thank you. needless to say, this all put quite a damper on the fun. like, totally killed the fun.

so, we made our way back to 55, found a denny's somewhere on the way out of town, and then as we kept driving, made a last minute turn off at the bolingbrook exit. hank knew if anything could bring back the fun for me, it was ikea, and he was right. we got a lamp, hank got a meat tenderizer and gemma got more fabric for a crate cover (since i undermeasured last time...oops!). all in all, good trip. ikea, you make everything better!

field museum friday!

so, friday hank and i went to chicago's field museum. it was our christmas trip/present to each other, since we knew it wouldn't be cheap (well, it's not like it was super expensive, but we just don't have money for trips without me needing to have an occasion to justify them). the king tut exhibit was just about to leave, so we had to get up there before the new year. we were both so excited to see it, and i couldn't wait to see the sarcophagus. so before i'll get into how awesome the actual exhibit was, i'll lodge my one complaint: there was no sarcophagus! i mean, what the fuck, field museum?! you can't just splash pictures of the sarcophagus all over everything, and i mean everything, advertising the exhibit and then not produce the goods. seriously bunk. if they hadn't gotten my hopes up so impossibly high, i would've had no reason to be even the slightest bit disappointed. so, on to the highlights:

they had some really great items that belonged to tut. a pleasantly unexpected one was a child's chair that was believed to have been tut's when he was crowned at ten. the detail was fabulous--four gold side panels with the two inside and two outside ones identical (pretty impressive when you consider everything was surely done by hand), a wonderfully-shaped carved seat and best of all, claw feet. i just couldn't believe that people have been doing the claw foot furniture for 3500 years or more. the jewelry, especially the collar pieces, were amazing and made of so many really beautiful stones and metals. the tiny intricate details were just stunning, especially on the end of the dagger tut had buried with him and in the collar thought to have been worn at his coronation. also, though i was disappointed with no tut sarcophagus, there was the sarcophagus of tut's great-grandmother, and that was just breathtaking. overall, the exhibit was wonderful and i'm really glad i got to see it. i hope to continue to remember all the little particulars.


the museum also had a nice bunch of stuff about evolution, which i thought was great considering that they have sue the tyrannosaurus rex, and dinosaurs weren't just plopped here by magic. unless you're this one stupid asswipe who let her kid look at all the dinosaurs, but told him that they weren't going to look at the other stuff because "that's just not what we believe in." ridiculous. i will likely get totally fired up about this later on and post a gigantic tirade. for now, you will just have to trust me that she was a totally ignorant ass.

kim family benefit auction.

i'm so glad to see that something like this has come together for the kim family. i don't know these people, but their story really got to me, in a way that was almost embarrassingly profound. i just really feel for this woman and hope that her children grow up proud of their dad, who seems to be quite missed.

(image from doe.)

whimper.

gemma's gone for the night so we can go to chicago for the day tomorrow. how did i ever live without my snugglebug barking all up in my grill? she's a naughty girl, but i miss her.

today is hank's 26th birthday. we went to chili's and the waiter kept calling him "dude," "brah," "man." super annoying, but hank still gave him better than a 20% tip. maybe that waiter brah made hank feel young. heh. today was fun, and we could actually play kissyface without gemma freaking out on us. how lovely for us to be newlyweds again. i'm getting really sad about moving next weekend.

bluegr-ass.

i don't even know why i decided to, except i guess that there's nothing better on tv and i can't hear the lemonheads album hank had on upstairs anymore, but i turned on the bluegrass music channel. what was i thinking? i mean, normally i'm okay with bluegrass. i remember really enjoying my first tattoo, the buzz of which was set to hours and hours of bluegrass. so i can deal, yessiree. however, this particular selection was a beatles cover of don't pass me by by the beatles by lou reid and terry baucom. dudes, why? just why? don't you know that no one should cover the beatles? (i'm looking at you, fiona apple.)

DN-nay.

i just saw these pillows over at apartment therapy's store. now, i can appreciate the idea behind this, and the art-ing up of something that scientists see so rigidly, but i just can't accept that these are called DNA pillows. i don't really see it. nope, not DNA-like. it's probably stupid that things like this bother me. now, i really like these pillows (though $180 is just too much for any pillow), don't get me wrong. i just think it's stupid to name them something that they don't really call to mind at all. is this what the public at large thinks DNA is like? cuz it's not. minor grooves, people! major grooves!

also, i would just like to say that rosalind franklin got screwed. big time.

not green with envy.

this is grape green. apartment therapy's featuring it in their colortherapy post today, and i'm totally stoked, because it is one of my favorite colors. so favorite that i painted half our living room in the same shade. see?

it's great. i fully intend, once we move to st. louis and buy a house, to paint some of that house grape green too. and maybe more of the cozumel in the kitchen like we've got now too. our paint's really fantastic, no matter what anyone else says.

smart people say smart things.

three quotes i'm really digging lately:

"For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes!"
--Dag Hammarskjold
Swedish diplomat (1905 - 1961)

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
--Charles Darwin
The Most Awesome Scientist Ever (1809 - 1881)

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
--Eleanor Roosevelt
A Neat Lady (1884 - 1962)

(i thought these quotes were special enough to even take the time to hit the shift key and capitalize properly. the roosevelt quote's something i've loved for a long time, since jennie gave me that nice frame with the quote in it on my first day of high school. i wish i could get back in touch with her, like totally majorly. if you're reading this, and you happen to be my best friend jennie from grade school, let me know, because i really wonder what you're up to. )

envy.

this locket is totally awesome. it is, however, awesome enough to cost 100 british pounds, which is more than i am apt to spend on myself for jewelry. or on myself for most anything.

puppies aren't cute on accident.

this is gemma. she's our dog. you might notice that she's about the cutest damn thing you'll ever see. i'm convinced this is not an accident. you see, gemma is a naughty puppy. probably no naughtier than any other puppy, but she's kind of a pain in the ass. last night, for instance, hank awoke sometime in the dead middle of the night to a "squeak, squeak" noise. you might be thinking, "but puppies don't go 'squeak, squeak'" and you'd be wrong, because puppies who wake up in the middle of the night to chew on shoes do, in fact, squeak. or the shoes do, or something. i guess it shouldn't have been such a big problem, because 1) she only tore out the lining, and i can probably glue-gun that back in and 2) the shoes only cost me $3 (three fucking dollars!) at payless around three or four years ago, so i've definitely gotten my money's worth, but you know what is a big problem? when said puppy is thirsty at 5:30am because of a late-night shoe snack. thanks, gemma, for making me get up last night to let you out and get you some water, and drag you back into bed so you could wake up only an hour and a half later. good thing you're cute, buddy, cuz your manners leave a lot to be desired.

shuffle up and deal.

first ten songs on my itunes shuffle (no cheating, and why should i have to? i have awesome taste, no joke.):

here comes your man--the pixies
hollywood diary--black flag
college town--ALL
like soldiers do--billy bragg
the tigers have spoken--neko case
descendants--carrie nations
every day i write the book--elvis costello
bone machine--the pixies
(hidden finale)--queens of the stone age
yeah, it's beautiful here too--superchunk

number one.

so, mostly i've decided i want to do this to keep a diary, of sorts, for myself. maybe other people will read this, and maybe they won't. either way's fine by me.