A friend of mine once told me that he could always tell that I was happy when I stopped blogging.  And when I was depressed, I spent a lot of time sitting at home emptying wine bottles, writing about how my heart was broken, and the guy who didn't love me back was an asshole (this was, I should note, in my Single Girl blog, which would be about 10 years old this year).

So if I go away for a while, it's not because I'm pregnant, or I got kidnapped by a crazy gunman at 7-11, or anything like that.  It just means that I'm out doing my thing.  Especially with springtime arriving, I have spent as much time as possible outside, walking around the lake, and getting some extra doses of Vitamin D.

That being said, I don't want to just disappear again, so here's a lowdown on the events of the past few weeks:

1)  I decided to go to Seminary.  But I don't really know why.  I don't know that I ever want to have a church of my own, and preach.  Maybe.  I haven't thought that far ahead.  For now, it's enough to know that I just belong in Seminary studying the Bible, and being part of the conversation that creates Doctrine so that, you know, Christianity can be more about loving people, and not so much about excluding people because they're gay or whatever.

2)  My husband is hemming my performance dress for choir.  If you fancy hearing some nice a capella choral music on Saturday, the Claremont Chorale is performing at 3pm and I'll be up there in my hemmed dress, looking fancy.  It's super-cool that my husband can hem my dress, I should add.

3)  I've boarded the fertility treatment train.  But I'm not going to get carried away with it.  I'm really going to try to be conscious of the fact that you can easily spend thousands upon thousands of dollars, and lots of time and heartbreak, getting IVF and all that stuff, and frankly, I'm not that desperate to have a biological child.  If that's your thing, it's great that it's possible, and I applaud people who do it.  For me, I just want to have a baby.  I don't feel the need to genetically breed, and there are millions and millions of kids in the world who just want a family that loves them.  To me it seems like a needless expense, but that's just me being judgmental.

4)  We're also starting to seriously check out adoption, and are signed up to go to an open-day at an agency in the summer.

5)  This summer is going to so totally rock.  We're going to NYC for me to go to Book Expo and negotiate with publishers about our ebook project for libraries.  Then PA for some Family Time.  Then London and...wait for it...I'm finally getting my ass to Iceland to see 24 hours of daylight.  I'm so stoked.

6)  In the Realm of Stupid Things I've Done to Lose Weight: last week was high up there.  I had a weight goal I wanted to make by Memorial Day.  As of Wednesday, I was still 3 pounds away.  So I went on a liquid diet.  Didn't eat any solid food for 4 days.  I made the weight (of course I gained it back since then) and had a fun day shopping at the Gap Outlet, which made me feel like I was 19 again, because their Muzak was Songs from the 90's, and nothing says 90's more than shopping at the Gap and listening to The Cure, but I digress...now I feel ridiculously dizzy, tired, and stupid for having done that.  But whatever, I have new clothes.  So...yay for new clothes...

The Music Wayback Machine: 1999

I've been playing around on Spotify, using the Billboard charts to make playlists of different years.  Here's one from one of my favorite years, 1999, when I was 23:  http://open.spotify.com/user/hteysko/playlist/46OKyZBEVMvR3fY2QtBWX0

Let me tell you about the coolness of my life at 23.

First off, in the spring of that year, I broke up with my longtime boyfriend Mark.  We wound up breaking up several times before it finally took.  He was a good guy, I'm sure he still is.  It's just that, you know, I was 23 and I'd known him since I was 19, and life is too short to not spend your 20's doing crazy stuff that will make your grandkids cringe someday.

So that summer I moved to LA and lived in Koreatown, at 426 S. New Hampshire Ave, in this cool art-deco building from the 20's.  It's where I spent the year before moving to London when I was 24, and that year will always be one of my favorites.  My apartment had a fold-in-the-wall murphy bed, big windows with bars on (I'd hang plants from them), and a tiny kitchen with a tall ceiling.  I was too broke to have a mattress when I first moved there, but after I found a job at a headhunting firm in LA, I saved up, and around October I had enough for a mattress.

On the day it was delivered, I woke up early and rode the bus (oh yeah, I didn't have a car) to the kmart on third (where The Grove is now) and bought a full bed set with a comforter, that I still sleep with to this day.  I waited in the lobby for the mattress because my building was so ghetto that none of the buzzers worked.  And once it was delivered, I walked to the Chinese place on the corner and got dinner, made up the bed, and spent the evening watching football and eating dinner in bed.  Life was blissful.

(Here's a funny story - in the summer of 2005, before I met J, I went on a blind date with a guy who lived in that same building.  It was too random for words.  There are thousands of apartment buildings in LA and I wind up on a blind date with a guy who lives in the one I lived in five years before?  Too strange.  It kind of creeped me out, but I still went upstairs to his apartment anyway because I just had to get inside the building and see whether they'd changed the carpet.  Plus he had a cute cat and I'm a sucker for cute cats.)

So anyway, there I am in my little studio apartment (which I really adored.  I've never had an apartment I loved as much as that place) with the fold in the wall bed, and a mini-refrigerator because the big one that came with the place didn't work, and the building management never fixed it.  Since I didn't have a car, I walked around with a fold-up grandma cart and took the bus to Trader Joe's, and I learned how to cook chicken.

There was an earthquake that fall that was strong enough to wake me up in the middle of the night.  I was dreaming that a monster was shaking the bars on my windows, and I was pissed off at him for that.  Then I woke up and realized it was an earthquake and ran to the doorway, but by then it was over.  I woke my parents in Pennsylvania up in the middle of the night, though, to tell them I was ok in case it was on the news or something.  They weren't impressed.

Blink 182 got popular with What's My Age Again, which coincidentally had lyrics in it about being 23, which I took as some kind of sign.  Of what, I'm not sure.



I went on a couple of Very Bad Dates.  With one guy, we had a good first date, and then he wanted me to come out and see him the next night, but it was late, and I was going to have to take, like, four buses to get to the Valley, and I was lazy and didn't care that much, so I wound up not going and falling asleep without calling him instead.  He freaked out and called the police, reporting me missing, and they came banging on my door at 4am.  Listen, I'm sorry I stood you up, whatever your name was, and I guess it was sweet of you to not want me to be dead somewhere, but had the thought not occurred to you that I was standing you up?  Really?

Speaking of dating, I was so bad at it, that when a guy didn't call me back after I'd left him like, five messages, I assumed that he must have lost my number and I called him at work to give it to him.  Seriously.  Such a bad move.  I'm glad that somewhere along the line I finally learned how to play it cool and not wear my heart on my sleeve.  So that six years later, when J and I were on our third or fourth date, he was talking to somebody else and referred to me as his girlfriend, and I completely ignored it.  And then a couple of hours later, at the end of the date, I quickly said, "I'm glad you called me your girlfriend," and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and then walked out the door.  It was the smoothest move I've ever pulled off, and he said that it was one of the things that officially hooked him.

And now, just an hour ago, he burped in my ear.  I asked him why he did something so gross, and he said, "so your brain could smell my dinner."

We sure know how to be classy.

Italiano Day Deux

I threw in some French there, just to keep you on your toes...

So, in my Quest to Start New Things, this week I am dusting off my Rosetta Stone Italiano Levels 1, 2 and 3 programs that I got from the Amazon Vine program a year ago.

So here's how my desk looked last night

notice my fancy hole-puncher in the background?

As you can clearly see, I'm totally, like, ready.  I installed Level 1 and, after having spent about two hours on it over two days, can now say words like:

run (corro)
egg (uovo)
eat (mangia)
drink (beve)
bread (pane)
sandwich (panini)
bicycle (bicciclete, which I like, because you get to say the word "bitch" for fun)
car (machina)
cat (gatto)
dog (cane)
cooking (cucina)
reading (legge)
writing (scrive)
rice (riso)
apple (mela)

I also know the difference between
he: lui
she: lei
they: loro

Thus enabling me to say simple things like :
Lui legge
Loro cucinano
Lei beve caffe
una bambina mangia riso e mela

I could so totally order coffee, milk, an egg, an apple, and rise in Italy now.

I'm off to a flying start.  Seriously, I haven't had this much fun in a long time.  I've been spending an hour a day on the course, and it just flies by - not at all like those 43 minutes of painful high school German reciting verb conjugations.  Ich bin.  Du bist.  Er/Sie/Es ist.  Let me stick my Stift in my Augen jetzt!  No offense Frau Miller.  You were awesome.  It was just kind of dull, that's all.  And Italian words are so much fun to say.  It's so musical.  Like the whole language is one big symphony.  I love it.  I'm so freaking glad I dusted off this Rosetta Stone thing-a-ma-bob.  Week One of Trying New Things is definitely off to a good start!

Oh, if you're curious about the old man on my desktop in the picture above, it's David Starkey, a brilliant British historian who gives me goosebumps.  It's a screenshot from the Monarchy series that was on ITV a few years ago, and now graces my home regularly thanks to Netflix streaming.  J was teasing me about how much I was watching it, saying I most likely had a crush on said Mr. Starkey (which would be funny, cuz in addition to being, like, old enough to be my grandpa, he's gay).  So I grabbed a screenshot and made it my desktop, so now if J ever uses my computer, he gets to stare at the object of my crush as well.   It's one of those random things that makes marriage fun.

history, marriage, and Monty Python

So last night hubs and I are turning in, and he's already laying down, with a pillow over his head.  The lights are off, and I'm doing my little nightly moisturizing routine, sitting on the edge of the bed.  I say to him, "you know, I've noticed a direct proportional relationship between the amount of time I spend moisturizing, and the care I take of myself in general..." and I proceed to tell him everything that I blogged about the other day.

He lifts the pillow off his head and says, "I've noticed a direct proportionate correlation between the amount of time you spend telling me 'interesting' stories when I'm laying in bed trying to go to sleep, with the amount that I love you."

Silly hubby.

One other thing to share.  I've become completely obsessed with Rhys Bowen's mystery series, Her Royal Spyness.  I've never been a big mystery fan, but this does it for me. It's set in 1932, Depression-Era England. The heroine, Lady Georgianna, is 34th in line for the throne, but her family is completely destitute.  Her father, a Duke of some godforsaken place in Scotland, took his own life after he lost everything in the stock market crash, and left her brother peniless with death duties to pay.  When the series opens, Georgie is still living in Scotland with her brother and sister-in-law Fig, but they're trying to marry her off to some Prince in Austria, and she doesn't want to be married off, so she high-tails it off to the family's house in London.  For the first time in her life she's living without a maid, and she has no money, so she has to figure out how to make it in the big city.  Things like learning to light a fire and dress herself are obstacles to be overcome.  And then people start dying around her, and she has to solve mysteries and save the day even though she is continually underestimated.  I inhale these books, and I'm bummed because I'm on the last one now.  I highly recommend it.

In a completely different time period in British history, I'm also obsessed with Bernard Cornwell's The Saxon Stories, about life in England when it was just a collection of individual kingdoms like Wessex and Mercia.  The leader of Wessex, Alfred the Great, built the first "English" navy to combat the Viking invaders, and foresaw a time when the entire island would be united in one kingdom.  I know next to nothing about this time period, though I want to get some non-fiction about it now that I'm getting into it through these books.  When you say Mercia to me, the first thing I think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Arthur riding since the snows of winter covered this land, through the kingdom of Mercia, where you can't find coconuts, given that it's a temperate zone.  But I'm completely into this period now, and that's one of the reasons I love historical fiction.



It's not a question of where he GRIPS it!