Around the house

I know you've all been dying to see some grainy iPhone pictures of the current state of our home.  Well, your wish is my command.

Without further ado, I give you:

1.  The blue velvet couch. My favorite piece of furniture.  Also, a self-made parsons table and a pillow with inquisitive zebras on it.  Because who doesn't need a flock of zebras looking at you incredulously every time you sit down?

2. The entry way.  (For the record, this is not an iPhone picture...it is courtesy of Blake and his camera skills).  I love the way it looks when it's so sunny.

3.  Flowers from the garden on the kitchen counter.

4.  My new coat hooks.  Do I love them? You bet giraffe I do! (That joke never gets old.)

5.  New (cheap!) pillows for the living room couch.  I've since re-arranged them so that the patterns aren't both facing in the same direction. It's absolutely driving me crazy in the photo below. Alas. First world problems.

And that, my friends, is a quick tour of our house as seen through an iPhone lens.  You're welcome.

More of Spring

I can't get enough of our house in the springtime.  The forsythia bush blooms bright yellow and is followed shortly by the tulips (I planted them last fall and was ecstatic to see them come up in such force).  Then there's the piece de la resistance - our cherry tree. 

Blake and I have both decided that if anything ever happened to the cherry tree that we'd have to move.  It's just so much a part of the identity of the house.  Our yard would feel naked without it.

When it's in full bloom, I can smell it wafting down the street about a block and a half away.  The sun is always hitting it just-so as I'm walking home from the metro and it makes my heart burst with how much I love where we live.  The first thing I do when I get home on those nights is to crank open all of the windows and let the scent fill the house.  It feels and smells like spring.  It's magical.

On a different note, I also think we're single-handedly employing all of the honey bees in the metro area during the two weeks it's in bloom.  The whole tree buzzes happily with activity.

Azaleas

One of my favorite things about springtime DC is that the color comes in waves.  Not everything blooms at once.  The daffodils come first.  Then the cherry blossoms and the tulips, then last (but certainly not least) the azaleas.  I'm pretty sure it's nature's way of easing us through 'til summer.  Just when I think the soggy blossoms littering the pavement are going to break my heart - wham, here comes the next round of color and I'm perking right up again.

Blake and I have been taking walks around the neighborhood at night to enjoy our neighbors' azaleas.  Our neighborhood is absolutely filled with them - in every shade you can imagine.

These photos are from my iPhone and were taken at dusk, so they're nothing special.  But, you can imagine how amazing the colors are in person.

When we bought our house we had only two azalea bushes on the property.  Huge, white, puffy ones by the patio.  We've kept those, and added several more. We can't be outdone by our neighbors now, can we?

On Blogging

Blogging is a weird medium.  It's rather narcissistic, completely voyeuristic, and usually unrealistic.

I write for me.  To keep track of stories and to stand in place of a hard copy journal.  I write because I've got opinions and because some things are just too funny or strange not to share.  I'm not kidding myself about my audience (which I'm pretty sure consists almost entirely of my family and a few friends), but still I find it fun to post things to the digital void.

I'll say it again, though. Blogging is weird. 

When you have a bad day at work, you don't write about it because it would be unfair to publicly post negative things about co-workers.  Instead, you write about how you had a momentary lapse of judgement when you were cutting jalepenos, rubbed your eye, and spent the next hour squinting out alligator tears while you cooked dinner.

When you are feeling depressed or angry or annoyed, you don't write about it because it makes you sound morose and ungrateful.  Intead, you write about the shock of having that homeless guy mess his pants while you're sitting next to him on the metro. 

When you're excited about something it comes off as bragging.  When you're sporatically grammar-inept you seem dumb as a brick.  It's really hard to find a balance and still truthfully represent who you are.

But I've found that there are great things about blogging, too.

I met up with Jane for lunch yesterday at Shake Shack.  She was in town for a few days with her husband and mother in law and I practially coerced her into meeting up with me.  We met on study abroad in 2006 in Paris.  Our schedules didn't overlap much, so we sadly didn't get to know each other that well back then.  BUT, we've followed each others' blogs through the years and have had a great time commenting back and forth.  [She's a fantastic writer, by the way. Check out her blog.] 

It just kills me that we didn't hang out more in our carefree college days. It's definitely an incentive for me to be less shy - think of all the friendships I may have missed out on due to social anxiety and silence.

When her husband walked into Shake Shack yesterday I felt like a crazy stalker because I immediately knew who he was even though I'd never met him before (another slightly creepy aspect of blogging).  It was so fun to catch up after all this time and still feel like we'd never missed a beat.
 
Sometimes you just feel really connected to someone through their writing, you know?  Maybe it's their cadence, or off-kilter word choice, or their prolific use of parentheticals (I love me some parentheticals), but it just clicks. 

And, for now, here end my thoughts on blogging.

I'm off to write a persuasive email to Jane outlining (in detail) all the reason that she and Alex need to move to DC.  Wish me luck.

Easter

I never wrote about Easter this year.  Mostly because I was spending my time enjoying the moment, but also because I was lazy after the weekend and consumed with work and life.

Blake had to work all weekend (until midnight each day as he did for the whole month), so I got to tag along on Easter festivities with Blake's family and with friends. 

Saturday we had Easter #1 at Blake's parents' house.  We had a lovely meal, way too much dessert, and then played all sorts of games outside with hard boiled eggs.  We played the balance-an-egg-on-a-spoon-and-run game (which was especially entertaining when the three-year-olds got involved) and we also played Bocce Ball with the eggs.  You can see my extra classy egg below - decorated with a blue sharpie and smudged by yours truly. 

I'd like to blame my egg for my terrible Bocce skills, but the truth is that I have terrible depth perception in games like this and ended up giving my egg to my 3-year-old nephew so he could have an extra turn.  He successfully smashed the egg in one turn - but at least the yolk landed fairly close to its goal.  That's got to count for something.

Sunday I joined with some friends from church for a second Easter dinner.  Tiffany, Kristin and I had spent an evening earlier that week making "special" Easter eggs.  We blew out the insides, dyed and glittered the outsides, then cut small holes in them and filled most with fruity pebbles and two with glitter.  Then, after dinner, each person got two eggs to smash on the head of an unsuspecting victim.  If you got one with glitter broken over your head, you got a prize. 

I stole the photo below from Kristin.  She was the first one to break an egg over my head (with great force, I might add) and it was filled with fruity pebbles.  No prize.  Just extra dirty hair.  Yumm.  I am not sharing the photo of Tiffany smashing a glitter filled egg over my head (prize = yes. clean hair =a definite no) because I have approximately 4 chins in it.  Even after several shampooings, I was still digging glitter out of my hair for a week.