three little rituals in April

 One the greatest joys of adulthood has to be finding your own rhythms and rituals. Look at me! A person out in the world deciding my own preferences. The absolute pleasure of identity-making (or at least identity exploring?). Here are some of my favorite rituals over the past month:

A favorite walking route. Most mornings, Chris and I take Bear for his morning walk together. While we have favorite routes we take often, Chris especially tends to mix things up each time. On days when Chris is out of the house for work, though, I have one favorite route that I always take Bear on for a solo morning walk. We go past my favorite garden house where we stop to drink from the dog bowl and see what's starting to grow, then past what I've decided is our future house to admire the porch. We go down a short stretch of a paved walking trail, then loop back past my friends house. Finally, we go past some flowering apple trees and a house with chickens. The perfect morning loop. 

The quietest Friday nights. Currently, weekends have been jam-packed with my regular coaching work, plus shows and rehearsal schedules for both the company I skate on and the company I direct. This has led to Fridays being one of our chill-est nights. While I often go to happy hour on Wednesdays only to stumble back at 10pm, on Fridays, I get home from work and find Chris already starting dinner (often from the vegetarian cookbook we're working through). We chat together while one of us takes lead finishing dinner, have a drink, then curl up with our comfort food in the living room. We usually only watch one episode of something (recently: Beef, now: Ted Lasso and whenever the Bruins are playing). Then I shower, we clean up, we talk, read a little, and go to bed early. 

A reading break from the world. Spring is a busy season for work, and I've been working hard to ensure that I keep myself grounded and happy even while running around. I'm proud to say it's been a little better this year. One of my new year's resolutions was to stop working when I get home at the end of the day, and I've stuck to that. I've now also started to add in some reading upon walking in the door some days. Ideally, it's a beautifully sunny day. The sun is still out. I grab a beer, then curl up on the couch for 20 or 30-minutes with a book. Sometimes, Chris joins with his own book or a video game. Ultimate reset. 

Happy Friday! xo

Winter 2023: A Scrapbook

 

Somehow, winter has come and gone and I am typing this while snuggled up on the couch on a relatively warm March evening. I am currently enjoying what I think must be the best part of any long-term partnership: Chris is currently making dinner, and has also explicitly said that he doesn't want me to help or to talk to him so he can cook while watching TV. The beginning of relationships are so fun, but I think my heart is partial to being able to give each other space without feelings being hurt. This is what a marriage of two introverts looks like, and I love it. 

January and February have been jam-packed with activities and have been busy work wise, but somehow, I still feel like there's been a lot of time to just...exist? Throughout most of my adult life, I have considered myself a little better at working than at playing. From 18 until very recently, I've held down multiple jobs at once, had periods of life where I was training skating almost 20 hours a week, and been a student. I love the purpose that comes with being a "busy" person, and overall I think I'm more emotionally even when I keep my calendar relatively full. It is not good for me mentally, however, when that drive pushes me over the edge into anxious territory. I watched this Tik Tok from our light, our life, our love: Chelsea Fagan recently, and honestly have been thinking about it for weeks. I know I have internalized a sense of always needing to be busy, and I do struggle with my self worth when I do something as simple as take a day off because I'm sick. I want to be better at reframing the parts of my life that are self-imposed, instead of making myself a victim of my owl compulsion to do everything.

Heading off to Portland ME!

Used bookstore in Portland.

One of my goals for the New Year was centered around working more intelligently, and no longer allowing the constant sense of "always being working" to keep messing with my personal life. I decided to set a hard limit on the admin side of coaching. Since the start of the year, I have a hard rule about not working when I get home from coaching (depending on the day, this could be as early as 6:30 or as late as 9pm). It's been life changing! At night, I have no agenda and just hang out with Chris and Bear, make dinner, watch movies, or read my book. In the morning, I wake up with a lot less dread because I gave myself time to unwind the night before, and I've been so much more focused at getting stuff done during the day because I don't have the option of figuring stuff out in the evening. It also makes me way more likely to see friends in the evening, because I have no sense of keeping the time available in case I need it for work (which I always did when it was an option). 

I think this mindset of actually "leaving" work at the end of the day has been especially important for me right now. Over the past few months, I've been working through a lot of self doubt and inadequacy, and all the shame that comes with feeling those things while also "getting" to "live my dreams." Weird territory! So it's satisfying (and grounding) to feel so proud of my personal life at the moment. For perhaps the first time, I feel like my life is full of friends, adventures, satisfying relationships, hobbies, and quiet time to lay on the couch with the dog. I love my personal life right now. It is joyful and playful and creative and life giving. I am proud of the years it has taken for me to cultivate this, and I don't want to take it for granted. 

Saturday afternoon relaxation of choice: Youtube and a lunch beer.

Tacos and beer on the coldest day of the yar.

We've made room for so many adventures over this winter: In January, Chris and I took the train up to Portland ME to go to bars and walk around bookstores. It snowed SO MUCH but we loved it even when we got chilled, and catching the train back home was so fun. Towards the end of the month we had friends over for what I called a Friendsgiving (even though we were well past the holidays, I served pasta, and the only remotely festive thing was a pumpkin cake). It was the most people we'd ever had in our apartment for a party and I LOVED it. This will be the year of parties. In the beginning of February, we also experienced a few days with below zero weather. While we mostly stayed in, we did sneak out for tacos and beer at one of our favorite walking-distance spots and sitting in the warm bar while we watched frost form on the windows was exhilarating. For Valentines Day, we decided to be a Proper Grown Married Couple and got reservations for the Saturday before at Cava in Portsmouth, a *fancy* tapas place that we'd only been to once before. We sat at the bar and did their fixed menu option and really enjoyed it.  

Also for Valentine's Day, I made Chris a homemade coffee cake. By a stroke of luck, I unlocked all my own nostalgia: this recipe tasted exactly like the Krusteaz mixes my mom would buy and  make on Sunday mornings before church. Also in the homemade date category: February we experienced a Disney resurgence and watched so many movies, new and old. While Turning Red was probably my favorite of all the new watches, my favorite night was when we watched Ratatouille while eating homemade ratatouille, with crusty bread, a cheese board, and wine. Probably my favorite at-home date nights we've ever done. 

Ratatouille date night.

UNH Hockey Game

Mid-February, I took a leap and got a wolf cut. I love it! And honestly feel like this is the most "myself" I've ever looked like. Styling bangs again is a trip but thankfully I'm much better than my 13 year old self was (scroll through the archive for proof, at your own risk). Other highlights of the month were seeing a comedy show at WHYM brewery, going to a UNH hockey game with friends, finding what we believe to be the best happy hour in town (it's The Brick on Wednesdays), and my first time night skiing in four years. To round out the winter, we saw Couch in Burlington VT with friends at Nectar's, a small bar and concert spot downtown and walking distance from their apartment.

Seeing Couch in Burlington VT.

Overall, an epically full godsend of a Winter. I'm so grateful for my friends, my husband, our sweet Bear and Charlie, and the chance to be out here trying new things. Spring is looming and looking busy, so I'm excited for: soaking in and really noticing the sunshine and longer days, creating more at-home date nights, doing some fun travel, and getting outside more often. Thanks for being here! <3

I can't move on until I say something about 2022

 

I've been working on a post that adequately sums up 2022--a year that was equally full of the most heartbreaking moments of my life, as well as the most joyful--and also explains every way in which I intend 2023 to be better. To be fair, I didn't intend for 2022 to be so challenging. January of last year, I was also journaling and planning blog posts and getting ready for a busy year of achievements, new hobbies, travel, better habits. But some years are just like that--unexpected avalanches of challenge and grief. I think it would be more fair if these moments were spread out, like mini snow squalls of unhappy things spread over a decade. I guess we have about as much control over that as the actual weather, though. 

Amongst everything else, there is something about this year that has felt so solidly grown up, so adult. When something goes wrong, there is no one to tell, no one to get. I can (and do) tell people about it, but there's a big difference between retelling a story and leading with "help!". I also find myself using the word "adult" more than any other adults I know. Somehow, I am constantly looking for the grown-ups, trying to mimic their behavior and walk in their shoes in a way that definitely comes off less cute and more naïve than when actual children do it. I wonder if large, out-of-our-control circumstances is what helps people turn the corner from looking for the grown ups to being looked to. Alongside the anxiety and grief and weight of this year, I've also felt a perverse sense of pride, even of joy, in how we (my husband and I) are able to handle things. An unexpected move and six weeks living apart, my partner's concussion, loosing grandparents, and loosing someone who was basically my brother in law unexpectedly a week into our own honeymoon. The shitty circumstances remained shitty but I am still proud of how we reacted. We took actions, came home early from trips, were reliable and present and made ourselves voice our thoughts. We showed up--dressed appropriately, with tote bags of food and markers for guest books--and stayed afterwards to clean up, like the grown ups we apparently are. Is this really what we were looking forward to all these years?

Because everything about growing up is gray and nuanced, it would be unfair to write bout 2022 and only list the circumstances that were hard. This year also held a jam-packed, adventurous summer, making a lot of art I felt strongly about, moving to a new town and feeling like it is exactly where we wanted to be. This was the year I got to marry the man that stood by me and picked me up and made every hard circumstance of this past year doable. Our wedding was beautiful and fun and very us, and we cried the whole time. 

My whole life, I have felt both incredibly excited and incredibly terrified to grow up. I was one of those kids that was always a bit too grown up; prim and proper and obedient, never overly excited and (predictably) too wrapped up in the approval of adults. I never felt like a kid, so imagine my confusion when I hit birthday after after birthday and instead of finally feeling "my age," I started feeling younger and younger. I became somehow more inept and confused, and way less impressed with my own capabilities.  I have spent this first half of my 20's feeling remorse for all the ways I wasn't more wild when I was younger, feeling embarrassment for all the ways I haven't felt more grown up, and desperately throwing myself on the hamster wheels of "catching up" and "good enough."

Perhaps this year was a chance to stop and realize that life comes at you too fast to worry so much about being on top of it. Our lives are often messy, chaotic, unsatisfying; sometimes it's our fault, and often it's not. Life is just all the things, constantly. The parts of my life that often feel the most embarrassingly non-grown up didn't affect how I showed up with my family as we were grieving, or how Chris and I planned our wedding and life together. You don't have to be emotionally mature to clean the house, but you definitely do to attend funerals that really shouldn't be happening. Or host a huge party and not yell at anyone. 

In the mundanity that's (luckily) filled our lives this fist part of 2023, I'm enjoying a sense of feeling grown up in more gentle ways. Throwing flyers in the recycling instead of on the table when I check the mail. Lighting a candle to make dinner. I am grateful to be enjoying these things. To not be worried if I'm too young or too old, but just to be who I am, where I am, carving out some space for myself amidst the noise. 

September Ambitions

 

Though my to-do list overfloweth, this Tuesday has led me to a quiet night alone in our apartment, a sleepy dog that for once isn't threatening the neighbors, and a very large pour of wine because the bottle wasn't full enough to justify leaving it for another night. I've set my timer and allotted myself thirty minutes to indulge my blogging self for a bit. It's been a while! This marks my eighth post in all of 2022, and we find ourselves in the very beginning of September (though my calendar already says the 13th. weird). But a September feeling is certainly in the air...I'm starting to crave baking and cozy nights in, the only recently bought six-packs have all been pumpkin themed, and we find ourselves buckling down with a renewed focus to just get things done. 

Specifically, Chris and I are now panic-planning the last details of our wedding, which is now a whopping 3.5 weeks away. I have a lot to say about planning a wedding, chiefly that I am excited,  I've never been more ashamed of my procrastinator tendencies, this is going to be a hell of a party, I will certainly never do something like this ever again, and I cannot wait to get to the day and be wearing my awesome shoes and surrounded by friends and drinking a butternut squash martini and BE MARRIED!

The rest of this year is gearing up to be a whirlwind. Wedding weekend leads us into two weeks of road tripping for our honeymoon. Two days after we get home I fly out to an ice show through the rest of the year! Busy, busy, busy, but all I want to do right now is soak every single moment in. This year has gone by so fast and I just want to keep treasuring and holding all these moments. 

Here are some of my September ambitions (and some bonus for the rest of the year). 

>> Workout every single day before the wedding! Because otherwise I will go completely insane. We're dealing with things as they come up and making sure we're going in with some clarity. 

>> Not running around for work, but instead focusing my time and attention on my core skaters. I want to make sure I leave everyone for a bit with goals checked off, strong programs choreographed, sub coaches updated, and everyone feeling good. 

>> Walk into the week of the wedding with the most organized set of spreadsheets, week of timeline, and wedding binder I can manage. I've been a hot mess through most of this but we're going to nail that. 

>> Send out Christmas cards! I love Christmas cards and sending out our first Christmas cards as a married couple is something I am looking forward to literally so much. Can't wait. 

>> Make the best scrapbook of our honeymoon!

>> Read so many library books!

>> Soak up every single moment with family, friends, and Chris over these hectic weeks.

Intentional Living: Less Aesthetic, and More Mess

#1: A fun, special weekend breakfast at home. Fun brunch vibes!

(Sharing this post along with some more fun ways I've been trying to "live intentionally" this summer).

A perpetual theme in my thinking, Youtube watching, journaling, and existential crisis-ing is my deep desire to be living an intentional life. 

So much of life feels completely chaotic, and this year for me personally has been the most chaotic yet. In many ways, though, I'm incredibly grateful that this string of unfortunate events took place this year. For the first time in my entire life, I feel more equipped to handle it. Chris and I are stable, and good. We have strong friendships. We're both relatively comfortable at work, and have control over our work lives. We've started to feel like real adults, and with that our capacity to deal with challenges has grown larger. 

Moving in with Chris was a milestone in my life for many reasons, but one of the most challenging aspects of it at the time was what a strong break it marked between me living my life the way I wanted to, and me living in a way that my upbringing expected. Growing up in not just a conservative Christian household, but also a fundamentalist-leaning homeschooling community, moving in with a boyfriend carried the weight of not just a life change but of moral failure. At the time, I was still doing my best to be a good Christian and form my life in that way. While I didn't believe moving in together was wrong, I also spent a lot of my emotional energy coming up with ways to defend myself. 

#2: Always having fresh flowers (once a bouquet starts to die, I pull the ones that still look good and make these mini bouquets).

While we hadn't tried to hide it (and actually, had explicitly told our close church friends before we moved in together), a pandemic meant that it took six months before most of the people in my home church "knew." A lot of people were upset. We received heartbroken texts, and went to dinner with one couple who told us everything we were doing wrong. Fast forward a year, and we were engaged and starting to plan a wedding. We reached out to a church I had been to get married, and received a double sided pdf in response. The letter held many bullet points (and interestingly, only one bible verse) and demanded an apology from me. It stung. I felt abandoned and alone by a church family I had tried for a really long time to please. 

These scenarios, which all occurred within a year and a half of each other, were monumental shifts for me. They marked the first time in my life where I chose myself--my needs, wants, and desires--over the life that has being handed to me and expected of me. I grew up with a lot of expectations around me, as well as a lot of black and white thinking over what the "right" way to be was. Even when these expectations didn't seem to fit me (and to be honest, they often didn't), I tried my best to change myself for them rather than finding a different way. I did this as a kid of course, but I also did it as an adult...for way too long. 

#3: Cooking with both smaller portions of meat, as well as less days where we eat meat. This veggie stir fry has been a go-to this summer! Cheap, cleans out the fridge, and doesn't heat up the apartment. :)

The past few years have felt like crash-landing into an adult life where I actually have options. It's been exhausting, and to be honest, a little traumatizing. But while the last two years haven't exactly looked like a That Girl video waxing poetic abut the importance of routines, I can't imagine a way I could have lived these years more intentionally. In all the mess, this season of life meant me finally getting real about what kind of future I wanted. It was about me challenging old beliefs, and standing up to people and systems I had previously believed it a sin to question. For the first time in life, this season I embraced change and discovering new ways of looking at the world. We don't talk to talk about the mess, but I think the mess has way more to do with "living authentically" then we care to admit. 

Perhaps our views on living intentionally need to shift. Perhaps it's less morning routines and fruit infused water and more hard conversations, setting boundaries, and challenging yourself in therapy. Maybe living intentionally is making scary, annoying, and even mundane choices. I love an aesthetic "Sunday Reset" vlog as much as the next person (and honestly, maybe more), but we all must realize deep down that changing your sheets don't actually change your life. The most important stuff isn't the pretty stuff. 

As we've worked through everything the past few years, I have felt a lot of grief, a lot of anger, and a lot of disappointment. I've realized my self-esteem was based largely on what others think of me (a pretty unstable foundation). I have felt the inclination to hide from family, to hide from the world, just to avoid getting rejected. Carrying all of this has felt so heavy. 

#4: Taking a second to CHILL. I've been trying to be very aware about my energy lately, and turns out, after running around out in public for a few hours I am STRESSED and need to sit on the bed or the couch, have a fun drink, and just zone out or else my brain becomes mush. 

As the waves seem to settle, and a new season emerges, I'm preparing to feel a lot more satisfaction in this life we are living. We are only two months away from getting married! We are all moved in to our new apartment. Bear is behaving significantly better than he used to. We have fantastic friends that have stuck by us through all the sticky parts. And we're ready to live with a lot more JOY. 

Because it's a huge gift to get the chance to build a life. Though it feels like I'm starting from scratch, it's a gift to have a fresh start and to get to explore all the ways I could be. The world is truly brand new: are we sleeping in on Sundays or going for a run? Happy hours with friends or brunches at home? Beer or wine on a Friday night? Trash tv or curled up with a book? Where do we get the news? When do we read the news? How do we budget? Who are our friends? What are we valuing in the world, when we aren't told what to value? How are we showing up for our communities, when we aren't told who to show up for? What do I think and want, when I finally get to tune out decades of other voices?

#5: Going on way more fun, little adventures that remind us we are ALIVE and DOING THINGS! Bonus points if they include friends, and double bonus points if they include something local we haven't done before (this was a Portland Sea Dogs game!).

I'm excited to find out. I suppose if I had to have a quarter life crisis, I'm grateful for where this one led me. Here's to continued question asking, intention setting, deep thinking, and a lot more spontaneous fun in the next 3/4 of my life. 

big thoughts about community and living a real life (& photos from Burlington, VT)

 

Jesus. This spring. 

Work has been great but literally so busy. I am only beginning to pull myself out of a very intense feeling of overwhelm...the kind of overwhelm where you have 300 unread emails and have to write down "text so and so back" to force yourself to do so. I have a ridiculous stack of random sticky notes and long lists that I've been carrying around with me from room to room, just attempting to make some sense of everything. It's not really worked! But we're getting there. And then....all the mess of the world this week. I don't have words for tragedy like this, but I also know not acknowledging it is worse. I don't know what to do about it, but I do know that we as a community must be less stagnant and passive about every important issue we face. Plenty of people who know more than me have pulled together great resource lists; Cup of Jo is a good one. 

In our own families and households and friend groups and neighborhoods, we must all be more engaged and more human. More supportive. More caring. More discerning. More ready to take on the work of large changes, and more consistent with our practice of small changes. In this moment, I want to work on: being a better family member, specifically an "aunt" to Chris' very little cousin and a supporter of my own younger cousins; a more generous community member with my time and attention; being a more empathetic observer of my neighbor's lives; and more willing to sit with the news, research, and develop opinions about changes. 

Even before this week, I've been thinking a lot about how I want to be careful not to disconnect from the world. Even the grief, even the pain: I want to bear witness to all, to feel the range of the human experience. One of the parts of our upcoming move we are most excited about is being back in town. Our current apartment is a perfectly nice, white-walled unit in a duplex. There is a neatly paved driveway filled with cars. There are fine, quiet neighbors. Someone cuts the grass every Friday. The whole town uses the exact same trash and recycling bins. We live in a cul-de-sac, with many nice, quiet houses. We don't know the neighbors...sometimes we pass someone when we walk the dog, but no one knows (or cares) who we are. When we first moved here, we were excited for more space. Isn't that what we're always searching for? The picket fence? The privacy? But as our move approaches, I am most excited for getting back to the messiness of buildings crammed together. I want to wake up to slammed doors late at night and loud, happy drunk voices in the street. I want to walk by people smoking on their front steps and past piles of free junk on the side of the road. I want to notice people working odd hours, and staying up too late on Tuesdays. I want to to see people existing outside of the apathetic suburbia molds. I want to feel the energy of the first really warm weekend and the quiet of misty Monday mornings. I want the hustle of digging everyone out after a snow storm and the ability to say "let's grab a drink" without grabbing the car keys. 

The truth is as much as I'd love a yard for kids and the ability to plant gardens wherever I pleased, the joy and community I really want to belong to doesn't seem to be here. I want to be throwing elbows with the people fighting for parking spaces and not taking tomorrow for granted. My people are the baristas and bartenders and artists that still hold onto their 9-5's, not the guy who's sat at the same desk for 30 years and thinks we could buy a house if only we stopped spending all our money on coffee.

My childhood was isolated. At times I loved it, and at times it felt wrong. There's a lot of gray area to be found between the good and the bad of a homeschooled, conservative Christian upbringing, and I was certainly firmly rooted in the gray. The one thing I always felt, though, was utterly disconnected to the world around me. My lack of trend following and pop culture knowledge was praised by adults, and scorned by peers. I took a lot of pride in not liking what everybody else seemed to. But I also felt a lot of shame for having no grasp on what "real life" felt like. Real life is what everyone else was living; I was caught aloof and uninvolved, like I was watching a goofy sitcom where the outcome didn't matter to me. Whatever my childhood was, it wasn't living. 

As an adult, I often still feel behind. The difference now, though, is that I can choose to be more connected instead of continuing to hide away. I can choose to not just talk about compassion, joy, being thoughtful, being neighborly, but to really act in that way. To shape my own life into the way I want the world to feel. There is much to be done on a macro level enable us to live as more whole communities. But the pieces we can really control are the small things, that take place inside our own kitchens and churches and bars and front steps. I want to take this move as a chance to be putting that work first.

All of these pictures are from our quick trip up to Burlington, VT in mid-May. Chris drove up from NJ, and I came up from NH. We got an Air Bnb downtown for two nights. It was a ridiculously hot weekend--in the 90's!--but we had so much fun walking around, going to our favorite used bookstore, and trying new sandwich and coffee places. We got to see my best friend and her boyfriend for a quick visit, and tried a very cool new-to-us restaurant called Poco which was so small, intimate, beautiful, and delicious. Our main reason for coming up was actually to get to see Sal Vulcano's show! I had bought Chris tickets back at Christmas and it ended up getting postponed, but we finally got to see him! So fun. This was our first time being in Burlington when it wasn't freezing cold, and we loved it. 

10 Things On A Tuesday in May

 1). Last we chatted, we were in the middle of utterly horrible chaos. To be fair, we are still certainly in the midst. Last Thursday, though, I rushed to my third apartment showing (and just another of many that Chris has dutifully reached out to) and somehow, within hours we had a lease sitting in our inboxes. 20 minutes later we signed it. Yay! WOW. Jesus, what a relief. We can move in 6/1. Chris is currently still living in NJ with Bear. We still need to get out from under this apartment. But it now feels like there is a way to move forward. 

2). This had been on my mind pre-crisis, but I've been thinking a lot about "Main Character Energy." A pretty nebulous topic, but in my head it consists of mornings spent reading and sunlit porches, a great pair of shoes and a bowl of garlic noodles, fun late nights with friends and early mornings spent running or thinking and just being. The photo above is a screen shot of my "Main Character Energy Spring '22" saved collection on Instagram. It has croissants from Joy the Baker (the queen of main character energy), a woman talking about relaxing on her porch after work, colorful framed art prints, a getaway cabin, and lots of talk of romanticizing your life. I'm ready for a change. 

3). The only thing I don't like about this new apartment is that there is no outdoor space. We don't have a porch (or even our own staircase), no little spot to throw outdoor plants. I currently have a bunch of pansies outside as well as two peppers and two tomato plants. I'm thinking I will keep a pansie or two, and my veggies and put them in our one assigned parking spot and just park behind them? That's not crazy right?

4). To be fair there are other things I'm upset about: the cabinets are dark. It's in Dover, which will be so close to friends (fun!) but add a lot of time to my commute (sucky!). This house feels like a pretty basic apartment to me....none of the cute little cubbies or corners like some of the historical Portsmouth apartments I'd been looking at. But I realize I am being so picky!! It will be great. 

5). Before we signed, our working plan had been to put all of our stuff in storage and then live in a motel or with my parents until we were able to find a place. So, I've been putting a lot of energy into purging everything we own. We are both pack rats; like it's bad. We have way too much stuff. And even though now we have a place, it will be smaller and we won't have as much storage space and I just don't want to feel crowded. I want to feel light! So I'm staying committed to getting rid of as much as possible. Those are two completely different purging questions: what can I move into the new space? And would I pay to store this somewhere? I'm loving the resolve that the second question is offering.  

6). Connected to purging is my rediscovered passion for Buy Nothing groups. Honestly, Buy Nothing groups are probably the most pure and wonderful place on the internet, and certainly on Facebook. So far, I've gotten rid of: a few baby gates from when Bear was a puppy, a board game, a giant beer making kit we had gotten for Christmas, some old records we don't listen to, a bag of art supplies I don't like anymore, at least 20 books, and a bag of random old pots and containers for someone to make an outdoor music board for their kid! How fun is that?!

7). Outside of all this home chaos, work has actually been going really well. I am choreographing a few ensembles right now: two of my Artistry classes are each doing a number in their club show, we've started rehearsals for our first ever American Ice Theatre of NH Junior Company piece, and then I'm doing a very cute little Learn to Skate number for my group class. Busy busy! And so so fun. I should do a works in progress post soon. 

8). With spring I've been fantasizing about a lot of the making I want to do. Here's my recipe list as it stands right now: ham and cheese croissants from Joy the Baker, chocolate orange and cream cheese pound cake from Joy the Baker (maybe for Mother's Day gifts?), these wraps from Budget Bytes (I'm picturing lots of dinners in the park at our new apartment, to replace our porch-sits), fish from Dinner A Love Story (I'm scared to cook anything other than chicken or ground beef so trying to get better), and lots of cocktails that use Aperol. On the non-kitchen side, I am planning to finally start this cross stitch kit from Elise Joy. I'm also dreaming of some sort of flower a day/one picture a day cross stitch to mark our first year married, and making a t-shirt quilt beach blanket from some old sentimental shirts. 

9). For Christmas, I had gotten Chris tickets to see Sal Valcano when he was performing in Burlington, VT this winter. The weekend he was supposed to be there we had a snowstorm, so we still went to VT to see friends but his show got rescheduled to May. With all this moving stress, and finals, and so much work, and the fact that we're living in different states, I wasn't sure if we'd be able to go. But I think we need a break, so we're going for it. We booked an AirBnB for next Thursday and Friday night. Maybe Chris can board Bear in NJ and then meet me up there? Unsure of the details. But this is much needed; I'm excited!

10). Books of the moment: just finished listening to This Is The Story of A Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett on audiobook. Loved it. My goal for May is to read my second paper book of the year and I'm planning to restart The Incredible Journey of Plants by Stefano Mancuso. Shows of the moment: Chris and I had been watching Inventing Anna on Netflix, and I'm planning to start Dairy Girls soon. I continue to watch every single piece of content The Financial Diet puts out. Listens of the moment: Elise Joy's podcast is back and I've been finding this season very grounding and inspiring!

That's the update friends! I'm reminding myself that life is short: even if we are lucky, we still only get about 4,000 weeks to careen through our lives. Even in the midst of the upsetting, turbulent times, I want to remember to not waste a week by forgetting the moments of joy, meaning, fun, and connection. Spring is here, and we're moving forward!