Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Welcome Fall!

Today is our third wedding anniversary and it has been a most awesome three years. And some of the best parts of it have been this year in particular as we took what we thought was a huge risk to pull up our roots and I feared to quit working a stable job so that we could move to Illinois. However, on this happiest of days, as I plan to celebrate with the love of my life the wonders of the last three years, I can barely stop grinning thinking about how absolutely wonderful everything in my life right now is and about how great Illinois has been. It helps that today is an absolutely gorgeous day with blue skies and the trees all turning vibrant fall colors the like of which I have never seen before. In movies and pictures, yes; but never in real life. The oranges and yellows and even purples and browns and reds peek between the greenery in the most amazing display of color I've ever seen. I'm amazed. I'm impressed. I'm blown away. I wish I were a painter and could capture these colors on canvas!

I'm really happy right now. Super super happy and content with my life. I love being Chris's wife! I love that we moved to Illinois! I love this house and this neighborhood and how happy my step-son Colin is since we moved. It's like a cloud over him just lifted! He has friends and activities and runs around the neighborhood and yard with nerf guns and swords or plays basketball in the driveways and rides his bike! He is excited about school and learning great things and having to try harder and getting a great education! He seems so grounded and happy and smiles all the time and jokes around with Chelsea almost continuously. It's been really incredible for him too. For all of us! Chris loves the disc golf courses and the great weather for playing disc golf all summer long. He likes riding the train to work so that he can get work done while commuting. I love not working and keeping house and making homemade dinners and that I'm a new part of the book club on the street. I love my new knitting group and our new doctor and our new grocery stores and just everything.

I certainly do not mean to "dis" Texas because I really loved it there too. I loved my life and had a lot of pride in Texas and being Texan. As do most people from Texas. In Texas, it's common to hear people say prideful things like Texas is the greatest state in the nation and everything's bigger and better in Texas. It was one of the reasons I was so scared to leave. However, since moving here and living here (tho I have yet to experience the "brutal" winters) I have realized that my Texas pride was blind pride. I had never lived anywhere else so I had no basis for comparison. I just can't possibly explain how incredible every experience from going to the doctor, to getting our drivers' licenses, to playing disc golf courses, to shopping for anything, to having my hair done, to going out, to commuting, to the SCHOOLS!!!, to the job opportunities (I'm keeping my eye on jobs but not really applying yet), to the parks, to the weather, just you-name-it ~ It's a fabulous unbelievable experience unlike anything I'm used to in Texas. People are SO friendly! People in Texas are friendly too but not to this extent and certainly not while driving on the roads - people here will let you in in front of them and aren't assholes behind the wheel. Our neighbors are all so neighborly and friendly. My knitting group is so welcoming of new-comers and full of such nice friendly personable people. I know I'm gushing but today I'm brimming over with love and it has to go somewhere.

I hope all married people experience this much joy in their relationships and I hope anyone interested in getting married finds this happiness too.

LOVE






Monday, September 17, 2012

Increasing happiness

Monday morning and back to the routines of life - work and school for Chris and Colin. A job interview for Chelsea that we are all hoping she gets. Piles of laundry for me and vacuuming and collecting dishes from around the house and getting ready for visitors next weekend. I really really enjoy not having a job to report to but there is also a lot of housework to do! I do feel like we have a nicer kept house than we used to in the past. That is definitely for sure.

We will eat in every day this week in anticipation of my mother and father in-law coming on Thursday, so I'm planning a menu for the week. We are really looking forward to their visit. I'm not one of those people who don't like my in-laws - in fact, I love them! They are an amazing, thoughtful, wonderful couple whose relationship and values Chris and I attempt to emulate every day.

And so they will be our second visitors from Houston. My brother Kevin spent one Sunday with us previously but we really didn't know where to take him or what to do with just one day. This weekend we have a LOT of ideas including going into Chicago and seeing museums or the aquarium and riding the train and taking a boat tour on Lake Michigan. My mother in law wants to see a Great Lake. We have ideas of various restaurants we want to take them to and new experiences we plan to share with them. There is so much that this area has to offer that it's almost impossible to decide what to show them next! The amazing parks, the excellent restaurants, the city, the museums, the putt putt courses, the disc golf courses, the nature centers and forest preserves. It's really rather overwhelming.

Friday, Colin is off of school and will be taking a game design class for free at the public library. They may want to see the Schaumburg Library which is incomparable to any library I've ever seen. Houston's Downtown public library is huge, large collection of books and highly regarded for research, however, for a public library the one in Schaumburg is beyond cool. Their media room is as large as their children's books area and nearly as large as their fiction area. They have a theater where we have attended a lecture on how cinema portrays the aged running through a large selection of movie clips. They have this lecture every first Thursday. They have isles of sheet music and records and video tapes and DVD's to check out. It's fairly incredible. Their children's section has multiple sections grouped and decorated by age group with the chairs and tables gradually growing larger. They are currently building a new teen section of the library and they also have more computer stations than I've ever seen in any library before. In fact, probably more computer stations than some of the larger labs at the University of Houston where I used to work.

Chris and I spent the weekend together fairly alone with the kids both in Houston and we had a fabulous time. We don't yet know anyone else but are perfectly happy to enjoy a thousand new little experiences a day with each other. I'm not sure there would be anyone else with whom I could so thoroughly enjoy a simple drive through a new area remarking on it's quaintness. Every little town and road through the area is so quaint that I've actually sort of recalibrated my quaintness meter.

On Friday night after dropping the kids off at their flight, on a lark we decided to check out downtown Palatine for restaurants and bars. We ran into Octoberfest! Who knew it would be going on in September? We had an absolute blast! So much fun! So much polka! So much bier!

That's all for now. Next time I'll tell you all about Casino Night!
LOVE








Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Our Visit Back to Houston

This past Memorial Day weekend, Chris and I went back to Houston for three days during which we attended a rehearsal dinner and wedding, organized a brunch with friends, played a new disc golf course in Conroe with disc golf friends, and attended a Memorial Day back yard barbecue with dozens of friends and musical folks in League City. We also took a swim in Chris's parents' pool and ate Mexican food and had multiple margaritas! It was a deliciously fun and busy weekend full of great friends and good times compacted into just a short period of time.

My thoughts on the trip about Houston in general are thus:

1. It was damn hot! I mean sweat oozing from your every pore and running down your face / neck / legs / chest / back, etc., dripping onto your clothes, soaking your shirt kind of hot, with 98% humidity. I haven't sweat like that since leaving Texas and almost forgot what it was like. I believe I was near heat-stroke on Sunday morning playing disc golf at Little Egypt in Conroe. Our car said it was 104 degrees when we got back into it. I was having cold sweats and my brain had pretty much stopped making decisions. I was sunburned on all the areas of my skin that were showing. It exhausted and drained me. When we returned from playing disc golf, we decided to jump in the pool. That was very refreshing but also tiring.  We then took a nap for about an hour.

We could have slept till morning but we had a party to get to. Jumping ahead to Monday, we caught a super early flight and slept the whole flight back to Chicago and went right to bed upon our return that morning for a five hour nap. Today is Wednesday and I still feel tired from the trip. I didn't make dinner last night for lack of energy - we went out for dinner which saved us from frozen pizza.

2. Weddings are the most fun! I love weddings! I especially love weddings where Chris is the officiant marrying two people I know and love and for whom I hope all happiness and good things. There is nothing so great as witnessing someone you know finding love and declaring it in front of all their friends and families. And Chris does a fabulous ceremony! Carl and Chanel's wedding was the wedding of a life-time! Attention to EVERY detail! They had it all! The kick-ass dress! The coordinated mothers outfits - mom of the bride wore pink, mom of the groom wore green to match the colors throughout - pink and green were everywhere! Pink & green pillows in the lounge, pink & green M&M's as a give-away, pink bridesmaids' dresses, green groomsmen vests & bowties. Pink and green flowers spilling from every available vase and location. pink rose petals to throw at the couple as they made their way to the limo waiting to take them to their honeymoon suite. A large portrait of the bride near the bar. Open bar - all you could drink. Delicious food from steaks to seafood, roasted vegetables, scalloped potatoes, salads and rolls. A photobooth complete with costume trunk for dressing up your photoshoot, music and dancing and photographers recording everything. It was grand. Everything about the whole wedding was absolutely grand.

Weddings also always make me reflect on my own wedding! What a fabulous party! I loved my wedding so much! There's no way you can ever recreate the happiness you feel on your wedding day. You simply cannot stop smiling no matter what you do! All your friends and family are surrounding you and wishing you well, participating in your union and in the love you feel for each other. And while during my wedding we may have been barefoot on the beach and had no photographer or coordinator or caterer or personalized M&Ms we had the best darn beach party you can possibly have! We felt the love from all our guests and ate and drank til our bellies were as full as our hearts.

3. I really miss having friends, and Mama Tried and going out to hear local live music. We need to get back into having a social life. I know it took a long time to develop our social life in Clear Lake to the point where it was as rich as it was (and still is to some extent.) And I believe that a lot of it had to do with disc golf. It was years of playing disc golf with some of the guys out playing before being invited to people's houses or inviting others over to ours but we made it there. The same with my knitting / crochet friends. I dragged Chelsea with me to the yarn convention - Stitches Midwest because I don't know any crafty people here. I don't think anyone could ever replace the people in Clear Lake in my heart but they are in Texas and I am in Illinois and I want friends and activities here the same way I had them in Texas.

Over the course of the weekend I saw and had conversations with at least 40 people I know and love ~ mainly due to the fact that there was a wedding and a huge backyard barbeque going on and everyone was already gathered at these two events. Except for brunch on Saturday morning and disc golf on Sunday morning where we saw some friends who weren't at either event. And there were at least a dozen or more people I did not have a chance to see who I would love to see again - mainly my family members - I didn't get a chance to see my lovely sister or any of my other siblings or my mom, or Chris's family, I didn't get a chance to see my knitting / crocheting friends or Toni who I haven't seen in many months.

Finding people whose company you enjoy is often so difficult. It's like dating to some extent - first you have to put yourself out there by going out and doing things and meeting new people which is scary and hard to do. Then you might meet others but so often they are sort of "not your type" or they are crazy or weird or offensive in some way (chauvinistic, small minded, republican, racist, homophobic, party too hard or into heavy drug usage, gamer hermit types who just sit and watch tv or play video games for entertainment, overly religious types, etc.) It takes hours of conversations and multiple outings / events / meetings to determine if you are a "match" for a friendship to develop. It's daunting! But I have to do it if I want to attempt to emulate my old social life.

I should start with my neighbors. I should invite them over for tea or we should have a barbeque in the back yard with frisbee and plenty of beers! I'm going to set a date and make invitations!

LOVE