i took tara on a photo tour of the house…admitted that i haven’t left since saturday and i think my hermit-ing is getting to something bigger than cabin fever.
i also told tara about the mouse, thaddeus, who is my only friend in santa cruz so far. remind me again how to function in the real world?
today was kind of brutal. two days of cleansing my demons coming up.
i wish this could exist for every single president ever (especially harrison and taft).
(Source: aint-no-acid-in-this-house, via whenyourise)
The cable guy was here ALL day, so I made a necklace.
Craft night with Jesse! String balls are totally necessary.
“…for it is written, that wine makes glad the heart of men.” - st. Thomas Aquinas
Today, I found starfish and sea critters. I’ll be starting a book collaboration and hopefully working…
we live in california now. we haven’t baked any bread.
it’s colder here in the mornings, really warm in the day, and then colder at night. summer will be different.
we live in the mountains and here are the things that are “new” to our life:
1. the electricity goes out if you blow dry your hair.
2. the electricity goes out if you are charging your phone and computer while you have a light on.
3. the electricity goes out if you have an electric tooth brush.
4. there is a mouse that lives in the third railing on the front porch. he keeps a strict schedule: when there’s light, he’s not visible. when there’s dark, he’s in the warmest corner of the railing.
5. there are loads of hummingbirds in our yard. i was surprised by how much they sound like kamikaze bombers.
6. there are billionaires up the hill who grow loads of oranges on their property. i’m hoping they share.
7. our driveway is 1/4 of a mile up a hill and it takes 12 minutes to walk to the mailboxes, 30-40 minutes to walk to the nearest bus.
8. jesse likes his new job and his new company. i like that his new company appreciates air plants and blown glass.
things are different on the west coast.
warm november
It’s been a year since Jesse and I got married. It’s been a little less than a year since we uprooted, pulled ourselves out of Chicago and asked each other to reconsider what it means to live with someone else, with our own selves, and with our lofty ideas.
It’s unfair to review or assess probably, but it’s natural too. Maybe unfairness is natural…is that a fair deduction from previous sentence?
We spent our anniversary in Maine. Two weeks running around the state, seeing how big the ocean is, and getting sand in our shoes. We collected rocks, shells, driftwood, birch bark, and really amazing memories. Our trip went this way:
Ithaca to Albany (Tara and Jason—and Willow!), Albany to Lee, MA (to sit at Joe’s Diner and mimic the Rockwell painting), Lee to Portland, ME, Portland to Cape Eilizabeth and South Portland, South Portland time with Two Lights Shack, Portland to Rockland, Rockland to Spruce Head, Spruce Head to Owl Head, Owl Head to Bar Harbor and Acadia, Acadia to Belfast, Belfast back to Portland. We stopped at everything that caught our eyes and followed no real logic in travel.
There was time for us to really talk about “America” and what we were noticing, since leaving Chicago and traveling around the East Coast, about regionality. Maine had a strong sense of region, a strong resurgence of its own Maine-ness: new paper mills where there were old mills, microbrews and coffee roasters on a much smaller and more realistic scale, a sense of wanting to “keep” Maine. In the paper, a story about a house for sale that would only be sold to “Mainers through and through.” The Maine Beer Company interviewed and clearly articulating the logic of wanting to make a good product and just hoping that the craft, the work, the labor will be recognized for its goodness.
At Primo, we sat next to a family from a book: old money stereotype. A father, two sons, a mother, and a daughter. Of the two sons, one was twitchy, talking literature and art, and the other was collected, talking economics and law school. It was clear that the father favored the economics son, the mirror of himself and the mother favored the younger, art-inclined son. The daughter was quiet, interjected occasionally or was asked how her food was, why she wasn’t eating. A book, a living book! The two sons were arguing about “the decline of the middle class.” There was a perpetual insistence on manufacturing, labor, and industry jobs and it was hard not to ask what industry they were hoping we’d be able to return to. This, with all the newly emerging statistics of rapid increase in wealth for the top one percent, the occupy movements, and our own financial flops, was strange to sit next to—especially after seeing a state so proud of bringing back small businesses and realistic scales.
We ate. We drank. Can I mention that it was perfect? And it was more perfect to see my family last weekend—Tara, Dad, and Mom. Jesse made apple pancakes for Gabby and family (he’s really perfected that recipe) We spent all our evenings laughing and there was time to share our one year anniversary cake.
