Days of love and endless snow

Monday, February 9, 2015

If you’ve read my recent post about Valentine’s Day, you’ll know that I’ve vowed to keep things PG-13 this year. And let me clarify before you get any ideas about this blog – I’m still talking food and beverage.

There will be no mass consumption of alcohol, no next-day apologies…no questions as to whether I’m still technically part of the family.

I’ve pledged to do more of the Valentine’s Day activities that you’d expect from a mother of three. Baking? Check. Handwritten cards? Check. Chocolate? Yes, please, all of it.

This’ll be a new thing for me. I’m never one to pre-plan for Valentine’s Day. Christmas? Different story. I once ordered presents in August, just to get a jump start on my wrapping. A summer babysitter once innocently asked what all the boxes were for, and when I responded “Christmas”, I could see furtive glances towards the nearest exit.

But Valentine’s Day always surprises me. It takes up a small amount of brain space during the month of February – in the form of “I think it’s coming up soon.” And then, one day, the kids’ backpacks come home with a bulky mound of candy and Hallmark-emblazoned paper with rickety signatures, and gosh darnit, you’ve missed it again.

In an effort not to be the Valentine curmudgeon of years past, I visited our neighborhood Michael’s to pick up some supplies. By the way, have you been to Michael’s? I know that the prospect of visiting a big box retailer may be less thrilling for those of you living in suburban areas, but they just opened one up in Chelsea and it’s like Disneyland. For crafters. I’m definitely not a crafter, but I can get sucked into the moment if I’m in the right place.

There were multiple aisles of Valentine’s day gear from stickers, to heart-stamped tape, paisley-printed cardboard, and plastic jewels to tack onto your love notes. I’m embarrassed to say how much I spent, but I’m comforted by the fact that we’ll have Valentine’s Day crafting materials until my youngest reaches Middle school.

So that’s what we did this weekend. For 15 minutes. Just until the novelty wore off, prompting me to subtly remind {nag} my kids for the rest of the weekend that each child in the class needs a card, not just close friends.

And those reminders were just for the girls. Sam took one look at the heap of pink and red construction paper and decided that he’d prefer to build Ninja stars.

Apologies, friends of Sam. There won’t be Valentine’s Day cards this year. I hope that you’ll forgive me; it wasn’t for lack of effort.

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Family

Winter storm Juno

Monday, February 2, 2015

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“Why are there handcuffs on my kitchen counter?”

[silence]

“Guys, this room is a mess, can you help me clean up?”

[silence]

“Does anyone want some hot chocolate before I pour my booze into it?”

Just a few of the conversations that happened over a very long 36 hours that was, according to Twitter, Instagram and all of the hashtag-using entities: #snowmageddon #winterstormjuno and the #blizzardof2015

Also known as….just your average Tuesday….or most hopefully, Chad Myers’ swan song.

Although it would be sad to see meteorologist Chad Myers go. I eagerly turn on CNN whenever we’re in the face of an impending storm. Simply to see him wild-eyed and foaming gently at the corners of his mouth, talking about Arctic highs and barometric drops. And, I might add, sourcing every other word from World Wrestling Entertainment. With all of the slamming, rocking, and pummeling, we could alternatively be talking about a Guns ‘n Roses concert or a fracking expedition in North Dakota.

So who hangs out with me couch-side when I’m watching these Emmy-worthy performances? That’s where it gets complicated.

Every television show needs its own tactfully-chosen viewing partner. It’s best to watch the tube with someone who’s properly attuned the show’s comedic vision. For ABC’s “The Bachelor”, that viewing partner is my husband. Some of our finest moments as husband and wife have been on the couch, glass of red in hand, voicing suspicions about who’d illegally snuck into our bachelor’s tent after hours. If I were to prioritize, watching these television moments together rank lower than the birth of our children, but might top our trip to South America.

For CNN – and yes, CNN does have a comedic vision…it just doesn’t know it yet – that viewing partner is my Mum.

Rodney, despite his strengths as a Bachelor accomplice, doesn’t think that CNN is funny. A wind-whipped newscaster plunging a yardstick into 3 inches of snow isn’t funny. Don Lemon riding around in the “Blizzardmobile” through the night, investigating a most unstory of stories, isn’t funny. Chad Myers yelling at his fellow newscasters and spiking his script on the ground, isn’t funny.

My Mum, bless her heart, thinks it’s hysterical. Which is why when a storm bears down on the East Coast, we swap phone calls and exchange notes – “did you see the woman with the giant thermometer?”

We’re lucky when we get to watch CNN together in person, which doesn’t happen as often as we’d like these days. So we’re forced to chat virtually; the silver lining of our phone conversations is that she doesn’t have to wonder whose handcuffs are lying on the kitchen counter (let the record state that they belonged to Sam) …or witness the mess that our living room becomes after 36 hours indoors. Or, heaven forbid, see with her bare eyes how much booze gets poured into my hot chocolate.

Some things are better left private. Others…well I’m happy to share a few moments from our experience with Winter Storm Juno last week:

The actual storm before the storm…
(Really, if there was a storm, it happened two days before Winter Storm Juno. Don’t ask me why this storm didn’t get a name…. Weathercasting is confusing even before you even start talking about divergent models and barotropic systems)

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Family

Oh snowy day

Monday, January 26, 2015

With all of the sun and fog and toes in the lake, it would seem as though we haven’t had our fair share of winter.

I’m here to prove to you that not only has blustery weather passed through the Northeast corridor, but that we’ve also been taking advantage of the season.

Some of you may recall that last year our winter season went down the tubes because our pipes froze and burst. I won’t go into the details, but despite all efforts to keep our house at a minimum temperature and turn the water off whenever we leave….sometimes the weather/housing construction gods are in cahoots and will foil your best efforts to maintain a flood-free zone. It was a mess and a three-month effort to clean up.

The good news is that new insulation has made our home much cozier than ever before, giving us renewed freedom to freeze our nose hairs off doing all manner of winter activity.

There’s the obvious winter sport: skiing….a favorite pastime, especially now that we have two down/one to go in our efforts to get our three kids on skis. This weekend I even used poles. Poles I tell you! No backwards inverted pizza as I steer a rickety kindergartener down the mountain. I was carving skis and planting poles and it was northing short of a miracle.

It may surprise you that New Jersey has skiing, but it shocked me to find out that our neighborhood ski area, Mountain Creek, has over 1,000 feet of vertical drop spread across 3 peaks. Look across the foothills and you can see the ridge of the Appalachian trail. If it weren’t the closest ski resort to Manhattan and overrun with a bunch of wild-on-foot yahoos, it would be pretty much perfect.

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Family

Into the fog

Monday, January 19, 2015

When I was in my mid-20s, my (then) fiancée, (now) husband & I applied to business school. We applied all around the country, knowing that acceptance rates were low, and hoping for the best: that we’d both get into the same program, and could move to our next city together.

We were lucky, as UC Berkeley just outside of San Francisco, accepted us both. It was off to Northern California, right across the bridge from his hometown of Marin.

Moving from the East Coast to the West Coast is an adjustment. Seasonal weather, leafy trees, and gothic architecture were quickly replaced by fresh crab, lemon trees, salty air and fog. Lots of it.

That’s what stays with me the most. More than the farmer’s markets, the vintage bookstores on Telegraph Avenue, or the classes themselves. Summer fog, winter fog, day-long fog and morning fog. They just don’t manufacture fog the same way on the East coast.

The Inuits have 50 words to describe their snow: “aqilokoq”:“softly falling snow”; “piegnartoq”:“the snow that is good for driving sleds”; I imagine that Northern Californians have a more intimate understanding of fog. Pea soup, black fog, dry fog, killer fog, sea mist, and valley fog; all names of fog, all unidentifiable to me, even after two years of living there.

“How”, I thought as I wandered out of the lake house one morning recently: “would the Northern Californians classify this?”

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Family

How to get your PhD in nesting

Monday, January 12, 2015

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More nesting. I apologize. But these are particularly good nesting moments that needed to be shared. They happened post-Christmas, which was technically part of the same vacation as the last post. But I couldn’t bore you with 60 images in one sitting. Or you’d never visit this site again, and that would make me so very sad.

You may recall from the last post that I’m working on obtaining my PhD in nesting. Some of you also may know, from experience, that getting a PhD – whether it be in biophysics, mechanical engineering, or the art of relaxation – is hard work.

I spent the first day of 2015 ingesting healthy foods. Which is challenging when someone with a horse tattoo is trying to steal your spiced pumpkin seed garnish.

And I’ve been working on strengthening the mind/body connection with my spiritual guru. He’s an industry leader, having developed a patented set of progressive methods to induce relaxation. Furthermore, he’s published numerous papers in several relaxation journals, and is frequently cited by Psychology Today as one of the great minds of the 21st century.

Let me introduce you:

Central to his theory of relaxation are 1) find a comfortable spot, preferably an off-limits bed and 2) follow a rigorous set of stretching, snoring, and other breathing exercises.