Flashback Friday: Thanksgivings of the Past

Since I did not do the obligatory Thanksgiving Post yesterday, and it is Flashback Friday, I thought I would take you a on a little journey through my Thanksgivings.

From about age 8 through my junior year in college, Thanksgiving consisted of piling into my dad's Honda Accord at 5am on Wednesday morning and driving 8.5 straight hours from Portland, OR to my grandparents' home in Vacaville, CA.  Until I turned 10, it was just my dad and my brother and me.  We fit quite nicely in the car.  When I turned 10, however, my dad married my step-mom who also had a daughter, and from then on it was all five of us crammed in the car, with feet on coolers (so that we wouldn't have to stop) and all of us kids with our backpacks full of car entertainment, all trying not to talk to each other.  Good times.

Once we arrived, we were met by my dad's two sisters and their children (my cousins).  Our Thanksgivings were fairly formal - we all got dressed up, the table was set with my grandmother's finest china a silver, there were place-cards with our names (designed by my cousins and me, of course) and we all waited until all 20 of us were served before we began eating.  Afterward, we changed into PJ's and lounged around the house, finally crashing on the floor on piles of old couch cushions and even older air mattresses that held air for approximately 30 minutes before beginning the slow deflating process that lasted until morning.  After enjoying family togetherness for the following two days, we piled back into the Honda for the 8.5 hour turned 11 hour car ride back to Portland.  Thanksgiving was pretty much the only time that I saw my cousins each year, and was one of the two times I saw my grandparents.  That is probably one of the reasons why I love the holiday so much.

Since college, I've had a series of very interesting Thanksgivings.  Here are a few of note:

The Thanksgiving with the most modes of transportation:  The first Thanksgiving after Jason and I got married, in 2006,  stands out as probably the craziest I've ever had.  My mom's whole family (including 6 brothers and all of their family) decided to rent a house on Orca's Island - a small island off of the coast of Washington state.  Jason and I were living in New York at the time.  I had some extra time off of work, so I decided to fly to Portland for a few days to see my dad and step-mom before catching a plane to Seattle on Wednesday evening.  Jason flew in from New York and met me at the airport, where we rented a car and drove about an hour to the ferry.  We missed the first (and faster) ferry so we had to wait about 2 hours for the next one.  That ferry took about three hours to get to the island.  Once there, we had to drive an additional 30 minutes to the house, on dark winding roads.  Two days later, we turned around and did the whole thing in reverse, complete with a red-eye flight back to New York.  While on the flight, I contracted the stomach flu, and spent the whole flight trying to not to throw up.  I spent the next week off of work, lying in bed.  We decided that we would never, ever, travel for Thanksgiving again.

The Thanksgiving with the longest car ride:  Despite our vow to remain at home for this great holiday, Jason got really depressed about not being able to be with family for Thanksgiving in 2008.  We were still in New York, so the closest family we had were Jason's mom and step-dad in Kansas City, Kansas.  On a whim, we decided to drive there for the week.  It's a 20 hour drive.  We left after work on Friday night and drove through a snow storm to some small town in Ohio.  The next day we drove the remaining 12 hours to Jason's mom's.  And we brought our dog.  Oh yeah, and I was 9 weeks pregnant.  In fact, while we were there, Jason and I had a scare with the pregnancy and feared that I was miscarrying.  So we actually ended up going to the emergency room on Thanksgiving day to make sure everything was all right.  It was.  At the end of the week, we turned around and did the whole drive in reverse.  Everything went fine until we hit Pennsylvania and realized that our car was shaking violently every time we went over 55 mph.  We stopped at a Walmart tire center and discovered that our tires were completely bald and not safe to drive on.  As luck would have it, Walmart did not have the correct tire size.  Our only option was to sign a waver and put the wrong sized tires on our car so that we could complete our journey home.  Quite an adventure.

The Thanksgiving where we should have just gotten takeout:  Jason and I decided to host Thanksgiving at our house last year for 12 people.  My dad and step-mom offered to get one of those prepared Thanksgiving dinners from Safeway, but Jason and I just couldn't bear the thought.  Instead, we decided that we would cook the whole meal ourselves - turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, peas, apple pie, pumpkin pie, and cheesecake, plus appetizers. If you will remember, we were not in the ideal kitchen situation

Jason and I have yet to create our own traditions around this, my favorite holiday.  Hopefully, we can have some stability long enough to do so...or get creative enough that stability doesn't matter!

Flashback Friday: The Journeys of Bear

This is Bear.  He looks a little worn and ragged, but that is for good reason.  He has provided countless hours of comfort and companionship to not one small child but two, and he may well be on his way to accompanying a third.  My mom got Bear when she was 11 years on a trip to Disneyland and he was her companion for the next five or so years.  When I was born, she had him re-stuffed, and he quickly became my most treasured object.

Flashback Friday: Apartment Hunting in the Bronx

I have basically spent all afternoon trying to find apartments in Phoenix, which has had me thinking about the last time we looked for apartments.  It was the fall of 2005, and Jason had just moved to New York.  I was living with a friend at the time, and things between us got kind of tense, so Jason and I needed to find a new place to live pretty quickly.

Our budget was $1,000 a month, which, almost anywhere else in the country, seems lush for a 1 bedroom apartment.  However, it was actually quite meager in NYC.  We considered Queens and Brooklyn, two far more hip and happening boroughs, but ultimately decided to limit our search to upper Manhattan and the Bronx.  I felt comfortable with these areas, as I had been living in the Bronx for the past 18 months and commuting through upper Manhattan.  Plus, we figured that we could get more for our money in both space and proximity to the train in these areas.  

Flashback Friday: The Great Christmas Baking Fiasco

I've been doing a lot of holiday baking so far this year.  Well, really, I've baked one particular dessert several different times, and I'm not done yet.  That dessert is cheesecake.  I have a recipe that my mom developed over several years of testing and trying, and I happen to think it is one of the tastiest things I have ever eaten.  It has become my holiday staple, and I pretty much make it for any holiday gathering occurring between Thanksgiving and New Years.  This year, I made one for Thanksgiving, one for Cy's Blessing celebration, and one for Jason's office holiday party.  I am making four for this Tuesday's Relief Society Enrichment Meeting, and I am making at least one for Christmas Eve dinner.  All of this cheesecake baking reminds me of the first time I made this recipe all by myself.

It was the year 2005 and it marked Jason's first Christmas in New York.  We were engaged and sharing an apartment in the Bronx.  We were unable to fly home for Christmas because we had to fly home in January to plan our wedding in April.  It was admitedly depressing to not be with any other family, so I wanted to bring some of my family's traditions to our little Bronx Christmas.  There are two things that make me think Christmas - homemade cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning and cheesecake for Christmas Dinner.  So, never having made either before, I set to make them both on Christmas Eve.

I began with the Cinnamon rolls at about 1:00pm in the afternoon.  I mixed all of the ingredients, rolled them up, put them in the pan and left them to rise.  And left them.  And left them.  They didn't seem to be rising the way I thought they should, but I baked them anyway.  They came out small and hard, and they smelled oddly of play-dough.  I took one out and took a bite and was disgusted to discover that they tasted of play-dough as well!  After examining the flour bag, I realized that, not being a regular baker, I was using extremely old flour! I think it had expired like 6 months prior or something.  So, I started all over.  I don't remember exactly how long the cinnamon rolls take to rise and bake, but it is quite some time.  It was at least evening by this point.

I then began my cheesecake.  After several phone calls to my mom, I had it all mixed and ready to go. The way her recipe works is that, after making the graham cracker crust, you then make the rich, cream cheese filling.  You bake that for about 30 minutes, let it cool for 10 minutes, then put on the sour cream topping and bake for another 10 minutes.  I guess with eating dinner and what not, the process took quite some time.  When I pulled it out of the oven the first time, I was extremely pleased with the results.  Beleive me when I tell you that it was perfect.  There was not one single crack, it was smooth, and the perfect consistency.  I mixed the sour cream topping, and put it back in the oven.  While it baked I took a shower, as I had been baking all day and was tired and dirty.

It was about 1:30am Christmas morning when I went to pull the cheesecake out of the oven for the final time. Oh man, it's hard to talk about even now, four years late.  I pulled the cheesecake out, and as I did, the bottom of my spring form pan popped out of the ring, rose into the air (with the cheesecake on top, of course), turned over and landed with a splat on the floor.  I believe my response went something like this:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I then ran into the bedroom and flung myself on the bed in a fit of tears.  I had been baking for 12 hours and all I had to show for it was one lousy batch of cinamon rolls!  Jason ran in from the living room to see what was wrong, sure I had burnt myself or cut off a limb or something.  When he saw the disaster, being the thoughtful guy that he is, he immediately grabbed a camera and snapped a picture.

Yes, my friends, that is what happens when hot cheesecake, which has not yet had time to set, is thrust to the ground by gravity. It really did flip exactly upside down in the air.  Kind of amazing, really.

That is the splatter effect up the dishwasher.  What you can't see, is that it also splattered clear under the dishwasher.

A close up.

To his credit, Jason sent me to bed and cleaned up the whole mess, after getting photographic evidence, of course.  The worst part was that I was going to miss out on my Christmas Cheesecake!  Fortunately, our good friend Jean was also unable to go home for Christmas and was planning to join us for ours.  I called her first thing Christmas morning and asked if there was anywhere in her neighborhood that was open on Christmas day that might sell cream cheese and sour cream.

Lucky for us, there was, and so I made my second ever cheesecake fewer than 24 hours after making (and killing) the first.  Though not quite as perfect as the first, it was still mighty tasty!

Cheesecake #2

Fortunately, I have yet to have a repeat of that disaster; however, I have been permanently scarred.  While I am fine to remove the cheesecake from the over after it's first baking, I am so terrified of a repeat performance that I insist that Jason remove it after it's second baking, just to be on the safe side.

Flashback Friday: Jager's Accidental Overdose

I've managed to let the past two Fridays slip by with nary a Flashback, and I just couldn't let it happen again! So, here is another Jager story for you.  As you may remember, Jager finds just about everything edible.  Her credits include chapstick, an unused pregnancy test, clorox wipes, and 20 PB&J sandwiches.  However, her most infamous - not to mention most dangerous and expensive - incident occurred two years ago on this, the Friday before Thanksgiving. 


On that Friday, Jason and I had gone out to dinner after work.  We arrived home to pools of dog vomit all over the hallway and living room.  It was like a crime scene unfolding before our eyes.  With each step we saw another, and another pool of vomit.   We quickly realized that she had gotten into something, so we began scouring the house for evidence.  I don't remember who discovered it, but one of us got to the bedroom at the back of the house first, and there it was - an empty bottle of Ibuprofen.  It was a large bottle of 200mg gel caps, one of the 80 count ones and it had been a little over half full when we left that morning.  We figured that she had consumed somewhere around 50 caplets - a total of 10,000 mg of Ibuprofen.  Yikes.

We called animal poison control and were told to monitor her for stomach ulcers and kidney failure.  At first she seemed her usual, peppy self, but by Sunday morning, she refused to go outside, would hardly leave our bed and was peeing all over the house.  We did some research on-line and found out that Malox could help dogs with potential stomach ulcers, so we went and got some.  And here's the funny part - our dog, who eats literally everything, balked at the Malox.  She clamped her lips closed, and when we forcefully opened them and poured in the MAlox, she shoved her tongue to the roof of her mouth and forced it back out again, spitting out showers of chalky, white Malox. Then she ran away with her tail between her legs.  To this day, shake a bottle of Malox in front of this dog and she runs for the hills.  And they say dogs have no memory.

Anyway, we finally took her to the vet on Monday morning.  Before we set out, we determined that she had a budget of $500 - that's all we could afford to pay.  When the vet examined her he found that she had extreme kidney failure and bleeding stomach ulcers.  And, even though she had been drinking water vociferously, she was severely dehydrated because the ulcers kept her stomach from absorbing the water she drank.  He admitted her overnight and gave her IV fluids and antibiotics.  The total - $580. Ok, we figured, we can handle that.

The next day, however, the vet called back to say that she could not keep food down and would therefore have to stay another few days - probably until Thursday, but since that was Thanksgiving and they were closed, they would keep her until Friday but not charge us the extra day.  The total for the remaining four days - $500.  Well, here's the thing.  At this point, we had already invested over $500 into our dog.  So if we brought her home early, we had the possibility of losing not only our dog, but also our $500!  So, we dug deep and paid the additional $500.  

Yep, that's right, we spent over a $1000 on our dog - we are those people.  But the thing is, she is part of our family, and at the time, we had no children.  We realized then, though, that if we had had children, we would not have been able to make that choice.  Lucky for her, we could, and we did, and she has now made a full recovery (though her bladder control was never quite the same). 

Fortunately, we've since learned our lesson.  We do a "Jager check" every time we leave the house, just to be sure that we haven't left anything tempting.  And we've learned to expand our definition of what is edible, because with a dog like Jager, you just never know.

A Tribute to the Low Man (or Woman?) on the Totem Pole

In our house, there exists a kind of hierarchy of priorities when it comes to those who can't take care of themselves. At the top, of course, is Cyrus. I don't even really think I need to go into detail as to why - he is, after all, our child. Next comes our dog, Jager. Before Cy was born, she took top priority. (Some time, I'll tell you just how much of a priority she was as illustrated by her $1,000 doggy hospital visit - that's another story though). And then, at the very bottom, as a sort of afterthought, is our cat. Even her name suggests little attention or care - we simply call her "Cat". Hers is a story of accidental ownership.

Jager was adopted by Jason the day I left for New York, and she moved with him across the country (and back again, come to think of it). Cyrus was painstakingly planned and tried for. The cat, on the other hand, was discovered by me one December night when I was walking Jager through our Bronx neighborhood. It was snowing and she was huddling in a box. I didn't even rescue her the first time I saw her. I went back home with Jager, and then told Jason about her over dinner after he got home. I suggested we go back out to see if she was all right. We both knew, of course, that if the cat was still there we would be bringing her inside - neither of us is so heartless as to leave a cat outside in the snow. Well, she was there all right and so we brought her in. She was completely emaciated, and most definitely wouldn't have survived the night. She was so weak she couldn't walk. We fed her and made a little bed for her in a box, and then the next morning Jason set to work finding her a shelter. He called nearly every shelter in the NY-metropolitan area. Each shelter's response was the same - "Oh, you say she's inside your house? Well, congratulations on your new pet." The shelters were so overrun that they wouldn't accept an animal that had been taken in. We tried for two weeks to find her a home, and then finally accepted the fact that we had a new cat. That's how she got her name. We didn't want to name her officially when we thought we were getting rid of her so we just kept referring to her as "the cat". By the time we finally decided to keep her, the name had stuck and there it was - "Cat".

Now, some cats are quite fun and endearing...but this one is a little odd. She isn't skittish, by any means, but she can be territorial of spaces and extremely fickle - one minute she loves you and is purring loudly, and the next minute she's ripping your hand to shreds. I still kind of like her, but I'm a cat person - Jason merely tolerates her, on some days more than others. She claws the furniture and can be extremely needy in the most annoying way. She wasn't even supposed to make the cross country trip, but we couldn't find her a home with someone we knew and I just couldn't turn her out on the streets. So she still belongs to us, but kind of by default.

However, despite all of this, she has some cute moments. I realized today that I don't think I've mentioned her on this blog except for as part of our retched subletter experience. Obviously Cyrus is going to get more press time than either of our animals, but Jager at least has a label. So, I thought it might be time to give the cat a little attention, even if only via my blog. One of her few endearing qualities is that she creates some fantastic photo-ops just by chance. Here are some of our more amusing pictures of the cat:

Cat doing Su Doku

For some reason, nothing is as enticing to her as a pile of freshly folded laundry. Now, I didn't place those items on top of her - they were neatly stacked. She wedged herself underneath them for some reason.

Though I think most cats like bags, this one has an obsession with them. She seems to find it her personal responsibility to investigate any bag lying around, and sometimes she finds herself caught up in it. She dragged this bag all over the kitchen for about 20 minutes one night.

We had this bag of plastic bags hanging in our closet in the Bronx so that we could grab a plastic bag for Jager's walks. The cat decided that it made a nice bed. You can't tell in the picture, but it is suspended about four feet off of the ground.

Apparently we didn't feed her fast enough, because she sought out the food herself.

Maybe if she keeps doing cute things, we'll keep her a little longer.

Flashback Friday: The Story Behind the T-shirt and Tux

Last week, I posted this picture at the end of my post about Jason rejecting me in 7th grade:




This picture was taken just after Jason and I got engaged. As you may notice, and as was pointed out in two comments on last week's post, Jason is wearing a tux and I am in a grubby T-shirt. I guess this begs some explaining, so here it goes.

First, a little background info. In the spring of 2005, Jason and I had been dating for 4 years and all but three months of that had been long distance. We started dating when I was in college in Los Angeles, and continued dating while I studied abroad in South Africa, worked two summers at Trail Blazers Camp in New Jersey, and then while I lived in the Bronx to continue working full time for Trail Blazers. There is only so much communicating and relationsihp building that you can do over the phone, and it became pretty obvious by that Spring that we either needed to be living in the same city or we needed to break up. Fortunately, Jason opted to move to New York.

Since I left the city each summer to live full time at our camp in New Jersey, Jason toyed with the idea of working at a different summer camp. He even had several job offers with various rich-kid sports camps. However, our camp was in desperate need of lifeguards and Jason was a strong swimmer, so at the last minute, he turned down those other jobs and decided to move out to the wilderness and work as a lifeguard for the summer with a bunch of crazy kids. Oh yeah, and me!

Now this may sound like the perfect summer camp romance, but please consider a few things before jumping to that conclusion: First of all, I was essentially the assistant director at that time, and therefore more or less Jason's boss. We had very different sets of rules to follow. Also, our camp was intense in the strongest sense of that word. We lived in teepees, used latrines, went backpacking, cooked over open fires, all with inner-city kids, who were not only unfamilar with the setting, but also often came with their own sets of challenges and baggage. And the summer of 2005 was even more intense than usual for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here.

So, now you have the background. Now, when someone moves clear across the country for you, it's pretty obvious that marriage is likely in the cards. Jason and I had talked about it all summer, and had even looked at rings on one of our days off, so I knew a proposal was coming. But I like surprises, so I didn't want to know the specifics. (Are you starting to get a sense of how the clothing choices came to be?)Fortunately, Jason is extremely romantic and thoughtful, and pretty good at planning things.

At the end of camp, after the kids have gone home, the staff stay for an extra two days to help take things down for the winter. On the last day we have a big staff banquet, and then all of the staff leave early the next morning. Part of my job as an administrator was to make sure that all of the staff's jobs had been done properly before staff banquet could start. So on that afternoon, I was preparing to go pack up my belongings and then to go do some checks around camp. As I was heading out to my shelter, two co-workers, Kate and Jean, asked me to take a walkie-talkie with me. I thought this was a bit odd as the kids had already left, but I figured they just wanted to be able to reach me as they checked their sections.

So, I'm in my shelter and I hear Kate and Jean on the radio, calling me over to them. They were standing at the top of a path that led down to probably one of the most beautiful spots on camp property, a place called Vesper Glenn. It sits right down next to the lake and is surrounded by trees and flowers. Anyway, when I approach them, they both have very somber looks on their faces and they tell me that we have a problem. According to them, when one of the other staff members checked Vesper Glenn, she found beer cans, bottles, and other evidence of debauchery. Kate asked me to follow her and explained that I just had to see it for myself. Now, our staff that summer were a bit rowdy, but this stil seemed a bit far-fetched. I was beginning to wonder if there was some other plot hatching, but I went along with it anyway.

As we began walking down the path, Kate said the following: "The staff have really done it now. I think we're just going to have to cancel staff banquet and send them all home tonight." Mind you, it was already 4 in the afternoon. On hearing this, I became convinced that Jason was about to propose, so I got this huge grin on my face. However, I also thought that there was a chance, albeit very slight, that Kate and Jean were actually telling the truth, so I tried to hide my grin so that I wouldn't look too stupid if I ended up being wrong.

Well, fortunately, I was not wrong. As I got to the bottom of the path, I heard "our song" playing and saw this:



Yep, that's Jason in a tuxedo with two dozen roses ready to propose. This was my reaction:



He did it all right. He got down on one knee and said some amazingly romantic things, then presented me with my ring.



Of course, I said yes! As we kissed, I heard this huge cheer erupt. I looked out across the lake to the girl's dock and saw almost the entire camp staff cheering! Apparently, everyone knew about the proposal but me! In fact, they had been delaying the staff swim until after Jason proposed.

One of the best parts for me was hearing all of the effort that went in to staging this proposal. Camp is located in a very tiny town, and yet somehow Jason managed to procure a tux. The morning of, he made some excuse to me about needing things for the banquet and went out to buy flowers and pick up his tux. Then, he and another staff member dogded me as he headed over to get set up. Those little tables with white table cloths? They are actually milk crates covered in white camp sheets! At the last minute, he realized that the cd player needed new batteries and he had to run over to the girl's side to get batteries and then run back over to Vesper Glenn - all while wearing a tux in swealtering, humid New Jersy August heat. Here's a shot of what that looked like:



So there you have it. I was wearing a grubby t-shirt because that's pretty much what I wore all summer long, and I was caught by surprise. Jason was wearing a tux becuase he is romantic. And, to answer Kristen's question, the No Bull t-shirt was a left-over from college, when I belonged to - wait for it - the vegetarian club. Get it? No Bull? Yep, pretty clever, I know.

Just Sit Back and Relax, Already!

Call me naive, but generally speaking, I beleive that all people are good at heart  I really do.  But there is something about airplanes that seems to bring out the worst in people, and I just don't get it.  Let me share some examples.

On several occasions I  have been on flights where, upon landing, the captain or flight attendant mentions that some people on the flight have close connections in this city and asks everyone on the plane to please let these folks off of the airplane first.  On at least one occasion, I was one of these people, and because of whether delays I had literally 20 minutes from the moment my first flight landed to the moment my next flight took off - we're not talking got to the gate here, we're talking touched down.  And of course, I happened to be at the very back of the plane.  The captain made his announcement, but, as I've seen on every other similar flight, no one listened.  Everyone rushed for the aisle and took their time getting their bags, while I sweated that I might not make my connecting flight.  As if this wasn't stressful enough already, it happened to be Christmas Eve.  If this were the only time I had experienced this, I might be able to chalk it up to  excitement/stress/anxiety over getting home for the Holidays - but it has happened on other far more mundane days.

I was actually talking to Jason about this very thing as he drove Cy and I to the airport yesterday.  And as if to confirm my assertion that airplane travel makes people rude, I encountered several more examples of unpleasant behavior on our flight.  To fully appreciate these examples, you should know that our flight was 100% full.  Ok, here they are:

1. A woman gets on the flight toward the end of boarding and she is carrying a large, round, hard case.  As she looks around at the overhead bins, searching for somewhere to put her case, the guy sitting across the aisle from me says very loudly  and with attitude, "Ship it next time".  As she continues looking for a place for her case, he says, again loud enough for her to hear, "Come on Lady, just sit down already."

2.  Another woman gets on with a small rolling suitcase and tries to put it in the overhead bin above her seat. There is a laptop case that is clearly small enough to fit under a seat but is making it impossibly for her to fit in her suitcase.  She asks around to find out to whom is belongs and when a guy pipes up, she asks kindly if he can please put it under his seat, where there is nothing being stored.  He replies "There is no room."  They go back and forth about why he can't put it there and the woman ultimately has to check her bag while the man has nothing under the seat in front of him.  Incidentally, she ended up sitting next to him, which I'm sure made for an uncomfortrable flight.

3.  There is a woman sitting behind me with a small child in her lap as well.  Before the flight takes off, both her child and Cyrus are being very good, but are making little babay noises.  The guy sitting across from her says "Wow, I guess we're not going to get any peace on this flight" loudly enough, obviously, that I can hear him.  As if those of us with babies aren't already overly concious of the fact that our babies could be loud and disruptive during a flight, someone has to point it out to us.

Now I suppose it is possible that all three of these people in the above examples are just rude anyway.  However, I don't think it's possible that several airplanes-full of people are rude in their every day life.  And I like to think that those three people sitting near me are also kind at some point in their lives.  So if that is the case, then what is it about airplanes that makes people say and/or do things that make others' lives more difficult or make others feel bad.  Is it the anxiety of flying?  Is it the fact that you are likley to never see these people again?  And, does a full flight lead to more anxiety and thus to more abandoning of basic human decency?  I don't know the answer.  But I do know that I now make a concious effort to smile to parents when their kids are being loud or taking a long time, to only put large items in the overhead compartment and wait to put my jacket in until the end, and to allow those folks with connecting flights to get off first.  Above all else, I try to keep my comments to myself so that, at the very least, I don't make someone feel bad.

Has anyone else noticed this airplane phenomenon?  Does anyone have any insight into what might make it so? 

Oh How Much Can Change in a Year

Exactly one year ago yesterday Jason and I found out that we were pregnant with Cyrus.  It probably seems a little strange to remember the exact date of that kind of thing, but I do. And I know the date because I remember feeling cramps on October 8, which was the due date of our first baby, the one we miscarried at 10 weeks.  And I remember thinking on October 8th that it was only the 17th day of my cycle (you keep track of these things when you are trying to get pregnant) and how cruel of a trick for me to be getting cramps on the very day that I was supposed to be giving birth.  And then nothing happened. I took a pregnancy test on day 26, and lo and behold, I was pregnant!  It was pretty much the perfect time because I think that if I hadn't gotten pregnant that month, I may have gone just a little crazy - in fact, I'm pretty sure I was already headed down that path.  As I'm sure is the case with anyone trying to get pregnant, it can be torturous every month that you aren't, and I think this is especially true if you've suffered a miscarriage - or at least it was for me.

So anyway, that blessed day came and suddenly our whole perspective changed.  We began making plans and before we knew it, our whole life had changed, and that was even before the baby arrived!  It is a rather interesting sequence of events that have led to where we are right now, and as I've been reflecting on it, I thought I would share.

We pretty much decided right away that raising a child in New York, and especially in the Bronx, just wasn't going to work for us.  Now I know lots of women who do raise kids in the Bronx, and I admire them greatly, but if you don't have to, why would you?  It's just hard in many, many ways.  Plus, we realized pretty quickly that we couldn't pay for child-care on our non-profit salaries, and we couldn't afford for me to stay home on just Jason's salary, while still living in New York.  So it was settled - we would simply have to leave New York.  The first question was where would we go and the second was, when would we leave.

Sometime at the end of October, well before we had told any of our family that there was a baby on the way, my dad called to tell me that the person who had been living in and managing the room rentals in his Portland house was leaving and that if we were thinking about coming to Portland in the next year or so, that we could take over.  Well, that pretty much answered the first question. Portland was where we wanted to live anyway, and now that we had housing it was a no-brainer.  However, we were still thinking we would wait until the end of the summer/beginning of fall to move - it just seemed a more convenient time for Jason's job.

Well, as a kind of side note, we decided to drive to Kansas for Thanksgiving, as that was where our closest family lived and we couldn't really afford to fly anywhere, and, we really didn't want to spend the holiday alone.  (Another key reason why leaving New York was bound to happen).  As we left our family and began the 20-hour drive back to New York, we both realized that we just really, really, REALLY didn't want to be going back there.  We were done with New York, and the sooner we could get out of there, the better.  So on that drive we decided that summer was far too long to wait, and instead, we needed to move before the baby was born.

We put things in motion right away.  We set a "Leave NY" date of February 28th.  We called my dad and told him he was going to be a grandpa and that we wanted to move into his house.  We gave our notice at both of our jobs and at our apartment.  We cautiously started telling people that a baby was on the way.

And then we were off. There was no turning back.  Even as we realized that the job market in Portland was somewhat abysmal. Even as we realized that the cost of moving across the country was going to be astronomical.  It didn't matter.  This just seemed to be the right thing to do.

So we somehow made it work.  We traded in our money-guzzling Saturn Vue (that is another story altogether - one that I may or may not have the stomach to tell) for a mini van with "stow-and-go" seating that would help facilitate our cross-country move.  We sold most of our furniture and cleared out more than half of the random crap that had accumulated over the five-plus years we had lived in New York.  And on February 28th we packed our van and a trailer, pretty much filling them to capacity, and headed west.

We arrived in Portland with a place to live and that was about it.  We had practically no furniture, no job, no plan, really - just a good feeling.  And fortunately, it worked out. Jason found a job that paid enough for us to pay our bills and included insurance (a big deal, I discovered, when you're about to have a baby).

Sometimes, it's hard to imagine that just a year ago our life was very different.  We definitely had more money, but we also had way, way more stress.  Life in New York is stressful, or at least it was for us.  When I saw the word "pregnant" pop up on that little test, I of course knew my life would change (how could it not with a baby) but I don't think I could have imagined it changing this much.  And yet, I'm glad it did.  It now feels like this is pretty much where we're supposed to be, at least for now.

Flashback Friday: The Perils of 7th Grade Romance

This week we are venturing back to the oh so terrifying days of Junior High in all of their awkward glory.  Surely you remember those days - when everyone is jockying for popularity, when boys and girls are starting to really figure out that they like each other, but don't really know what to do about it.  

Toward the end of 7th grade, this boy moved into our school.  I thought he was pretty nice and kind of cute.  We started spending a lot of time together, just talking and hanging out, often with a group of other people.  At the end of the year, our whole class went to Oak's Park and this boy and I spent almost the whole day together.  I realized that I liked him - you know, LIKED him, like, more than a friend.  And, as 7th grade girls do, I told my friends who all assured me that he liked me too.  In fact, I'm sure there was one of those fun chains where one of my friends asked one of his friends to ask him if he liked me, and I think that by the time it got back to me, the answer was yes.

Well, I must have felt very bold because I decided, probably after hours of consultation with my friends, that I would approach this boy and find out for sure if he liked me.  From there, I'm not sure exactly where I thought things would go, or if I had even thought that far ahead - I guess the point was really just to find out if we liked each other.  

As luck would have it, we took yet another 7th grade trip (what was with all of these class trips, by the way?), this time to a park, and we were all walking there together.  It just so happened that this boy and I ended up walking together, because, after all, we had become pretty good friends.  So as we were walking I decided that this was my big chance to find out just what was in store for me.  I mustered up my courage and led with this fantastic line: "So, I hear you kind of like me."  Smooth, I know.  And then I waited for his affirmation.

Imagine my surprise and chagrin when he replied with "Well, you shouldn't believe everything you hear."  Pause. Wait, what?  He doesn't like me?  Oh, the embarrassment!  Oh the hurt!  How could the friend chain have been so wrong?  My cheeks instantly flushed bright red and I stammered something incomprehensible, then proceeded to begin walking really, really fast, so as to put distance not only between myself and the boy but also between me and that horribly embarrassing situation.  I do believe I cried my little eyes that evening.  Alas, whatever visions I had of 7th grade romance had been shattered.

Sometimes, things happen for a reason.  That boy and I recovered from the awkardness of junior high and he eventually became my best friend, then my boyfriend, and finally my husband.  If I had dated that boy in 7th grade, who knows what would have become of our relationship.  Plus, now whenever we have an argument, I get to remind him (all in good fun, of course) that he broke my heart once upon a time!

Jason and I right after he proposed.

Flashback Friday: The Subletter from Hell

All right, I'm not sure what the blogger protocol is for starting a post series and then interrupting it...but I'm going to do it anyway. It is, after all, Friday, and it's time for a Flashback!

The summer after Jason and I got married we both planned to work at the camp I ran in New Jersey, and therefor would be leaving our apartment empty for the summer. Now, I don't know how common the practice is in other parts of the country, but if you're a New Yorker and you plan to vacate your apartment for even a short time, let alone three months, you better believe you're going to try to capitalize on that and sublet it! So, that is what we set out to do. We posted on craigslist and even offered to pay utilities if the potential subletter was willing to keep our cat for the summer and take care of her (we took our dog with us to camp, but couldn't accommodate the cat).

New York is a pretty hot spot for subletters, and although the Bronx is slightly (or more than slightly) less appealing than most of the other boroughs (except Staten Island...no one wants to live there), we did get a fair number of responses. We showed the place to a few people, but it was a pretty long commute to Manhattan, so no one was interested so far. Then we met Kerry*. She was a law student with an internship in upstate New York and so our Bronx apartment was perfect for her. She came to take a look and immediately wanted the place. We were less sure about her. I couldn't put my finger on it, but there was just something about her that didn't sit right - she seemed a little awkward in kind of a hostile sort of way. Oh, if only I had heeded my gut instinct. But, it was very close to summer and we desperately needed a subletter, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt and we decided to go ahead and sublet to her. I mean, she was law student, after all, how bad could she be?

Despite our hesitation, our good nature and assumption that others are also of good nature took over, and we didn't even write up a contract. We did ask for a security deposit, equal to one month's rent, and then asked for each of the three month's rent to be paid on the first of the month. We packed up our clothes and some of our more valuable items and left them with a friend, scrubbed the heck out of the apartment, and then left our cat and moved to New Jersey for the summer.

Fast forward to August 15th and we haven't received August's rent yet. I called her and e-mailed her several times, but got no response. By sometime around the 25th of August the kids had left camp, but I was staying for another week to close things up, and I still hadn't heard from her. I feared the worst. I had visions of scenes worthy of Law and Order running through my head, and at the very least I was worried about my cat. So I grabbed a friend and drove the 2 hours back to the city. I remember distinctly sitting in the car outside of my apartment, feeling nervous. What would I find? Would she be alive? Dead? Tied up? What other solution could there be to not getting rent and not hearing back from her? Or would I find my apartment emptied of all of my possessions?

Well, I still had a set of keys, so we went up to the door, knocked several times, and finally entered with my key. I cannot describe the scene before my eyes. I literally pushed the door open against a pile of clothes and shoes and the pile continued all the way down the long hallway to the bedroom. The living room was also a disaster. And then I saw my cat. My poor, street-rescued cat had more than doubled in size! She was so fat her head almost disappeared! Before I walk into the kitchen to further inspect the damage, Kerry popped her head out from the bedroom, clearly only half-dressed. And this was the weird part - she didn't say "Hang on a minute let me put some pants on" or "I'm just in the middle of getting dressed, give me a minute" she just proceeded to have a conversation with me while she poked her torso out of the bedroom. I told her I hadn't received rent and that I had been worried because I hadn't heard from her and all she said was, I sent a check, sorry. I was so taken aback by the state of the apartment and by her oddness, that my only response was "I'm taking the cat and going back to camp." My friend still laughs at that statement. It had a ring similar to "I'm taking my toys and going home!"

I went into the kitchen to grab the cat's food and discovered why my poor animal was so obese - there was container after container of cat food sitting on the counter. It was like an all-you-can-eat buffet, 24/7. Now some cats might know when to say when, but not rescue kitty - oh no, she always ate in survival mode. If it was there, she consumed it just in case it wasn't there the next day. So she had been gorging herself on cat food for who knows how long! Then, we left and drove back to camp.

A week later, on Labor Day, Jason and I returned to our apartment for good at about 8:30pm, not sure what we would find. On first glance, it didn't seem to be too bad. But as we looked closer, we saw just how disgusting this law student was. Oh friends, it was ugly. Let's just say we cleaned for three hours before I felt Ok going to bed, and then spent the entire next day trying to get our apartment back. Words are good, but pictures are better. Below, please observe the grossness...

The Kitchen floor, before we even had a chance to sweep up the rest of the stuff on the floor. (No, that's not a real tomato, it's a timer, but still)

Our bed, with a mysterious, scary stain on my Egyptian Cotton mattress pad. That stain went through the mattress pad, the foam egg crate and the mattress! We threw the top two out and got a new mattress a few months later.

The buildup of cat hair on the area rug in the living room.

Where the cat box usually sat. It looked as though it had not been cleaned out once. Then we picked it up and saw this beneath it. Clearly, the cat litter that went over the edge of the box had not been swept up. It took me over thirty minutes to clean this 2 square feet of tile!

I wish this was all. There was pot ash on the coffee table, strange stains on the wood floor that took off a few layers of finish, she had taken our laundry basket and our bathmat, had gotten bleach on one of towels, left an air conditioning unit on a windowsill and turned it pink with water damage, and had left various sundry clothing items, books and jewelry. And it didn't stop there. We continued to find evidence of her damage and presence long after she left. Part of the deal was that we paid utilities. When we got the electric bill for the month of August, it was $200 more than it had ever been, due to the running of the air conditioning unit 24/7. When we got our cable bill, she had ordered pornos on our TV.

Now for the worst part. Remember that last month's rent that I never received? Well, I never received it...ever. I e-mailed and e-mailed and called. Her number had been discontinued and she never responded to my e-mails. We had her security deposit, but there's no way she would have gotten that back after the damage she left, and we still ended up losing money because of the things we had to replace. She also hadn't returned our keys, which started to freak me out. I finally got kind of urgent in my e-mails regarding the keys. A few days later, the keys showed up in several layers of envelope, with no return address.

Some of my friends and family wanted us to pursue her, try to get her to pay her last month's rent. But honestly, I was just so sick of the whole thing and was so glad to be done with it that I just wanted to close that chapter and forget about her. Annoyingly, we continued to get mail for her for several months, and even found an old package addressed to her when we were packing up to leave, nearly three years later! She just would not be forgotten...

We had all kinds of ideas about what we would do differently the following summer - collecting the whole summer's rent up front, drawing up a contract, having a friend in the city just drop by every now and again, trust our gut instinct, etc. However, Jason ended up getting a job he couldn't and didn't want to leave for the summer, so we never had to deal with that again. Which is good, because I'm not sure I would have had the stomach for it anyway!

* Name has been changed to protect the guilty.

Who's your daddy? (or mommy)

When Cy was first born, pretty much everyone commented on how much he looked like Jason or a member of Jason's family. Now as he's growing and changing, I'm trying to see if it looks like I had anything to do with him. Check out the picture comparisons below. Who do you think Cyrus most resembles?

In the top picture are Jason and his twin brother Brian. Jason is on the left (denoted by the penned in J). Below is Cyrus is the same shirt. Check out those profiles!

In the top picture is me at around 6 months. In the bottom picture is Cyrus at around 2.5 months. Well, we at least seem to share some temperament...

Ahh, here we go. Now we see the similarities! Check out those pouts! I guess he did get a little something from me after all!

Flashback Friday: My film debut

Welcome to the first installment of Flashback Friday! Several of my blogging friends implement this blogging idea, and I decided to try it out, especially since I can use all the inspiration I can get as I attempt to write 31 posts in 31 days!

About four years ago, my aunt and uncle generously included my mom, step-dad and I on their family's trip to Disney World. One of rides in Disney's Hollywood Studios is the Studio Backlot Tour that begins with a live demonstration of how water tanks and pyrotechnics create the effects of battles and storms. At some point as we were waiting in line for the tour to begin, someone came out and asked for four volunteers to help with the demonstration. Now, I don't remember exactly how it happened, but someone my family managed to convince me to do it, and I in turn convinced my Aunt Bev to join me.

They ushered us out to this little hut and had us dress in full coveralls and then proceeded to explain the setup. We were filming a Harbor Attack on board a battle ship. I don't remember the parts of the other two people, but my aunt and I were chosen to be deckhands, and our job was to provide comic relief. When the attack began, we were told, we should lose all composure, fall to our knees, pray, run around, etc.

Aunt Bev and I preparing for our big roles.

Now, as some of you may know, I was pretty involved in high school theater, and I consider myself to somewhat of a ham. And, my Aunt is quite the character, so I figured she would go right along with me and we would make fools of ourselves together. So, when the battle began, I played it up - I threw my towel in the air in a panic, fell to one knee and theatrically pleaded to God, and grabbed my aunt in a terrified embrace. I did all of this expecting that she would join me. Instead, she choked! She just doubled over in hysterical laughter, leaving me to be comedic releif all on my own!

Aunt Bev doubled over with laughter as I act the fool.

All through the scene, I continued to play my part, waiting for her to join me, but it never happened! As we exited, I asked her what the heck happened! Did I do it wrong? Did I look really stupid? Why was she laughing at me? Through tears of laughter, she told me that she was so impressed by my performance that she couldn't pull it together! Apparently, I was even funnier than I thought. For the rest of the day, my aunt periodically laughed out loud as she remembered our performance. She even bought me my own "Oscar" at the end of the tour - most likely the closest I'll ever come to receiving one!

Aunt Bev still chuckling as we make our exit.