news as of late.

I’ve been awakened to all that is Downton Abbey. I never usually follow TV shows as they’re airing, but seriously. How many of you knew about this and didn’t force me to watch it? I can’t remember life before it and I wait for season three with bated breath. 

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I got a job as a Stylist at the most fabulous store: Madewell. Go to the site. Look, shop, and drool over everything. If you come to the King of Prussia Mall (largest on the east coast mind you), I’ll help you fashion a fabulous outfit. I know that I once stated that I could never be a fashion blogger because I love to dress frumpy, but maybe now I’ll be inspired to post photos of what I wear to work. Gotta look fly, friends. And it’s so awesome to work in a place that is fashion-forward. My last place of employment could barely handle my bright pink J.Crew chinos. If I do get gutsy and post outfit photos, we can call it off-the-job advertising. We’ll see. No promises. 

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Remember our ridiculous summer away from home? Well we just embarked on another three weeks away. We’re currently in Santa Barbara visiting a dear college friend, then we're off to San Diego for my brother’s wedding. In just 8 days, we’ll be at the most incredible mountain-top Southern California party wedding, and we’ll inherit a new sister-in-law! Will and I are both in the wedding, which is fun, and we’re so excited to have time away for a destination wedding with so many family members and friends. My brother and I are incredibly close, so I feel like this wedding will be more enjoyable for me than my own - almost all the same people, except the attention won’t be on me so I can actually chill and relax (not to mention eat a full meal and have time to dance)! Then after the west coast party, we head back to Massachusetts for the east coast party. The fun never stops, friends.

[my brother on the far left, Landon from Santa Barbara on the far right]

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I painted our front door a lovely shade of eggplant. I’ll post a photo when we get home. I really like it.

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We rescued six adorable baby red squirrels from our backyard. The mom had abandoned them for hours so we grew worried. We called an animal rehabber who has us box them up and drive them to her house - where she and her husband are currently raising like 70 abandoned squirrels until they’re old enough to be released. Can you even fathom that?! But she sent us a few photos of them to let us know they’re progressing well. Here are some of our little friends at roughly 6-7 weeks old.

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Well I suppose that’s all for now. I’m never good at posting on the road (and not even that great when I’m stationary), but I’ll try to send some goodies from our next three weeks of travel!

1 year, 2 months and 3 days ago.

I know, I'm late. But the experience still needs to be shared.

One year, two months and three days ago we were doing this:

And just two months and three days ago, we were doing this! Will surprised me with a sunset hot air balloon ride, remarkably just 15 minutes from home. It pays to live in the farmlands.

Needless to say, it was absolutely stunning. I have always been infatuated with the idea of hot air balloons and would not so subtly drop hints about wanting to do it someday. Will had done it before but this was my maiden voyage! It was so cool watching them inflate it, but it's definitely a time consuming process. We got there around 5 and I don't think we took off until after 7. These guys were really cool though and they explained everything to us as they were doing it and were very keen on letting us get nice and close. 

Now I'm totally a thrills person - there isn't a roller coaster I won't try and heights don't bother me at all. But in my opinion, it's quite a bit different when you're in a hot air balloon. As you can see, I had fixed quite the death grip on that pole. Will was all dangling over, seeing the sites - but for crying out loud, we went 6,400 feet. You did not mis-read that. We were over a mile off the ground hanging in a glorified picnic basket. No restraints, no seat belts - just hovering a mile off the earth. Talk about a seriously unnerving feeling. Everything in my body was telling me I was horribly unsafe, but I was trying to ignore that to soak up this experience I had dreamt about for so long. Despite the seemingly high risk of death and the comfort I felt having just signed a waiver to partake, it really was a beautiful evening and a night to remember.

It did come as a complete shocker though that once you're up there, you just kind of go where the wind (or lack of wind in our case) takes you. There's no map, no set course, you just kind of float along. And when you're running out of fuel, you look for a nice big yard to land in and cross your fingers for a "balloon-friendly" property. Well we did not land on a balloon-friendly property, so that spiced things up a little. Once we landed very softly to the ground, we had to scoot our balloon to a side street to get off the balloon killjoy's yard. Then when we were all packed up in the van that followed our path, we drove back to our launch site for champagne and snacks. A ballooners tradition, we were told. I like the way these people think. Live life on the edge and then celebrate a safe return.

It was a splendid evening and I can't think of a better surprise. To my husband: thank you for the most perfect first year. It hasn't looked very conventional, but it's been all ours. I love that we blaze our own trail and do things just a little differently. Thanks for vowing to do it like that forever with me. Here's to year number two having just as many adventures! Love.

adventures in meal planning!

Whenever I've read blogs where people meal-plan, I've always thought that they were uber-organized super moms who need to do this sort of thing, lest they lose their last remaining marble. So since I'm not really any of those things (that organized, a mom, or quickly going insane), I've never really considered it as something we should do.

However, there was a night a few weeks ago where Will and I were griping and complaining the whole ride home about how starving we were, and then proceeded to do everything in the world when we got home except for make dinner. We chatted at length about our days, tidied the living room, put PJ's on - I may have even cleaned the bathroom as a stall tactic. We ended up cooking something kind of ghetto and didn't sit to eat until after 9PM. Yeah, unacceptable.

After this debacle, I said to him, "We need to have a weekly business meeting!" and I actually wasn't kidding at all. We both used to live in intentional communities (houses of 14-17 people who cooked and ate dinner together four nights a week, did chores, and lived the ups and downs of life and became super tight) where business meeting was a crucial factor in our success. This is where we assigned which pairs would cook dinner on which nights, which pairs would do dishes, check in on how chores went that past week - without it, we wouldn't have been able to function.

So I proposed to Will that we have a business meeting on Sunday nights where we analyze our weeks and plan meals from there. Monday after work, we'd do all our grocery shopping for the week - good thing we both had the chore of "grocery shoppers" in our communities! My shopping mate and I would even organize our lists by where the items were laid out in the store for utmost efficiency. We were pretty intense.

For Will and I, we think buying groceries based on meals will not only help us to be organized and efficient at meal time, but we think it will also cut down our grocery budget because we'll only be buying things that we know we'll have a specific use for in the immediate future. No extraneous purchases that might eventually go bad/expire anyway.

This past week, we were able to assess that we only needed to plan meals for three nights, because we went to the pub with a friend on Tuesday, and saved Friday for consuming the week's leftovers. Saturday we were with my parents and Sunday was the Superbowl! It was a nice three-day week for transitioning into a new system.

Now I know it won't always be this way, but we came up with some pretty swanky meals for week one! Totally utilized some awesome cookbooks that we have. Don't even ask about week two. Epic fail. But in our defense, the Superbowl fell during out business meeting, so we were behind from the start.

Here were our successful meals from last week (please excuse the poor kitchen lighting in these photos)!

MONDAY

grilled scallops with crispy leeks

photo by Will

I give this dish an A++. We'll definitely be having this one again.

Leeks are delish and the scallops were impeccable and super fresh. 

We live on the water in a fishing town for crying out loud.

WEDNESDAY

sesame chicken with edamame and quinoa

photo by me

I'd give it a B+. While I love edamame and quinoa, the sauce for the 

chicken wasn't what I was expecting, and I would have wanted more sauce 

than the recipe called for to make it a little less dry.

THURSDAY

penne with chicory and honeyed walnuts

photo by Will

I'd give this dish an A for what it is, but we'd change a few things next time around.

Neither of us had tasted chicory before, and it was a wonderfully bitter complement to 

the sweetness of the honey sauce. But we'd cut it thinner next time as to not be left with

these big bitter and wilted stalks at the bottom of our bowl. They were 

intimidatingly large the way the recipe called for them to be cut.

So that's that! Hopefully we can pick up this week's slack and deliver a good show next week.

Let me know if you want any of these recipes!

the travel bug strikes again.

Over the past 5 weeks, I have done the impossible.

My darling sweet husband is great at surprises. He surprises me all the time - big things, little things - he's so good at it and gets so much joy from surprising me. In general, I'd say that I hate surprises. I'm a planner, so I don't like being caught off guard. But since I love him and trust him and he's proven himself to be trustworthy with such things, I have grown to love surprises from him.

But this month, the surpriser has become the surprisee! That's right folks - I did the master planning this time around. And I know what you're thinking - she's the planner so no problem, right?

Well what I neglected to say is that the planner also is the one with the enormous mouth who can't keep a surprise secret to save her life.

Yep, that's me.

I can keep normal secrets (like I'm not some huge blabbermouth) but not when it's a surprise from the person I tell everything to! Come on people. He's my other half for crying out loud. It simply can't be done. I don't know how he does it all the time.

But my surprise is huge. I booked us a mystery trip! I know. Awesome Wife Award. Send it here.

I feel a little selfish because the trip is actually to a dream location of mine. So yes, it is a surprise end-of-the-semester trip for my hub, but the location is a teeny tiny bit more catered toward me. I'm sure he'll love it, but let's just say that if he surprised me with this trip, I'd basically keel over and die.

We leave tomorrow after work and will have all day Saturday, Sunday and Monday at our destination, and then return home at an ungodly hour Tuesday morning, where I will continue on to work and spend the day in a vegetative state. Hey, it's worth it to save a vacation day.

But I've researched tons of fun things that we can do on our mini vaca, and I'll let Will be the one to decide what we do. After all, it's a surprise weekend for him ;)

Can you believe that he still has no idea where we're going? Neither can I. I'm just so eager to get our travel on. We've been stagnant for far too long.

So stay tuned to see where we're headed! I'm bringing the camera and I'll be sure to tell all upon our return.

Wish me luck though - I still need to keep this secret for 30 more hours.

featured!

Today I was featured over on my friend Em's blog, Tales for Karina Marie! While Em has been blogging for a while, she recently redesigned her mission after her best friend Karina tragically passed away in a car accident in September. Now she retitled her blog and writes her entries in honor of Karina, to keep her filled in on the goings on down here. I think it's really sweet :)

She asked me to write about life as a newlywed, so check it out over here!

Hope you're having a lovely week and enjoying this Indian summer weather if you're in the northeast!

old married lady.

My loving mother has been calling me an old married lady these days and let me tell ya - I've been feeling that way lately. Many friends are asking, "how's married life?!" and the truth is, it's so wonderful! Life feels so normal living with Will, cooking with Will, waking up with Will - but we are two of the most exhausted people ever. What's with us? Is being married just an exhausting thing? Are we still catching up from all of the wedding-planning stress? Who knows.

We had an absolutely fantastic day. It was gorgeous and my grandparents' yard was transformed into the most perfect backyard wedding venue. The weather was flawless and the yard was littered with our closest friends and family who came from all over - from Illinois, from Pennsylvania, from Australia - I know, we're a big deal. But it was so laid back and enjoyable, and we can't wait to see the highlights from our video and more of our photos. I'll post more fun things as soon as I've got 'em :)

But in the meantime, the hub and I are like grandma and grandpa. We're back in the monotonous day-to-day life of full-time work only to come home, make dinner, and still have unpacking to do in the apartment. We're trying to catch up on sleep, but man are we dragging. Is this normal to feel after getting married? We've heard from some people that they basically went into hibernation for two months so they could adjust... wouldn't that be nice. Just take an extended vacation from work and all responsibilities for a while. Ugh. Well, can't win 'em all. Until then, we'll just keep pushing through and sorting through our piles and piles of belongings. Our to sell pile is growing. Anyone need a twin mattress and or a wake board?

Below is a photo of me and the hub. I told you, this life is certainly taking it's toll.

[photo by L. Harwood, Brisbane, AU]