Accomplishing Something

Happy Day to me! I came in second in the Baseball Blogging Challenge. It was my first one, so I'll happily accept the silver...but next time, watch out. I'm in it to win it. Cheers to Miscellaneous Missives for coming in first! Well-deserved.

Speaking of accomplishing something...There are days where I just don't want to do anything.

Saturdays are often those days. I'm tired from the week, I don't feel like doing laundry or anything else that requires "standing" or "moving."

I had this feeling last Saturday, but I told myself, you have children, you can't just sit and drink coffee and mess around on the internet and not do anything for them for a while. So I went online and registered domain names for my kids...while sitting, drinking coffee, and (by definition) messing around on the internet. And since it was in their names, it was for THEIR benefit.

And then I took a nap, because that was a pretty big thing to cross off the list of parenting to-dos.

Boston Baked Baseball

***Last Post for the Challenge, if I did my math right!!! All 30!! If I didn't, well, then I'll have to figure out which one I missed and you can read it tomorrow.***

Wow, I've only been in the Boston area for six months and I can tell you, in no uncertain terms, that this town loves their baseball team.

And how.




They are really insane for their team. And with the accents, it's very cute when they say "Go Sawks!" Although if one of our daughters inherits that accent in its entirety, I may find it slightly less cute. (And it could happen - the oldest one says "aah-range" instead of "orange," and I blame that on living in New York during her formative years. However, she also says "uff-da," so I also think that parental practices do have some sway.)

It's been pretty great living here. We haven't spent a whole lot of time in the city, which is unfortunate, because I really love Boston. But where we are is pretty fantastic too.

It's really just beautiful. When we were thinking about moving here, we knew nothing about the surrounding area. We were ready to not live in a city (for the first time in almost EVER), and I think my husband and I both kind of had our hearts set on a Stars Hollow-esque small town. I was in desperate need of some quiet. As much as I loved living in New York, I felt as if my nerves were permanently jangled, and that I hadn't had a moment's quiet in my own home for more than four years. There was always, ALWAYS some sort of noise. Even in yoga class, you could hear the traffic going by or sirens wailing. I also wanted to live near the ocean, because if you have your pick between one town on the ocean and another an hour away, both with commuter rail access to downtown, why would you not pick living by the sea? LIVING BY THE SEA?!?! All of the time? Not just for a week on vacation? SOLD.

So here we are on the South Shore, in a town (not a suburb, it's really an honest-to-goodness almost four hundred year old little town surrounded by ocean on one side and houses and forests on the other).

I feel like I can definitively say it's not a suburb because it takes about a half an hour to get to the nearest Target.

And if it takes me buying Red Sox apparel for each and every family member to be able to keeping living where this is across the street, well, then, I'll just have to learn to love the red, white, and blue (and silver):

Cause I'm a Jay, Jay, Jay, Jay, Jayhawk

Today's post brought to you courtesy of guest blogger extraordinaire, Matthew.

My wife was kind enough to allow me to guest blog about the Kansas City Royals.

The Royals are a baseball team based in Kansas City, Missouri, which I find disingenuous.  No one thinks of them as a Missouri team, they already have the Cardinals.  So, that's somewhat lame.  This happens to Kansas not infrequently.  The Chiefs are also based in Kansas City, Missouri.  This really kind of sucks for Kansas.  My entire family is from Kansas, so I really should know more about the Royals than that Zack Greinke was wasted there for several years (the Royals have sucked for some time, thought they apparently might actually be good this year).  The only other thing that comes to mind when I think of the Royals is this:

Admit it, that's all you can think of, too.  The Pine Tar Game is the only thing most people think about when they think about George Brett (even though he is in the Hall of Fame).

That's all I really have to say about the Royals.  So now it's time to talk about THE KANSAS JAYHAWKS, THE BEST BASKETBALL TEAM EVER TO EXIST, EVER!!

As I said, my entire family is from Kansas.  Both of my parents grew up in Kansas and attended KU.  They have framed newspapers from 1988 up in their house to this day.  If you don't know what happened in 1988, this happened:

That's all to say that I come by my love of KU Basketball honestly.

Now, KU plays Kentucky tonight for the national championship.  By the time this is posted, the game will probably be over and I'll either be catatonic with joy or grief.  When Kansas won in 2008 I jumped up and down, by myself, in the dark, while trying to figure out how to celebrate, given that my oldest daughter was asleep 10 feet away.

God, I love KU basketball.

ROCK CHALK JAYHAWK KU!!!!!!

And that's your 2012 Kansas City Royals!!

**Blogger's note -- Or not. That's your 2012 Kansas Jayhawks! Let's just be honest about what this really is, sweetie.

It's a Burgh Thing

Pittsburgh gets a bad rap. Or at least it used to.

Many Americans think of Pittsburgh (please include the "h", otherwise you're talking about a town in Kansas) as a dirty, sooty, creaky old city with coal mines and steel mills and horrifying accents.

That's so not true. And it hasn't been for about 50 years. Except for the accents -- they are endearing to me but understandably may make your ears bleed. They invented and perpetuate the word "yinz". As in, "yinz guys goin' dahntahn?" Personally, I think "y'all" has more universal appeal, but when I'm in an airport or at Disney World and I hear a yinzer it makes me smile.

I love going to Pirate games, although I've only attended them at Three Rivers Stadium, which was blown up to make way for the new PNC Park (Pirates) and Heinz Field (Steelers). My in-depth knowledge of the team evaporated after the days of Andy Van Slyke, Barry Bonds, and Bobby Bonilla. Interestingly, that's also when they started to suck.

But I love the Pirates. The Bucs, as we call them. I love a team that doesn't have boatloads of cash and doesn't buy players, a team who plays with heart, if not always with skill. I also loathe the designated hitter. So, the Pirates are my team.

I am happy to swap out teams for the slot of "second favorite" in my heart. It's been the Brewers, the Nats, the Twins, not the Orioles, Mets, or Yankees, and it may be the Boston Red Sox (depending upon if we're here on the South Shore to stay). But number one will always belong to the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The team:



The town:



Yinz really otter chekkit aht.

Things I miss about NEW YORK now that I'm a YANKEE

See what I did there?

We moved to Massachusetts about 6 months ago, 11 days before our second daughter was born. It was a hectic time, I'll just say that.

While I love it here, there are certain things that I miss about New York, and because I kind of need to go and use the treadmill while the baby is contemplating taking a nap, this is going to be quick:

1) Central Park. Every season, it's just lovely. Plus, on a summer evening, it's about 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the city.

2) Sigmund Pretzel Shop, in the East Village. Homemade awesome pretzels with cups of dips, such as grainy mustard (tasty) and nutella (even tastier). And Vivi Bubble Tea, in Chinatown.

3) Curry Hill. Technically, it's Murray Hill, on the east side in the high-20s/low-30s, but it's chock full of awesome and inexpensive Indian restaurants. Love Bhatti, especially.

4) Having my dear friends be, at most, a cab or subway ride away. That was really nice. And at least eight really good yarn stores.

5) The Green Kitchen. This 24-hour diner was directly below our apartment. We got to know the waitstaff and delivery guys super well, to the point where the one waitress would see us outside in the morning and would run us out a handful of muffins for our daughter, and one waiter would bring us cups of coffee when we would linger on our stoop. I miss being able to order a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on an English muffin, with a side of super-hot fries, at 2 in the morning, and have it brought to our door in less than 15 minutes.

6) Walking everywhere. Hanging out with friends in the West Village until about 10 pm, then putting the little girl in the stroller and walking all the way home to the Upper East Side, with a stop or two along the way at Starbucks. Or the rice pudding place. Both are quite satisfying.


7) The feeling of all the tension in your body melting away as you cross the George Washington Bridge, heading out of town.

8) Taking tap class again as a 34 year old, and having many other women approximately my age in there, and nobody blinked an eye.


9) Things that are better in New York than anywhere else: Bagels (it's condescending but true -- bagels suck everywhere else in comparison). Pizza. Theater. Shopping. Delivery service for everything. Jobs in the financial services industry.

10) Things that are (surprisingly) cheaper in New York than anywhere else: Cab rides. Manicures and pedicures. Nannies (sometimes). Fake designer handbags. Certain real designer clothes (sample sales). Bodega flowers (a dozen roses of any shade for $9. They die in a day and a half, but you get what you pay for).



http://www.etsy.com/listing/44920676/i-heart-ny-but-hate-the-yankees-8x10

Minnesoter

I love Minnesota. I applied to law school there while I was living in DC, because I figured I loved the Midwest, I had been there once to be in a wedding and twice to catch a plane to Mexico for Spring Break, Minneapolis seemed like a nice city, and it was a top-20 school at a really cheap price.

Plus, I was kind of sort of seeing this guy and he lived there.

Anyway, I applied, I visited, I got in. I was set. So, I packed up my apartment in DC and sent most of it home to Pittsburgh with my dad, then I packed the remainder (including the pink guitar) and set off on my Colorado trip.

Interestingly, Sarah and I were supposed to go to the Blues Traveler concert with the aforementioned guy. As faithful blog readers will recall, the concert was cancelled, so we all hung out in Denver for the evening. Somewhere between the brewpub and the Diamond Cabaret (no, I'm not going to link to it, you can Google that one for yourself), he mentioned that he accepted a new job and was moving to Texas.

Huh. How 'bout that.

When I got to Minnesota, I was still not interested in having a boyfriend, I mean, really not interested. I was 23, and just wanted to go out and have fun and kiss boys. Then the first week of school I met a guy from Minnesota and he invited me to the Mill City Music Festival (he said it was supposed to be a "group outing", but interestingly nobody else showed up. Hmmm.). Fast-forward a year and a half, and I was engaged to my (now) husband, and we've been married for more than ten years.

So I'm thinking it all worked out for the best.

We planned to stay in Minnesota forever, but jobs (or lack thereof) took us to DC, then New York, and now Boston-ish. And my husband is very sad that his eldest daughter doesn't seem to have much of an affinity for the Twins or the Vikings, although he had hope for a while there because her favorite color was purple.

Alas, it didn't stick, and she now wears both a NY Yankees cap and a Patriots t-shirt with pride.

But I still love the Twin Cities -- I love the view heading north on I-35 as you see Minneapolis, all glassy and shiny looming in the distance. I love the houses on Summit Avenue near our old apartment in St. Paul, and lunch and coffee at Cafe Latte (and the orange ricotta bread - they still serve it on Fridays). I love walking around Lake of the Isles and Lake Calhoun, in every season. I love the drive to St. Cloud to visit my in-laws, where we would spend an hour and a half detailing how we would spend Powerball winnings. I love Lund's and Byerly's, because they're like Whole Foods but you can also buy things like Pop-tarts there. I love Rice Park and the Landmark Center in the winter, all twinkly with lights and covered with snow, because that's how it looked the night we got married.

The Nats

Strangely, I probably know more about the Washington Nationals than I do about any other baseball team, because the Washington Post is my very favorite newspaper of all time, and I read it each and every day. I can't help but read the headlines, even the ones in the sports section, and it is my understanding from carefully poring over the Lifestyle section that Ryan Zimmerman is both hot and a very nice guy.


I lived in DC twice -- once right after college (technically, I lived in Arlington [right across the street from this] and then in the barrio Alexandria), and then again after law school. I was graduating from law and grad school, and my husband and I both needed jobs, and what better place for lawyers who have public policy degrees than Washington, D.C.? My husband's first trip to DC was when we went out there, on tax day, to find an apartment with a lease that started on June 1st. He loved it, like I knew he would, and 6 weeks later we moved into the teeniest-tiniest apartment ever. It was right by Dupont Circle, and it was two stories with a beautiful wrought iron spiral staircase separating the living room from the bedroom. The staircase was fabulous, unless a) you fell up it and almost broke your knees (Matthew), b) you chose not to wear shoes and it left painful patterns on the soles of your feet (Bethany), or c) you were hungry or thirsty or had to use the bathroom and climbing or descending it was simply too much to bear (Bethany and the cats). The apartment would have been perfect for 1 person, or 2 people with not that much stuff.


I have lots of stuff.


Plus, two cats. It was pretty cramped. Luckily, we spent a lot of time taking late-night walks around Dupont, Kalorama ("If you don't know where it is, you can't afford to live there"), Georgetown, Woodley Park, Cleveland Park, and Embassy Row. We'd stop at Starbucks around 10 and then head on out, and not get home until 2-ish. Sometimes we'd stop for water or a Popsicle, just to liven things up a bit. We'd wander around and look at the embassies and talk about everything and nothing. This was pre-kids, btw, if you haven't figured that out yet. I liked to say I was going to faire l'exercice Français, because I would drink dark roast coffee and smoke cigarettes while I "worked out". If only I wore high heels while doing it, the look really would have been complete.


I have lots of fun stories about living in DC, and more memories than I can count. I would absolutely move back there because that's where every job that I really want resides, and there are many many people that I love who live there (or in the surrounding burbs -- yes, you, Jill).


Ok, here's the baseball part - the Nats came to DC while we were there. When we lived on Capitol Hill (after the Dupont apartment, this was a townhouse near Eastern Market and it felt like a mansion in comparison) we walked to the games at RFK Stadium, and it was awesome. 


Even the part where we kind of ran home in the dark so we wouldn't get mugged. 

Upcoming Blog Challenge

I found my new blog challenge. It involves tv, and that's all I'm going to say about it now.

But once the baseball challenge is complete, I will post the challenge and we will begin.

It will be SO WORTH THE WAIT...especially if you have cable or Hulu or small children or other indicators that television is your premium form of entertainment.

I guess this is about the Cardinals

I have so very little to say about this team...here goes:

The Cards play in St. Louis. My [very large bank employer] has a campus in St. Louis. If I win the half a billion dollar MegaMillions jackpot on Friday, I will quit my job with [very large bank employer] before the weekend is over. Frankly, before Saturday even begins. I will leave a voice mail and mail my computer back.

I am classy like that.

Speaking of classy, did you know that the Cardinals have some sort of "spirit squad"? I don't know much about MLB (obviously), and I'm always watching the dance team or cheerleaders at a sporting event rather than the actual "sports," but this seems weird to me.

Apparently I'm not the first one to wonder about this. As usual, Slate has some answers:

For decades, baseball spurned pompoms. The first American cheerleaders were men who worked the crowds at college football games in the late 19^th century; women didn't get involved until the '20s and '30s. In the years that followed, football and basketball players had their feats heralded by organized squads of cheering women, but baseball players had to make do with hollers from the crowd.

Baseball historians aren't sure why the sport went without for so long. But it was a handful of entertainment executives from the Walt Disney Company who helped initiate the change. When Disney purchased the California Angels in 1996, it added some bells and whistles: a six-piece Dixieland jazz band, zany sound effects for foul balls, and the Angel Wings Cheerleaders. The Angel Wings danced on the top of the visitors' dugout between innings, attempting to rile the crowd.

The crowd got riled. Apparently the Angel Wings dancers frequently blocked the views of season ticket holders behind the dugout; from the very start they were heckled and booed. Disney management quickly moved the dance team to a platform in the stands out in right field. From there they continued to lead "dance-offs" that tested the crowd's skills at the macarena and the chicken dance. The Angel Wings Cheerleaders were abandoned the following season.

Despite the shaky start, the Toronto Blue Jays have since brought in the J-Cru Fan Activation Team (now known as the J Force), and the Florida Marlins have introduced the Marlins Mermaids. San Diego has a dance team known as the Pad Squad—pronounced "Pod Squad"—which runs around the field at Padres home games, clapping and tossing T-shirts into the crowd. (Reaction from San Diego fans has been mixed.) The Expos had cheerleaders, too: Indeed, there were those who felt that the Molson EX Girls (who danced to Bananarama on top of the dugout) were an excellent reason to keep baseball in Montreal.

With such a motley record, it's unclear what the future holds for American baseball cheerleaders. But cheerleading already has a firm foothold in the rest of the baseball-playing world. It's de rigueur at games in the Dominican Republic, where women in body stockings dance to recorded merengue music on top of the dugouts. In Korean baseball, football-style cheerleaders with whistles, megaphones, and pompoms get the crowd excited, while college games in Japan feature women dancing quietly with pompoms while men dressed in black lead the cheers.

The next time I go to the Dominican Republic, I am TOTALLY going to a baseball game.

That other town in PA

The Phillies.

Us Pittsburghers have an interesting relationship with Philadelphia. On the one hand, they are a built-in sports rival -- so we kind of hate them. Nothing makes a Pittsburgher madder (and belies a dearth of knowledge of mid-Atlantic geography) than when someone says, "Oh, you're from Pennsylvania! Are you an Eagles fan?" On the other hand, it's the cradle of liberty and all of that, and we have a bit of an inferiority complex that makes us play up our "blue collar" side in comparison to Philadelphians, who are effete or something because their city is bigger and older and richer and more prestigious (I guess). Then again, we acknowledge that between Pittsburgh in the west and Philadelphia in the east, in the middle lies Pennsyltucky...but even they didn't re-elect Rick Santorum last time he ran for Senate.

ANYWAY...Philadelphia is lovely, I've heartily enjoyed it every time I've been there. I love a good cheesesteak, and their street pretzels beat the hell out of New York's -- plus, they're shaped kind of funky, which is interesting. 

Their team name is dumb. They used to be the Quakers, which is way more interesting in my opinion. I would not go and see the Phillies play. But I WOULD go and see their AAA affiliate, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, who play in Allentown. But the most fascinating fact about Philadelphia sports team names comes from football, and I'm going to share it with you now.

Back in 1943, for one season, there was one professional football team in Pennsylvania (P-A, to those of us from there), and it was called the Steagles. Most of the football players were fighting in WWII, so they had to improvise. 

That may have been one of the last times Philly and Pittsburgh actually collaborated on anything other than the Pennsylvania Turnpike, or trying not to elect Pat Toomey.

Hey-ohh!!

Schlemiel Schlemazel, Hasenfeffer Incorporated!

We're gonna do it!



I love most things about Milwaukee, including (but certainly not limited to) Laverne and Shirley. I still want a sweater with a big swirly cursive "B" on it.

I used to go to camp in northern Wisconsin every summer, and spend a week or so in the Milwaukee suburbs (Brookfield and Wauwatosa) just hanging out with my friends. All through high school, those two weeks in Wisconsin were the highlight of my summer. (My parents have never met these people -- I had gone to a national church youth thing and met these kids and they said, you should come to camp with us. They sent me the form, I told my parents I simply had to go, and they filled it out and sent a check and bought me an airline ticket. Again, in retrospect, quite permissive, although it helped that I was pretty independent. At 13. The curse of the only child.)

So Milwaukee. City of festivals, technically, but also of brats and cheese and beer. I loved my time in Wisconsin so much that I went to college there (Go Badgers!), and if someone told me I was moving there next week I wouldn't complain. Great people, beautiful place.

The Wisconsin State Fair was my first real midwestern state fair. Probably not as much food on a stick as the Minnesota State Fair (simply not possible), but it was still fantastic. The cream puffs are to DIE for.

And the beer...oh, the BEER!! Everyone knows Leinie's, but not everyone knows Gray's. Gray's is the microbrew that got me hooked on really, really good beer. Made in Janesville, you simply can't buy it here on the East Coast. I know, I've tried.

I went to a few Brewer's games in the old ballpark, and had a blast. When you're 15, and it's a sunny day, and you're hanging out with your friends eating brats and nachos and drinking icy cold cokes, you're going to have a good time. Even if you know jack about baseball.

Wisconsin forever.

Seattle Morning

Did you know that the Mariners are owned by Nintendo? I think that's really cool.

They're also one of the only two teams (the other being the Nationals-formerly-the-Expos) that haven't ever played in the World Series. 

Poor Seattle. That's got to suck.

But Seattle is a fantastic city. I was out there in high school for a church thing and spent about a week and a half also visiting a friend of mine from high school who lived with his dad during the summers. His house was on Bainbridge Island, so I got to take the ferry out from the city and visit this fabulous place. It's remote, but not -- beautiful views and trees and the ocean all around...just, wow. 

His dad is an acclaimed architect, and his work was featured in one of the Not-So-Big House books. If you haven't seen these, I highly recommend them. They are beautiful, and I love the idea behind them, that functional space is more important than sheer square footage -- a concept that I think has been lost by most American home builders (and most Americans, frankly).

I have heard, but don't really have time to confirm right now, that for all of its reputation for rain, Pittsburgh has more overcast days per year than Seattle. If that fact is true, I would not be surprised.

I was really into David Benoit in high school -- I'm really not sure why, the music is kind of cool but looking back I don't understand why I latched onto it so hard. But I do remember descending into Seattle, seeing Mt. Rainier sticking up through the clouds into the sky and cuing up this song on my Sony Sport Discman (you remember, the bright yellow one):

Clearly, I was a bit heavy-handed with my allegory, but that's kind of who I was when I was 15. And 21. And 24. And...

Anyway, I would live in Seattle - for a while, we thought about moving there, because there are lots of job opportunities for my husband and a surprising number of federal jobs that appeal to me there, as well. One downside, though, is that it's SO FAR from everyone we know, and now with the kids that would be pretty hard, I think.

Easy access to Whistler, super-fresh sushi, and reasonable commutes via ferry would ease that pain somewhat, however, so I'm not saying "no".

 

 

Diamond[back]s are a girl's best friend.

And I'm super excited that tomorrow is Monday, because Smash is on!!

 

Why can't we have a tv blog challenge? I promise my posts would be so much more on point.

Arizona baseball, yadda yadda...KATHERINE MCPHEE!!!

If the promos are any indication, it's going to be a good episode.

Monday nights at 10, on NBC...after the show where my boyfriend sits in a chair wearing a sweater and there are singers The Voice.

You come at the king, you best not miss. -- Omar Little

Crap. I missed posting yesterday. I was tired. I have no real excuse.

Anyway, in honor of my dear sister-in-law who is coming for a visit today (who is in medical school in Baltimore), I will write about the Orioles.


Bawlmer.

I have some pretty strong feelings about Baltimore. We used to live there. We still own a house there. I wish we didn't (we rent it out, but at a loss). Apparently, moving away right as the housing market crashed was not the financially savvy thing to do. Hindsight. Hopefully we'll get to sell it someday soon and come out close to even, because I'm not exactly planning to retire there.

I really don't like it there. The city politics are horribly corrupt, urban blight was practically invented there, and commuting to DC from there was on paper, not bad, but in practice, terrible.

It's like Pittsburgh, but awful.

Part of my negativity about the city likely stems from the fact that we bought a house and renovated it, and finished it right before we moved out, and during that year and a half of renovation that we did mostly ourselves we had a baby and commuted an hour and a half each way to DC for work and all of my friends and family were at least 40 miles away and we had very little money and people kept getting mugged outside...so I was exhausted and worried and broke and we had no help with the baby and few friendly faces. I was miserable there. I get that, realistically, this is not all ENTIRELY the city of Baltimore's fault (and in retrospect, there may have been some post-partum depression at play), but it frankly feels that way, and I can't untie my personal misery from the experience of living there.

The best thing about Baltimore (besides overuse of the word "hon" and beehive hairdos) is The Wire. It's the best television show ever produced, and won exactly ZERO important awards. People are idiots.

See, even writing about Baltimore puts me in a sh*tty mood.

The Wire was on HBO, and tells the story of the city via drug dealers, drug addicts, dock workers, cops, kids, the politicians, and the press.  It is the best show that you have ever, or never, watched. I guarantee this. It's remarkably true-to-life -- seriously, that stuff HAPPENS there -- and it will break your heart. Especially season 4.

The show also has some of my very favorite tv characters: Stringer Bell, Bubs, and Omar Little. Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks Omar is fantastic. And Jimmy McNulty is a super-hot train wreck of a man. There is one of the most creative scenes I've ever seen on tv that takes place between Jimmy and his partner Bunk, where they walk you step-by-step through an entire murder scene using only gestures and the f-bomb, and you completely understand exactly what transpired. It's been written about extensively, and aptly described by one author as a "goddamn symphony of profanity".

The show will make you laugh, and cry, and think. It gives you hope and crushes it, and not necessarily in that order. If you haven't seen it, watch it from the beginning, you WILL NOT be sorry you did. Stick with it, even if Season Two isn't your favorite (sometimes it's not), it is absolutely worth it.

So, that's my tale of Baltimore.

All in the game, yo, all in the game.

(In the interest of equal time, I will also say that one of Matthew's favorite restaurants is in Baltimore, Golden West Cafe. They have awesome tater tots. It is definitely a redeeming feature of the city. That, and the cheapness and availability of crab. And Poe lived there. Yeah, I think that's about it.)

Blame Canada.

The Toronto Blue Jays are in Canada.

I love Canada. Although I think it would be alright if they only competed with us in hockey, and left baseball alone. Just seems unnatural.


Anyway, Canada is fabulous. It's like Minnesota, but even cleaner, with fewer guns, and more francophones. And poutine. And socialized medicine. And pâté. And liberals. And up until recently, a favorable exchange rate with U.S. dollars.


Let me tell you a little story about Canada. We went to Canada on our honeymoon, 10+ years ago. We got married in December, in between semesters in law school, so we were *broke*. While I wanted to go to the Greek isles, that was simply not possible given our budget. And seeing as we like snow and my husband wanted to ski, we decided to go to Canada. We went to Calgary for a couple of days, which looked exactly like Minneapolis but with a rodeo. The exchange rate was killer, so we stayed in a Fairmont hotel (fancy!!). We had a suite, for the low low price of about $119 USD / night. 


When we arrived, I was really tired so I took a nap. I woke up from said nap with a sore throat and a fever. The next day, my brand-new husband called the front desk and they found us a doctor that was open on a Saturday and sent us on our way. At the clinic, we waited for about 10 minutes and then got to see the doctor. The receptionist asked if I had my Alberta Health card, and I said no, I'm American. They were so apologetic when they told me the visit would cost $35. Canadian. Even a broke law student can afford that!


I got in to see the doctor a few minutes later. He looked at my throat and in my ears and wrote me a prescription for antibiotics for my strep. He then spent the next 10 minutes writing down places for us to visit, eat, and ski  -- he was our own personal Not For Tourists guide.


I got my prescription filled at the Canadian pharmacy for about $5 CAD, and then bought all sorts of fun flavors of Halls that they don't sell in the US (blueberry!) and boxes of allergy medicine that were prescription-only back home (Allegra!). Customs didn't seem to care, thankfully.


I felt better right away, so we drove to Banff and Lake Louise right on schedule and skiied and ate and had a fabulous time, for a very reasonable amount of money. I hope we can go back for our 15th and do the same, although I doubt it will be as cheap.


(Socialism + snow / decent exchange rate ) * really nice people = what's not to love about Canada, eh?

 

 

Brave(s)

 

Now that's out of the way.

Braves. Bravery. I'm trying to be brave, I started doing the Jillian Michaels Body Revolution this week. I had lost all of my baby weight three weeks after she was born -- I had gestational diabetes and I was absolutely religious about diet and exercise, so it was very well controlled without insulin. That meant that I was actually losing weight while I was pregnant -- the baby kept growing, but the rest of me was shrinking. Nice, right? So I lost everything immediately...and then what did I do? Exercise? Eat right? Nope and nope. I ate Halloween candy, Thanksgiving pumpkin pie (and whoopie pies), and Christmas candy and cookies and everything else...so I gained 10 lbs before you could say "King Arthur Flour". 

Matthew is doing it with me. We began with the 7 day kickstart, which is about 1200 calories and two 30 minute exercise periods a day. The first two days were fine. And boy, do I hate to be hungry. HATE IT. But it really wasn't terrible...until lunchtime today. Today, I was EXHAUSTED and sick...to the point where I took a two-hour nap this afternoon and woke up and still could hardly stand up. So I broke out my handy dandy diabetes sugar meter left over from the pregnancy, and lo and behold I had ridiculously low blood sugar. Apparently, all of the exercise and so little food and nursing the baby don't all combine well.

So, we're off the kick-start phase and onto the more varied but still calorie-restricted diet. I'm just really happy to not have to eat tilapia for dinner or tomatoes with everything. I feel kind of like a failure, because  I should have been able to gut this out better. But, I will keep trying to do what I can do and follow the program; if I need another 200 hundred calories of lower-carb food a day to be able to walk around like a human being, so be it. If I can't stand up, I can't exercise, and that seems to be very important for this program (and in general, of course).

I actually threw away the last homemade Twinkie from the ski trip today. Not easy, but I did it. It's gone. Maybe I'll make it through after all.

If you build it...

The Chicago White Sox were at the heart of the 1919 "Black Sox Scandal" and "8 men out" --  when eight players were banned from professional baseball for life as a result of intentionally losing games for $$$.

You know how I know so much about this? Wikipedia? Perhaps a little. But REALLY...what I need to know about the White Sox I learned from "Field of Dreams."

I really like this movie. It's fun and sentimental and takes place in Iowa and there are ghosts and James Earl Jones and a tagline -- "If you build it, they will come."

[I do wonder, though, if Dennis Quaid looks at Kevin Costner and thinks "Dude, you totally stole my career...and I could have done it much better than you." If he did, he would be correct.]

BUT...there's something else that comes to mind when I think of "If you build it.." And that's Pinterest.

If you don't know much about it, Pinterest is a social media pinboard site, where people post ("pin") pictures of things that interest them and organize those pictures into folders, and share that with their friends. Pinterest took off like gangbusters -- in January 2012, it had almost 12 million unique users, and was the fastest site in history to break the 10 million mark. Apparently, they built it, and people came. Quickly and in large numbers.

I don't just blog about Pinterest; I'm also a client. I have a love/hate relationship with Pinterest. I LOVE many things about it:

• I enjoy wasting time
• I enjoy looking at pretty pictures
• I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to and which pretty pictures they waste their time looking at
• I like being able to keep track of things I've seen that I want to get back to later

I HATE the following:

• How much time I can waste on it
• How completely detached from reality most people's pins are (including my own)
• The ridiculousness and pretentiousness that abound

For example, on any given day you will see the following:

• a picture of a mango-quinoa blueberry corn salad posted by someone that you know who subsists on burgers, fries, and chinese food, with the caption "Nom nom! So yummy!" Whatever. You will never make that, let alone eat that. Who do you think you're kidding?
• prints with variations on the "keep calm and _______" theme and exhortations made by 1950's style housewives that the speaker is fluent in "sarcasm and profanity" and other various someecards. Yes, we've all been to the site. They are funny. But do you need to collect 40 of them and refer to them on a regular basis? 
• a picture of a dessert that looks full-fat and fabulous but is called something like "low-fat brownie yogurt balls" with the caption "These are amazing!!! And only 86 calories per serving!!!" Really? Did you make them and eat them? Then don't attest to their fabulousness. Frequently, if you click through these pictures back to the original or semi-original poster (which is the only way to get the actual recipe) you'll see comments like "Huh, you know, when I did the math they were 200 calories per quarter-sized serving, are you sure about that?" Caveat eat-tor.
• Pictures of cupcakes with elaborate toppers and exquisite party decorations that are re-pinned by everyone you know with kids -- "Perfect for Madison's 4th B-day!" Um, sure. Is someone from Land of Nod stopping by to hang all of that crap up for you, or is this for you to show your professional party planner? Or are you really just going to tape up some balloons and streamers and buy the matching Disney Princess plates, cups, and plastic tablecloth from Target? Because THAT'S OKAY too.

My husband asked me "what is the deal with Pinterest? I have no idea what it's about." Here's my answer:

Pinterest is:

• food that one will never cook
• houses one will never own
• crafts one will never do (see previous post re: that damn tooth fairy door)
• quotations one will never say
• clothes that one will never wear
• books that one will never read
• parties that one will never throw
• hairstyles that one could never pull off

Kevin Costner had the Field of Dreams, but apparently Pinterest is the website of dreams.

And that's my baseball post of the day. Time to go pin stuff.

Are you going to San-Fran-cisco....?

The San Francisco Giants. These guys.

They were originally the Gothams, which is a much more interesting name, and apparently have a big rivalry with the Dodgers, also formerly from NY. The Giants used to play in Harlem, near Central Park and then later further north, deeper into Harlem, always renaming their home field "The Polo Grounds".

I did not know that.

San Francisco is the most expensive city in the continental US that I have never lived in or visited for any length of time. I have no interest in living in California, but if I did, it would be in/near San Francisco.

This is interesting though - San Francisco is the most expensive city in the country for renters, according to a recent article in the Daily Mail. New York didn't even make the top 10. That's going to annoy a lot of New Yorkers, because they (formerly we) love to kvetch about how everything is so expensive and tiny and it's such a huge pain to live here but why on earth would anyone live anywhere else because this is the most fabulous city in the world? 

Until you do. And you find another place that suits you. Which sounds like exactly what the Giants did.

Sorry this is so devoid of actual content....Read yesterday's post, it's longer, if you're fixin' for more reading material.

Happy Monday, everyone!

Dodgers...dodging...skiing...

Today I'm going to write about the Dodgers.

Well, kind of.

Actually, not really.

I'm going to relate them to something I would like to talk about -- my weekend. We went skiing in Vermont...with some friends of mine who used to live in L.A. [relation 1] They used to ski in Mammoth, but this weekend they skied in Vermont. With us. [relation 2] The mountain was pretty empty on Friday, but on Saturday it was crazy full, and we had to DODGE people all over the place. [relation 3] It was really sunny and warm this weekend, about 60 degrees, which is pretty much like L.A. [relation 4]

Relevance satisfied. Now for my story.

So we went to Vermont to ski. Brought the baby, left the big girl at home with her grandmother. This was our first time skiing since our honeymoon 10 years ago, and let's just say I'm not in nearly as good a shape as I was then. When we planned this trip, we knew that this had been a pretty warm winter, but typically March is a very snowy month in the Northeast, so we figured that between early February and mid-March, there would be a few wicked snowstorms.

We thought wrong.

There was a decent base, about 3 or 4 feet, but when it doesn't keep snowing and the weather is over 50 degrees, that base does not last long. So we participated in what skiers like to call "Spring Skiing", but I like to call "Suck".

Friday was okay, but my boot was all jacked up and by the time I took it off, I couldn't really touch my shin without yelping. I thought it would be fine by Saturday, but when I put the boot on and walked around the condo we had rented, I was kind of in tears. I sucked it up though and went outside. "Oh yeah, I can totally do this, I'm fine."

"Ski in, ski out" -- that was the whole point of staying there, right? Well, by the time I got over to the "ski out" portion, I could barely get my skis on because there was a crust on the snow that I could not penetrate. Turning was impossible, between the icy ground and the fact that whatever muscle/tendon thing is in the front of my shin had a huge lump on it and screamed with pain every time it touched my boot. I couldn't shift my weight forward; ergo, I could not ski. We paid $70 to ride the chair lift twice and take two icy crappy runs where I pretty much had to snowplow because I couldn't rotate my inside leg.

Lame. Literally and figuratively.

My remarkably considerate husband went to get the car so I didn't have to "ski in" back to the place we were staying...and because of the conditions he had to hike up the hill carrying his skis over the shoulder. He was a sweaty exhausted mess by the time he came to get me, so we just called it.

Now here's the good part - we showered and then went to a cute little Vermont town and bought whoopie pies and craft beers and THAT'S how we spent the rest of the sunny afternoon. And it was so warm we didn't even need our jackets.

That is what I like to call a "silver lining."

Also, through the magic of Facebook, a girl I knew in high school saw the picture I had posted during the weekend and commented, "Hey, is that Sugarbush behind you? Do you know I live two towns away?" So we stopped by her house on our way out of town and had a lovely afternoon visit -- I haven't seen her in 19 years. (MY GOD! That's like a whole PERSON!) Plus, she scored because I brought her all of the beers we hadn't finished. Win/win.

Essentially, I spent the entire weekend skiing a little, eating a lot (the aforementioned whoopie pies, fondue, cupcakes, bacon and eggs), drinking more beer than I've drank in the past year combined, and enjoying my dear friend's and my husband's company. Plus, on the way up we stopped at a place my husband saw on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and I bought homemade Twinkies. They taste like regular Twinkies but minus the chemical aftertaste.

Turns out you don't even miss it.

See all the beautiful snow? No? Me neither. But that's a damn fine donut.

The Reds, or One More Team Named for Hosiery

If you asked me "Tell me something about the Cincinnati Reds," I would mutter some phrases like "Pete Rose was some sort of gambler, right?" and "Marge Schott was some sort of racist, right?"

But a small part of the Wikipedia entry for this team makes me like them -- at least, the historical "them" -- 

The best players of the Cincinnati Red Stockings relocated to Boston after the 1870 season, taking the nickname along with them and becoming the Boston Red Stockings, a team later dubbed the "Beaneaters" and eventually the "Braves", who are now based in Atlanta. A new Cincinnati Red Stockings team became a charter member of the National League in 1876, five years after the first Red Stockings team. The second Red Stockings team was expelled from the league after the 1880 season, in part for violating league rules by serving beer to fans at games, and for their refusal to stop renting out their ballpark, the Bank Street Grounds, on Sundays. 

Sweet. So their fans were drinkers and they were capitalists who ignored blue laws.

That's a team I can get behind.  Hosiery and all.