Spring Cleaning

I've been horribly remiss in updating ye olde blog. Mea culpa! At first it was because nothing at all worth mentioning was happening, and then because life got a little too busy. In the future I will attempt to keep this place a little fresher.

First order of business: I've added a few new Bad Vanity Plates to the sidebar, although not nearly as many as I've seen lately. There have been a rash of first names, for people who apparently suffer from amnesia but at least can remember where they parked the car. What's my name? Hold on, let me check my plates. Oh yes: Otis. 

Most exciting update: Mike and I signed up with Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Midlands. It was originally Mike's idea, as with so many of our life improvements (see: vegetarianism), after he was inspired by President Obama's call to public service. When Mike went to his orientation session, he learned that we could be a Big Couple, so I signed up as well. I just completed my orientation last week, and we can't wait to get a Little Brother. We were told that because there are so many boys awaiting mentors and not enough Bigs for them, we should get a match soon. For girls, the opposite is true: Big Sisters go on a 6-9 month waiting list. So I am happy to help out a little boy who is waiting to find a friend. Out of respect for our Little's privacy, I will probably keep any future blogging about this experience to very limited & general updates, but we are so looking foward to this new adventure.

In more recent news, we had another excellent restaurant meal last night. We went out with friends to Stokes Grill & Bar in the Old Market. It is a Southwest spot that we've been meaning to try for ages, but which I always seem to forget about when we're deciding where to eat; finally, we made it down there. I had somewhat low expectations, and this is probably unfair, mainly because it looks cool and the ambience is well put together. Sometimes restaurants that focus so much on appearances fall apart on the food, but this is not the case at all for Stokes.

I'll mention the one downside up front: not a whole lot of choices for the vege-pesca-tarian. There were only one veggie and two seafood entrees for us to choose from; however, there were also four salads and eleven appetizers that could easily combine to make a meal. The four of us started out by sharing nachos with cowboy beans and some crab rangoons. The rangoons were good, nothing spectacular, but tasty and crispy as they should be; the sauce was a little on the sweet side for me. The nachos were great, with blue & yellow corn chips and plenty of topping.

I ordered fish tacos for my entree: grilled tilapia in two flour tacos served with beans and rice. I usually don't like tilapia all that much, because it has little flavor of its own and is often badly prepared. However, the fish tacos were very good! The tilapia were cut in nice little filets, neatly blackened and well seasoned. The soft tacos seemed fresh and were just a little toasted. Best of all, the beans and rice were absolutely delicious. I have had many Mexican meals since moving to Omaha, and in pretty much every instance the bean & rice sides have been travesties: cold, dry and completely and utterly without flavor. At Stokes, they were hot, seasoned, and zesty. I almost would have been happy just to eat the sides, and that's saying a lot when it comes to beans & rice. Mike ordered the Twisted Garlic Shrimp Pasta: radiatore pasta with Southwest spices, tomato, avocado, and shrimp. He thought it was also very good. I stole a few bites of his pasta and it was tasty: kind of like a Southwest-style mac and cheese. 

One other minor complaint: I ordered a margarita, and, while pleasingly large, it was weak and off-the-charts sweet, with a pretty artificial-tasting lime flavor. Like a limeade with a couple extra teaspoons of sugar. Probably would not order again, but it didn't take anything away from the meal.

Today we have been busy doing some much-needed but much-dreaded housecleaning, including washing the curtains and table linens, and doing poop patrol in the backyard. Of course, two hours after mopping all the floors, it all looks crap again because Russell has dragged in two tons of dry leaves. Lesson for next fall: RAKE.

Surviving a Recession Human-Style

Tough economic times have hit the nation, and even the irrepressible Humans have been affected. While I wouldn't exactly call us bona fide Recessionistas, I think we have found a few ways to cut costs during this financially stormy weather.

Cut cable and landline. As I've mentioned before, our cable bill was enough to make Baby Jesus cry. So we got rid of cable TV, canceled the landline, and signed up for a $17/mo Netflix account that gives us three DVDs at a time. Net savings = $120/mo, not bad, not bad at all. 

Shop a little smarter at the grocery store. We call Whole Foods "Church," so I must confess that this is really the last area we are willing to seriously slash. We love food, we believe in eating well, and we don't want to skimp at the expense of our health. But we have done a few things that have lightened our grocery spending. (We include household cleaning and paper products in this line item.) I substituted some canned and frozen veggies for fresh - broccoli is just fine frozen, and canned corn is good enough in the off-season. I switched from canned beans to dry - canned beans are cheap to begin with, but dry are cheaper. And some of the pricier items we use, like soy milk and granola bars, we now buy at Target instead. Net savings = about $25/mo, not too shabby.

Don't heat the rooms we aren't using. I finally got around to it today, but I have been meaning to do this for months - since the summer, I think. I bought magnetic vent covers to block the heating/AC vents in the finished basement and guest room, neither of which we ever use. They cost less than $5 for a three pack at Lowe's. Net savings = TBD.

Don't go anywhere. It's about as much fun as it sounds. But in the short run, we have saved a lot on entertainment spending just by staying in.  The Netflix subscription certainly helps there too. Sure, we're getting cabin fever, but we've had a lot of fun too. You can't do The Robot at a movie theater, and believe me, I've tried. Net savings = as much as we can stand.

On a lighter note... weekend review.

Mike and I went to see the car show downtown this weekend, to celebrate the birthday of a friend who does not like to celebrate birthdays - hence, a low key event completely unrelated to cakes or waiters who sing to you in front of the other patrons.

As we were driving down, we ran into a colossal traffic jam, headed toward the Qwest Center where the car show was taking place. We had to take a circuitous detour and as we finally approached, we saw that all the official parking lots were filled. So Mike dropped me off as close as he could get me (a few blocks) and went to find a spot to park.

I trudged along with a big herd through the bitter cold - it was in the low 20s and windy - and followed the crowd into the lobby of the box office. It was packed with people, freezing cold, and sold out. Scalpers were outside hawking tickets. Our friends were nowhere in sight and when I texted them, they replied that they were still parking. Unbelievable! All this for a car show? What, were they debuting the first working Delorean time machine? I was confused, cranky, and freezing my buns off.

At last Mike arrived from Parking Siberia and informed me that I was in the arena part of the Qwest Center. You know, where they were having some big college basketball game. Ohhhhhhhh.

So we trudged back over to the convention center, found our friends, and looked at some cars. I'm not all that into cars, but I can appreciate a little pretend shopping. Mike and I were ogling the Honda Fit hybrid, while our friends were comparing and contrasting Lexus and Mercedes. Different strokes and all that.

Afterwards we parted ways, and Mike and I went grocery shopping and returned home. I made some veggie maki rolls - cucumber, avocado, and carrot. I think my sushi rice is decent and I am an okay maki roller. The weak spot always seems to be the nori, which is chewy and on the ends it's even crispy and hard. It's probably just not the greatest nori in the world, but at $4 a package for the cheap stuff, that's about all the splurging I can justify for DIY sushi.

Post-dinner, we watched Hustle and Flow. It was a little hard for me to put the celebrity gossip about Terrence Howard out of my mind at first (I've heard he's kind of a... not a nice guy) but he did give a good performance and I enjoyed the movie. I was worried that it was going to glamorize pimping, but that was far from the case. It was a pretty heartbreaking portrait of what life is like for men & woman who try to make a living on prostitution and petty drug deals.

Today has been a day of cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. We dusted, we laundered, we scrubbed, we mopped. We (Mike) unclogged the gross shower drain and installed a strainer thingy. I also attempted to start our taxes and realized, after several hours, that I have to wave the white flag this year. Life has gotten too complicated for Turbo Tax, and I think we're going to hire a pro to figure that jazz out for us this year.

Road to Recovery

It's an education I wish I didn't have to have, but I have learned a lot from miscarriage. I've learned that while becoming pregnant can seem instantaneous, becoming unpregnant takes a few weeks for the body to achieve. I've learned that the answer to the question "why?" is confusing and frought with more and more questions. I've learned that some people do not understand that we are grieving a death.

We are grieving a death. I understand that until you go through it, you probably can't imagine it - I know I couldn't, before it happened to me - but consider this a public service announcement. Whatever your intellectual thoughts on pregnancy and human life may be, I can assure you that the emotional experience for me and for Mike is not that I had a health-related mishap or a medical emergency, but that someone has died. 

Every day gets easier, though. Sometimes a thought, a song, or the sight of a baby can send you reeling backwards with surprising force, but then you forge on again. I can't imagine how we would be coping if we didn't have each other and a strong marriage to fall back on... if we didn't have the solid and reliable power to make each other laugh, still, even on the worst days.

It's funny how, when you're pregnant, everything becomes in reference to pregnancy. Every food you eat, every move you make, every thought you think points back to I'm pregnant. When you lose a pregnancy, everything then points to I miscarried. One of the many, many random thoughts I've had in the last week and a half was, "What a time to cancel cable!" I thought there could be no worse time to lack the immediate & compelling escape of television. But for the one millionth time in life, I was wrong. The silence of the television has been unexpectedly pleasant. Instead we've spent our mornings and evenings listening (and even dancing) to music, talking, or just sitting quietly together. It's peaceful, and perhaps just what the doctor ordered.

We lost the baby.

Over the weekend, I miscarried naturally. It happened very quickly, beginning Saturday morning and over by midday Monday. On Monday afternoon I saw my doctor to confirm. At 8 weeks, I heard a healthy heartbeat. At 9 weeks and 3 days, I lost the pregnancy.

It's hard to know how to blog about this. It seems like I could write a whole book, or nothing at all, but anything in between is insufficient.

Mike and I are coping okay. We appreciate the kind words we've received from friends and family, and even the words that don't come out quite right... we know that people often do not know what to say but wish us well.

I am doing fine physically. There really is no answer for why this happened. I am just trying to stay healthy, and we will try again when we can. 

First Gifts

We have received our first baby gifts!

The first batch was from my dear friend Jenn. She was one of the people I blabbed to a little early... we were talking babies and I spilled the beans. Jenn is a wonderfully generous and thoughtful person and she sent me a box of awesome parenting books. She's an editor at a small publishing company and we found her name in the acknowledgments of some of these books - how cool!

The second package came from my mom, a first time grandma. It bugged me out to hold up that little shirt (it says "peace") and picture having a baby that small... then bugged me out even more when I read the tag and saw it's for a six month old! I can't imagine having such a teeny baby, even though I have held my fair share of newborns before. 

The socks are adorable, in a set of six different colors and all printed with a sneaker pattern. The book is a fun little fill-in-the-blank keepsake book with a goofy, silly style that is perfect for Mike and me. The illustrations are really cute 60's style cartoons... we're going to enjoy writing in that together.

So we went "fantasy shopping" at Nebraska Furniture Mart today and just picked all the things we would buy if money were no object... not just baby gear, but we still need furniture for most of the other rooms in the house as well. It's somewhat hard to find pieces we like, since we don't share the Midwest's love affair with shades of brown, but there were a few cute things to add to our fake shopping cart, like a cute lime green loveseat and a retro red leather sofabed (not for the same room!). We managed to find a few simple cribs that were acceptable, though most of them were huge hulking behemoths. I don't understand why cribs now look like giant sailing vessels that need their own zip codes - ? Babies are still really small these days, right?

The Third Human

Happy New Year friends & family!

In 2009, we resolve to... add another Human to the family! And we are on our way, as I'm 9 weeks pregnant today. We waited until Christmas to begin telling everyone, but we've known since the day after Thanksgiving. It was hard to keep quiet - we are not good at keeping secrets, and actually we blabbed to a couple of people early and swore them to secrecy til Christmas.

On Christmas Eve I had my first doctor's appointment. I did not think it would be too exciting so I told Mike to skip it and go to work as usual. The doctor gave me a mild fright when she examined me - she said that we probably would not be able to hear the hearbeat until I was 10 weeks along, and I was only 8 at the time... but the moment she touched my belly she ran out of the room saying "I'm going to get the Doppler!" I lay there thinking, holy crap what if I'm like 12 weeks along and didn't know it?? But when she came back she said that because I'm so slender we might hear it... and sure enough, she found the beat - strong and fast, at 144. I wish Mike had been there for that - it was so cool - but he will hear it next time. 

To answer the most commonly asked questions: Yes, we were trying. Yes, we will find out the sex as soon as we can (it will be at the end of March). No, we don't really have a preference but we are both guessing girl. We do have some ideas for names but nothing we want to publicize just yet. I feel really well, I have had no morning sickness, have been a little tired some days, but not every day, and other than that don't have any unpleasant symptoms. I do want to eat everything in sight sometimes, and at other times all food tastes like wood. But overall I'm great. The doctor did clear me to work through my pregnancy and said that I should wear a mask for safety, but that paints these days are pretty harmless. And my estimated due date so far is August 6th. 

We're really excited and it has been so much fun telling everyone. We've gotten the best reactions from people we know who already have kids - they all tell us it's the best thing in the world and we're going to love being parents. I figure if the battle-worn still get excited about kids, it must be a pretty good experience, haha. We will be updating frequently so check back to hear more as my belly grows....

Secret Society of Short Shorts

Mike & I have noticed a disturbing trend in our neighborhood: men in short shorts. At first it was just the neighbor across the street, mowing his lawn in teeny tiny cutoffs. Then it was the neighbor next door to that neighbor, also mowing his lawn in little Daisy Dukes. On another occasion a third, unidentified man walked down the sidewalk in front of our house, just taking a casual stroll. In short shorts.

We must ask ourselves, have we moved into an enclave of the Secret Society of Short Shorts? Or have we stumbled upon a fashion forward neighborhood so forward that even Heatherette has not yet caught the wave of man thigh mania?

Shrimp for two.

Like this bouquet of hydrangeas? I hope so, because we spent $15 on it while laughing in the face of a nationwide recession. Haha! Now that we're official lifetime residents of Benson we're supporting local businesses whenever possible, which this weekend included these flowers and a half dozen dinner rolls at a new bakery that just opened on Maple Street called Sweet Georgine's. And really, thems are some pretty hydrangeas.

Mike and I had a little cocktail party to go to hosted by someone who worked with me in faux finishing but is leaving the business. You can be sure you enjoyed a party when all your laughing muscles hurt by the time you leave. We made our exit around 8 pm and were famished, but didn't know where/what to eat, so we just headed downtown. By the time we found a parking space we were starving and it was raining hard, so we literally dashed across the street to the nearest restaurant, which happened to be Vincenzo's in the Old Market.

Apparently it was prom night, because half the tables were taken by young ladies and gents in formal wear, which of course prompted much reminiscing about high school and how lame our proms were etc. Mike ordered Shrimp Scampi with angel hair and I ordered the Shrimp Trittata with bow tie pasta. I never prepare seafood at home but it's often an indulgence for when we eat out and have limited vegetarian options (or particularly appealing seafood options). We were served warm rolls (fine, not great) and house salads (ditto). I thought the pasta and sauce were fairly good, but the shrimp was quite tough and had very little flavor. Overall it was a pleasant enough meal but I don't think it will make the list for a return trip... there are far too many other restaurants we'd like to try before we'd even think about going back to Vincenzo's I'm afraid.

When we got home Mike brought out our high school yearbooks and we played a little game called "guess which people were my friends." Mike did pretty well. I badly misjudged the girls in his class - all the girls I picked as the pretty, popular ones were actually outcast, cigarette-puffing headbangers who hung out by the auto shop. I say he missed out, lucky for me perhaps.