Archive for February, 2012

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February 29, 2012

My Cup Runneth…

by Katie

Sometimes I know I’ve been fortunate.

So incredibly fortunate.

I’ve tasted warm, Nutella filled crepes on the rain-chilled streets of Paris.  I’ve rappelled waterfalls in the damp, verdant jungles of Costa Rica.  I’ve seen every color of the rainbow embedded into ethereal rock splayed across the Badlands.   I’ve added 5,500 miles to the Tracker’s odometer in a single trip — marveling at the competing corner coffee shops of Seattle; the craggy, hasselback coastline Oregon; the overhyped sidewalk stars along the grimy streets of Hollywood; the unpretentious grandeur of southwestern deserts;  the popping display of vibrant Fourth of July fireworks that greeted me from the mountains as I entered Colorado Springs, and much, much more.

I’m on the right. Okay… not the most flattering of makeup-less helmeted garb, but whatever. I was waterfall rappelling in Costa Rica, for crying out loud.

I’ve stood in a forest field of lemon-yellow buttercups in Switzerland, I think.  I’ve spelunked the depths of a guano-filled cave in the mountains of Georgia.  I’ve danced in a club in Ibiza while the floor filled with water.  I’ve jumped from a plane over the sun-dappled island of Oahu.  I’ve bartered with an artist in Malaga for the ugliest drawing I’ve ever seen (story coming soon).  I’ve scuba’d the breathtaking reefs of St. Lucia.  I survived a border crossing to Nicaragua with nary a scratch, and I suffered a thank-God-it-wasn’t-a-brown-recluse spider bite in my own front yard and lived to tell the tale.

Spelunking

Me. Spelunking.

I’ve driven across the Golden Gate, I’ve gazed upon my nation’s capital, I’ve walked on glass over the city of Toronto, I’ve stared in awe at the St. Louis Arch, I’ve seen where le tour de Eiffel touches the ground.

Skydive Hawaii

Sometimes, even in Hawaii, you need to get a little closer to the sun.

Yet somehow, it’s not enough.

It’s never enough.

My experience only reminds me of how much I haven’t yet seen.  How much there is still to see.

And there is a constant battle in my head over where I should concentrate my energy.  I ask myself, why am I spending money on curtains when there are these things to do?  Why are we ordering takeout when we could save to eat REAL food in Thailand?  Why am I still paying these student loans when I could flee the country and live quite comfortably in Central America?  Why did that parking lot car accident just cost us $500 when we should be riding in an Indian rickshaw anyway?

And then Justin looks at me funny because I already made him feel bad about the accident when it wasn’t even his fault, but also because riding in an Indian rickshaw doesn’t hold the same appeal for him as it does for me.

Travel, I think, is in my blood.

And those who are pathogen-free will never understand.

Hell, I don’t understand.

I don’t understand why I’m sitting here, in my office, caught between two worlds.  Travel magazines, and writing books on one side of me, paint samples and curtain packages on the other.

One side. (un-staged.)

The other side.  (un-staged.)

It’s like a snapshot of my brain, scattered across my pristine white desk, each side pulling me in a separate direction every moment of every day.

It’s a very fast way, you see, to go nowhere at all.

Or split in two.

I know.  If that is my problem, then I have it made.

But maybe it’s a metaphor.  A really bad metaphor for the struggle of balancing our real lives — relationships, obligations, jobs, and bills — with the vision we’ve seen for ourselves since childhood.

I’m not sure where I lost sight of mine, but I’m hoping it’s not too late to get it back.

I’m hoping I can balance it with the things I have and love already.

I’m hoping I’m not as crazy as I sound.

Posted in Bon Voyage | 6 Comments »

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February 27, 2012

Forgive Me Pretty Baby But I Always Take the Long Way Home.

by Katie

I’m going to be honest.

This was one of those weekends I wish I could do over.

Not because it was so spectacularly awesome, but because I feel it was relatively wasted in its entirety.  Aside from a fun night of drinks with a girlfriend on Friday, I didn’t do anything notable or interesting.  I accomplished exactly nothing.  I took not one step forward in any aspect of my life.  In fact, I actually took one step backwards because we had to return the curtains I ordered for the bedroom.

They weren’t right.

See, they were incredibly white.  And shiny.  And they felt like a bridesmaid’s dress, except they didn’t get prettier when I got them drunk.

Ba-dum-dum.

*Update: My buddy Dennis commented that it’s ME who would have to get drunk in order for this scenario — and joke — to work.  That’s what I get for writing posts before 7:00 a.m. Why do you always have to be right, Dennis?  WHY?  (P.S. I don’t think I get prettier when they get drunk. Since I mostly walk around my bedroom naked, they’re not exactly lookin’ at my face, if you knowwhatI’msayin’.  Ba-dum-DUM.)

And actually, I made Justin return them, poor guy, because I couldn’t face the idea of going into town to shop.  Especially not for curtains.  Because apparently bedroom curtains are my Achille’s heel of decorating.  Well curtains, and pretty much anything else that requires money and a commitment.

But don’t feel too bad for Justin because he volunteered.  Probably because he wanted to get away from me and my manic online curtain shopping — that torturous hell hole of grainy photos, 80′s valances, and mixed reviews.

Oh, the reviews.  I read them for what feels like hours and was eventually convinced that it would be better for me to go pick a fabric and sew my own damn curtains even though the most I’ve ever sewed is a button but then I realized that in order to get fabric I’d either have to go out and shop, or I’d have to look online and read more reviews since everyone knows the reviews are the only thing allowing us to make a semi-confident purchase over the internet and still, because of my shiny white grommety curtain fiasco, I’ve learned that even the reviews are confusing and not always reliable and I’d probably end up with some kind of poop brown velvet that a bunch of strangers across the internet convinced me would be a good choice because of its energy-saving qualities and machine washability.

No, thank you.

Fortunately for me and my sanity, I’m learning how to live in the moment.  To step away from my privileged white girl problems, crack open a Yuengling, and surf instead for interesting road trip destinations and cheap tickets to anywhere.

It’s called escapism people, and it’s a beautiful thing.

That is, until you realize that an entire 48 hours have passed, your house is dirty, the laundry has piled up, you have no food in the fridge, you’re still only halfway through your book club book and the meeting is on Wednesday, you haven’t written anything worthwhile in an embarrassingly long amount of time, and you still have no curtains.

I don’t like wasting a weekend.  It makes me feel icky.  I’m one of those people who doesn’t feel right if something doesn’t get done.

But really, I’m thinking of moving us back into the bedroom anyway, because curtains are mostly just for the sake of the neighbors who don’t want exposure to the things that might happen in there, like reading in bed or swinging from our sex toy chandelier.  But honestly, if they don’t want exposure, then maybe they should just stop looking.

You know?

The good news is that I officially have something to look forward to, besides public displays of sex toy swingery.

Here’s a hint:

Okay.  That’s more than a hint.

It’s a road trip, baby!

So it’s not quite the epic cross-country trip that’s been consuming my thoughts, and it’s not even as far as Miami where I drive to visit my sister, but it’s something.

And some of those places are new to me.

And some have old friends.

And wonderful family.

And good food.

And a bed for me to stay.

Because while this trip could easily be accomplished in a single day, you know, in your heart of hearts, that it’s me.

It’s travel.

It’s unquestionable.

When it comes to going anywhere, I always take the long way home.

What about you?  Do you need to feel a sense of accomplishment over a weekend, or are you happy to relax and let one slide by?  Any fun trips planned?  Anyone else like to take the scenic route?

*Post title from “The Long Way Home” by Norah Jones. Love it.

Posted in Bon Voyage, Just Sayin, Living and Learning, This 'n That | 8 Comments »

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February 23, 2012

Fine. Here’s a Sneak Peek at my Bedroom. Pervs.

by Katie

It feels a little intimate, this whole sharing of the bedroom.

I mean… when it looked like this, is was no big deal.

It was just a room. An uninteresting, plain yogurt, asexual cube of space.

But now?

It’s like she’s hiked her skirt up a little bit, and now I’m not sure how I feel about you looking at her.

Because you might judge her.

And you might not be into the kinds of things I’m into.

Like the charcoal gray walls or the S&M sex toy we’ve hung from the ceiling.

Oh, wait. That’s just my armillary antiqued silver chandelier.

You know, inspired by those awesome looking armillary spheres that depict the earth as the center of a cosmic system with various rings representing the circles of all of those floaty things up in the sky.

It’s kind of like this one from OurBoatHouse.com:

Except mine didn’t cost $1,080.

It’s this one, from Bellacor.com:

Solaris Olde Silver 3-light Chandelier by Chrystorama.

Except I didn’t spend $218, either.

I happened to luck upon finding an open item on their website, meaning someone else bought this beauty and returned it.

I can’t imagine why.

So, with Bellacor’s guarantee that the product had all of the pieces and was in brand new condition, I bit the non-returnable bullet and purchased this baby for $109.

Is it still more than I’d like to admit spending?

Definitely.

But I think I might be in love. And the pattern it splays across the ceiling when it’s turned on is phenomenal.

You’ll just have to wait to see that, though.

A girl can’t reveal all of her secrets in a single day.

So this is where my bedroom makeover is so far: Painted trim, painted ceiling, painted walls, and new light.

I warned you before, and I’ll say it again — the room might not be everyone’s cup o’ tea, but it’s my cup o’ Tanqueray and tonic with a squeeze of lime.

So far it’s sexy and sultry with a splash of celestial.

Oh, and Justin likes it too.

Posted in Around the House, Crafts and Decor | 21 Comments »

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February 21, 2012

And This Is Why You Should Never Do Anything Nice For Anyone Ever.

by Katie

This weekend, I broke my boss’s television.

Yep.

Welcome to my world.

I know these things don’t just happen to me, right?  You told me these things don’t just happen to me, like the time I flashed my co-worker, boss, and pretty much the entire city my skivvies in broad daylight.  (Because, you know, any other time of day would be perfectly acceptable.)

It was one of those moments when, clear as crystal, I had an epiphany – we really should lie the television down while we move it, I thought, rather than balancing it up on its stand.

Of course, as is common in these types of scenarios, I was having that epiphany as I pressed the accelerator when the light turned green.  In the forward momentum, the backwards-facing television decided that it would rather stay at the stop light, so it fell, face down, and landed on top of a file cabinet.

And I got that feeling.  You know that sickly feeling when you feel like life is playing a joke on you?  Like any second time is going to rewind itself to the moment before The Incident happened, and you’ll have time to change the way things went down?  Like this really can’t be happening, and we’ll just stop at the office to drop off the filing cabinet, and then there will be plenty of room to properly arrange the large, not-inexpensive flat screen television in such a way that basic physics won’t lead to its ultimate demise?

But wait.  That already happened.

And now I have to explain to my boss, when we show up at his new house to which we were helping him move his family’s worldly possessions from his old house, why, exactly, I broke one of the two things I was responsible for transporting.

After that thought crossed my mind, a more primal instinct took over.  I’m not exactly sure, but I think this is the conversation that took place in my car:

Me:  We could just keep driving.  We could just keep going and start over with nothing but this Tracker, a filing cabinet, and a broken, flat screen television to our names.

Justin:  That sounds great, except for the part where I get arrested for ditching the military.

Me:  We could just throw it out the back of the Tracker and tell him we got mugged when we were driving through a less-than-savory part of town.

Justin:  We didn’t drive through a less-than-savory part of town.  He’ll only believe that story if we tell him we got mugged by a McDonald’s employee or grass-fed prep school children.

Me:  It could happen.

Justin:  And the only thing they stole was the flat screen?

Me:  What else are they going to steal?  Mixed CD’s from 1998?  A pack of kleenex?  The copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull I bought in a used bookstore in Canon Beach  in 2003 that’s been sitting in the pocket of my door ever since?

Justin:  Good point. But we’d have to file a police report to make it believable, and I refuse to get involved in that type of scandalous affair.

Me:  What, they didn’t teach you that in Catholic school?  That it’s okay to file false police reports on your wife’s behalf so she doesn’t have to tell her boss that she broke his expensive television?  That you BOTH broke his expensive television?  Don’t forget, Mister, you were in the car.  That makes you an accomplice.  And I’m your wife.  Catholics are totally into that idea of doing-whatever-the-spouse-wants-no-questions-asked, right?  I mean, it’s for the good of the marriage.  I could be carrying your CHILD.

Justin:  What?  You could?

Me:  No.  It was a hypothetical.

Justin:  …

Me:  Let’s talk about something else.

In the end, my boss wasn’t mad.  Or at least he did a good job of hiding it.  I console myself by saying it was an older flat screen, and he said he’d been looking for an excuse to buy a new one anyway.

That, and the fact that I work for a bargain.  And he knows it.

And we’re the only people who showed up to help him move.

And we did it for free.

So hey.

You get what you pay for, right?

I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson to be learned here.  Something like… don’t do nice things for other people because it will likely bite you in the ass.

Or something like that.

I’m still working on that one.

Posted in Just Sayin, This 'n That | 14 Comments »

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