Friday, July 3, 2015

May and June 2015: A summary

I miss doing lists. I miss blogging. I miss writing. I should be able to solve this problem on my own, since I am the one who decides how I spend my time. Anyway.

May and June were busy months. They deserve lists. Wahoo for lists!

Places we went:

  • Spokane. The first weekend in May, we went back up for Bloomsday. It was such a fun mini-vacation. We ate a lot of food, laughed with our friends, ran a great race, duped a fancy restaurant into giving us a free dessert, and made great memories. I'm sure you feel like you were there from that very specific description.




  • Park City. Just for one night, the Sunday to Monday of Memorial Day. It was super fast, and we spent most of the time at the pool in the rain (gotta love Memorial Day in Utah! It ALWAYS rains.) but it was fun. I might be the only person ever who takes a sandwich maker on vacation with her. It didn't do any good, since we ended up at Taco Bell for breakfast (we all love sausage AM crunchwraps, and will do crazy things to obtain them.)





Places we ate:

  • Buffalo Wild Wings. I am in love with the spicy Thai sauce, and the garlic parmasan (which is bizarre, because garlic is usually my natural enemy, but this sauce is sooo delicious.) I highly recommend the Buffalitos. I don't know why it took us so long to eat there.
  • The Habit. Great burgers, and the best part: they will add avocado to almost anything. Be still my avocado-loving heart.
  • Costa Vida (where I somehow ended up running into Lucy. Man, I love Lucy. And even better to see her unexpectedly, across a crowded room. Yay for running into friends!) 
  • La Puente.  When Shane and I were dating, I hated La Puente. It is a Mexican restaurant on State Street that has been there forever, and I was always a fan of Los Hermanos in the UC which kept me from loving La Puente. But after living on the West Side, aka the Mexican-food-deprived-side of Salt Lake County, I fully appreciated our night out at La Puente. I keep trying to get my kids to go back there, but have been unsuccessful.
  • Bombay House. I love me some Indian food, but no one else does. So I have to make a special trip to 3 different restaurants typically in order to have it for myself (the kids eat one place, Shane eats at another, and I get BH.) It is worth all the effort to have the deliciousness that is Chicken Coconut Kurma. 
  • Zupas. I ate here with my dear mother-in-law on one visit, and again with my bestie Melanie in a very rushed but worth it lunch one afternoon.

New Business (a veiled Mad Men reference. Mad Men ended in May, a fact that I am still mourning.)

  • Shane got a new-to-him car. We sold our Xterra after 11 years and bought a Subaru Legacy. It had some problems at first. By "problems" I mean it stalled ON THE WAY HOME which resulted in two weeks of repairs, paid for by the dealership, that included dropping the trasmission, new transmission computer, and another part I can never remember but we lovingly refer to as the "flux capacitor." While it was being repaired we drove around in a brand new Impreza. I drove it as much as I possibly could, which was fun (we put over 500 miles on it. Oops, sorry Mark Miller Subaru.)
  • Pebble Greybeard Lovejoy. He is a Russian Blue kitten, and he is a pain in the ass. He is Ben's cat, and he is just like Ben. He is giving our cat Bucket a nervous breakdown, because she looks like his (Siamese) mother. He jumps out at her from behind corners. He attacks her tail. He acts EXACTLY like Ben acts with his older sibling. But he is sweet, sometimes. Like last night, when he crawled up on my chest and forced his way under the blanket. I had him on my chest, and Bucket on my lap, and it was a little bit like kitty heaven. Note: I have a private name for him, that I abbreviate to MLB. It stands for "mean little bastard." I giggle every time I say it. He loves to chase toys, his tail, Bucket, feathers, and pencils. Piles of folded laundry are an obstacle course for him, and he is never as happy as when he is attacking a rolled up pair of socks. (For approximately 2 minutes of me writing this, he was purring on my lap. And now he's watching me type. Can I get an "Awww!)

  • A laptop. Which sounds fancy, but it isn't. Laptops are sort of disposable now, so I didn't want anything too fancy. My old one took 300 minutes just to bring up a browser, which may have been because of the fact that most of the storage was full of pictures. I was terrified it would crash before I moved 13 years worth of pictures. It didn't. The new laptop is adequate. It has a 10 key, which was pretty much my only requirement (I don't know how people have a laptop without one.)

Media that was enjoyed

  • Hozier. I love this CD album with my whole heart. I can listen to it exclusively for hours.
  • Florence and the Machine - How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. I will always get excited for new Florence music. 
  • Uprooted, by Naomi Novik, a new-to-me author. I just finished it last night, but carried it around with me for 3 weeks. Thomas is also reading her Temeraire series.
  • My Real Children - I haven't finished it yet, because I could renew it and not the Novik book, but I will be finishing it shortly.
  • Headspace - a meditation app that I have been using regularly. It it so helpful. When Amy and I were little, we shared a room. Our closet was always, always a disaster. We kept everything there and most of it was leftover books and papers and clothes and toys and records that we didn't need anymore, but couldn't get rid of. I feel like my emotional and mental closet has been overflowing for years with hoarded emotions, thought, feelings, and experiences that I just didn't have use for, but were crowding my judgement and thought patterns. I'm cleaning out my closet. I'm figuring out how to not take everything so personally, and not get trapped in my thoughts as much. Headspace has helped with this process.

Other stuff I don't want to forget:


  • Thomas finished 8th grade and Ben finished 4th.
  • We fed a baby bird for a week. It was doomed from the start, and he passed away sometime before yesterday morning. Sad. But my kids were great bird daddies for a few days.
  • We watched Jurassic World on Father's Day.
  • My kids finished Spring soccer. Thomas hadn't played on a team since he was in first grade (which mostly consisted of him pretending to be Spiderman, or a dinosaur. My how he's grown!) and so it was kind of a big thing for him to play. Ben is obsessed with soccer, so it's just the usual for him.
  • I got new running shoes. After three weeks of hating them, I found some inserts that work really well, and now I love them. 
  • I started walking once a week with my neighbor friend.
  • Started to clean out my mom's house. It's sort of anticlimactic, since I've obsessed over it for years. (See "Headspace" entry above. Deep breaths.) We did manage to get a lot done in a few hours, so that was nice. But there are many more hours to be spent there, sigh.
  • Went fishing with the kids at Daybreak Lake. It was hotter than crap, and I missed a lot of it because I was at my mom's house, but it was something different.
  • I got 70,000 steps on my Fitbit in one week. I had to try really hard to get it. I almost made it the week before, but my Fitbit died in the afternoon on Saturday. Sad.
  • Threw my back out for one terrible week. I didn't mess around this time and went to the doctor right away. He gave me prednisone, which I didn't take last time because steroids make me very bitchy and mean, but it was only 6 days, and they didn't seem to affect me as much. My back quickly got back into shape. I'm so glad. I think part of the reason it got better faster was that last time, we were going through the baby thing, which complicated it immensely.
  • Had the first summer without Ragnar in five years. I missed it a lot. But, the weekend of the race was really hot, so maybe I didn't miss it that much. I could have joined my employer's team - they went through runners like wildfire! - but that was that weekend that my back was injured, and I wasn't invited until mid-May. It was hard to turn it down, especially since it would have been free, but in the end, it was the right thing to not participate. 

How were your May and June?

1 comment:

Feisty Harriet said...

I desperately need a new laptop and am also kind of wary of the bells and whistles because, frankly, I don't need or want them and it seems wasteful to pay for them.

xox