Welcome to November

Those days of yellow and orange and red (my favorite) are past, but it looks like it should be a sunny weekend. What more can you thank November for?

(A: The darkening of days that means the holidays approach, whatever produce is still showing up at the farmers' market, being a scapegoat for your actually un-seasonal unhappiness.)

I do savor the moments like that one, heading home in the afternoon, looking up after I cross the busy street and realizing everything is gold. I also feel the cold and dark threatening to shorten my days, which already feel short from work and inaction and being too into being asleep when I was previously asleep.

I think that the plan is not to try to paint a beautiful life on this blog, not right now.  I think my boyfriend and maybe most people, if they ever hear it, are sick of the November shtick. But here in this blog, let's all agree (that's me, agreeing with me) that November can be really hard. But so can October. So can September, and August, and July. I've been taking baby steps, and they don't really go anywhere, but I'm going to try harder to get on track. November, life kind of sucks, but I'm also not giving in.

So, a plan for Friday.

Alarm goes off, leap from the bed and into the steamy hot shower.
Get dressed. Eat. Spend a quiet, calm, thoughtful morning with myself. Pack bag. Eat lunch. Go to work (don't be late). Eat dinner. Go to work. Go to bed.

A plan for Thursday 11:59pm: go to bed!

I Want

a loaf of bread
2-5 apples (get me through the weekend or the week)
new red lipstick (lost mine)
a borrowed iron
the will to hem my curtains (hinges on iron)
donuts and cider
$20 to get through the week

That's all I want this weekend, at least that's tangible/measurable (if the curtains are hemmed, the will was there).

Paying back student loans, it turns out, saps all your extra money. No paid sick or vacation days kills the possibility for extra money. Life, friends, is boring!

 My brother's baking bread today, so hopefully by tomorrow I'll have some. Free, and so delicious.

I'm going to the cider mill tomorrow, even though the money was spent yesterday on mulled wine at the new beer garden and Strongbow and cheddar ale soup and ravioli, split with Emma. A beautiful evening followed by a lovely date with cocktails and pizza and a tasty s'more.

As for lipstick – red lip gloss forever, I guess. It's been running out for a year, but never actually does.

Identity Crisis

I hate blogs.

That's not true. I hate my blog.

I hate my blog because it's inconsistent. It's been around for over four years. Most of the early posts are pretty bad, though they served their purpose, which was keeping in touch with friends while I was abroad. More of the later posts are acceptable, but many of them are months apart, and there are still crappy ones. Just write something, I told myself. Get it going again. Occasional bad posts are okay when they're hidden by a flood of content. They're not so acceptable when, like this one, they are one lonely dot on a sparse timeline.

I hate my blog. That's not true. I'm just frustrated. It's been so long, and for what?

Maybe it's time to start a new one. Almost three years ago, I was thinking about renaming the blog, since I was no longer an occasionally-itinerant Landstreicherin in Europa. Then again, I only had a few months of college left, so I would be moving somewhere, maybe even traveling again. Back then, I was applying to teach English in Austria through the Fulbright Kommission, but that didn't work out so well, leaving me without a plan at graduation. (My application got lost in the mail.)

I moved to Grosse Pointe, and was not a tramp, but an outright, sedentary bum. Not a cent of income for four months.

Okay, not a bum. I went to Ann Arbor every weekend to see my boyfriend, and then I moved to Ann Arbor and got my surprisingly long-term restaurant job and commuted to Detroit every other weekend and then some.

But now, it's two years from then, and I haven't even moved in over a year, and my blog is pretty much dead.

Thought of the Day: Internet/Sauna

Thought of the Day: 
I am incompatible with the internet* life.
Oh no, I'm incompatible with modern life!
I'm doomed!

Motivation: 
Can't ever seem to finish the tasks requiring the internet, because there are always more. More importantly: lost count of how many days in a row I've had a headache. I had the same headache for over three days. By now, I don't think I can claim it's the same headache (day five? day six?), but I'm writing this from hour 4 of ibuprofen. Maybe by hours 6-8, as the ibuprofen wears off fully, I'll feel that same dull agony and recognize that it never truly dissipated.

More computer never equals less headache.

Alternate Thought of the Day:
I love saunas! Even though it's been 90 degrees out forever!

*Why is this still officially capitalized? Please explain.

Porches, Painfully Obvious

I have a summer dream, and that dream is porches.

ALI AND DREW, MARRIED, RELAXING ON A PORCH. This is a really good porch, by the way, at a truly lovely hunting-lodge style home in the woods of Georgia, south of Atlanta. Any of the below would be great on this porch. Photo courtesy of Ali's cousin Katie.

The Hairpin is out for the weekend. The Circuit Court and County Building here in Washtenaw County, Michigan, have a four-day Memorial Day weekend thanks to a furlough day. I'm down to one out of four attorneys and no calls lighting up the switchboard, I've got my sunglasses open on my desk and a stomach clamoring for lunch.

It's almost dinnertime. Remember when I had a porch in the canopy of downtown Ann Arbor? Emma and I ate twenty-four pierogi at our first meal on that porch. We had a graduation cocktail party for Emma in the wind and chill of late April. Later, they passed a bottle of Jim Beam Black around in the dark until it disappeared. We had a welcome-home party for Emma after a summer of Yiddish on the East Coast. Meg and I drank a bottle of vinho verde on that porch after I got home from Detroit via Amtrak, two hours late or more. We sweated and sweated and finally escaped the heat at a nearby bar.

So many breakfasts of scrambled eggs and orange juice, while the bumblebees bumbled into the sliding glass doors, bump bump bump. I never knew a bumblebee could be so loud.

A porch, a table and -cloth, the evening sun. Sunglasses, eventually pushed up onto your head. A pitcher of water, glasses. Bread and cheese, burgers, whatever, I'll take it. Just give me some carbs and some fat and a drink, and some smiles.

It was my birthday on the porch, once, on a Thursday evening almost a year ago. Basil gimlets, uh...attempted Singapore Sling? Blood of Christ? Something red.

When the sun sets, candles. I buy so many candles in my attempts at being a girl, and use them so rarely. I don't have a porch this year, not really. Candles don't really work in the wind, also, but that's what lanterns are for!

It's five, goodbye, office, goodbye, internet.

(I have a lot of summer dreams. Beware.)

Salt Tooth

I need some new snack ideas.

Or maybe I should have just bought a new box of stone-ground wheat crackers when I was at Trader Joe's two hours ago. Three or four crackers and a few slices of cheese is an entirely reasonable snack, especially accompanied by a little fruit. Lately, though, with the demise of my fancier cheese (1,000-day gouda, so hard, so salty, so good), I've turned back to my old habits. Butter just goes so well with these crackers. Just three buttered crackers, just tonight, not so bad.

Just two more buttered crackers. Two more.

Every night.

And so today I told myself, no more stone-ground wheat crackers right now. Butter is too addictive.

Now I am bereft. I need a little salty snack to finish the day; lunch was too big to warrant dinner. Frozen custard around four was too everything to warrant anything.

Perhaps popcorn. Made with at least a quarter-stick of melted butter. That will show my non-cracker buying self!

(Emma and I went to Somerset and Birmingham for Important Wedding Preparation Errands. Namely eating pizza and browsing Anthropologie's sales rack and housewares--Very Important. Now you know.)