Boston Wedding Bonanza

I just returned from six nights in one of my favorite cities...and from the title of this blog post, you can probably figure out which city that is.

Day 1, Thursday was kinda like a kindergartener's book. I drove in a car, flew on a plane, rode a bus and took a train to get to my final destination. A lesson in transportation. If only I had taken a boat ride at some point. I spent that night in Wellesley with my wonderful family eating delicious food and staying up late with my cousin Wes drinking wine. Poor Wes had to work the next morning but not I. (The beauty of vaca.)

Day 2, Friday I met my TriDelta sisters at the BU Pub for lunch, wandered over to Fenway and made my way downtown. Kristin very kindly invited me to stay with her at the swank hotel Jess' wedding was at. We got checked in, ran into the bride and groom and headed out for a lobster dinner. YUM! Then it was back to BU for the rehearsal night party at, appropriate for the BU themed wedding, White Horse, one of our old stomping grounds. At White Horse we discovered the overwhelming wedding-nature of everything. Three engaged TriDeltas were there and a few others are looking down the tunnel of love at diamonds. Hence the "wedding bonanza" of it all.

Day 3, Saturday started out with Kristin and I taking it fairly easy and ended with one awesome wedding. Jess and Rob had their ceremony at Marsh Chapel on campus and the reception at the Colannade Hotel in downtwon Boston. It was nothing shy of amazing. Rooftop cocktail hour, lighting effects in the ballroom, NY strip for dinner, live band and flip flops for when your heels became too much. Jess' dress was beautiful and her dad's speech was spot on one of the best I've heard. They invited the guests to join in their first dance and we rounded out the reception with a few choruses of "I am a T," our fav TriDelta rush song that I believe has been sung at all our weddings thus far. I think we had two photographers capturing that moment and I can't wait to see the pics. And of course in the middle of all that I got to meet baby Taygan, Amanda and Joe's little bundle of baby boy joy.

Day 4, Sunday Eight or so of the college friends met back near campus for a gluten-free brunch, recommendation of Jane and Chris. It was also Amanda and Joe's first anniversary and according to them, they loved spending it with all the guests from their wedding last year. Brunch ended trying to decide who would get married the last weekend of July/first weekend of August in 2011 so the tradition could stay alive. (It also ended knowing we'll all see each other at Ben and Anna's wedding in April which is quite promising.)

Day 5, Monday was spent relaxing with the Renaud family in Brimfield. Lots of baby kissing.

Day 6, Tuesday started in Brimfield and then migrated to Boston when Rachel, Amanda's sister, flew in from Florida. The four of us (3 girls and Taygan) spent the afternoon and night in Southie at Aunt Pam's place. As it was Taygan's 2 month birthday, we celebrated with cupcakes and wine. Taygan, I'm telling you now, all birthdays should be spent that way. (The sweets were from a local placed called Sweet Tooth and were soooo good. Its a good thing we don't have one of those that close to my house because I would eat it every day.)

Day 7, Wednesday was primarily a travel day but began nicely with a light Dunkin Donuts breakfast with Amanda and Rachel and then a tour of Arlington by Jane and lunch at pizza place in the town's center. Then to Logan, then Newark - which for the record I am never ever ever flying through again - and finally into Austin around 11:30 p.m. to be greeted by my perfect husband with red-tipped yellow roses, precisely my favorite kind of rose.

Whew! There you go, the Boston adventure in nutshell.

Now its back to work for a couple days, getting my life back in order after 2.5 weeks of being all over the place and getting Ross ready for his first day at GFD on Monday. Woohoo!

PS I had to go back and fix like 6 spelling errors in this blog post. I am clearly losing my writer's touch. Only practice makes perfect so I suppose...I shall have to blog more?

My New BFF

Taygan is my new BFF. We're having a blast. More later when I return to Texas.

Favorites x 2= Love

One of my favorite photographers/deltas (Kristen) did a photo shoot of my favorite Girl Scout/Army wife/mentor (Cindy) and her family. This blog post and the photos just holler "AWESOME!"

I know this was Cindy's family's photo shoot, not mine, but it just fills me with butterflies and rainbows that the worlds of Girl Scouts and TriDelta have collided in Austin and that's making good things happen for good people. I'm thankful to Kristen for her generous photography donations to Girl Scouts (and for helping me out of sophomore slump back in college) and thankful to Cindy for her unwavering and honest mentorship, both professionally and personally. And I'm just bursting with joy that these two great ladies got to meet each other!

See Kristen's great photos of Cindy and fam: http://www.faux-toes.com/blog/2010/07/a-special-session-for-a-military-family.html

PS Another fav: planning a lunch date with my pledge class (& then some) at the BU Pub on Friday. I believe it is the official kick off to the Eddy-Porter wedding weekend and I am jazzed.

There are no words but I'll try anyways

During vacation I finished both books that I brought with me before the flight home. In Denver I poked my head into B&N and picked up two books.

Great, two fluffy girl books, The Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl and Hard to Get. I started reading Call Girl, was amused by some of the client scenes and finished it yesterday. It was a pretty entertaining book until the last two chapters when the character does a 180 in the span of four pages and with no explanation. I actually checked about three times that I wasn't missing pages.

And so before bed I started reading Hard to Get, a paperback about a girl who upon throwing her sister's bachelorette party discovers one of the male strippers is the former love of her life. Presumably the story is about the back and forth of getting back together.

OMG. No. I unknowingly practically bought erotica! Even as a grown, married woman I blushed uncontrollably as a I read the first two chapters. Just after the first I was thinking "my goodness" but thought I would give the second chapter a shot, maybe the author was just trying to hook me. Oh no, the second chapter was equally steamy (and raunchy and...just omigoodness)!

I don't think of myself as prudish but I just cannot read this book! What's more, I don't even think I can take it to Half Price Books as a donation. I shop at the same one every couple of weeks and while I know its probably very vain to think the salesclerks remember me, what if they do!? Then I'll become the woman who donated erotica!

So like I said, there are no words to describe my embarrassment. My solution: throw this book into the bottom of a Goodwill donation bag and be an anonymous donor of erotica.

Ann & Diane

Last year Ross and I watched a Diane Sawyer special on 20/20 (btw if you didn't know, I really love my ABC News people, Diane included. We're on a first name basis). The special was called "A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains" and it focused on the poverty in Appalachia. What we took away from it was being baffled by the health issues in coal mines, the unspeakable conditions kids grow up in and the prevalance of drug abuse in such poor communities but what really blew us away was the use of Mountain Dew. As a rule, we don't drink cokes. Not for any kind of moral highroad or anything but I gave them up for Lent once and never went back and Ross is just actually that health conscious.

In the 20/20 Special they showed parents giving their kids Mountain Dew in sippy cups. As you can imagine, the list of issues with that is obscenely long. Poor oral health, useless calories, hyperactivity, expense of it etc. We were floored. It made us both thankful that we had parents who would never have done that and who taught us, even just by example if not by conscious lessons, that coke in sippy cups is just not OK.

Tonight on Dateline, Ann Curry ventured off to a very poor region of Ohio ("America Now: Friends and Neighbors"). She interviewed several families, among whom was a woman who runs a local food pantry. It was a good special though I can't say anything hit home quite as hard as the Mountain Dew nightmare of Diane's special. Though that said, it definitely reiterated the point that so much of this poverty is simply caused by a lack of education. Of course I don't mean fancy private university education, although yes, college would have opened more employment doors for folks, sure. But teenagers getting pregnant because they aren't educated about birth control or the challenges of being a teen parent. Parents not educated about what healthy foods they should feed their kids and why other foods are so bad.

Even though I definitely had years as an entitled jerk of a teenager, I do think I was always thankful for the advantages I had like a good school, a car at 16, a college education. I'm not sure though that I've often, then or now, really thought about the other advantages I had. I've probably just always taken loving family, well balanced meals, knowledge of budgeting and such fo granted. (I think though that this is relatively common. Right? I'm not alone in this am I?)

That said, I often get angry people's inability to care for themselves. To me, a girl with every advantage in life, it always seems so easy. I hear people say "life is hard" and frequently think "no, it isn't." It sounds harsh and judgemental and I'm not saying its the right attitude. Occassionally, I definitely need to be reminded that my life wasn't hard but that's just my life (thanks Ann and Diane for that reminder). I'm not sure if what I view as blatantly bad choices will ever stop irritating me. Frankly probably not. But I do hope I have the perspective to remember that for many it isn't all their fault. They had nobody to teach them, nobody to set a good example, not a single advantage in their childhood. Keeping that perspective I know will not only make me a less judgemental person but will help me help others and be patient. Here's to hoping I can regularly summon up that kind of perspective and realism and then act with purpose, patience and selflessness.

Colorado-extravaganza

Yesterday we got back from our Colorado-extravaganza and it was awesome.

Day one we arrived in Denver, grabbed our rental car and drove up to Estes Park, a little touristy town on the eastern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. While we waited for the condo to be ready, we took the airtram thing up the side of a mountain and scoped out the view from the observation deck. As you can see from the pic...needless to say it was awesome. We saw little chimpmunks running around, brave little suckers. One practically ran across my foot! The we checked into our freaking amazing condo, complete with fireplace, mountain view, hot tub for two in the bathroom, marble countertops, you name it, this condo had it.

A quick cat nap later, we had after all woken up at the crack of dawn, and we went out to dinner with my cousin Winslow and his new fiance, Megan. It was great to meet her. Lovely girl. Had an excellent dinner with them. And by the way, the YMCA they work out is crazy big! Wowzas.

Day two started with an 8 a.m. breakfast trailride. That's right, horseback trailride. With our guide and a mother-daughter pair we started out into the mountains on our horses. My horse, April, was a very nosy horse. It was a fight to keep even a foot between her and the horse in front of her. After an hour of riding we stopped for breakfast. Now here, unfortunately the daughter from the other pair realized she had a crazy rash across her whole face. A little freaked out, they called it an early day and went to the hospital. Fortunately she had no problems breathing or anything so I'm sure she's fine. Of course the result of this was Ross and I had 2.5 hours of a private horseback ride through the mountains. The views were amazing!

Day three we got a wild hair and went on an eight mile hike. Two miles up the side of a mountain to Gem Lake, two miles across the top of the mountains to Balanced Rock and then of course, four miles to get back. The first two miles were the hardest but fortunately we were also the freshest. Despite that though when we were just a quarter mile or less from the lake, I thought I was going to die. It was so steep! I kept telling Ross to stop and he kept saying "just make it to this spot" or "baby, just a little further." Grrrr. It hurt but I did eventually make it to the top.

Day four, Thursday that is, we left Estes Park and worked our way into Denver via the Coors Brewery. Ross was in love. And even as a non-beer drinker, I have to say, the brewery tour was pretty good. It was entertaining and I've never learned so much about making booze in my life. After the brewery, where Ross got enthusiastic about a Christmas ornament souvenier for the first time ever, we headed into Denver. By this point, my laid-back always relaxed husband needed some downtime. After all, in this relationship, I am the Energizer Bunny and he is the Super-Relaxo. Its a combo that usually works very well for us. So I explored the 16th Street Mall in Denver while he zoned out in the hotel to an hour of ESPN. The 16th Street Mall is great! It's like Faneuil Hall in Boston but in Denver. Shopping, coffee houses, restaurants, street performers, painted cows and pianos. It had it all. On my exploratory visit I scouted out a dinner location and after a little more ESPN with Ross in the hotel, was treated to an excellent meal downtown.

Day five we flew home, picked up our baby Lexi and wrapped up one excellent Colorado-extravaganza. Hurray!