Mulling it over

Today marks one week since Matt and I committed to getting at least 30 minutes of physical exercise a day. Mostly that’s consisted of brisk walking in and around Reston, which we’ve really enjoyed. This morning we chose, perhaps counterproductively, to combine it with a breakfast date. I got mushroom and cheese crepes and Matt got eggs, a croissant, and bacon. Bellies full, we then walked back home and proceeded to run a couple of errands by car–hitting both the Arlington and Reston libraries, cleaning out my locker at work (hurray), and also hitting up Trader Joe’s for the first time. Let us just say we are big fans of that experience! We picked up some frozen fruit, bread, cheese, hot chocolate, and a couple of other things for around $30–not quite Aldi’s, but cheaper than some of the other grocery stores around and almost everything was some kind of funky organic house brand. Right up our alley!

Our favorite thing by far was a couple of bottles of Gluhwein, or German mulled wine, which we’d been introduced to at the Krista Detor house concert. If anything ever tasted like happy holidays come home to roost, this is it–delicious, warming, and spicy. We heated some up on the stove right away and are planning to spend the rest of the day getting cozy with that and our new library books. This is the way to spend a winter weekend!

The Name Game

First of all, anybody who says this isn’t the catchiest thing you HAVE EVER seen is lying!

Second of all, it being Christmas card season, I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who has taken the time to address a card to the two of us using the names we’ve chosen. I know it’s not the usual way of doing things and (believe me!) I know it’s a lot of letters, and to be honest, this is an issue that confuses even us at times. But it really means more than you know. So–thank you.

When the Dog Bites…Or, These Are a Few of My Favorite Links

OK, so the dog didn’t actually bite, he just lunged menacingly. But regardless, this is the sight we woke up to this morning–accompanied by the sound of our frantic cats skating across everything on our desk to get down from the windowsill where this character was nosing around. I have no idea what possessed his owner, because he was on a leash, a retractable one at that, and she continued to let him lunge and bark at the window instead of directing him elsewhere where there weren’t terrified cats and half-dressed people peering back out at her. We figured once she saw us, she would get the message and take her dog inside or elsewhere–but not. At one point, she backed up from the window, but continued to stand there and stare at us, like some kind of challenge. To what? It was the weirdest thing and it made me so mad! The cats have been going around with flattened ears and spiky tails ever since. If you can’t feel safe sitting in your own window, where can you?!

That said, since there’s not much of interest going on with us, here are some sites I’ve found helpful or interesting lately:

Lifehacker is where I learned about Retailmenot, a Firefox extension which automatically–yet unobtrusively!–notifies you of any coupon codes available (for free shipping, a percentage off, or what have you) at any retail sites you visit. I used to have to scour Google for them and this saves a lot of time! Just yesterday we saved $12.95 on shipping from Fannie May, and they have codes for just about anywhere else you can imagine too. I would say it’s paid for itself already, but it was free!

Babycatcher is the blog of a 29-year-old nurse-midwife who currently practices in Malawi. Talk about an eye-opening look about a totally different set of problems than those currently facing maternity care in the United States. While she fights for access to basic technology, we’re fighting to curtail the invasion of what is arguably too much. (I read on another birth blog the other day that natural, drug-free “physiological” childbirth is set to become the next “fight for women’s right to choose”–it’s become that controversial of an issue.) In both cases, caught in the crush and losing big-time are mothers, babies, and healthcare workers. Cue midwives.

Morning Coffee isn’t really a site, it’s another Firefox extension that lets you open any number of preselected sites with the click of a button. You can choose to add sites on a daily, weekly, or
other basis which is great if you have a number of blogs or news sites you read on a daily basis. I really love it because it’s super convenient, and it also has the added functionality that when I’ve finished everything in my Morning Coffee, I know that then I should really get to work. (Whether I actually should have gotten to work about an hour earlier is not up for debate!) It helps limit (though does not eliminate) the “one thing leads to another” aspect of websurfing that has a tendency to get away from me.

Smitten Kitchen is a site with amazing recipes and gorgeous pictures. I believe they use the same Canon Rebel camera that is high on both my and my brother’s wish lists.

101 Cookbooks is written by a blogger who has written her own cookbook and is also cooking her way through a sizable number (guess how many?) of others–which explains the high caliber of her culinary abilities. She uses a similar Canon, if not the same model, as Smitten Kitchen and achieves similarly mouth-watering results. The cookies that are up right now use her recipe for Organic Homemade Thin Mints which I am planning to make at my VERY earliest convenience.

SmartWomanRx actually has nothing to do with motorcycles, despite the sassy animation at startup. It’s a site when you can buy mail-order generic birth control pills (OK, yes, I admit that sounds scary, but they’re really quite legit) for as low as $13 a pack. They’ve been around for awhile, but until about a year ago there were usually other low-cost options available. Myself, I’m sitting at a $20/month copay on an already-generic drug, which makes me cringe when I think back to my days at the University of Iowa and their free generic drugs (Zolpidem/Ambien, anybody? At our house, we sleep better than anybody on the block and we do it for free! …For a little while longer, anyway). While a savings of $7/month doesn’t sound like a ton, it’s something; and if somebody offered me a $7 coupon every month for the next five years or so, I would take it. Combined with the convenience of mail-order, it sounds like a winner to me. (Lest you worry about forgetting to order on time, you can have them overnighted for $19. While this does somewhat negate your savings, depending on what you pay now, standard shipping is free!). I also love the idea of supporting something innovative like this rather than just bending over for the pharmaceutical companies.

VistaPrint: not only do coupon codes abound for freebies like business cards, T-shirts, hats, and the like, but they are the first place I’ve found where I can easily fit both of our hyphenated names classily on on the top line of an address label. We paid about $4 for 240 of them, they arrived in about three days, and while what looked yellow on the screen is perhaps more of a lime-ish shade in real life, nothing compares to the thrill of seeing all 19 characters of our surname spelled out in all of its lengthy glory. In related news, you can visit the New York Times’ Interactive List to see whether your last name is in the top 5,000 in the country. Neither of our family names made it, and the combination obviously didn’t–but my sister-in-law’s maiden name did, as did my mother-in-law’s. Welcome to the road less traveled, ladies 🙂

So there you have it…a pretty good synopsis of what I learned in law school!

Superbad is Super-AWESOME!

So our television’s exile to underneath the kitchen table (the only place it fit at the old apartment) is officially over. We still don’t have, you know, actual television service, even network, but we do love watching movies. Especially free movies. And I thought Superbad was so good that I would even encourage you to pony up the $1 or $1.50 (though perhaps not the ridiculous $4.00 charged for a basic rental out here at Blockbuster) and PAY to see it if you have to. It was silly, of course, but that’s the point, right? And hidden amongst the incredibly raunchy language (moms and brothers, consider yourself warned) was a surprisingly realistic portrait of how I remember high school. Maybe the girls didn’t look quite so much like buxom supermodels (or did we?), but in general I thought that the way the boys, especially, related to each other was startlingly real. For that reason and others, there are times that it’s just cringingly uncomfortable to watch (truly, nobody does awkward more painfully or endearingly than Michael Cera of Arrested Development fame), but after laughing uproariously nonstop for the entire 118 minutes, we were glad we did.

Black Snake Moan

LOVED IT!

While I was justifiably hesitant to watch another movie starring Samuel L. Jackson with the word “snakes” in the title, this one did not disappoint. And while I usually have a hard time with movies that have any degree of violence toward women, especially any degree of sexualized violence, the treatment in Black Snake Moan is not at all prolonged or gratuitous. The movie, while certainly odd at times, ends up being a very poignant take on, among other things, sexuality, love, and past abuse. Samuel L. and Christina Ricci were both fabulous and, while you may find yourself questioning why they won’t let her put on a pair of pants for the first half of the movie, it all kind of ends up making sense by the end. She actually addresses “The Necessity of Being on the Set Almost Naked” here, and expresses similar thoughts to the conclusions I came to about it. She also talks in general about survivors of sexual abuse and refers to having worked with RAINN, which I found really impressive. I thought her observations were really good, and supported her strong performance in the movie.

That said, I still think she looks like she could use, as my mom (used to?) say, like she could use a bowl of thick soup. But I suppose the prospect of being “on the set almost naked” for two months would scare anybody down a size or two.

We rented this movie courtesy of Redbox, which has an abundance of free movie codes, so that you pretty much never have to pay for movie rental if there’s a box near you. They seem to be more common out East, but maybe it will take off in the Midwest too.

Reston Peace

I just got home from accompanying Matt halfway to work (in 50-degree weather, no less!).

Commuting to work, DC-style:

vs Reston-style:

Needless to say, we love it here, and we feel so fortunate that everything worked out as well as it did!

But in the meantime…

…since I have been a recalcitrant poster lately, and mostly because posting is a more attractive option than buckling down and briefing the cases to be found within the less- fascinating- than- it- is- expensive Problems in Contract Law, which is what I should be doing, I thought I’d bridge the gap between now and when I can show off pictures of us baking in the heat at Farm Aid by offering a book review. Reviews, actually, in that there are two of them…not so much in that they offer much in the way of actual content analysis.

I mentioned a long time ago that we’d begun reading books together. This means aloud, to each other, and substitutes for the time we used to spend watching reruns of Six Feet Under or Arrested Development or otherwise multiplying our indebtedness to our local Mr. Movies. It also makes a useful bedtime routine for those of us who may have retained a night nurse’s resistance to physically “winding down” in the evening (as my mother would call it). We’ve tried a variety of books, some of which lend themselves to it better than others, but none we have found so far have done so as well as the books by Bill Bryson.

A Walk in the Woods (or as I like to call it, for obvious reasons, The Bear Book) was the first of Bryson’s that we read together. Not only was it witty and entertaining (Bryson has a very dry sense of humor that makes sense when you consider that he has alternated living his adult life in Britain and on the East Coast), it also rekindled (for Matt) / initiated (for me) an interest in nature and camping and general good old doing-without in the wilderness. It was this book that ignited our desire to go to the Delaware Water Gap, where we camped this weekend, alongside the Appalachian Trail–the hiking of which, by Bryson and a companion, forms the basis for the entire book. It’s not a particularly sensational book, but it made us laugh, and want to camp and hike, and also raised awareness for certain environmental tragedies currently befalling the American landscape.

We’re now in the midst of Notes from a Small Island, which Bryson has written about a trip he took through Britain. I find this to contain an even more incisive and hilarious degree of wit than the first book. Upon meeting a fellow boarder at a house where he’s staying for the night, Bryson remarks about the person’s name, “But it was one of those names only British people have – Colin Crapspray or Bertram Pantyshield.” I had to put down the book and laugh, hard, for a good five minutes. It reminded me of when my brother used to hear me laughing out loud at books I was reading in bed by myself, and yell across the hallway what a nerd that made me. Ah, some things never change; but I actually do post these specifically with my brother in mind, because I think that the casual style and exceptionally dry wit of these books seem like something that would appeal to him. To anybody, really–we highly recommend them.