A White Weekend

While most people spent their Easter weekends visiting with family and friends and celebrating traditions, etc., we spent our Easter weekend painting our itty-bitty condo. 

Remember when Ken and I painted our place this awful brownish/mauve-ish color way back when? 

(The color itself wasn't awful; it just looked awful in our apartment, and we knew it as soon as we had passed the point of no return on the paint-scale.) 

We made do with these pukey walls for nearly two years until finally, last weekend, Ken and I decided it was time to pick a new color. Because we are renters, and because our rental agreement states that any color we may choose to paint the walls during our tenancy has to be covered with white again before our contract is terminated, we decided it would be a good idea to save ourselves another painting job down the road by choosing a white paint. White is the it color right now, anyway (thanks to the popularity of Scandinavian-influenced interior design, no doubt) so, really, we were being practical and cool with this little decision of ours. And how hard could it possibly be to paint our small space white?

Hard. 

First, we were met with roughly two hundred different shades of white upon our first visit to the local paint store. And I'm probably being quite conservative with that number. 

Second, we probably should have gone over our brown/mauve walls with primer before tackling them with white paint. We didn't. (I know. Dumb.)

We kicked off Friday morning with all of our supplies in order and feeling very optimistic about our painting project. Excited, even. 

After we went through the mundane task of taping-up everything we didn't want to paint, we happily set about spreading white paint along the corners and edges of our little apartment. 

Thirty minutes into the painting job, we were both commenting on how cathartic painting really is and how we should do stuff like this more often. Maybe we should even take a painting class so we can paint pictures to hang on our new white walls!

Three hours into the painting job, however, we were cursing our 29-year-old selves for being so stupid as to paint the apartment in the first place, way back when.

And here's a little bit of blunt honesty: Spending approximately 16+ hours painting your living space with your spouse (unsuccessfully, I might add, due to the aforementioned lack of primer) has a way of showing you what your marriage is truly made of.   

I'm very happy to report that both of us--and our relationship--came out of our painting project intact and in good health. There were only a few fleeting moments when I had the urge to dump the bucket of remaining paint over Ken's head, and Ken did a spectacular job of not reaming me out the third time (yes, three times) I bent over to pick up a paint brush only to have my full head of hair stick to a wall of fresh paint on the way down. 

I'm also happy to report that our apartment is now white, 16+ hours of labor and two gallons of paint later.  

We went to bed late Saturday night reeking of paint fumes, sweat and tears, but finished.  On Sunday we woke up, each of us aching in every muscle imaginable (including muscles I wasn't even aware I had), and we practically waddled into Burlington to have Easter dinner with Ken's brother and his mom. And, if you look closely, you can see I still had a fair bit of white paint glued to my hair, three washings after the fact:

(...and it's still there, making my pre-existing grays look far more dignified than they should.)

Easter Colors

Last night we decided to color Easter eggs. 

This little bit of inspiration struck while we were strolling past the egg aisle of the grocery store during one of our regular hunts for dinner ideas. (The "What should we have for dinner?" question is a nightly bit of drama around here and it's always welcoming distractions of any kind.) Easter eggs. It sounded like a pretty great idea. (Better than making dinner, even.)

I stated my brilliant new intentions to a not-so-enthused Ken, carefully chose a carton of perfect white eggs, and then changed the dinner-hunt into a food-coloring hunt. 

Once we got home and unpacked our shopping bag (which consisted of eggs, food coloring, and an Easter lily -- no dinner items), and while I haphazardly set about boiling the eggs (and subsequently cracked three of the dozen), Ken was suddenly struck with a bit of inspiration of his own. When he opened the box of food coloring, he was delighted to find that each little bottle came equipped with a gnome-like hat. This little character-like quality put his creative imagination into overdrive. This is what followed:

I think it was a food-coloring vs. eggs battle (ambush, more likely) and the food-coloring clearly won.

Since we didn't have a proper egg-coloring-kit that came equipped with egg-dippers, we had to use our fingers for the coloring process, which caused things to get messy pretty quickly.

(Our fingers are still stained in multi-colors.)

But we had a lot of fun dipping layers-upon-layers of coloring onto each egg, no doubt rendering them completely inedible in the process. 

Also...

...Ken took his newfound food-coloring obsession a step further and started adding drops of it to his glass of riesling... and proceeded to drink it. (It was gross.)

And, finally, here is our finished Easter project:

Nine multi-colored, science-experiment-gone-wrong Easter eggs.

Happy Easter!

Photos of Old

Ken and I had our pictures taken by the lovely wMac Photography way back in September of last year. It is now the first of April, and I'm just now getting around to choosing prints. This is proving to be a far more difficult task than I imagined it would be. We love a lot of these photos for different reasons, so which ones should we choose to hang on our wall? I don't know, and it's starting to stress me out a teensy bit.

 Here are a few of the favorites I've narrowed it down to so far (nearly seven months after the fact): 

 

 

Knowing Ken and myself, we'll probably get overwhelmed by this decision (as small and insignificant as it may seem) and it could very well be another seven months before these things finally make it to print. (Family, friends, and anyone: Feel free to email any photo-choosing suggestions to me.... We need help! More can be viewed on wMac's website here.)

Randoms: Brought To You By...

Instagram!
(They didn't ask me to do this.)

I'm not lying when I say the only reason I wanted an iPhone in the first place was so I could have access to the Instagram app. I also realize that's a horrible reason to buy a brand new phone, which is why I didn't buy one for quite a while.  But when my cheap ol' flip-phone finally died and sweet ol' Ken gave me an iPhone for Christmas, the first thing I did with it as soon as I removed it from its packaging was download Instagram.

I love Instagram. And I use it a lot. So much, in fact, that I've started deleting a lot of my Instagram photos as soon as I take them, that way they automatically save to my phone and I'm not constantly bombarding my "Instagram friends" (all five of them!) with pictures of restaurants and (mostly) of Bubba. Not that it stops me from bombarding my blog with them.... 

Here are a few recents:

The above photos are the only ones I have to show from our friends, Jared and Alisha's wedding back in February. (My battery died twenty minutes into the reception -- what luck!)

See the above righthand photo? This is a classic example of how Bubba orders me to refill his Kong. (He's such an alpha.)

Bubba's new squeaky frog is also his new bestie. He plucked it out of a toy-filled bin in the pet store when we were there to buy dog food last week and he looked so crestfallen when I took it away from him that I caved and bought it. He carried it the whole way home and they've been inseparable ever since!

(More pictures of Bubba being Bubba.) 

For some reason I've taken dozens of food-related pictures since getting my iPhone. (It would seem that I get as excited about eating as Ken gets about having his picture taken right before he eats.) 

And that's all the randomness I have for now. More Instagram posts will surely follow in the future, as I've taken enough pictures to fill a book. (I should be their spokesperson!) 

A Friday Vacation Day

Three things: (1) I love my husband more than anything in the whole world. (2) I love my dog more than some things in the whole world. (3) I'm thankful to have a job that is conveniently close to home. 

Those things said, I sometimes need to have a day off from all three. And today just so happens to be such a day.  

Since I'm currently in the middle of a "trial week" as a vegetarian, I started off my loner-Friday with a trip to Sadie's Diner, a nearby vegetarian restaurant (and one of my favorites), for breakfast. 

I sat there for a good hour-and-a-half, eating banana pancakes and veggie sausages, drinking coffee, reading Vanity Fair, and listening to my waitress blatantly confess to the guy sitting next to me that she's still in love with him and that "I don't think you're here just for breakfast; I think you're here because you're still in love with me, too." (You can imagine my awkward-filled horror when the guy--presumably her ex--informed her that he was just there for breakfast and would she please go away so he could eat it in peace, sending my sweet-but-dumb waitress running to the bathroom, sniveling into a napkin.)

As soon as I finished my soap-opera-filled breakfast, I high-tailed it out of there and found myself strolling down Queen Street West, which was eerily quiet this morning even for a weekday. (Queen is usually crawling with teenagers, hipsters, fashionistas and drunks, so its unusual deadness felt a little post-apoctyliptic and creepy.)

As I was walking past the Gap on Queen (while continually looking over my shoulder), I suddenly remembered the Gap gift card that had been sitting in my wallet since Christmastime! It was actually a gift to Ken from his brother, but my sweet ol' husband hadn't expressed any interest in using it, and marriage is all about sharing, anyway, right? So I went in. 

Just for fun, I loaded a dressing room with 20+ garments (they didn't have a limit!) and then gave a full-on fashion show for Ken via text... while he was sitting in a conference for work. 

Ken wasn't overly impressed with my antics (of all the ridiculous pictures I sent, the last one especially irked him), and neither was the sales associate when I ended up only buying a pair of yoga pants. (But it was still fun.)

After my little Gap excursion, I decided I couldn't take a full day off from Bubba because, like it or not, the little guy does have a bladder and an occasional need to empty it. So I slowly made my way back home, freed Bubba from his crate (he was happy to see me, which made me feel guilty for contemplating leaving him there and going out for another coffee), and we took a little stroll to the dog park. 

Leave it to Bubba to make me regret my sense of responsibility. 

He managed to find the only mud puddle in the whole park and traipsed right through the middle of it at high speed for absolutely no reason (we weren't playing near it, there wasn't another dog near it, nothing). This resulted in a trip back home and a toss into the bathtub...

...which neither of us enjoyed. 

Now I'm thinking, since Bubba has been Spring-cleaned (in a way), maybe the apartment should be Spring-cleaned, as well...

...which is how I shall be spending the rest of my Friday off.  

Costa Rica

I will start off this post by saying: Leaving Manuel Antonio last Saturday was the hardest thing I've had to do in a good long while. (For you Twitter-users, you might agree that I have #firstworldproblems.)

If you don't already know about it, and if you're interested in the details, Google "Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica" and feel free to read all about it (I will spare you my sketchy account of its facts). I will tell you that, even though I'd been there before on a cross-cultural trip with my university over ten years ago (!), it has made its way back to the top of my "Prettiest Places in the World" list (which I've never officially made). In addition to its beauty, Manuel Antonio contains some of the friendliest people I've met while traveling, which is enough to make any trip a great one, no?

The wildlife and natural beauty of this place are absolutely, positively stunning (it's like living in a leafy-green zoo!) and I'm sorry to say my shoddy photography didn't do them an ounce of justice. Now, with that little disclaimer out there, here are a few tidbits from our trip:

Being the notoriously lazy travelers we are, Ken and I spent 95% of our days lazing around on the beautiful beaches...

...and occasionally peeling our vitamin D deprived selves out of the sun to go on treks through the rainforest...

We spent some time searching for friendly monkeys (they clearly weren't hard to find)...

 ...avoiding the scary, confrontational ones...

...and looking for other wildlife we could startle away....

(Ken accidentally stepped on the tail of a fairly large iguana while we were hiking one day, and the incident left all three of us shrieking and running for cover.)

We ate loads of really good food....

(I always say we eat our way through the countries we visit, which in turn makes me think of the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It's a little different, but the mental picture adequately sums up our piggishness.)

We each consumed half our body weight in Costa Rican coffee and mango smoothies...

(which were delicious, but--surprise!--did not bode well for our stomachs)

...and we spent a lot of time watching some of the prettiest sunsets our eyes have ever seen....

As I have previously stated, I have hundreds of other pictures I may post at a later date, but I'm not going to lie: It's getting a little depressing sorting through the beautiful, warm photos of Costa Rica while sitting in our apartment, bundled-up to the nines, staring out the window at a frigid minus thirteen degrees. (I just shuddered a little at the thought.) 

That little bit of complainy negativity aside, I'm so, so glad we had the opportunity to go to Manuel Antonio this year. It was truly one of the best trips we've ever taken and we're already making plans to go back again in the near future. 

(Let me know if you want to come, too!)

Back Since Sunday...

...and I'm still weeding through the 900+ photos we took while in Manuel Antonio. 

But a Costa Rica picture-post is coming soon. Including lots of pictures of these intrusive (and very cute) little guys...

And lots of pictures of our tan, relaxed, happy faces....

(...which are fading quickly.)

And hundreds of other pictures. 

Hundreds.