The Duel

Every year since we've been married, Andrew and I have hosted "The Dueling Marinades." 

It was something we actually planned on our honeymoon. We had so much fun getting all of our friends in the same place for our wedding that we decided we needed to host a party with good food and drink (just like our reception) as soon as possible. We decided to have a big cook-out, invite our families and our friends, and we decided to make kebobs simply because we have a mini-obsession with grilling kebobs. 

In the week before this first party, we couldn't decide on a marinade, so we each decided to make one. When my dad showed up, he called this our "dueling marinades," and since Andrew and I are competitive by nature, it turned into a major competition. This first competition included a wide variety of meats for a build-your-own kebob bar: beef, chicken, shrimp, and brats. My tequila-lime chicken was a big hit, although I will say I thought Andrew's mojo beef was pretty darned good. We had a great time, and we were shocked by how much fun we had hanging out with our parents and friends and co-workers - in other words, we realized that when you're an adult, it's fun to invite old(er) people to your keg party.

By the next fall, we had moved into our now home, so we hosted a second Duel/housewarming party, inviting our parents again, grandparents new friends, old friends, and new coworkers. It was the first cold day of fall, and a little miserable, but fun nonetheless. In the second year of the duel, Andrew's BBQ marinade killed my orange sesame ginger marinade. Tough crowd, in my opinion.

So, this year, the party had become tradition as had the friendly competition. Since we've been here nearly two years, we found that we had a much expanded guest list - about 75 people were invited, and 30 came, which frankly, was a pretty big turnout. We simplified some things (we just provided marinaded chicken, beer, hotdogs, and soda - scratched the build your own kebob thing), and asked everyone to bring a dish to share. And, to add to the fun, my Greek marinade won by a landslide over Andrew's chipotle pepper marinade (13-5, to be exact).

Andrew's birthday gift from me was a fire pit, so we capped off the evening with s'mores.

Watching children make s'mores has to be one of the more terrifying and hilarious things on earth. The kids were covered in sticky goo, and relished in setting marshmallows on fire. Surrounding the firepit was a graveyard of discarded, badly burned marshmallow debris and the graham cracker box had clearly been attacked by sticky fingers. Fortunately, we had three more boxes left, since I insisted to Andrew that we get the huge box from Sam's Club.

My new favorite thing is sitting outside by the fire. It's so nice and relaxing to hang out and talk with friends or family and just enjoy good company. There are some things I don't like about being a grown-up, but I do like how they party.

To the Birthday Boy

Dear Andrew,

Today, you turned 27.

In my mind, we're both still 24, standing on some concrete steps, staring down at our loved ones' smiling faces and wondering how the heck we got here. It's hard to wrap my head around the fact that it's 2 years and a handful of months later. The time has gone quickly and slowly at the same time, and I get this strange feeling that it's just the way these milestones happen.

We've moved together, each changed jobs, visited the ER together (twice), made leaps, and each time, we've been holding hands.

I'm pretty lucky to have you by my side. I know it's your birthday today, but I can't help thinking what a wonderful gift I have in you as my partner.

Love,

Katie

Japanese Make-In

Last night, I spent two whole hours preparing dinner.

For the last month or so, I've been slowly collecting the things I need to make a full Japanese meal. I bought tofu, sushi salmon from my local (and awesome) fish market, nori (seaweed), pickled ginger. While visiting Alma Mater on Saturday, I talked Andrew into stopping at the massive world gourmet food store, and I found the seasoning for miso soup, something that had been quite elusive in Iowa.

On Sunday afternoon, when Andrew and I were lamenting that we had nothing left in our fridge, I realized that if we added a cucumber and an avacado to my list, we could have one heck of a dinner.

Around five or six, I started with rinsing the sushi rice and throwing it into the rice cooker. Then I cracked the eggs and started following the directions for making a Japanese omlette for what I think is called "tomago" (which I am sure translates in Japanese to "mmmmmm!"). It took 5 eggs and we ended up with 4 pieces of sushi out of that, but to my absolute shock, it turned out perfectly. I cut up the cucumber, salmon, and avacado for rolls, toasted the nori, seasoned the rice, rolled everything up, heated up the miso, cubed the tofu -

- and two hours later, I emerged covered in sticky rice with a platter of 5 pieces of salmon california inside-out rolls, 5 pieces of cucumber rolls, 2 pieces of salmon sushi, and 2 pieces of egg sushi, and two bowls of miso soup (and a container of leftovers). Before serving this masterpiece to my husband, I took pictures. While I love to cook, even I could recognize that I probably won't be doing this again soon.

It tasted great and I was very proud of myself (hence the blog about the adventure), but it also dawned on me that two hours is a LONG time to be in the kitchen, and even though Andrew was helping out by washing dishes as I went, there were 4 pans, 3 bowls, 3 cutting boards, 3 knives, 1 fork, 3 mini bowls, and several measuring cups used before we even got to plating the meal - which is a total that I feel is maybe a little overboard for a dinner for two people.

In other words, take-out is probably a lot more cost-effective than make-in.

Employment

I've been putting off blogging for about a week because I've figured that I'd want to write about the new big leap in our young lives - but I also wanted to make sure everything was official and that I had something to say.

Last week, I accepted a job offer. It's a position still in higher education, but not classroom instruction, which is/was my current career. When I first started thinking about submitting the resume, I wondered if this was the right move. While I love teaching, I wasn't teaching full time, and thus it didn't offer a lot of stability for Andrew and me. By the time I had the interview, I recognized that I really wanted the position - I wanted to be able to use my talent and understanding about higher education, but work in an environment that presented a new and different challenge. I also realized that part-time teaching is the fast track to burn out, a cold reality that I've been trying to ignore for the past two years. This new job will still be using the same creativity and many of my same skills in the classroom, but in a new way. I couldn't be more thrilled. It's a very, very good fit. Readers of this blog should probably also know though that I will be beginning my new job and continuing to teach until the end of this semester, so fasten your seatbelts: your author is about to have one very crazy autumn. And, since this is a completely public blog, that's as much about my professional life as I plan to describe.

However, in the eve of this new job, there have been a lot of conversations about how life will change in our home.

The most bizarre realization by far is that I'm 26 and have never had a full-time job with benefits. As far as I can tell, this is the only downside of grad school. Since I was 24 when I was done with school and then strung together teaching gigs for the last two years, it's not like I've been sitting at home in my parents' basement, but the thought has more than once crossed my mind that it's going to be very, very strange to say I worked a 40+hour week. Andrew and I will likely be seeing each other a little less, and we will be starting all over in terms of getting in the rhythm of a work schedule (right as we'd gotten pretty settled into our current pace).

And then there's the financial impact. It's no secret that I'm really bad at math, but to me, the most exciting thing about a full-time job is having a yearly salary. As a part-timer, the only time I saw my yearly salary was if added up each individual assignment on a calculator, and even then, I'd stare at it cross-eyed and re-calculate. I am convinced (Andrew is not) that I can now afford the lifestyle I've always dreamed of. I've already won two auctions on E-bay, so I think we're off to a great start.

But in all seriousness, we've been talking numbers a lot. It's little written about or discussed (which is why I think I should write about it and discuss it), but sorting out finances, as far as I can tell, is the most complicated part of a young marriage. Since our financial strategy in the time since our nuptials has been to get our bills paid and on time, it's been exciting, oddly comforting, and (at least on my end) insanely boring, to start discussing our savings plan. Though we have different savings goals (I want to save so we can go to Italy and so we can afford pretty, shiny things for me to wear - Andrew keeps on blabbering on about retirement, family, education, etc), nonetheless, I'm starting to realize that "savings" is a very nice word.

There is also the topic of the breadwinner. Andrew and I have always planned that I would be the breadwinner, eventually. This made sense to us, since I was in school longer and have more expensive loans to pay. In Andrew's senior year sociology class, there was a discussion of women out-earning men, and he thought to himself, "Hmm, Katie should make more than me. Interesting." (And he says that he didn't think about marrying me until more than a year later!) It's not something that he has any problem with, and he's never complained or even blinked an eye about supporting my less-than-lucrative career choice since we got married. Our financial view is that our money is simply that: our money. Frankly, I think Andrew may be more of a hard-core feminist than I am - he's pretty proud of me. But I have been pretty intrigued by how many articles there are out there about how men are happier when they earn more than their spouses. In our house, I haven't detected any sadness on Andrew's part - we've been cracking jokes and grinning at each other like we're the luckiest damn people in the world.

That's basically how I feel - Andrew and I feel like lottery winners. Life is good. We're both employed, our kitties are fed, and our house is safe. What more could we ask for?

Oh! And speaking of the house - luck has shined on us again.

First instance: our next door neighbors replaced their perfectly good screen door and gifted the old one to us. "New screen door" was the only remaining item our summer/fall house repair list, since our front door lacks a screen door, thus lacks in the energy efficiency department. By the time it gets cold, we should be more efficient!

Second instance: the rental house next door now has tenants, a husband and wife about our age with a baby. When we looked out our bedroom window and saw their car with its NPR decal, Andrew and I nearly did a happy dance.

Finished...Really?

Last night, around ten o'clock, I made a scary observation:

Our upstairs is finished - well, mostly.

The only change/fix/upgrade that we have left is to get our fireplace in some sort of working order (eventually, there will be a long post about this, as we sued over it). But, in the short term, there aren't any more projects left.

We finished the floors, and rugs have been laid down.

On Saturday night, I got a call from J.C.Penney's that our new Roman shades were in - which weren't supposed to come for another 3 weeks. We got an incredible deal on them ($15 per shade) so it wasn't shocking that Andrew spent three hours and every curse word uttered by mankind to put them up. Regardless of the pain it took to install, the end product is that our entire house is now mini-blind free, and the shades look, at least to us, pretty fantastic - though anything would have been an improvement over the mini blinds that our cats had been slowly gnawing off so they could stare out the front windows.

And last night, I painted the ceiling fan in the master bedroom. Oddly enough, this is a project that we'd done before at our old rental. The fan in the study there had one of those primary color fans, perfect for a kid's bedroom, and I couldn't stand the darned thing. The day project that I thought the fan would be ended up being a nearly week long disaster involving copious amounts of spray paint. This time, I knew better. I got out my "sorority paints" (wood paint that I have a nice collection of after painting paddle after paddle during my college years) and went to town on the hardware - which Andrew removed quite easily, since we were old hat at taking down ceiling fans.

Then, while waiting for that to dry, I sanded and stained the fan blades. I wasn't a huge fan of the color of the stain, so I decided just to paint them brown. Unfortunately, after painting the nightstand in our bedroom, I was out of brown. But, my parents spent a small fortune on art classes for me when I was little, and I remembered the most important lessons ever shared there: the color combinations which will result in brown.

Yet, like any project under our roof, there was a roadblock. The only red/purple I had was fushia. I mixed yellow and green in and then some blue to get it darker, which resulted in a cool slate color, and then I added in the gold paint from the hardware. Andrew was watching me like I had inhaled too much of the paint fumes, but in the end, it actually worked really well.

We let the whole mess dry and went over to a friend's for dinner (single ladies: contact me - this guy makes FABULOUS lasagna), and then Andrew put the fan back up. Viola! A new fan for about $3 in paint.

Our next interior house project is to finish the basement, but I don't see that happening too soon. I know I'll figure something out and the little projects never cease, but there's something both thrilling and sad about looking around our little house and realizing that there's nothing pressing that I want changed in the immediate future.

The Crackberry

Yesterday Andrew and I made a move that we now believe will
irrevocably change the landscape of our married lives.

We got blackberries.

Now as I write, I do so from my shiny new blackberry. It is hella cool. I am a little slower with the typing, but I'm already deriving much joy from the fact that I can blog from the sportsbar where Andrew and I are watching football. I really just came here for the lunch, so now I can be entertained by more than just the Bears themed bridal shower taking place in the private room. It took us awhile to figure out what kind of party it was, but we caught on when we saw a blender followed by pyrex hoisted high for all to admire.

Andrew and I have been sitting here for nearly an hour. He watches his alma mater and during commercial breaks we commiserate about shortcuts and downloads.

Ah, marriage in the technological age.

Nature is Gross

Earlier in the week, Andrew got a notice from the Environmental Protection Agency telling him he needed to clean up some brush that he'd put in a pile in the back of our property (off the alley). At first, we thought maybe one of our neighbors was nutzo and "turned us in" but then on closer inspection/reading, we realized that it was just a random neighborhood check - probably because the same agency mows the lawn of the house on the corner once a month (smooth!). We felt a little stupid, but did have to laugh a little at the irony because we realized that we wouldn't have gotten a notice had we just let everything behind the garage grow back into the Little Garage of Horrors. It wasn't a big deal, though Andrew has yet to clean up the mess (tsk tsk!) before they come back on Friday.

Feeling oddly motivated, today I decided to clean up my potted herb garden. Since I hurt my back, Andrew let my tomatoes fall into disrepair, and a bunch of weeds crept through the wood chips around the pots. At our last session, my PT told me to up my activity level, so I figured messing around in the garden was fine. After I moved the first pot, I saw a huge centipede and I got that creepy crawly feeling. I got the rest of the pots moved, and then I spotted a big huge spider sitting on her web.

This is the point where I bailed. I came back inside, sat down in my study (planning on blogging about my short-lived gardening attempt that I'd left in a mess for Andrew to clean up). All of a sudden, I heard a bunch of dishes clanking around in the kitchen. Morty was in our kitchen sink, freaking out about a cat he saw outside.

We've been waging the war against neighborhood/feral kitties all summer. Morty is territorial and has "Retaliation Aggression Syndrome" which means he'll get angry at the cats outside and then see Elmo, get confused, and beat the crud out of Elmo. It's kinda scary (and resulted in Andrew going to the emergency room once this summer when Morty got loose and ran outside to wage real war on one of these kitties). We found that a mixture of "kitty repellent" (looks like kitty litter, smells different) and moth balls got the cats off our property, but recently the cats have been creeping back.

Being the brilliant person I am, I decided to chase after the cat. I walked out the back door, closed it behind me, and went running. The cat ran off, and I felt exhilarated, since I haven't run in about a month.

Then I turned around and realized that I closed the back door. The back door that locks automatically. The back door with the replaced lock. Taking a deep breath, I located our hidden key. No luck - we were still hiding the key for the old lock.

I had no idea what time it was - I knew it was somewhere between 4 and 6, and Andrew would be home at 6:30. I had no shoes, and was wearing a tank top and short shorts - no bra - so this is not the clothing where you can go over and knock on your neighbor's door.

It was at that point that I went back and faced the spider and finished the gardening chores. I also tried to weed the cracks in the driveway, but that got boring, so I retreated to our front porch and did my best creepy old man impression as I just watched the goings on of the neighborhood.

Andrew came home at some point, so clearly I was rescued. But, I learned a valuable lesson that I should have learned in ohhhh 4th grade: always have a freakin key!

In other news, Andrew volunteered with United Way today and was paired up with a kid at lunchtime as a part of Big Brothers/Big Sisters. He's contemplating signing up - he had a fun time hanging out with the kid, learning the ins and outs of monkey bars and "take-aways" (subtraction). I'm in favor - sounds like there could be some fun dinner time conversations to come.