...and back to winter...

I have spent a lot of my adult life struggling to figure out how to balance my rather all-consuming job with my desire to have a fulfilling life outside of work. However, there is one small chunk of the year (the weeks between President's Day and Easter) when I give myself fully over to my job and let the rest of my life languish and gather dust (this is so not good for school, by the way, and as I type this I realize that I was supposed to do an interview for a project sometime today and it is already 2:30. Right.). Which is why I have worked 11-12 hour days each day this week, my clean laundry from Sunday is still in a basket by my side of the bed, and it is clear each time we open the refrigerator that something climbed inside while we were in Hawaii and died.

For me, this kind of schedule is unsustainable long-term, both physically and emotionally, but there is a strange sense of freedom in embracing the fact that I will NOT reorganize the pantry or sew curtains or cook a healthy dinner or, I daresay, put away my laundry until the next Laundry Day, but will instead eat ramen and watch Emma, then fall asleep at 9:30. Talk about embracing the simple life!

Jason has been working late and long this week, too, and last night he didn't even argue when I suggested having pancakes for dinner (though if I'd suggested canned green beans one more time, he might have decided to starve). We are playing this risky game this week called "Not Buying Groceries," and since we tried our darndest to eat everything in our fridge before we left for our trip (although apparently we forgot to finish of the now-revolting goat cheese), pancakes are about all that is left to us.

Last night one of my coworkers warned the rest of us to remember if we told him anything that after two days of non-stop meetings and hearings, his brain was mushy oatmeal. I feel like that today, which is why I'm supplementing my study of transportation funding proposals with this and this. And, of course, making a menu for next week (which required me to reread Andrea's entire blog in search of this), because we will certainly not make it past Friday without a trip to Trader Joe's...

Nephews, Plural.

By the way, it turns out that I have failed to mention in any obvious way on this blog that we will soon have a new nephew to dote on. Right before we left for Hawaii, Jenny called to say that it is officially a boy, and we can't wait to meet him, come the end of June or so. We felt the need to include the new baby in the Hawaiian festivities, so in the attached picture he gets a lei, too.

And while we're speaking of nephews, I just had to include this picture, as well...

Aloha

Hula
Originally uploaded by jmsmall2005.

Can I just take a moment to say how very depressed I am to be wearing a sweater and wool socks? Even after 15 hours of flying (which included at least two hours of being kicked from behind by a screaming baby during the red-eye flight to LA), I loathed to wash the Hawaii off of me when I took a shower when we got home this evening. (Of course, I did. Seriously, 15 hours of sitting on a plane in the same clothes takes its toll on you.)

If I could speak more Hawaiian than "Aloha" and "Mahalo" and "Waikiki," I might be able to better express how much I love Hawaii. We had an absolutely wonderful week.

We started our trip off just right with a short but fun visit to good friends in the LA area. We spent Friday night and most of Saturday with Telfer and Andrea, meeting Henry and their cute house, feasting on Foodie Friends delights, and making ourselves hungry talking about cheese in downtown Redlands. It was downright terrific. Then we drove about an hour and a half to have dinner with Amanda and Ben, full of good food and good company, before leaving early Sunday morning to head back to LAX (Amanda and I opted NOT to take an early morning photo...). It was a great little trip, and we commented regularly throughout the week how glad we were that we stopped in California.

Sunday was full of arrivals and a little bit of time exploring KoOlina before we all crashed--some of the crew had to be at the dock at 5:45 a.m. on Monday to catch the BoomBoom and, hopefully, some Mahi Mahi for dinner. Jason and I didn't go fishing, but, as we were on Cole-duty, we were up almost as early! We then spent the day moving between beach and pool, beach and pool. Perfection.

We did punctuate the lazying about with a few adventures. On Wednesday, Jason, Chad, Kim, and I went to the North Shore to watch the surfers and find some turtles. We took in some Thai food and famous sno cones at Matsumoto's in Haleiwa on the way and ended up driving around most of the island before heading back to eat the fish that the crew caught on Monday (and hear again the tale about "the one that got away"--a 200 pound marlin!).

We spent most of our time on the KoOlina resort, where we stayed, but on Thursday we headed into Waikiki. My first few trips to Hawaii were Waikiki-centered and involved throwing on a swimsuit and a backpack and heading down to meet my grandparents for breakfast at the Yum Yum Tree, then hitting the beach, International Marketplace, etc. for the whole of the day, and meeting up at the statue of the Duke sometime before dinner. We relived those moments a little on Thursday when we headed down for brunch at Duke's, then the boys went surfing on Waikiki Beach and the girls headed for some serious bartering at the International Marketplace. We ended up back at Duke's for some Hula Pie before heading into the mountains to hike through the jungle to Manoa Falls.

We had a week of sweet-smelling, perfect sunsets, seafood and pineapple, and hours of sitting in loungers, drenched in sunscreen, reading. It was more than delightful, and to spend it with family was wonderful. By the end of the week Cole was saying "Aloha!" in addition to "Mimi" (which is his name for me, much as it was Shaanti's name for me when she was learning how to talk). And now if only it weren't February and forty degrees outside...

Happy Valentine's Day!

We decided to celebrate by working late and eating whatever leftovers we had in the fridge so that they wouldn't spoil while we are gone next week. Luckily, Jason surprised me by getting take-out from our favorite Mexican restaurant instead, saving me from utter starvation--the miscellaneous collection of curry lentils, string cheese, and one sweet pepper available for dinner sounded pretty depressing by the time we left our respective offices after 7:30. I'm a sucker for a chicken enchilada and a man who can read my mind.

We have spent the last six weeks abstaining from sweets (sort of), eating vegetables, and bonding with the treadmill...and exchanging emails with the fam that have subject lines like "Hawaii here we come!" or "29 more days!" or "I want a sno cone!" It all comes down to tomorrow when we board the plane for LA (and a fun day with the Griffiths, Amanda, and (maybe!) Ben), then Honolulu. Jason already has the beach music teed up on his ipod.

Disgruntled*

I walked in tonight to the smell of lentil soup in the crockpot (that is, the actual smell of dinner ready, mmm…) and a box from Amazon. I’ve been on a bit of a book-buying binge lately, which, in retrospect, seems alarmingly rash and frivolous, like the shoes I almost bought online this morning when I was bored and out of humor, and I had to remind myself as I looked at the stack of clean, new books that I had been editing lists and scrutinizing titles for over a month in order to find just what I wanted. So now I have a pretty pile of fresh-smelling fiction (Morningside Heights, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Oscar and Lucinda, and One Hundred Years of Solitude), a crisp non-fiction hardback (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), and two scary-looking books on web design (for school, thank heavens) sitting neatly on the beautiful pedestal table in our living room.

And now if only I could find the time to go along with the titles.

Today is a good day to come to home to dinner in the crockpot. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always a good day to come home to dinner in the crockpot, especially if there is also bread in the bread machine (alas for Phase One!). But today it’s particularly nice, having spent most of the day (until about 3:30 when I completely gave up on accomplishing anything of note) trying to recover from waking up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

I arrived at work later than usual after having awoken to the horrible realization that it wasn’t Thursday like I thought, leaving at least two discarded skirts on the bed and a pile of unwashed breakfast dishes by the sink. There was an epidemic of wrong-sidedness at the office today, everyone on Team Simpson feeling the weight of February and a long and awkward legislative week.

February is so much worse than January. It’s a good thing it comes with chocolate.

When I was 23, I used to have these random days that had this faint whiff of discontent that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Kind of quarter-life-crisis, John Mayer’s “Georgia” days, when for a few hours everything lost a little bit of its luster and seemed slightly less-than-satisfactory. Last month I heard “Georgia” on the radio again and realized that I hadn’t had a day of nebulous discontent for a while. These days, the source of disgruntledness is easy to pinpoint—the sheer boredom of having the same painful meetings with the same nameless people for the seventh year in a row, a complete and utter disinterest in theories of rhetoric my professor is trying to apply to document design, downright disgust with the idea of cooking dinner in an apron and heels on weeknights before collapsing in front of a Seinfeld rerun.

So by noon I decided that fresh air—and a little sweat—was required, and I pounded out some of my frustrations between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. It was a perfect day to be a tourist. If I were actually a tourist, I would have thought otherwise—it was cloudy and humid, and the severe thunderstorms threatened by the weather channel seemed imminent. But I thought the damp air was so delightful that I ran even more slowly than usual just to stay out in it a bit longer. I was so anxious to stay outside that I briefly but seriously considered stopping in at the orchid exhibit at the National Botanical Gardens. Wisely I did not, since my next meeting showed up early, but, for a few hours at least, the fresh air did the trick.

Wisely also I did not buy shoes on a disgruntled day.

*Disgruntled: the name of the form letter we send to constituents who have so many complaints about so many things that we cannot possibly begin to respond to all of them.