Five Things I Love about Recess:

In much the same fashion as when we were in the first grade, in this house we live for recess. The almost unbearable long stretch between President's Day and Easter is behind us, and now we only have to make it four or five weeks between breathing periods. It is Jason's first year of really experiencing the glory that is congressional recess, so in honor of that I'd like to share with you this list.

1. Yoga: As I mentioned here, I discovered yoga last fall...which was pretty good timing, since the economy was falling apart and I was taking two classes at once and I still get kinda stressed thinking about it. I tried to explain to my dad, who has been having stress headaches, why I love yoga so much (I mean, for the last five minutes you get to lay on your back on mats and they turn the lights off. If there was only kool-aid and animal cookies afterward, it would be perfect.), and I knew he thought I was silly. No matter. During recess I can fit yoga into my week, and it makes me--and the muscles around my neck--very happy.

2. Mail-writing Show Downs: My coworker Nate and I had a contest this week to see who could write more constituent letters in one hour. The loser had to buy Suzi-Qs (a delicious Hostess treat) to share with the winner. I took Nate to school.

3. Digging Out: Mostly I spend my week of recess reading all the emails I should have responded to during the past five weeks, cleaning out my towering (and completely ignored) inbox, and hunched over my desk with a stack of file folders and labels, putting the pieces of the past month back into place. Seriously, it makes me so happy. And relieved, because, for just one week, all the balls are securely back up in the air.

4. Taylor Swift: I am finally on the Taylor Swift bandwagon, high school drama and all. This song on my iPod, which enjoyed play on repeat, pushed me through a couple of runs at lunch last week (another nice thing about recess) and a complicated memo on cap and trade.

5. Evenings: This week we planned a flower bed, made curtains, ate dinner in the dining room, got together with friends, and organized the library shelves. Usually all we manage to get done on weeknights is watching TV and falling “totes mude ins Bett,” as we used to say on my one trip to Germany. We also reminisced about the time, long, long ago, when we had a life outside of work during the week. At least we still have recess.

Green Thumb Update

Apart from a few disturbingly hot days over the past few weeks, it has pretty much been raining. Constantly. Which is good news for our garden, and the really cool watering system Jason installed has pretty much gone unused so far. We've been harvesting herbs for the past few weeks (seriously, anyone need some basil? Oregano? Cilantro?), and tonight I made lemon-dill salmon with delicious fresh dill. We also got two strawberries tonight...mmm, so tasty.

So far everything is doing really well. I bought most of the tomato plants, but everything else has been grown from seeds this year! The lettuce, onions, and beans are all going strong, and the peas have already grown to the top of the little fence I bought them. Since you've been viewing our garden progress from the same angle each post, here's the latest look.

In addition to veggies, we've had some great flowers this year. I've posted most of the pictures on flickr at left. The tulips we brought back from Holland were gorgeous this spring, and I had three lilacs on the bush we planted last year. And our rose bower is billowing with light pink roses. In the middle of our yard we have a climbing rose over an archway that leads to...nowhere. It just sits there in the middle of the yard. When we first moved in, I wanted to pull it out, since it just seemed like a pointless, thorny mess. But last spring it burst into bloom, and even though it serves absolutely no purpose, for a week or two each May/June, it is amazing.

Our houes is full of roses now...and my fingers are thoroughly pricked (those babies are thorny!). We think that this was originally the gateway to the once-large backyard of this former farmhouse, which was turned into four separate lots about five years ago. The rose bush is really old, so it is not going anywhere, and it's a good memory of what our house used to be. There is no way we could have afforded this house if it had come with its former acreage, but I can't help but miss what isn't here and it makes me a little wistful when I think of what this place used to be.

Zack's Wedding

Zack and Kristina got married this weekend, so we had a fun weekend of catching up with old friends. Ryan and Lindsay brought Baby Grayson and stayed with us for the weekend. I love that these nine-year-old friendships not only last but spread so that not only are Ryan and I still friends, but now Jason and I feel like both Lindsay and Ryan are good friends of ours.

Zack's wedding, which was our second Quaker wedding, was touching and beautiful. I like that in the Quaker tradition we are not just an audience watching the couple make their vows but we are participants, witnessing them vow to be faithful to each other for the rest of their lives. That is always how I feel about weddings, but I like that the Quakers recognize it so intentionally.
The reception was also great fun. We had met for coffee early in the afternoon, but we were glad to have an evening meal and lots of time to visit. We ate at Marrakesh, a really cool Moroccan restaurant downtown, where we lounged on cushions and ate seven courses with our hands before watching the belly dancer...and, unfortunately, being pulled out of my seat and into the belly-dancing spotlight. I mentioned here how my Nazarene hips do not swing that way, and now everyone who was at the reception can attest to that.

It was great fun to get caught up with these dear friends--and I got to see Josh for only the second time since we left Oxford! I loved sitting back and watching everyone interact, as though it wasn't a big deal that nine years had passed, and we were just as likely to be friends as real grown ups as we were as wide-eyed college students.

Thursdays

For some reason lately, Thursday night has become one of my favorite times of the week. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the busiest, most stressful day of the week has migrated from Wednesday to Tuesday (you can think all you want of the majority party's policies, but their scheduling tactics really suck), making the week seem unbearably long. For the past two weeks, I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince myself that it is not Thursday, only Wednesday (or, heaven forbid, only Tuesday!).

But it IS Thursday now, and lately votes have been cancelled on Fridays, which means that I can leave my desk at a decent time and go to kickboxing (mmm, love). And even though The Office is over for the season (and, really, around here we are relieved that it is rerun season, as we've been watching WAY too much TV this year), Thursday nights have an extra sort of umph to them. Sometimes we watch a whole movie. Other times we sit at the dinner table and talk in a lazy, drawn out fashion, as if we have hours to kill. Nights like tonight we sit at our computers and make playlists on iTunes named "grooves" and buy the music we like to listen to in the shower in the morning (and by we, I mean me. Jason doesn't like morning music. I know. But he's a pretty good guy otherwise.).

Inevitably we stay up way later than we should--just because we can--and then sleep in on Friday mornings. In the morning the alarm will go off and the sun will shine through the slit in the blinds and I will roll over and go back to sleep, then leave 90 minutes later than I did yesterday and still get to work on time, where I will listen to "grooves" while I drink my Friday afternoon milkshake (tasty) and respond to constituent mail. It will be so incredibly awesome.

Hockey

Welcome to our lives lately. While we were crushed to see the Caps lose in game seven earlier this week, I have to confess I felt a bit relieved at having my life back. The Caps have had so many games go into overtime that we have basically devoted every other evening to watching hockey for the past few weeks.

And then there are Friday nights. Jason has joined a hockey league that plays late on Friday nights. Friday night hockey games have transformed our weekends, which used to start with me working late and then falling asleep on the couch while we ate whatever Jason made for dinner. Now we get home, run some errands (i.e. the weekly trip to Home Depot), do a little gardening, etc., eat dinner, and hang out for a while before he gets geared up to get on the ice. Jason, who has always been an early morning person, comes home at midnight revved up from his game (especially if he scores, like he did last week!). And I have gotten reacquainted with my college/pre-marriage self, who loved staying up late and puttering around on Friday nights. It is like our weekends have gotten a few hours longer.

And, as if this much hockey wasn't enough, we are now lazily sitting in our office at our respective computers, and while I type this blog entry, Jason is playing hockey on his computer.

Thai Deliciousness

Our friends Steven and Amy spent the last two years in Thailand doing mission work, and they brought home with them a wealth of knowledge and experience...and some mad Thai cooking skills, which they shared with us tonight. It was definitely the highlight of the month. They gave us a tour of all their favorite dishes--spring rolls, green papaya salad, pad thai, cashew chicken, basil pork, green curry chicken (my favorite, I could eat it all day), sweet and sour chicken, and banana spring rolls with coconut ice cream. Needless to say, they were cooking all night, and we felt spoiled rotten. Ah. Maze. Ing.

Shaanti got me a Thai cookbook for my birthday, and I've been reading it (yes, I read cookbooks, and yes, usually from cover to cover) and feeling pretty overwhelmed by all the strange ingredients. So it was especially fun to go into Amy's kitchen and get a tour of all the things I'd been reading about--lime leaves and lemongrass and dinosaur eggplants. She's figured out where to find all this stuff, and I'm feeling a bit braver...and like I am definitely going to have to get her recipe for green curry chicken!

Rainy Relief

After three days of 90+ weather last weekend, I was very excited to hear that rain was the forecast for this weekend. While the garden certainly benefited from rain, it was Jason and I who really needed a rainy weekend, one that didn't compel us to get outside with our shovels and work gloves. Besides, the garden is all but planted--if it hadn't rained steadily today, I would have planted the cucumber and zucchini that I've been growing in little pellets since early April, and they would have been the last additions. There is already a tiny line of spinach popping up, as well as iceberg and romaine, and I am pretty sure that through the rain I saw the leaf of a bean plant just about to spring out of the soil. Goody!

So, anyway, after many, many weekends of basement renovation completed just in time for the Big Garden Project to begin, we were relieved to wake up to clouds and sprinkles on Saturday morning. The morning started perfectly with tea (I am suddenly a huge fan of Lady Grey) and a book. We did get a little yard work done between the showers--Jason planted some grass seed and I potted the last of the herbs, but otherwise it was a weekend of hockey and book club. Just right.

Yesterday it was spitting off and on, but today it rained steadily, and when we got home we warmed up leftovers and crawled onto the couch to watch a movie. I was so rejuvenated that I spent the rest of the weekend organizing the house--which has been starving for my attention over the past few months. In my subconscious I am convinced that if only each thing has its own place (properly labeled and color coded, of course), I will be utterly and completely in control of my life. I know, crazytalk, but I'm learning to settle for small victories--the desk is clean for the first time since Christmas, for example, and there is no longer a basket on the top floor of things that need to go downstairs and in the basement of things to go upstairs. And the library finally has picture frames (albeit empty ones) on the wall. All these are very good things, and they make me think that perhaps I will also be able to manage the daunting task of leaving work on time each night this week.

Tomorrow promises to be a good Monday, which bodes well for the rest of the week. After all, there is a box in the closet labeled "umbrellas" and a book that no one is making me read is sitting open on my nightstand.