30 Days and Counting

It is officially one month until our wedding. Yikes (in a good way)!

It is so surreal to think of the wedding day itself. It will be amazing to bring those that we love together. And it will be amazing to eat and drink and dance and be joyful. It will also be overwhelming, overstimulating, and more grand than perhaps it needed to be. I mean, I don't even like to splurge on dinner beyond 50 cent taco night. :) But I worry to much, and it will be lovely.

Guess what? This week's CSA box was AWESOME. We got: mixed greens for salad, radishes, strawberries, cilantro, parsley, kohlrabi, snap peas, zucchini, and cutting celery. YUM. Several ingredients went into a lemony quinoa salad for lunches. Mmmmm.

Photo Bomb

After taking photos of the quilt my mom made us, I uploaded photos from the past several months onto my computer. Enjoy - and yes, as you can see, most of what we do for fun is cook and eat. :)

coq au vin by SB with help from Julia Child :)

tofu and veggie potstickers

a quinoa taco salad of sorts

bread made with oatmeal stout containing huge chunks of gouda!

Hitting the Books

Well, although it is summer, we are both back to school. SB started teaching summer school this week and is enjoying it thus far - particularly the part where he gets done at 1:30 and goes for a 30-mile bike ride. The man is a biking machine. I wish that I had his will power when it comes to exercise.

I am also back to school this week - I started an eight-week online course (not credit-bearing) called Sustainability of Food Systems: A Global Life Cycle Perspective. You should have seen the joy with which I told SB "I have homework!" I was meant to be a student for life. My first reading was about the chemistry of foods - how all foods are essentially water, protein, carbohydrates and fats - and what happens chemically to foods when they are exposed to heat, etc. Interesting, but it definitely felt like a different language - I am no chemist. I also learned that many fruits and vegetables have higher water content than a glass of milk!

On the wedding front, the showers are over and the joint bachelor/ette party is this weekend. The showers were both a lot of fun, actually, and I took pleasure in writing so many thank you notes because I feel such gratitude for the generosity of our friends and family. We are now working to fit everything into our kitchen! My mom made us a quilt that is on our bed and gorgeous. I'll have to take a picture of it for the blog.

On the job front, I am going to apply for a position in this round of hires, but it is a writer/copyeditor position of which there are only 5 in the nation, and surely at least 100 people will apply. Probably more, actually. But hey, nothing to lose in trying.

Introvert

While not all of these are fair representations of introverts, at least from my perspective, some hit so close to home that I had to laugh out loud (2, 5, 8, 14, 23, 24, 31). As for sign #5 - you know who you are.

Anyway, time to go get married (well, not really, but to apply for our marriage license).

Smoked Porter

The best part of a bad day is when you're able to put the bad into context and realize all of the good that exists despite the bummer you're facing. A long hug and a clean kitchen (thanks to SB), a meal made together (using our new cast iron grill pan and grill press, as well as our surprisingly exciting salad spinner), two back-to-back Norman Blake records while sipping a smoked porter, and I am feeling pure gratitude. When it comes down to it, I could lose this job tomorrow and still have a decent savings account to fall back on and, more importantly, a loving and supportive family and the privilege of being well-educated. And, although at first I thought it was stressful to plan a wedding while facing job uncertainty, the wedding (and honeymoon!) are great fuel to keep me hopeful and truckin' to work every morning.

This week's CSA: mixed salad greens, garlic chives, asparagus, cilantro. PS. I ended up using last week's rhubarb in a dessert - it is just so good that way.

OH - And I listened to a pretty inspiring On Being episode today, during which a poet, Christian Wimen, recited a poem by Osip Mandelstam. It was the last poem he wrote before he died in a Russian prison camp. Listening to it read aloud was amazing, but here it is written out:

And I Was Alive
By: Osip Mandelstam

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.