10 Years

Today is our “first” 10 year anniversary! Wow! And hooray!

Aside: We had two wedding ceremonies so we celebrate two anniversaries each year. Our first wedding was in May in Michigan and was a pretty unusual “progressive party” style of wedding, ending with a ceremony on the beach. Our second wedding was in June in Pennsylvania and was a very lovely and traditional church wedding. The great thing about this (aside from everyone getting their “dream wedding”), is that if we forget our May anniversary, there’s always our June anniversary.

Time has really flown by and we can’t believe we’ve already been married 10 years. Les was so cute and was telling everyone all about it at work, even customers. What a romantic!

Here’s to another 40 years together!

Prunes, the REAL Musical Fruit

I know this is kind of weird, but I think I like prunes. I feel like I’m about 30 years too young for this emotion, but I’m openly admitting it nonetheless in case there’s a Youthful Prune-eaters Club out there that I can join.

One of my earliest experiences with prunes was not a particularly good one. It was at Lou Mitchell’s restaurant, in the shadow of the Sears Tower in Chicago. This is a diner of “extras” – you get piping-hot donut holes when you walk in the door, ladies get little boxes of Milk Duds as they wait in line, and yes, you even get a prune as part of every meal (maybe to balance the high-calorie diner food?). Because there’s always a line at Lou’s, we opted to sit at the counter for faster service. As soon as we sat down, the busboy put a dish of prunes in front of each of us. They were very fresh – sweet and wet, with the pits still inside. Quite hungry, and knowing that it might be a while before we got our food, I decided to see what this prune thing was all about, and ended up somewhat choking down the fleshy fruit, not at all sure that I liked the strong favor and the slippery texture.

The busboy, mistaking my desperate hunger for an enthusiasm for prunes, decided to hook me up with another prune, giving me a sweet wink as he took away my pit-dish and put another prune on the counter. I swallowed nervously and tried to smile enthusiastically, but did take my time getting around to prune #2, lest a prune #3 not be far behind.

So, it’s surprising that now I’m eating at least a serving of 7 prunes every day after dinner. I may have been roped in by the clever advertising on the package – they are not called “prunes” (except in very small print) but rather “dried plums,” which sounds much more appealing. The packaging also talks a lot about all the great nutritional elements of a prune (other than just the fiber that old people love them for) and it’s pretty convincing. In addition, the mini prunes I eat are more like big raisins than the wet, slimy lump I had at Lou Mitchell’s years ago, though the flavor is the same.

Try a prune out and see what you think. I’ll let you know when I start drinking any of those powered fiber mixers old folks are always advertising on TV. Then you can really start to worry about my premature aging.

A Saturday in Nashville / Urban Hike #2

Today was a pretty fun day of diverse activities. We swung by the Ryman to pick up tickets for the Erasure acoustic show tonight – something we had been meaning to do, but just hadn’t managed to actually accomplish. They still had tickets left in the balcony (they are only playing a few dates in the US and not any other dates close to us, so we weren’t sure), so we snagged those and then headed out to kill time before the show.

Les had read that there was a local art festival in Centennial Park, so we went to check it out. After many years of attending and fighting crowds at the huge Ann Arbor Art Festival, it was actually a breath of fresh air to not only have fewer artists to look at, but also to have fewer crowds to squeeze through. And the quality of art was just as good!

One of our favorite artists was the couple Lucius & Lenda DuBose. Lucius has some fabulous bird prints that we were immediately drawn to, but they are also wonderful people who we enjoyed just chatting to for 20 minutes about birding, art, and print-making. We hope to see them again in the fall at the bigger Nashville Art Festival. We want to buy one of their prints for Les’s mom, but we need her here to help pick it out.

We did buy a gorgeous wood cutting-board after our onion-flavored watermelon fiasco of a week ago (see Signs of Summer post), but managed to mostly just really enjoy walking around without consuming too much.

To further our urban hiking experiences, we decided to walk from Sitar Indian Restaurant in the Vandy area to the Ryman Auditorium downtown. It’s a little over a mile and half and probably about 20 blocks. It doesn’t sound very far when you say it that way, but it seems far when you’re driving it because you’re going from one side of town to the other. It definitely seems even further when you’re walking it because you get out of the city, over the highway, and you feel like you’re in a land between two lands. The walk there was fine and interesting and enjoyable, but the walk back after the concert was quite rainy and Les couldn’t see a thing through his splattered glasses. I kept saying, “Hey, we’re creating a memory here!” but I was seriously regretting our decision to walk to the show, especially as our clothes got wetter and wetter and heavier and heavier and it seemed like the entire return walk was uphill. We thought about taking a taxi, but we couldn’t remember whether the roof light was on or off if it was available (I now know that if the number light is lit up, the taxi is available; if the top light is off, the taxi is in use) so we just trudged on.

When we finally got to our car, we felt a great sense of accomplishment, but decided that next time we would definitely take an umbrella at least . . . or drive.

My Erasure “5 Things” are:

1. The songs translated surprisingly well into acoustic, countrified versions. I didn’t know many of the songs, but Les (who did know most of the songs) was impressed with how good they sounded as country songs.

2. The crowd was wildly enthusiastic. For once, I felt like I could sit back and not clap at all and still be assured that there would be multiple encores.

3. The balcony is THE place to sit in the Ryman – great view, more elbow room, great sound.

4. Andy Bell said that he was so happy to be performing that he just had to lick the stage. He did, and told the crowd that it tasted just like strawberries. He’s darling!

5. They ended with Respect, which got everyone up and dancing and singing along very dramatically. This music just brings emotive singing-along right out of you!

TMBG

They Might Be Giants came to town! We just had to go! Les has never seen them live except for an in-store performance at Borders, and I haven’t seen them live since New Year’s Eve 1992 (I think – it’s so long ago, now).

They were originally going to be at City Hall, which is a venue we’ve wanted to go to for a while, but then they changed the venue at the last minute to Exit/In, a smaller club that we saw Sharon Jones at and like quite well.

We got to the club and queued up outside in a sizeable line of people who appeared to have never queued up before (there were two lines for apparently no reason). When we got to the door, we found out that I needed ID to get in, even though – I assure you – I definitely appear to be over 21 and our tickets said nothing about ID being required. We rushed back to our car, drove home, got my ID, searched for parking, and got back to the club in time to see the show, though we did miss the opening band and heard he was great. I am yet again SO thankful for living in such close proximity to the city! If that had happened in Michigan, when we lived an hour from everything, we would have either skipped the show, snuck in, or I would have gotten to wait in the car. Yay, Nashville!

The show was great! TMBG are so clever and energetic and wonderful! We had a fabulous time!
A few years ago, when Les and I were going to 2 to 4 shows a week, we devised a system to boil down our show experiences and document them so that we would walk away with specific memories from each show. It’s just called our “5 Things” list (obviously, it’s more about documenting things than selling our system to the public through clever naming and marketing!).

My They Might Be Giants 5 Things are:

1. A lot of their songs were faster, more upbeat, rockier takes on the album versions. At times I thought I was at a punk show. Rock on!


2. They had a confetti cannon for one song. How awesome is that?


3. The audience was “old” – for once I felt like a young person at 32.


4. I asked for and got the set list from the sound guy. It’s my first set list ever, and even though it’s not the band’s set list, it still had interesting drawing on it and was cool.


5. They played a song called “Fingertips,” which is just a bunch of short snippets from never-written songs. It’s a weird song and not exactly one that would be easy to play live, so I was thrilled to hear it.

Urban Hiking

As many of you who have read my blog know, I have a step-counter and am a little bit obsessed with “getting steps” (10,000 at least) every day. I usually get around 5,000 steps at work, leaving me with another 5,000 steps to get after I arrive at home. Usually, that’s not too much of a problem, but if I arrive home with fewer than 5,000 steps, it can be challenging to get all those steps just walking around our apartment complex.

Yesterday, I arrived home with about 2,800 steps -- a new low for me. Getting up to 10,000 required an intervention, not just a little additional effort. Les, who has become committed to getting me 10,000 steps every day (come hell or high water), suggested a small “urban hike” to make up my deficit. “Let’s walk to our Post Office and back,” he said. Because this is exactly the type of adventure that strikes my fancy, I was chomping at the bit to head out.

Our Post Office is probably about a mile and a half away from us. There are no sidewalks where we live. We have to walk through a construction area that doesn’t have much of a shoulder for a short part, but the rest of our route is either off of the main road or on a road that has a very generous shoulder. We kind of walk past my office on our route and, since I have often wondered if I could walk to work, I was interested to see how long it took us to walk to the Post Office and how dangerous it was to be a pedestrian in a non-pedestrian-friendly area.

It took us about 45 minutes to make the walk each way. This was because we kept stopping to check out things we had never noticed when driving this same route. It’s amazing how much you see when you’re moving at a slow pace: turtles swimming in a pond, baby geese and their parents, old computer monitors dumped in the bushes, a collection of beer bottles in the woods, a parking lot that is easy-in/how-do-I-get-out, unusual businesses you’ve never heard of, weird flowers and trees, and even interesting-looking people encapsulated in their cars driving by.

You also never notice the hills when you’re driving in your car. There’s one killer hill that is long and gradual and I was convinced that we would never make it to the top. But we did, and then there we were . . . at the Post Office.

I have to say that I felt a great sense of accomplishment after we did this walk. I told a lot of people about it and took pride in their looks of, “What on earth were you thinking? Who walks on streets?!” Although it’s obviously much more productive to drive from Point A to Point B, it’s interesting to find out what is within walking distance of your house and what it is like to walk somewhere instead of driving there, the world blurring by your car windows.

Save gas – try walking somewhere.

Living a Lie

At the last Predators home playoff game, every attendee received a bunch of plastic strips to wave around in the air during the game. Half way through the first period, the announcer said (and it was written on the jumbotron, too), “Everyone, wave your pompons!” “Did he just say ‘pomPON’?” I asked Les, incredulously. Les, who was watching players skate around on the ice, gave me a grunted response, signifying that this was neither the place nor the time to ask such a ridiculous, non-hockey-related question.

So, during the first intermission, I asked the couple in front of me, “Did you hear the announcer say ‘pomPON’?” “Yes,” the woman replied, “and it’s printed in the program, too!” We both agreed that we had always thought it was “pompom” and now felt like we had possibly been living a lie for the last 30 years. As if to make us feel worse, the man added that he was familiar with the “pompon” term. His high school had a Pompon Squad, and he remembered very clearly that it was an “n” and not an “m” at the end of the word.

When I got home, I had to Google it to find out which term was really right. After all, can you really believe a hockey announcer and a hockey fan who says he remembers cheerleading squad information 15 years after the fact? Apparently you can. After looking this up online, I found this following information on a Common Errors in English website:

“To most people that fuzzy ball on the top of a knit hat and the implement wielded by a cheerleader are both “pompoms,” but to traditionalists they are “pompons,” spelled the way the French—who gave us the word—spell it. A pompom, say these purists, is only a sort of large gun. Though you’re unlikely to bother many people by falling into the common confusion, you can show off your education by observing the distinction.”

I couldn’t believe that I had been so grammatically incorrect for so many years! Next thing you know, I’ll be saying “Valentime’s Day,” “ying and yang,” “libary,” and “expresso”! Ugh!

Signs of Summer

As the weather has been getting gradually warmer here in TN, I’ve been seeing the signs of summer appearing in my everyday activities. Two weekends ago, I painted my toenails for a CD cover photo I was making about picnicking. Painting my toenails is one of the earliest signs of summer-to-be. It means that I am committing to wearing toe-less shoes at least three or four days each week so that everyone can see my awesome polish-job (“Hide it under a shoe-toe? No! I’m gonna let it shine!”). For my fake picnic set up, it was about 75 degrees out and certainly felt warm enough for a picnic outside on the as-yet-unmowed lawn. You could feel in the air that summer was coming. Yes, it was exciting!

Here are a few other signs of summer I’ve observed so far this season:

1. Last weekend we ate a watermelon. It was actually pretty good (8 out of 10 on the Larry-Lyle rating scale – my family’s standard measurement for watermelon), but we unfortunately sliced it up on a cutting board that had last had onions on it, and the onion taste managed to permeate the watermelon in parts! Oh, well!


2. I have put away my ice scraper (being from Michigan originally, I am one of the few TN residents who own a deluxe ice scraper with brush, two blades, and an extendable reach option) and gotten out my sunshade (folks, I still attest that this really does keep you car cooler).


3. Les and I are looking at lawn furniture. Sure, we only have a small balcony at our apartment, but it would be nice to sit out on it on these cool spring evenings.


4. I’m starting to wonder when the pool in our apartment complex is going to open. There have already been a few days when swimming seemed appealing.


5. We’re starting to make our list of summer festivals we want to attend in Tennessee (any ideas, please comment in my blog).


6. Les is wearing shorts and Birks everywhere except to work.


7. The outside patio at restaurants is fuller than the inside rooms.


8. It’s too hot to wear my hockey jersey to the Predators games. I have to carry it there, then put it on over my short sleeves once we get inside the arena.


9. My feet are getting too hot in regular shoes and I’m only too happy to show off my sparkly toenails in flip-flops.


10. People in my office have started wearing short pants and tank tops to work.

If summer hasn’t quite made it to you yet, be patient. It’s coming in all its glory soon!

Weight on the High Seas

I heard on the radio that the Coast Guard is taking a look at adjusting the per person weight average on smaller boats from the current 140 pounds to possibly as high as180 pounds in reaction to the American obesity epidemic. This has been brought about by a couple of ferries that capsized because (they think) there was too much weight on board and the boat became unstable. The last time the weight average was adjusted was in 1960. It’s hard to believe that the average American has gained 40 pounds in 40 years, but I suppose that a pound a year isn’t that dramatic of a weight gain . . . on a single person. It seems pretty dramatic as a national average.

Ferry operators are upset because this will change the maximum number of people allowed on the boats – one man said his load will go from 260 people to 225, for instance – and that will reduce their profits. He also complained that the weight adjustment doesn’t make sense for captains who more often take out a group of children rather than larger and heavier adults. Maybe it’s time to say good-bye to the idea of weight averages and accept the fact that things are too diverse and atypical to stay with our old system.

I may be too pragmatic, but I feel that the obvious answer here is to make a law that all charter boat operators weigh in their customers to make sure they do not go over their maximum weight, regardless of the number of people on board. Although some customers may feel uncomfortable with this, it really is for the good of all on board and has to happen. If you are afraid of getting on a scale, then charter boating is not for you.

Right now our luggage gets weighed on flights (and on small planes the flight attendants actually move larger people around to balance the weight on the plane) and there are certain sports like sky-diving and bungee jumping which have weight requirements because of the limitations of the equipment. It doesn’t seem radical that boating requires similar safety measures.