Living Small

Photos!

I finally have some photos to share with the blog.  As I have mentioned many times on this blog, I'm not so good with the digital camera.  I usually remember to bring it with me when I go somewhere (after all, it is so small and cute there is very little excuse to leave it behind), but actually taking pictures with it often escapes me.  For instance, when David and I were in Florida, we didn't take any photos in Key West or Miami Beach.  In part, this was a conscious decision: we both feel somewhat removed when looking at the world from behind a lens, and wanted to be able to experience our vacation as directly as possible.  But, for me, at least, part of it is subconscious -- I'm not a very good photographer and getting behind the lens produces some anxiety about that.  But we did manage to take a few photos in Florida.

This is me, surveying our retirement property in Cape Coral from the comfort and warmth of David's mom's new CaR-Ve.  The weather had just turned from ninety degrees and humid to about forty and windy.

David and I didn't take any photos while we were at Disney, but David's mom managed to get two of us at Epcot.  I'm not sure why this one is displaying sideways, and it is too early in the morning for me to try to fix it!

So that was late February.  At the beginning of April, I blogged about going to Festifools with some friends from grad school, but didn't say much about what it is.  Festifools is a parade of giant puppets that just went up and down, back and forth, about two blocks of Main street for one hour, and was allegedly the final exam for an art class at the university.  Some of the puppets were truly imaginative and many had political messages.

I actually did manage to get several photos at Festifools.  These were two of my favorite puppets.  I especially liked the pig when I thought it was holding a calculator, but a while later, I realized it was actually a cell phone.  Of course it was a cell phone -- after all, who uses calculators any more, except for me at work?

The next time the camera saw daylight was when David and I went to Traverse City and Sleeping Bear Dunes two weekends ago.

We made it to the top of the first dune on the Dune Climb just as we realized that it was raining for real and we wouldn't be able to hike the two miles to the lake (and two miles back) without getting very wet and cold (and, hence, rather cranky).  So we whipped out the camera to at least document the fact that we had reached the first peak, and then ran back down to the car.

When the rain cleared up later in the day, we did the Pyramid Peak hike, but didn't manage to take a single photo.  The next morning, David checked his email from the hotel lobby and found a message from one of his colleagues, a woman who used to live in Traverse City.  She said that we couldn't leave the area without doing the Empire Bluffs trail, so we went out there the next morning.  At that point, we were feeling a bit guilty about not having taken enough photos, so we took way too many on that hike.

Our travels through the Sleeping Bear Dunes were guided not only by brochures we picked up from the park service, but also by a book of 50 Michigan hikes that my mom gave us several years ago, and which we are slowly working our way through.  As I read the descriptions of the hikes in the book, David remembered a trail that was known for being a place one might spot hang gliders, and kept asking which one that was.  Since two of the hike descriptions mentioned hang gliding, I chose the one that actually said you might "see" hang gliders.  It turned out David wanted the one with the hang gliding launch area, which we found the next day.  We had spent so much time discussing (and, yes, arguing about) the semantics of "seeing" hang gliders as opposed to reaching the hang gliding launch pad, so I just had to document it.

There are plenty more photos on my Flickr photostream if you haven't had your fill yet!

Getaway

Since my birthday was last week and David's is this week, we decided that this past weekend would be the perfect time for a little road trip.  We thought about everywhere we could possibly go within a five-hour driving radius and settled on Traverse City, where we had been once before together (and where David had been many times before we met) many years ago. 

The highlight of our previous trip was the Dune Climb at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.  When we set out on this hike, all I could see was one giant dune, and I assumed that Lake Michigan was on the other side.  We climbed and climbed until we got to the top, but from there, all we could see were more dunes.  So we mounted each successive dune, sure that the lake was just beyond it.  We did eventually reach the lake -- about two hours later!  Since we hadn't known how far we would have to go or how long it would take, by the time we got there, I was so thirsty that I just started lapping up water from Lake Michigan (after asking David whether the water was salt or fresh, which he thought was the stupidest question in the world).  And then we had to turn around and hike back!

This time, though, we would be prepared.  We filled David's backpack with drinks, snacks, sweaters, and the camera, and set out.  I felt the first drop of rain just as we started to scale the first dune, and by the time we reached the top, it was full-on raining.  So we debated our options, took a few pictures, and went back down.  So much for our big hike.  In the end, the rain didn't last for long, and we ended up getting to do a different hike that day (Saturday) and another one on Sunday.  We also drove all around the lakeshore and past several vineyards, though the tasting rooms were all closed by then .  We did, however, sample a local wine at dinner that night, and learned a lot more about local wines when we stopped to pick some up for a friend at a wine shop in town.  Other highlights of the trip included running along the lakeshore on Sunday morning, listening to the low-budget up-north NPR station, and several nice meals out.

We did actually take some pictures on this trip, so I'll try to get them up soon!

A Return to Winter?

The thing I had most looked forward to about my trip to Florida last week -- aside from seeing my in-laws, of course -- was getting a break from winter.  It has been the snowiest winter I have ever experienced and, even though I have an awesome pair of snow boots from Land's End, I was getting pretty tired of slogging through endless snow in the dark on my way to work.  So I left my coat at home, didn't pack any long underwear, and arrived at the airport wearing a wool sweater layered over a fleece with a suitcase full of skirts and t-shirts.  As soon as the plane touched down in Florida, the sweater and fleece came off, yet I was still overdressed.  Temperatures were in the high eighties with tons of humidity.  It felt like Ann Arbor in July.  Having never been to Florida before, I simply accepted that as a normal Florida winter, but I learned a few days later that we had been experiencing record highs.

For the most part, I enjoyed the hot weather (David would have preferred about ten degrees cooler), but we really didn't have the wardrobe for it.  Instead of jeans and t-shirts, we really needed shorts and tank tops.  On our way out of Key West, we passed a Ross and decided to head in for an emergency wardrobe overhaul.  Shopping at Ross in Key West was probably the least touristy experience we had all week.  Granted, we could have been shopping at Ross or its equivalent just about anywhere in the country, but the clothes must have had some local flavor.  David came away with quite a few new items; all I found was a tank top, but it was the perfect thing to wear out to the Haitian restaurant we found that night in Miami Beach.

A few days later, I was ready to go to Ross again -- a cold front had moved in and the temperature dropped into the forties.  Again, I was unprepared, though I resisted buying warm clothes because I had so much cold-weather gear sitting at home in Ann Arbor.  So I layered on the fleece and wool sweater and, when we got to Orlando, borrowed another fleece from my mother-in-law.  Still, I was quite a bit colder than I wanted to be, though David was finally comfortable!

The temperatures began heading back up just as we were leaving Florida, but I was pleased to come back to Ann Arbor and find that things weren't so bad here.  Yes, I had to put my long underwear and wool coat back on immediately, but the sun was shining and the snow that had fallen while we were away was melting.  The weather reports, however, promised that more snow wouldn't be far away and, sure enough, we got another dumping last night.  But even though I had to slog through calf-deep snow to get to work today, there are some signs of impending spring: the sun is currently shining, and it was light when I got to work and home from work every day this week.  It can't be too much farther off, can it?

Back in the Mitten

David and I have just returned to Michigan (aka "The Mitten") after a lovely week in Florida visiting his mom and stepfather who are wintering down there.  I will certainly post more details about our trip over the next few days, but for now, a quick rundown of the highlights:

• Driving along US 1 (the "Overseas Highway") along the Florida Keys
• Getting stuck in a massive traffic snarl on US 1
• Basking in 80-degree temperatures in Key West and Miami
• An emergency shopping trip at Ross in Key West after sweating through all our warm-weather clothes
• Biking around Key West
• Avoiding drunken tourists while biking around Key West
• Visiting David's former boss in Cape Coral
• Learning that we, too, could retire to Cape Coral if we really wanted to
• Eating tons of delicious seafood everywhere we went
• Having 15-18% gratuities added into restaurant bills without warning and unwittingly tipping on top of that
• Spending two full days at Disney
• Realizing on Saturday morning that we had not been off of Disney property since Wednesday night

More details to come, I promise!

Finally, Some Photos

It looks like I won't be able to blog for the next week, but I leave you with some images of my November trip to California.

David and I went straight to the beach after we landed and, grateful to be out of the bitter cold (okay, it wasn't actually that cold here when we left, but it certainly was when we got back!), David dipped into the water.  Actually, the truth is that a coworker asked us to stop by Manhattan Beach to get him a t-shirt, which we did on our way to the fish market in Redondo Beach, and we figured we might as well see the ocean.

It's funny how, although we spent very little time at beaches on the trip, here is a picture of me on another beach, in La Jolla, where we stopped on our way to San Diego.  We were hoping to be able to get to Tijuana while we were in San Diego, but we heard rumors of long lines to get back into the US and we didn't have our passports and we had to be back in LA to meet friends for dinner, so we went to the zoo instead!

No matter where we go, David is always ready to have fun, or get his nose eaten, or something!

Back from Vacation

Even though UM staff don't get time of for MLK day, I took a long weekend anyway and met my mom in New Jersey to visit my grandparents.  The trip got off to a dicey start on Friday evening, or, rather, it looked for a while like we were never going to get off the ground.  The flight was almost ready to board here in Detroit -- equipment and crew were all there and ready to go -- when there was an air traffic delay in Newark, and our flight clearance was pushed back from 7:18 to 7:50.  They boarded the plane around 7:30, but by that time our clearance had been delayed again until 8:30.  So we sat at the gate until about 8:15, and then taxied for a very long time to the runway.  By the time we got there, one of the flight attendants was smelling raw fuel, so they pulled off the runway, checked it out, and decided to head back to the gate.  After a long taxi back to the gate, the mechanics came on board and decided that the plane was not fit to fly, so we were evacuated back into the airport.  By this time is was about 9pm, the time we were supposed to have landed in Newark, and there we were, deplaning in Detroit.  There was another flight to Newark at 9:15 and the people toward the front of our plane, who had gotten off first, were being sent to this flight.  I was next in line to be sent to the other flight when word came through that they had found another plane for us, and it was waiting at the other end of the terminal.  So we all schlepped up to the little train and rode it to the other end.  When I got to the new gate, my mom called to tell me she had just gotten off the plane in Newark.  She had flown in from Los Angeles and we had chosen flights that were going to land at the same time.  So much for that.  Still in Detroit, we boarded the new plane at 9:30, and then sat in the plane at the gate for an hour while the late-night baggage handlers got our luggage from the first plane and loaded it onto the second plane.  Then we finally pushed back from the gate, taxied to the runway, and got off the ground at about 10:50, nearly two hours after we were supposed to have landed in Newark.  Fortunately, once we got off the ground, the flight only lasted an hour, and by the time I landed, my mom had already picked up the rental car and was back at the terminal waiting for me.  David called just after midnight to see if I was still in Detroit and possibly in need of a ride home, so I was relieved to be able to tell him that I was already in New Jersey.  From there, the trip only got better.  It was fantastic to see my mom and my grandparents, and my mom's aunt, uncle, and cousin came down from New York to see us too, so it was like a mini reunion.  I was sad to leave yesterday, but glad to report that the flight home was totally uneventful!

Finally Back

I don't know if I have any readers left after my obscenely long blog hiatus, but I am finally back from all of my travels.  I actually was here for a day in between Chicago and Los Angeles, but spent that day tying up loose ends at work, getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist, unpacking, doing laundry, and repacking.

I don't want to say too much about Chicago because it was a work trip, but it went well and I had a good time.  Non-work highlights included riding in a limo (long story), wandering around Millenial Park in between paper sessions (just a block away from the conference hotel), and having dinner at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago, where one of David's good friends is a faculty member. 

The trip to Los Angeles was quite near perfect, though when David and I arrived the weather was overcast and the sky somewhat brown with smog.  I said to David that we hadn't come for the weather, but within a few hours the sun was shining.  We had many adventures on this trip, including visiting my  grandmother, eating oysters on the Redondo Beach Pier, ogling creatures of all kinds at the San Diego Zoo, going to the movies on Thanksgiving (the movie was terrible, but not cooking was a novelty), having Thanksgiving dinner at my mom's boyfriend's ex-wife's house (a family tradition in which I had not yet participated), going to my ex-boyfriend's parents' house for a second Thanksgiving dinner on Friday (kind of like the second-night seder), and people-watching at the Promenade in Santa Monica on the biggest shopping day of the year.  I'm super-grateful for all the people we got to see while we were there, and sad that there were others we didn't get to see.  Overall, it was a fantastic trip.

Meanwhile, here in Ann Arbor it seems to have gone straight from late summer to early winter while we were gone and we returned to find small patches of snow in front of our house.  I think I was away from here for just a bit too long because I forgot how to deal with the weather and made the mistake of walking to work this morning with wet hair!

Rollercoaster

David and I have been wishing for and planning for a weekend away for a long time, and something always seems to come up.  This past weekend, however, we finally managed to get away for a night, and went to Cedar Point, which is definitely the biggest amusement park around here and, according to David, the biggest in the world.  I had never been and David hadn't been since college, and we had been saying that we should go for at least a year now, so we were pretty excited to actually go. 

Once we got there, however, we started getting nervous.  Neither of us had been on a roller coaster in a VERY long time, and it seems like they have only gotten scarier over the past fifteen years or so.  David's assistant had recommended that we start with Millenium Force, since it is the scariest one.  His rationale was that, after that we wouldn't be nervous about anything else.  It probably would have been a good strategy, but we were too scared to try it.  Instead, we decided to start with the rides David had been on before and work our way up.  This strategy seemed to be going pretty well for the first three rides, but then we started wearing out.  We still went on two more, but by that point we were done, and we hadn't been on anything new!  I guess that means we will just have to go back next year...

Family Reunion

This weekend, David and I went to Defiance, Ohio for his mother's family reunion.  David's parents both grew up in Defiance, which was named for General Mad Anthony Wayne who, in 1794, built a fort at the confluence of the Maumee and Auglaize Rivers and said, "I defy the English, Indians, and all the devils of hell to take it."  A lot of places around here are named for Mad Anthony, including Wayne County (home of Detroit), and Ft. Wayne, Indiana, but Defiance certainly got the best of the names.  Fort Defiance is the reference point from which Michigan was surveyed after the U.S. obtained the land in the 1807 Treaty of Detroit.  Defiance is also where David and I got engaged at midnight on New Year's 2004, and I love telling people that he proposed to me in Defiance.

The family reunion was pretty much your ordinary picnic in a park, with the addition of warning whistles from one of David's second cousins whenever a police car got too close.  There was eating, drinking, and beanbag tossing, and David and I also played on the swings.  The reunion unites the descendents of David's grandfather and his four siblings, so everyone identifies as a descendent of one of these original five, only one of whom is still living, though she seems to be in good health and gave us an afghan that she had crocheted for our wedding.

After the party, David and I took the scenic route home.  Driving through Defiance, we noticed that high school football season was about to get underway; every downtown business had a sign in the window supporting the Defiance Bulldogs (or the "Dawgs" for short) in their upcoming game against the Cats, who we figured out are the football team from nearby Napoleon, Ohio.  When we got to Napoleon, however, we were surprised not to see any "Go Cats, scratch the Dogs" signs.  Either it is a one-way rivalry (perhaps Napoleon's big rival is Toledo), or else Defiance just has a lot more school spirit.

The Baltimore Report

As promised, here is my full report on Baltimore. Having traveled quite a bit in my short life, I have decided that there are about four things to do when visiting somewhere new: shopping, eating, sightseeing, and nightlife. Since I'm married and I don't drink, nightlife was out, but I did participate in the other three activities. Sightseeing: Since I can't afford to spend a whole lot on museums or other tourist attractions, my version of sightseeing is pretty much just wandering around a city. I like to think of it as urban hiking. The first place I went on Wednesday night was the Inner Harbor, which quickly disappointed me. It is highly commercialized, basically just a big mall. So I kept walking, and got to explore a bit of the East Harbor and Fells Point before I had to call it a night. Thursday, after I got the exhibit booth set up, was my main sightseeing day. Starting from the Convention Center, I walked north on Charles Street to the Washington Memorial, which is in the Mount Vernon cultural district. There were a couple of museums here -- the Walker Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum -- but the Contemporary hadn't opened yet and the Walker didn't seem quite as interesting, so I just kept wandering. From there, I went west, and eventually came to Lexington Market. Lexington Market reminded me quite a bit of the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles. It is a large market hall with stands selling just about every type of food you can imagine. And, since it was Baltimore, every other stand was a raw bar. Since I had already had breakfast and it was too early for lunch, I kept walking, this time heading east. A couple of hours of walking later, I found myself back in Fells Point, where I had been the night before. On Thursday, however, the sun was shining and I had more time, so I got to see more of this area. Fells Point was probably my favorite part of Baltimore, and it was the best shopping area (see below). On Friday I did a bit more sightseeing early in the morning before the conference, heading back up to the Mount Vernon area and going a bit farther north than I had the day before. It looked like there was some good shopping up there, too, but it was 7:30am and nothing was open yet. After the conference, I headed south of the Inner Harbor to Federal Hill. My first stop was the American Visionary Art Museum, which I had heard about the day before. I feared they would already be closed when I got there, but I arrived an hour before closing and, because it was so late, they let me in for free. The museum was fantastic, though unfortunately I couldn't get up to the third floor because a wedding rehearsal was being held on the stairs. Not being able to go up to the third floor gave me some time to browse the gift shop, and I ended up buying an artwork: a piece of Shawn Theron's SOGH project. I had never bought real art before, and was super-excited to take it home and show David. After the museum, I explored Federal Hill, hoping to find some more shopping (again, see below), but all I really could find were bars and restaurants. Shopping: Given that I'm not much of a shopper (I hadn't been shopping for clothes since September), this was about the last thing I expected to do in Baltimore but, as I said above, there is not much else to do while traveling. The best shopping was in Fells Point. I stumbled upon a consignment store and, before I knew it, had found about fifty garments I wanted to try on. Of the fifty, I ended up buying about ten, and was thrilled to have almost a whole new wardrobe (okay, I guess that is a bit of an exaggeration, since I mostly bought tops) for only $75. There were also some cute home furnishings stores in Fells Point, but after my clothing expedition I began to fear that my suitcase would be too full for anything else. I had hoped to find more shopping in Federal Hill because the Baltimore guide in my hotel room promised resale shops of all kinds, but the only one I found was a used book store. Eating: Eating was probably the low point of the trip because the food in Baltimore was, surprisingly, just not that great. For the first time in my life, I sent back an entire restaurant meal! The food was also terribly uninspired, and very short on vegetables -- getting my daily 1.5 pounds was quite a challenge! There were, however, two highlights: 1) grits. I had forgotten I was in the South until I wandered into an espresso bar on Thursday morning and found they were serving grits. So I ended up having it every day for breakfast. 2) crab. I expected to eat quite a bit of crab while I was there because, after all, it was Baltimore, but I just couldn't find that much of it. So on Thursday night I went on a crab expedition and ended up at Phillips, where I got crab cocktail, which was quite good. Otherwise, the food in Baltimore was unremarkable. In addition to having trouble getting my vegetables, I also had quite a challenge getting my two daily glasses of milk. I expected to be able to just walk into a coffeehouse and get a cup of steamed milk, but there just weren't many coffeehouses, and the ones they do have close at five. I wandered all over Federal Hill on Friday night looking for a coffee house and couldn't find one. I finally ended up at the SoBo Cafe, thinking cafe=coffe, but I was wrong. It was just a regular restaurant and they didn't have coffee, but I was desperate for my milk, so I sat down at the bar. The bartender asked if I was there for dinner, and I replied, "no, just a glass of milk, if you have it." She looked at me like I had antennas and repeated, "a glass of milk?" But she poured it for me, and I drank it while eating some tangerines I had brought from Ann Arbor. Soon another bartender came out and asked how I liked the milk. I told him it was quite good and he responded that I should come back on Wednesday because Wednesday is their free all-you-can-drink milk night. I told him that I wouldn't miss it. When I finished my milk, I asked how much I owed him for it. Between the three bartenders, nobody knew how much to charge me because none of them had ever sold a glass of milk, so they just asked for a dollar. I gave them two and headed back out. So that was Baltimore! Overall, I had a great time, though I would have loved to have shared the trip with David. Traveling alone is always really lonely.